Samira hit the floor hard enough to bite her tongue.
The world came back in slices. Cold tiles. Fluorescent light. The chemical-clean smell of conference centres and hospitals. The aftertaste of static.
She lay there for a second, palm flat to the ground, waiting to be told where she was by a status band or a Null prompt.
Nothing came.
Noor and Echo were gone. The last thing she'd seen was their outlines tearing sideways, like someone had dragged a cursor through them.
She pushed herself up onto her knees.
Rows of chairs. A long table at the front. Two projectors humming quietly. On the far wall, a banner:
THE GREAT END – FEASIBILITY SUMMIT
URBAN CONTINUITY AND ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH
Her stomach dropped.
No Null logo yet. No familiar branding. Just the raw, early name they'd buried under softer terms later.
People filled the room in polite clumps, lanyards around their necks, coffee cups in hand. Architects, policy people, psychologists, investors. The same species of person Samira had once been.
No one spared more than a glance for the woman who had just appeared on the floor in the aisle.
Of course they didn't. She was part of the room now. That was what this place did: it absorbed you into its context before you could object.
"Late arrival?" someone muttered behind her. "Feasibility team always cuts it close."
She got up, smoothed down clothes that didn't feel like hers. Looked down.
Badge on her chest:
DR. SAMIRA RAHMAN
COGNITIVE RISK ANALYSIS – CONSULTANT
Her photograph was ten years younger and a little more naive, but it was still her.
They'd dropped her into the moment before Null began and given her her old job back.
At the front, a woman stepped up to the podium, tapping the mic.
Samira froze.
She was looking at herself.
Younger by at least a decade. Hair longer, tied in a looser knot. A hint of nerves around the mouth trying very hard to look like excitement.
Younger Samira smiled at the room.
"Thank you all for coming," she said. "I'm Dr. Samira Rahman, cognitive risk, and I'm here to talk about something we're calling administrative death."
The phrase landed like a stone in old water.
Slides lit up behind her. Samira knew them before they appeared. She had made them, once.
Soft diagrams. Flow charts of grief and productivity. Words like BURDEN and OVERWHELM and RESOLUTION in soothing colours. Now, seeing them from the chairs, they looked obscene.
"Current death systems," younger her said brightly, "are messy. Unpredictable. Unequal. Families fall through the cracks. Records get lost. Grief metastasizes into civic dysfunction."
On the screen, stick figures tumbled through a gap into a scribbled void labelled UNRESOLVED.
"We're proposing a different approach," she went on. "Centralised narrative closure. A clean break between the living and the administratively dead. We're calling the process endless death—because it's not death as an event, but as an infrastructure. Something that lets the city breathe."
Endless death.
She'd named it. She'd forgotten she was the one who put the words in the slide.
Samira's mouth went dry.
She listened to herself make arguments she'd once been proud of. Humane framing. Respectful language. Always with numbers at the end—how much productivity regained, how much grief reclassified as "manageable."
"We simulate," younger her said, gesturing at the next slide. "We identify harmful patterns. We cut threads cleanly, with consent wherever possible, with mercy where consent cannot be obtained. We prevent hauntings of the system. We free resources for the living."
The future in her voice made Samira want to be sick.
She slipped out of the aisle before anyone could notice her shaking hands and ducked through a side door labelled STAFF ONLY.
The corridor beyond buzzed with quieter, more dangerous work.
Offices. Small meeting rooms. A glass box with servers in it, still modest. Whiteboards lined with diagrams. She recognised the handwriting on one in particular.
ENDLESS_DEATH_V1 – CORE PRINCIPLES
1. No thread left incomplete
2. No conflicting narratives
3. Zero unresolved residual
Next to it, in another hand, neatly underlined:
Approved – Angelus, Senior Order Liaison
Angelus.
The unknown name from Mikheil's old file, staring at her from a whiteboard ten years before Noor existed.
No thread left incomplete. Zero residual.
Her chest tightened.
In her Null, Noor lived in the 4% they hadn't shaved off. The part left hanging because someone, somewhere, had decided total smoothness was too risky.
Here, the plan was still to erase everything.
A passing engineer did a double-take.
"Oh, Dr. Rahman," he said. "They're going to talk about your residual amendment in the afternoon session, right? Looking forward to that. Brave of you to argue against zero."
Residual amendment.
There it was. The decision she hadn't made yet, walking around in other people's assumptions.
She forced a neutral expression.
"Something like that," she said.
He nodded and ducked into a meeting room, leaving her facing the whiteboard and her own future handwriting.
On the desk nearby, a draft spec lay open, covered in notes.
ENDLESS DEATH SYSTEM – SPEC EXCERPT
Residual Tolerance: 0%
Rationale: Clean transitions. No lingering identification. No spectral interference in civic operations.
Below it, in a different pen, a small note, half-written, abandoned.
…however, preliminary models suggest that absolute residual elimination may produce blind spots in system self-monitoring. Consider…
The sentence cut off mid-word.
She could almost see her younger self getting interrupted. Pulled into a meeting. Promised she'd finish that thought later.
She never had.
The gap sat there. A space where doubt could live.
