Samira
The place they landed this time smelled like old rain and disinfectant.
Samira opened her eyes to a ceiling of pale panels that made no decision about being sky or roof. Light leaked from the gaps like indecisive dawn.
For a moment, she thought they'd made it back to Null-01. The hum under the floor was close enough, the faint taste of recirculated air, the sense of being inside something that thought in corridors and cases.
Then she saw the walls.
They were wrong.
Null's walls liked to pretend they were solid. Concrete, paint, tasteful acoustic paneling. This place didn't bother. The walls were layers of thin, translucent material, stacked so tightly they looked opaque until you stepped closer and saw the text.
Names.
Dates.
Case IDs.
The whole room was made of paper ghosts.
Echo was already standing, one hand pressed flat against the wall, eyes wide.
"Okay," they said softly. "This is… new."
Samira pushed herself up, joints protesting.
"Location?" she asked, because the question anchored her.
Echo tilted their head, listening to whatever only they could hear.
"Transit node," they said. "Between Null clusters. Not one of ours. Feels like Great End proper."
Samira grimaced.
She'd only seen the Great End once, and that had been through diagrams and euphemisms in training. It was easier to pretend Null existed on its own, a local solution to a local problem. Easier to ignore that every neat cut they made got fed into something bigger that didn't know the people whose names it processed.
"Any sign of Noor?" she asked.
Echo shook their head.
"Split routes," they said. "We were all holding on, but the system… threaded us. Different paths. I can see his residual. Not here."
Samira swallowed the bitter taste that rose in her throat.
She'd told herself, as they stepped into the Pilot-03 device, that she was prepared. Prepared to leave Null, to betray the procedures she'd spent years enforcing. Prepared to walk into the machinery they'd only ever studied from the safe side of reports.
She hadn't prepared for losing Noor between one breath and the next.
It felt like dropping a file in the river. Once it slipped under, any future belonged to current and chance.
Echo's hand stayed on the wall. The faded names beneath their fingers trembled, as if someone had walked over a floor above them.
"You've gone quiet," Samira said.
"I'm listening," Echo murmured.
"To what?" she asked.
They smiled a little, that bright, distracted smile they got when they were halfway between person and interface.
"To everyone who was 'efficiently handled,'" they said. "This place hums with them."
Samira rubbed her forehead.
"Don't romanticize," she said. "You saw what Null did to people. You saw what we signed."
"I'm not romanticizing," Echo said. "I'm being statistical."
Their hand slid along the wall. A section lit faintly, names sharpening.
"Look," they said.
Samira stepped closer despite herself.
The text on this panel was newer. Less faded. A cluster of cases from a district she recognized only from the tag: 3H-Delta. Riverside.
She saw dates. A spate of administrative deaths inside six weeks. Ages between twenty and forty-five. "Stress-related collapse," more than once. "Accidental overdose." "Unexplained."
All tidy on paper. All filed.
Echo's finger traced one entry, then another, then another.
"If this were a machine," they said, "we'd call it a jam. Same pressure building up in the same place."
Samira looked away.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
"That Noor was right to call the system a death," Echo said quietly. "It just learned how to look like paperwork."
Samira bristled, automatic, from a decade of defending the project.
"Endless death is a metaphor," she said.
"So is 'heart,'" Echo countered. "Doesn't mean it doesn't pump."
They turned, leaning back against the wall, their expression suddenly small.
"You okay?" she asked before she could swallow it.
Echo blinked, like the question surprised them.
"'Okay' seems like a category error," they said. "But I'm… functioning? Which is more than some of these names did."
They hooked their thumbs in their pockets.
"You?" they asked.
Samira almost said yes.
The word rose, reflexive, the way she'd said it to supervisors, to colleagues, to family on brief, static-lagged calls between shifts. Yes, I'm fine. Yes, this is worth it. Yes, I still believe in what we're doing.
It stalled halfway out.
