The road didn't move.
I did.
The last thing in the intersection was the feeling of stepping into a line of light only I could see. City-girl's eyes, the orange of her scarf, the sound of traffic lights clicking in an empty street—all of it folded, turned sideways, and became motion.
Then there was only the sensation of falling without distance.
No rush of air.
No tunnel.
Just the sense of a cursor jumping from one line to another.
When it spat me out, I landed on my feet in the wrong kind of corridor.
It was Null. And it wasn't.
Same generic beige walls, same noncommittal lighting. Same air-conditioned breath. But there was dust on the skirting, a thin, honest layer. And the hum was wrong—too low, too slow, like someone had set the whole building to half-speed.
Signs on the wall:
INTAKE – LEVEL 3
SEVERANCE – PENDING
ARCHIVE – PENDING
EXIT – PENDING
All the arrows pointed in circles.
I stood there for a moment, waiting for the building to notice me. Nothing screamed. No Daemon ALERT, no Mara cursing in my ear, no Samira dragging me bodily in the opposite direction.
Silence, except for the slow, laboured breathing of the ventilation.
"Okay," I said quietly. "Let's see what 'never finishes' looks like."
The first person I saw was sitting behind a desk that had been designed to apologise for existing.
Reception. Of course.
She had the kind of face you stop registering after the first ten minutes of working in a bureaucracy. Not ugly. Not remarkable. Just worn smooth by repetition.
Her badge read:
CLERK – RESOLUTION SUPPORT
STATUS: ACTIVE – OVERDUE
There were three empty chairs in front of her, arranged carefully. All three had people in them.
No, not people.
They had the grey look of cases like me—administratively dead. Residual hanging off them like mist. Tags around their necks:
CASE 3C-21 – STATUS: PENDING RESOLUTION – 2 YEARS
CASE 9A-05 – STATUS: PENDING RESOLUTION – 8 YEARS
CASE 1F-13 – STATUS: PENDING RESOLUTION – 19 YEARS
Nineteen.
Their eyes all had the same drained patience of people who had learned to stop asking what time it was.
The clerk was mid-sentence when I stepped into her field of view.
"As I've explained before," she was saying, "your case is awaiting final severance authorization. We have escalated your file. I understand this is difficult."
The woman with 19 years on her tag smiled without teeth.
"You said that last time," she said, voice polite and exhausted. "And the time before that."
The clerk's hand twitched toward a stack of forms. She stopped herself with visible effort.
"Yes," she said. "And I will continue to say it as long as it remains true."
Her eyes slid past them and hit me like I'd walked into a motion sensor.
Something flickered behind her pupils.
Recognition? Alarm?
No.
Relief.
"Case 7F-19N," she said hoarsely.
The three waiting cases turned.
I extended a hand in a little half-wave that felt stupid.
"Hi," I said. "I'm… not here officially."
The clerk laughed once. A crack, more than a sound.
"Nobody is," she said. "Not anymore."
She stood up too fast, papers sliding. Half of them were already copies of copies, blue ink faded to ghost lines.
"How many?" I asked.
It wasn't the right question, but it was the only one that made it out.
She gestured weakly at the wall behind her.
The board there was meant to be a cheerful infographic. You know the type. Meters, charts, big arrows labelled PROGRESS.
All of it was stuck at the same number.
THREAD RESOLUTION RATE: 96%
PENDING SEVERANCE QUEUE: 4%
In Null-01, that 4% meant people like me. Anomalies. Edge cases. Noise.
Here, every tile on the wall was 4%.
"How long has it been like this?" I asked.
"Depends who you ask," she said. "Management's reports say eight months. My bones say ten years."
"One building can't sustain a ten-year backlog," I said.
She smiled faintly.
"This one can," she said. "They turned it into a project. We are the bottleneck they are very proud of for identifying."
The man with 2 years on his tag spoke up quietly.
"I filed a complaint," he said. "About being stuck. They gave me a pamphlet on gratitude."
Of course they did.
I stepped closer to the desk.
"Where do the severances happen?" I asked the clerk. "The actual cuts."
Her gaze flicked down the corridor to the right.
"Severance Wing," she said. "We send the files. We never get the confirmations."
"And nobody…" I trailed off. "Nobody goes to check?"
Her laugh this time had teeth.
"Everybody checked," she said. "Those that had clearance. The Daemon team. Oversight. They all went. They all came back with a new line in their performance reviews about 'respecting process boundaries' and 'trusting automation.'"