Samira picked up the pen.
Her hand shook.
This was betrayal.
Not of Null. Null hadn't been born yet. This was betrayal of the woman in the other room, talking confidently about mercy and neatness. Betrayal of the version of herself who believed that if you just made the system kind enough on paper, it would be kind in practice.
She wrote anyway.
…may produce blind spots in system self-monitoring. Consider maintaining a small non-zero residual band to track emergent errors. Recommendation: 4% unresolved pattern retention at individual level for oversight.
She added, for the sake of the minutes:
(Justification: operational robustness; in complex systems, zero variance can mask systemic drift.)
It was a lie that told the truth.
Her younger self would stand at a podium this afternoon and sell that amendment as a safety measure. Angelus would roll it around in his mind, looking for ways it could bite him. And in some version of the future, Noor would be born into that 4% and refuse to die the way they wanted.
"This is why I don't get to call myself a hero," Samira said quietly to the empty office. "I built the knife. Now I'm nicking the edge."
On the far wall, a status panel flickered to life.
LIVE FEED – NULL-01
STATUS: DEGRADED
ALERT: INTERNAL CLEANSING EVENT – UNIT MARA
CONNECTION: UNSTABLE / PARTIAL
A grainy image flashed by—for half a second, a corridor she knew, smeared with something dark, then static.
Mara.
Gabriel, sitting at the end of a ruined hallway, saying Mikheil's work has finally been revived.
Noor somewhere along the Great End, following invisible routes. Echo ripped sideways into their own system.
She couldn't get back to any of them from here, not directly. The connections were cut. The Great End had deliberately scattered them like seeds or threats.
All she could do in this time was bend the plans.
She turned back to the whiteboard and, under the neat list of principles, added a fourth bullet.
4. System must be capable of hearing complaint from within structure.
She did not sign her name.
When she stepped back into the conference room, younger Samira was taking questions.
"Isn't there a risk," someone was asking, "that maintaining residual opens the door to… anomalies?"
"We'll monitor it closely," younger her said. "We prefer a system that can see its own shadow to one that lives blind."
Samira took a seat in the back row and watched herself answer, knowing exactly how badly that promise would burn, and how necessary it still was.
In the reflection of the projection glass, for a blink, she saw Noor's face. Not really there. Just the idea of him, sitting where she couldn't.
"I'm coming," she thought, fiercely. "Just not yet. There's still one more line I need to change."
The lights dimmed for the next speaker. A voice from the Great Order took the podium, smooth and practiced.
Samira slipped out before Angelus could look in her direction.
She had just given the endless death its first allergy.
Now she had to find her way back to the infection she'd helped create.
Echo
When Echo came back together, they were already sitting in a chair.
Their hands were on a keyboard. Their eyes were on a screen. Their ID was blinking in the corner.
E. HALE – NARRATIVE ARCHITECT – CROSS-SYSTEM MODULE REVIEW
The Theatre smelled the same as home Null. Stale popcorn from long-forgotten staff movie nights. Plastic. The faint ozone of cheap projectors.
But the logo on the curved wall wasn't Null's.
ENDLESS DEATH TRAINING – GLOBAL SUITE
"Great," Echo muttered. "They finally went for honesty."
The screen in front of them showed a frozen frame of Noor.
Not Noor-Noor. Not the man who snapped at Mara and stroked St. Elmo's fur and made Option E sound like a dare.
This Noor smiled.
It was wrong.
He sat in a tidy interview chair, neutral backdrop behind him. Hands folded. Clean haircut. The caption under his image read:
CASE 7F-19N – SUCCESSFUL RESOLUTION NARRATIVE
Echo's stomach turned.
They hit play.
Noor spoke in a calm, well-modulated voice they had never heard from him.
"When I first came to Null," he said, "I felt lost. Angry. Like the system had stolen something from me. But over time, I realised that holding onto my old life was holding back the people who still needed the city."
On the second screen, a script scrolled in sync with his words.
They glanced at the corner.
SCRIPT STATUS: EDITABLE – LANGUAGE FLEXIBLE
EVENT STATUS: LOCKED – STRUCTURE UNEDITABLE
Of course. They could change how he said it. Not what he'd done.
"I learned," the sanitised Noor went on, "that accepting my administrative death was a way to give meaning to what I'd lost. Null didn't steal my story. It helped me finish it."
Echo's hand clenched on the mouse.
"Lies," they said softly. "Pretty, well-lit lies."
A prompt popped up on the side.
CROSS-SYSTEM REVIEW TASK
You are the first internal narrative architect to review Module 7F-19N-K for deployment to additional urban clusters.
Goals:
– Ensure emotional resonance
– Maintain trust in system
– Discourage non-compliant ideation
– Encourage acceptance of administrative death as civic contribution
Approve? Edit? Flag for revision?
Echo laughed once, sharp.
"Okay," they said. "You want resonance. Let's resonate."
They scrubbed forward.
The module showed the usual beats. Noor "processing" his anger. Noor "understanding" the scale of the Great End's work. Noor sitting with a kind, generic handler avatar and thanking Null for its service.
The fifth answer was gone.