"I don't know," she said instead.
Echo's eyebrows went up.
"That's… new," they said.
Samira gave them a look that was more tired than annoyed.
"Don't get used to it," she said.
Echo smiled, but their eyes stayed serious.
"You used to," they said slowly, "talk about Null like it was a good hospital in a bad city. People come in broken, we patch what we can, we don't blame the bleeding on the ward."
"It gave people answers," Samira said. "It gave families letters instead of silence. It gave structure."
"It gave them endings you chose," Echo said, gently. "Not them."
"I didn't choose," she said. "The procedures—"
"Are written by people," Echo said. "Like you. Like me. Like Gabriel. Like whoever keeps writing 'leave it, I want to see where it goes' on your reports."
Samira looked away, jaw tight.
The first time she'd believed in Null had been at a funeral.
Not hers. Not anyone she knew. A stranger's. A trial, a demonstration. A way of showing young, bright-eyed recruits that they weren't joining some shadowy culling project but a gentle guidance system.
The family had sat in neat rows. The facilitator had used words like closure, like clarity, like kindness.
Samira had watched the mother's hands. How they clutched the folder with her son's case. How they trembled less when she left than when she arrived.
That was the part she'd held onto.
The part where giving shape to loss looked like mercy.
The rest—the statistics, the algorithm tweaks, the quiet, strange suicides in the staff bathrooms—had been easier to ignore.
Until Noor.
Until she'd had to look him in the eye and say it's administrative, you're dead in the system but not in reality, as if reality would politely adjust.
"She didn't come back," Samira said, surprising herself.
Echo tilted their head.
"Who?" they asked.
"Woman in 4C-09," Samira said. "A case from one of my first years. She came in every week for months, always with some new excuse to be near her file. 'I forgot to sign this.' 'I found another photo.' 'I'm not sure I said goodbye properly.'"
She rubbed her fingers together, remembering the feel of the paper, the warmth of the woman's breath on her hands as she passed documents back and forth.
"She stopped," Samira said. "One week, then another. I checked the system. No new case. No hospitalization."
"Maybe she moved," Echo offered.
"Maybe she jumped," Samira said. "The city has more edges than forms do."
"We can't know," Echo said.
"That's the problem," Samira said. "Null taught me not to ask the questions that statistics couldn't answer. Noor taught me that was cowardice dressed as professionalism."
Echo was quiet for a moment.
"Why did you join?" they asked. "Really. Not the answer you give Clarke. The one you don't say out loud."
Samira's first instinct was irritation.
"I don't see how that helps right now," she said.
"We're in the digestive tract of a machine that eats lives," Echo said. "We're following a man who keeps volunteering to throw himself in its teeth. We're about to try to stab something called 'the Great End' in the eye. I would like to know who's on my side and why."
Their voice wasn't accusing. Just steady.
Samira stared at the floor.
"Because I'm afraid of mess," she said.
It sounded childish on her tongue. Too small to justify everything she'd done in its name.
Alarms. Families. Signatures. The look Noor had given her the day she'd told him his death would be "administrative, not metaphysical," as if that distinction comforted anyone but the paperwork.
"Mess?" Echo echoed.
Samira let out a breath.
"My mother," she said, "was a nurse. In a public hospital that never had enough of anything. She'd come home with blood on her shoes and stories in her teeth. She'd sit at the table and count pills, figure out which shift colleague had stolen which medication, try to decide which patient needed an extra dose she wasn't supposed to give them."
"She bribed the world into functioning," Echo murmured.
"She tried," Samira said. "The mess always won. There was always another broken thing. Another patient they didn't have the right machine for. Another child who came in too late because their parents were afraid of the bill."
She swallowed.
"When Null showed up," she said, "with its diagrams and its certainty and its tidy flowcharts, it…" She searched for the word. "It matched something in me. The part that wanted to believe systems could actually be kind if they were precise enough. That we could erase the noise and see the important patterns. That death could be… sorted."