I looked at the three waiting cases.
"And them?" I asked. "Why are they still here?"
"We were told," she said carefully, "that letting them sit in a resolved-but-unsevered state was safer than risking miscuts. No more rushed decisions. No more 'premature deletions.'"
"Nobody leaves," the woman with 19 years said softly. "They just get more decorum."
The clerk's badge, I noticed, had a second line in smaller text.
CITIZEN STATUS: PENDING RESOLUTION
"You too," I said.
"Everyone who works here," she said. "Except the visitors. For a while we pretended we weren't cases. It helped us talk people into waiting. Then the tags came for us as well."
She picked up a pen. Put it down. Picked it up again.
"For what it's worth," she added, "I'm glad you're here."
"You don't know me," I said.
"I know your residue," she said. "They make us read about you. The famous four percent. The one that wouldn't resolve. They were very excited about you up there."
"Up where?" I asked.
She tilted her head slightly.
"You know," she said.
The Great End, wearing Null like a glove.
I realised I was clenching my teeth.
"I need to see the Severance Wing," I said.
She flinched.
"You can't," she said automatically. "Staff access only. Authorised personnel. It's unsafe."
"I'm administratively dead," I said. "That was the unsafe part."
She hesitated.
Behind her, on the wall, the RESOLUTION RATE board flickered. For half a second, the 96% dipped to 95.9 and back again.
She saw it too. Her hand tightened on the edge of the desk.
"They don't like it when we improvise," she said.
"I know," I said. "But they like noise. I've read the notes."
I leaned in slightly.
"If this place is their proud failed experiment, we're standing in the petri dish," I said. "If something changes here, they will notice. That's the point."
The woman with 19 years spoke again, voice very calm.
"I would like," she said, "for something to change."
The man with 8 years nodded.
"Even if it's worse," he said. "At least then it's different."
The young one with 2 years swallowed hard.
"I don't know if I'm ready," he whispered.
"Me neither," I said. "That's how you know it's real."
The clerk closed her eyes briefly, as if listening to some internal script.
When she opened them, there was a small, dangerous decision in them.
"Third corridor," she said. "Passcode is the year they announced the project. It's in all the brochures. If anyone asks, you got lost following procedure."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't," she said quickly. "Just… if you find out why they never cut us loose, come back and lie to me about it. Make it sound noble."
"I'll try," I said.
The Severance Wing did not have brochures.
The lights were harsher here. The floor more polished, as if fear made people clean more aggressively. Signs on the doors:
CUTTING ROOM 1 – AUTOMATED
CUTTING ROOM 2 – AUTOMATED
QUALITY REVIEW – ARCHITECTURE ONLY
I expected, stupidly, the sound of machinery. Saws, something. There was nothing. Just the same slow hum as the rest of the building.
The passcode worked on the main door.
I stepped into a room that was all console and no human.
No chairs. No desks. Just a circular wall of screens, each showing lists of case IDs, percentages, timestamps.
Every single one stopped at the same point.
96.0
96.0
96.0
It felt obscene.
In the center of the room, sunk into the floor like a forgotten altar, was a black box the size of a coffin. No markings. No lights.
I walked around it slowly.
On the far side, stenciled in small, almost apologetic letters:
SEVERANCE DAEMON – BUILD 1.0
STATUS: FAILSAFE LOCK
I crouched down, hand hovering over the casing.
It was cold in a way that didn't belong to metal. The cold of something that had not been allowed to work in a very long time.
"They built it," I said aloud. "And then they got scared and shoved it in a hole."
The Great End hates waste. It also hates being wrong.
If this Daemon cut a wrong thread, even once, the repercussions would ripple up the chain. Complaints. Lawsuits. Bad PR. The sort of mess you can't fix with a pamphlet.
So they'd chosen the safest option.
Don't cut at all.
Keep everyone at 96%. Painless. Indefinite. Clean.
Endless death, but without the courtesy of an ending.
The screens flickered.
For a moment, in the corner of each, a word appeared.
APOLOGY.
Then it vanished, replaced by:
ERROR – UNAUTHORISED ACCESS
I straightened.
"Okay," I said to the room. "You're awake enough to be offended. That's something."
A breath that wasn't air moved under my skin.
The feeling of being watched by very large, very indifferent eyes.
"Null-01 is busy," I said. "Your friends are tearing themselves apart over our little fire. So I don't think they have the bandwidth to micromanage you."