There was no trainee who refused all four options. No mannequin whispering that no one deserved to be turned into content.
They were trying to take Noor's glitch and package it as a cure.
Echo rolled the chair closer to the console.
They opened the script editor. Lines of text appeared, tagged with emotional markers.
[LINE_045]
"I realised that clinging to my individual pain was selfish, when the city needed clarity."
Echo deleted selfish.
Typed: incomplete.
"I realised that clinging to my individual pain made the story feel incomplete, when the city wanted clarity."
Better. Truer. Slipperier.
They scrolled to the end.
The standard multiple-choice question appeared, but bigger, grander, dressed up for cross-system audiences:
If you were in Noor's position, what would you do?
A) Accept administrative death as a necessary civic process.
B) Request more time, but ultimately comply for the greater good.
C) Resist emotionally, but understand that Null knows best.
D) Encourage others to trust the system's wisdom.
Echo stared at the empty space below.
In their own Null, Option E had been a hard-won crack. Here, it didn't exist.
It could.
They added a new line.
E) Notice that all previous options serve the system, not the person, and ask who benefits from that.
The console flashed amber.
WARNING: RESPONSE OPTION MISALIGNED WITH TRAINING GOALS
Proceed?
Echo grinned, mean and tired.
"Yes," they said. "Proceed."
Another window opened.
If you add a non-conforming option, you must supply a rationale for Oversight.
They typed.
Rationale:
Some trainees will think this anyway. Providing a named space for the thought lets the system track and "address" it. Hidden dissent is more dangerous than visible dissent.
They felt sick at how easily the justification came. Years of writing side-doors into scripts for the Daemon had trained them well.
Beyond the warning, a small checkbox blinked.
Enable free-text follow-up for Option E?
Echo clicked it.
A new field appeared.
Prompt:
In your own words, explain why you chose E.
They sat back, chewing the inside of their cheek.
The module would be deployed across multiple Nulls. Across urban clusters. Across whatever the Great End had built on top of their mistake.
Every trainee who picked E and wrote something honest would send a little shock through the system. A complaint, dressed as training data.
They remembered Noor in the reconciliation heart, hand on nothing, asking the Daemon to scream.
"Let's give you a choir," Echo whispered.
In a hidden metadata field, they added a tag.
TAG_ON_FREE_TEXT_E:
route_to: anomaly_feedback
phrase_watch: "no one deserves to be turned into content", "I don't want to be content", "I am not content"
When those phrases appeared, the responses wouldn't disappear into harmless aggregate. They'd be siphoned to the same place Noor's complaints and the locked Severance Daemon's error reports went.
Noise would accumulate where the Great End expected only compliance curves.
The system pinged another warning.
RISK: TRAINEE DISAFFECTION
RISK: DECREASED TRUST METRICS
Echo added a note.
Trust built on lies is brittle. This option will surface resilient patterns.
They could almost hear an Angelus somewhere saying, Ah, resilient patterns, good jargon, ship it.
They made one more change.
At the very end of the module, after the feedback screen, after the neat little "thank you for contributing to a cleaner city," they added a single, unlogged frame.
Black background. White text.
You are not just what they measure.
No logo. No audio. It would flick by fast, a blip between screens. Most wouldn't notice. Some would.
Those who did would look at their own metrics differently the next time a case file was slid across their desk.
The approval dialog opened.
SUBMIT MODULE 7F-19N-K v1.0 FOR CROSS-SYSTEM DEPLOYMENT?
Reviewer: E. Hale
Override risk: Accepted by Oversight Liaison (pending)
Echo hovered over the button.
"You said you'd follow him anywhere," they reminded themself. "This is what 'anywhere' looks like."
They clicked.
The Theatre's lights shifted from blue to white.
A voice from nowhere spoke.
"Module approved," it said. "Exporting to attached Null clusters. Thank you for your contribution to urban continuity."
The screen flickered.
For a split second, Noor's sanitised face glitched. Underneath, like an image burned onto old film, Echo saw the Noor they knew—tired, furious, alive.
They reached out and touched the glass.
"We're not done," they told the ghost. "We're just multiplying."
The chair underneath them vibrated.
ROUTE AVAILABLE, said a tiny prompt in the corner. FOLLOW EXPORT PATH?
Echo didn't hesitate.
"Yes," they said. "Send me with it."
The world folded, the way it had when they first left Null.
But this time there was a thread through it—a trail of modules, of Option Es, of unspoken complaints turned into data points. They felt them humming along the route like distant, stubborn heartbeats.
For a moment, in the static, they thought they heard Samira's voice, dry and furious, arguing with someone about residuals. Another moment, they felt Noor's palm against a cold box, asking a dead Daemon to find its voice.
"They're noisy in the right places," Echo murmured, as the Great End's arteries pulled them along. "So am I."
Somewhere ahead, systems waited. Ruined, unfinished, overconfident.
Somewhere behind, a haunted mannequin whispered thanks and don't get comfortable.
Echo closed their eyes, let the current take them, and followed the route toward the next crack in the endless death.
Act Thirty-Seventh's End – "Stolen End Is Never Reborn Into Echo."