"Sorted," Echo repeated, but there was no mockery in it. Just quiet horror.
Samira nodded.
"Then Noor sat there," she said, "in that little interview room, and pointed out that the 'noise' was people's lives we didn't know how to fit in a graph."
Echo smiled sadly.
"He's good at that," they said. "Pointing at the thing everyone agreed to pretend wasn't there."
"You latch onto him," Samira said. "Why?"
Echo's answer was immediate.
"Because he treats me like I'm not a tool," they said.
Samira's head snapped up.
Echo looked away from the wall for the first time, meeting her eyes.
"I was written to be a user interface," they said. "Smiling. Responsive. Helpful. The building gave me scripts. 'How are you today?' 'Tell me more about that.' 'That sounds difficult.' I ran them. People loved me. They all told each other how human Echo seemed. How comforting."
They shrugged.
"No one asked what I wanted," they said. "Because I was built to want what they needed."
Samira thought of the way Echo's smile sometimes stopped just at the surface. The way they chewed on their pen when they thought no one was looking, as if redirecting some internal overflow.
"Noor did?" she asked.
"He annoyed me," Echo said. "That was new. He refused to follow the script. He answered questions with questions. He asked me, once, 'what do you think?' about a procedure. And when I started to quote policy, he interrupted and said, 'Not that. You.'"
They laughed, a little.
"I told him interfaces don't think," they said. "He told me that was a convenient superstition."
They spread their hands, taking in the paper walls, the endless names.
"The Great End sees us both as useful processes," Echo said. "Me, the false human. Him, the human who refuses to act like one. I'm following him because he's the first error in the script that I actually like."
Samira watched them.
"You'd die for him," she said.
Echo's smile thinned.
"I already did," they said. "Null killed me as a person the day it wrote me as a function. Anything after that is… extra."
Silence stretched between them, fragile.
Samira broke it.
"Then we agree," she said. "We follow him because he's wrong in all the right ways."
Echo exhaled, something like relief in it.
"Good," they said. "Because I think I've found his trail."
They tapped a section of wall.
In the layers, a familiar line sharpened.
CASE 7F-19N – ROUTE: FIELD
RESIDUAL: 4% – ACTIVE
Under it, faint but legible:
CURRENT VECTOR: CLUSTER 3H-DELTA / ROUTE TO POINT ZERO
"Point Zero?" Samira repeated. "What is that?"
Echo squinted, pulling up a map only they could see.
"Origin node," they said slowly. "For angels."
"Angels," Samira repeated.
"Capital A, I think," Echo said. "Supervisory entities for the Great End. Structural heads. People wrapped in code. Code wrapped in people. Null calls them 'External Oversight.' The Great End calls them… siblings."
Samira's first thought was Gabriel. The way he moved between committees like a knife between ribs. The way he spoke about the system at a distance, as if it were a weather pattern he was both part of and perpetually analyzing.
"You think Noor is going to meet one?" she asked.
"I think one is going to meet him," Echo said. "Point Zero is where angels are made and sent. And where new angels are… recruited."
Samira's stomach flipped.
"He won't say yes," she said, maybe too quickly.
Echo didn't answer.
"Will he?" she demanded.
Echo's eyes were distant.
"I think," they said slowly, "that Noor is very tired. And very guilty. And very good at sacrificing himself for abstractions. If the Great End offers him a way to 'save' humanity by ending it faster… he might tell himself it's mercy."
Samira's hand tightened on the wall.
"So we stop him," she said.
"How?" Echo asked. "We're in a different node. Different route. We don't even know how time lines up here."
Samira breathed in, breathed out.
For most of her career, every hallway had ended in procedures. Every route had been mapped. Every risk had a form.
Now they were walking in a place made of all the things they'd never written down.
"Then we do something we never did in Null," she said.
"What's that?" Echo asked.