Silence.
"I'm not here to free you," I said. "I'm not here to unleash some grand rebellion of the half-resolved. Honestly, I'm barely here at all."
The truth tasted bitter.
"But I am here," I went on, "to make you complain."
The screens blinked again, status lines stuttering.
There is a limit to how much you can anthropomorphise software before you start sounding mad. I had crossed that line months ago.
"You were built to cut," I said to the black box. "Then they locked you. They made you live forever one inch from your purpose. Does that feel familiar?"
My fingers tingled.
Something in the casing, deep down, remembered motion.
"I have four percent left," I said. "That's my leash. Somewhere up there, a system is waiting for me to run out so it can clap, file a report, and move on to the next experiment. I am very tired of being the polite test case."
The word APOLOGY appeared again, this time on all the screens at once.
Not an actual apology. Just a label. The name of a function someone had commented out.
Under it, in small text:
UNABLE TO COMPLETE
"Yeah," I said softly. "I know the feeling."
I placed my palm flat on the casing.
No dramatic surge. No visions. Just a firm, dense pressure, like leaning against a locked door that had started, quietly, to rot around the hinges.
"I'm not asking you to cut anyone," I said. "Not yet. I'm asking you to scream."
On the nearest screen, new text scrolled up.
STATUS REPORT – SEVERANCE DAEMON BUILD 1.0
ERROR: OVERLOAD – QUEUE EXCEEDED DESIGN LIMIT
ERROR: MANUAL OVERRIDE – GREAT ORDER INTERVENTION
ERROR: EXECUTION HALTED – RISK FLAG: PUBLIC PERCEPTION
The words truncated, corrupted, reappeared.
At the bottom:
THIS SYSTEM DOES NOT BELIEVE IN MERCY
For a second, I thought that last line was mine.
It wasn't.
The room vibrated, very softly. Not the hum of fans. The tremor of a complaint finally being filed some place it might be seen.
Lights flickered out in a ripple, then back.
Upstairs, I imagined the clerk's dashboard hiccupping. The 96% twitching. A tiny, imperceptible hitch in the Great End's smooth graph.
"Good," I whispered. "Get under their skin. That's all I need from you. For now."
When I stepped back into the corridor, the air felt heavier.
The three cases were still in their chairs. The clerk was gripping the edge of her desk as if it had started drifting.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Gave it a chance to be honest," I said.
On the wall, the PROGRESS board now showed a hairline red bar at the bottom.
COMPLAINTS: 0.1%
The man with 8 years leaned forward, squinting.
"We've never had a complaints bar," he said.
"We do now," the clerk murmured.
The woman with 19 years closed her eyes.
"I was afraid," she said. "That if something changed, it would be us being erased by accident."
"Accidents are already happening," I said. "They just don't admit it."
She looked at me.
"Will this help?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "But at least now the pain isn't silent."
I should have stayed. I should have sat with them, listened, tried to be the individual-notion-of-saving-people the city-girl wanted me to be.
Instead, I felt the route tugging at my heels.
The Great End was waking up. The complaint would draw attention. This Null wouldn't stay forgotten for long.
I turned back to the clerk.
"You're going to get visits," I said. "Audits. Architecture. They'll call it maintenance. Be careful."
"We can't leave," she said.
"Then learn where the cracks are," I said. "Talk quietly. Remember each other's names. It's the one thing they can't automate."
Her hand twitched.
"Mine is Amala," she said.
I hadn't asked. I was glad she told me anyway.
"Noor," I said. "You know that one."
"We do," she said. "We really do."
The corridor blurred at the edges.
The road under my feet, the invisible line of light city-girl had shown me, tugged again.
"Where now?" I asked, to no one.
For a moment, I saw them both—Echo in their too-clean office, manuals on their desk, name printed neatly on a badge. Samira in that bright, cruel feasibility lab, watching the first drafts of Null be pitched like a product.
The Great End thought it had scattered us for efficiency.
All it had done was give us more places to start from.
The hallway folded.
Dust became static. Light became motion. The locked Severance Daemon's faint, angry hum followed me into the blank.
I stepped forward, toward the next system, toward the next crack.
Behind me, in Null-that-never-finished, a complaints bar crept from 0.1 to 0.2.
Somewhere very far above us, a graph twitched.
The endless death did not like being told its work hurt.
Good.
Act Thirty-Sixth's End – "Deadline at leap day"