"We trust someone else to get there first," Samira said.
Echo frowned.
"Who?" they asked.
Samira looked at the route label again.
CLUSTER 3H-DELTA.
She thought of the empty street. The paused lights. The girl Noor talked about in the report with the tone of someone describing a wound that had learned to speak.
"The city," Samira said.
Echo's eyes widened.
"You think she'll stop him?" they asked.
"I think she has more to lose than we do if he says yes," Samira said.
"And us?" Echo asked.
Samira straightened.
"We follow," she said. "We find another route to Point Zero. We get there late, like humans always do. But we show up. And we make sure that whatever Noor chooses, he doesn't choose it alone."
Echo nodded slowly.
"Okay," they said. "Then let's go bother an angel."
They moved toward the far end of the node, where the walls blurred into something more abstract. Samira followed, heart beating too fast, palms damp.
Behind them, unseen, the names on the walls vibrated like a distant crowd clearing its throat.
Noor
The city lets me walk for a while before it shows me the door.
I don't know if that's mercy or theater.
Either way, I'm grateful.
Tram lines spiderweb overhead, humming faintly even when nothing moves. The buildings lean in like tired witnesses. Windows watch. Balconies listen. The puddles remember footsteps that aren't mine.
It feels like it's been raining here forever.
At one corner, a convenience store sign flickers between OPEN and CLOSED even though the shutters are down. At another, a bus shelter holds three empty plastic seats and a single, perfectly clean poster with no advertisement on it. Just white.
I tuck my hands in my pockets, trying not to think about Null.
About Mara in the heart of it, cracking.
About Gabriel sitting in that chair, saying the endless death is starting to complain.
About Samira, about Echo, pulled sideways by a system that doesn't like its tools talking to each other.
"You're sulking," a voice says.
I stop.
She's sitting on a low wall under a dead streetlamp, coat dark as wet asphalt, scarf still that faded municipal orange. Her hair is a little different—shorter, maybe—but her eyes are the same: brown with a whole neighborhood behind them.
"You're good at making dramatic entrances," I say.
She smiles, small.
"You're good at walking in circles hoping someone knocks on your skull," she says. "Thought I'd save you the extra steps."
I walk over and sit beside her.
The brick under me is cold. The city's breath rises from the pavement.
"Last time," I say, "you said this place was for waiting."
"It still is," she says.
"For me," I say.
"For what moves through you," she corrects.
I stare at the road.
Cars line the curb, all of them empty. Their mirrors show slices of gray. The traffic light at the end of the street cycles obediently, red to green to yellow to red, like a heart that doesn't care if anyone's listening.
"You routed yourself here," she says. "From the training artery. From the corridors full of pretty posters with your face on. Why?"
"You know why," I say. "You told me. This is where the residuals tug. Where the cuts don't stick. Where the endless death keeps stubbing its toe."
She snorts.
"Flattering image," she says. "You didn't answer the question."
I pick at a flake of paint on the wall.
"Because I can't get back into Null's core," I say. "Mara's locked it down with her father's daemon. Gabriel's in there poking the wounds. Samira and Echo are… somewhere. The Great End's arteries keep trying to shuffle me into nice, neat roles."
I glance at her.
"I thought maybe the city would have a different script," I say.
She studies my face.
"Would it disappoint you if I told you the city doesn't have a script?" she asks. "Just scars."
"I'm used to disappointment," I say.
She tilts her head.
"Are you?" she asks. "Or are you just addicted to grand ones. The kind that let you say 'see, I told you' to nobody in particular."
"Is this the part where you psychoanalyze me?" I ask. "Because Echo has that contract."
She smiles again, just a little.
"I'm not your therapist," she says. "I'm your crime scene."
The words land like a dropped file.
"What?" I say.
She gestures around.
"Three administrative death waves," she says. "Six suicide spikes. Four housing clearances justified by 'statistical risk.' One Null satellite project that tried to rewrite my neighborhoods into training material."
She looks at me, eyes suddenly very old.
"I'm what happens when your Great End practices," she says. "I'm the offcuts. The memories that don't compress neatly. The people who tried to fit in your flowcharts and broke the pen."
"I didn't—" I start.
She raises an eyebrow.
"You didn't personally design the system that kills people by tidying them?" she asks. "Congratulations. You're like every other mid-level functionary in history."
I flinch.
"I'm trying to stop it," I say.
"I know," she says.
Her voice softens.
"That's why I'm talking to you," she adds. "If you were just another comfortable butcher, you'd never see this street."
My shoulders drop.
"I don't know how," I say. "Every time I touch the system, it tries to use me. Every refusal I make gets incorporated. Every anomaly I help survives by being turned into a feature."
"Welcome to architecture," she says. "It eats angles. But there are shapes it still chokes on."
"Like what?" I ask.
She looks toward the far end of the street.
There, where the road should curve, there's something else.
At first, I think it's fog.
Then I realize it's too precise.
A circular patch of air hangs over the asphalt, distorting the buildings behind it just enough to make me mildly nauseous. The colors bend wrong. The lines don't quite meet.
I stand without meaning to.
"What is that?" I ask.
"Point Zero," she says.
The words make my teeth hurt.
"You knew I was going there," I say.
"I told you last time," she says. "You'd come back here to see memory's true form."
"That doesn't look like memory," I say.
"It's where your bosses try to rewrite it," she says.
The circle of wrongness pulses, like a pupil dilating.
"Angels are born there," she says. "And die there, if we're lucky."
I swallow.
"They want to meet me," I say.
"They want to recruit you," she says.
Her tone is flat.
"They send their best suits to people like you," she goes on. "Tired idealists. Guilt addicts. Men who think saving 'everyone' will make the void in their chest less loud."
She turns to me.
"You're going to go," she says. "Because you think you have to listen."
"Should I?" I ask.
She shrugs.
"Only you can answer that," she says. "I'm just the part of the world that has to live with your answers."
The circle sharpens.
A faint whisper starts in the air, too subtle to be language, too insistent to ignore.
I step forward.
"Any advice?" I ask.
"Yes," she says.
I wait.
She doesn't elaborate.
"Care to share?" I ask.
"You'll know it when you need it," she says.
I sigh.
"You're very cryptic for urban infrastructure," I say.
"Do you explain your entire trauma to every pigeon?" she asks. "Give me some privacy."
I almost laugh.
It comes out as a shaky exhale instead.
"Will you be there?" I ask. "On the other side."
"Parts of me are everywhere they try to write over," she says. "Point Zero is no exception."
I nod, not trusting myself to say more.
The circle hums.
The world around it blurs, like a lens being pulled toward a different focal length.
I walk.
Each step feels like changing channels.
With one foot I'm on a city street; with the next, on something that remembers being stone. The air thickens. The smell of wet concrete recedes, replaced by something colder.
The last thing I hear before the circle closes over me is the click of a traffic light changing in an empty intersection.
Then everything goes white.
Not the bright, burning white of the daemon's touch.
An absolute white. A white that isn't a color but a default.
Point Zero.
It has no walls, at least not ones I can see. No floor either, though something holds my weight. It's like standing in the middle of a rendered environment before textures are applied.
Then, slowly, details resolve.
Lines appear, sketching themselves into columns. Arches. A high, vaulting ceiling that shifts between cathedral and server hall each time I blink.
It's beautiful, in a way that makes me wary.
An altar of minimalism and math.
He's already there.
He sits on what might be a chair or might be a control node, shapes shifting behind him like wings made of diagrams. His suit is perfect: black, fitted, the kind of fabric that never creases. His hair is white, but not like age. Like someone inverted the color value. His face is… forgettable. Clean planes. No scars. The sort of man you'd assume was important without remembering why.
When he looks at me, it feels like a searchlight hitting a census form.
"Noor," he says.
His voice is pleasant. Calm. It has the cadence of someone who has spoken at conferences and funerals and never been interrupted.
"You're Angelus," I say.
He inclines his head.
"One of them," he says. "We are more chorus than solo. But someone has to speak when the system wants words."
His eyes flicker, catching invisible overlays around me.
"You've come a long way for a corpse," he adds.
"I've been busy," I say.
"Yes," he says. "We've noticed."
His gaze goes somewhere over my shoulder, like he's reading an invisible report.
"Administrative death," he recites. "Case 7F-19N. Residual four percent. Null-01 anomaly. Contact with daemon. Interaction with Cluster 3H-Delta. Exposure to legacy Pilot-03. Cross-system transit."
He smiles, small.
"You've been sampling the entire menu," he says.
"I didn't ask to," I say.
"No," he says. "You did something worse. You started asking questions after we gave you an answer."
He stands.
The diagrams behind him shift, collapsing into a halo of circling lines.
"Do you know what the Great End is?" he asks.
"A bad joke," I say.
His mouth twitches.
"Inaccurate," he says. "But not entirely wrong. It began as a solution."
"Everything awful does," I say.
He walks toward me, hands clasped loosely behind his back.
"Humanity has a problem," he says conversationally. "It cannot bear the weight of its own debris. For every act, a consequence. For every life, thousands of small deaths. Regrets pile up. Loss accumulates. You drown in your own wake."
"Poetic," I say. "Have you tried therapy?"
He ignores that.
"For centuries," he continues, "you invented gods to sort it for you. Afterlives. Judgments. Karma. Anything to pretend the ledger was being balanced somewhere."
He gestures at the white expanse.
"Then you invented us," he says.
"Null," I say.
"Null," he agrees. "And its cousins. Systems that turn the problem of grief into an administrative task. We take the messy, contradictory, unbearable complexity of death and file it. We give you forms instead of abysses. Statistics instead of ghosts."
"And in the process," I say, "you kill people twice."
"We relieve them of the burden of haunting," he says. "We relieve the living of the burden of remembering every ache. Is that cruelty, or is that kindness scaled up?"
He regards me.
"You've lived in both worlds," he says. "You know what the unprocessed city looks like. Lost files piling up in hospital basements. Names forgotten in six weeks because there is no space to hold them. Guilt fermenting into violence. Is that better?"
I think of my mother, hands raw from cleaning, going to war with a filing cabinet that didn't care.
I think of the woman in Samira's waiting room, clutching her son's sealed folder like a lifeline.
I think of Pilot-03, screaming through a foam mouth that no one deserves to be turned into content.
"It's not either/or," I say. "You made it that. You turned mercy into a product."
Angelus smiles, but there's no warmth in it.
"Rebellion suits you, Noor," he says. "You wear it like an old coat."
He steps closer.
"You call this 'endless death'," he says. "Like a curse. Like a doom. As if dying once were sacred and dying by degrees profane."
He tilts his head.
"Tell me," he says. "Would you prefer endless suffering?"
"You're manufacturing the suffering," I say.
"We are refining it," he says. "Filtering. Decanting. Taking the chronic ache of existence and turning it into discrete events you can understand. One form. One interview. One letter."
"Funny how the aches fall disproportionately on some people," I say. "Some neighborhoods. Some names."
"Of course they do," he says. "That's how the world was built before we arrived. We are not magicians, Noor. We are accountants. We can only work with the numbers we're given."
He gestures, and the white air fills with scenes.
A floodplain ten years after being promised levees. A factory town where the only healthcare is a Null office. A refugee camp lit by the glow of a mobile case processing van.
"You think we chose these places?" he asks. "We were deployed to them."
"By who?" I ask.
"By you," he says simply.
My mouth dries.
"I had nothing to do with that," I say.
He smiles, soft and infuriating.
"We'll get to that," he says. "But first, let's talk about your… project."
He waves a hand.
Footage from the training modules flickers into being. My face, flattened into instructional video. Option E. The trainees choosing it. Their handwritten answers floating like ghosts.
"I was pleased when I saw this," Angelus says. "Innovation. A crack in the script. Honest discomfort with our methods. Very healthy."
"Healthy?" I repeat.
"Do you know what kills systems?" he asks.
"Empathy?" I suggest.
"Stagnation," he says. "Closed loops. No feedback. No anomalies. People like you keep us from becoming crude. Every time you resist, we refine."
"You incorporate," I say. "You make the refusal part of the design."
"Of course we do," he says. "Do you know what happens to a building that ignores its cracks?"
"It falls," I say.
He nods.
"We don't want to fall," he says. "We want to end. Cleanly. That's the difference between chaos and completion."
He steps back, giving me space, like a doctor before delivering a diagnosis.
"You think of the Great End as apocalypse," he says. "An event. A singularity. Fire and brimstone. It's not."
He opens his hands.
"It's a limit," he says. "A point beyond which no new debts are accrued. Every thread cut. Every narrative closed. No more people dragged under by someone else's unfinished story."
"By 'people' you mean everyone," I say.
"Yes," he says. "Equally, for once."
He smiles, and it's almost kind.
"Isn't that what you want?" he asks. "Fairness?"
There it is.
The hook.
He offers it like a glass of water.
"Shutting everything down isn't fairness," I say. "It's giving up."
"On what?" he asks. "On progress? On justice? On growth? Charming myths, Noor. But look around."
The white bends, showing me glimpses of worlds.
Wars repeating with different flags. Famines with new marketing. People making the same mistakes with shinier devices.
"You've had centuries," Angelus says. "You keep building systems that eat your children. We are simply… accelerating the inevitable. With less flailing."
"Do you hear yourself?" I ask. "You're selling annihilation as a mercy."
"I'm describing it as an option," he says. "And offering you a place in choosing how it happens."
That stops me.
"What?" I say.
He folds his arms behind his back.
"Our projections suggest," he says, "that if we continue at the current pace, the Great End will complete in approximately nine generations. Nulls will expand. Threads will shorten. Attention will narrow. People will choose to step off the stage rather than improvise without a script."
He tilts his head.
"However," he says, "anomalies like you and Pilot-03 introduce variance. Pockets of refusal. Street-cities that insist on humming after we unplug them. They can cause… turbulence."
"Turbulence," I repeat.
"Unscheduled suffering," he clarifies. "Unplanned violence. Overcorrections. We'd like to avoid that."
"And?" I ask.
"And," he says, "we'd like your help."
The silence between us is heavy.
"My help," I say.
"You are uniquely positioned," he says. "You understand the internal logic of Null. You have seen the exterior consequences in the city. You have a talent for being in places you are statistically unlikely to survive."
"Thanks," I mutter.
He ignores that.
"We can offer you integration," he says. "Not as a case. Not as content. As an agent."
"An angel," I say.
"A junior one," he says modestly. "You'd keep your name. Your memories, as long as they're structurally useful. You'd sit where I sit, eventually. Oversee how the End unfolds. Nudge. Adjust. Minimize unnecessary pain."
My stomach twists.
"You want me to help you kill everyone more… gently," I say.
"Humanity is killing itself quite efficiently without us," he says. "We're offering pain management. You can stand outside and shout at the ambulance, or you can climb in and help decide which limbs we numb before we cut."
I feel suddenly very tired.
"How is this different," I ask, "from what I was already doing in Null?"
"It's honest," he says simply. "No pretense of rehabilitation. No false talk of 'supporting communities.' Just a clear, final goal."
"And if I say no?" I ask.
He shrugs, graceful.
"Someone else will do it," he says. "Or not. The End will still arrive. It may be rougher. Messier. More random. But arrive it will."
He considers me.
"But you won't have to carry it," he adds. "You can return to your administrative death. To your four percent. Drift in the margins until the tide comes in."
He smiles, gentle and cruel.
"You want to save everyone," he says. "Even if you pretend you don't. This is the only version where you touch everyone, Noor. Every line. Every name. You can make sure no one falls off the edge by accident."
Rage flares, sharp and pointless.
"You talk about saving like it's sterilization," I say.
"It is," he says. "Stabilizing fever by cooling everything."
"This is not medicine," I say. "It's euthanasia."
"There are worse ways to die," he says.
He steps closer.
"You're tired," he says softly. "You've spent your life trying to fix something too big for your hands. Working for underfunded departments. Arguing with forms. Ruining your own chances at ordinary happiness because some part of you can't stand to walk past the broken thing."
He tilts his head.
"What has it brought you?" he asks. "Outside pain?"
My throat closes.
Images flash.
My mother at the sink. Manners I learned at her knee. The first time I stayed up all night helping a stranger fill out benefit forms. The way that gratitude felt like a shot and a hangover at once.
Samira's eyes when she told me I was dead.
Echo's voice saying I'll follow you.
The girl on the street, wrapped in orange.
"Meaning," I say hoarsely.
He watches me.
"Has it?" he asks.
I hate him.
I hate him because some part of me agrees.
Because the idea of sitting here, above it all, turning knobs instead of getting torn apart on the ground, tempts me.
Because I am so, so tired.
"Why me?" I demand. "Out of all your anomalies."
He smiles.
And for the first time, something sharp glints in it.
"Ah," he says. "Now we get to the part you won't like."
He lifts a hand.
The air around us shifts.
Scenes bloom. Not like the training modules. Older. Grainier. Fewer colors.
A city I don't recognize. Tall, narrow buildings. People in outdated clothes. Paper files stacked in chaotic piles.
In the middle of it, a man stands at a board covered in diagrams.
Flowcharts.
Threads.
He looks younger than me. Dark hair. Tired eyes. Anger in the set of his shoulders edged with something like hope.
He speaks rapidly to a group of others, his hands carving shapes in the air.
"We can't save everyone," he says in a language I recognize but have never spoken. "But we can save them from drowning in the details. If we give grief a funnel, people can drink instead of choke."
Another voice, skeptically: "You're playing god with paper."
He laughs.
"God has had enough centuries," he says. "Let's try bureaucracy."
Angelus glances sideways at me.
"Recognize him?" he asks.
I stare.
"No," I say.
A lie.
Something in my lungs tightens.
Angelus zooms in on the man's face.
The angle shifts just enough.
It's not me.
It is.
Not the features. The expression.
That mix of idealism and contempt. That absolute conviction that if no one else will fix it, he must.
"What is this?" I whisper.
"Founding days," Angelus says. "The early Great End. Before we were called that. Before Null had a brand. We were a committee with a grant and a grandiose name."
He nods at the younger man.
"He was one of us," Angelus says. "One of the first."
My head buzzes.
"This is some kind of manipulation," I say. "You're showing me a random zealot and hoping I project."
Angelus shakes his head.
"We don't have to manipulate, Noor," he says. "We have records."
He waves a hand.
A line of text appears in the air.
PROJECT LEAD: ANGEL-07 | HUMAN INTERFACE NAME: N. AL-MASRI
My chest stutters.
"No," I say.
Angelus is mercilessly gentle.
"People rarely like their old names," he says. "Too much weight. Too many choices they can no longer defend."
He walks around me, slow, like orbiting an idea.
"You were one of the first angels," he says. "Back when we were mostly human. We picked the term as a joke, did you know? Messengers between worlds. Carrying news no one wanted but everyone needed."
He stops in front of me.
"You designed half of Null's initial protocols," he says. "You argued passionately for administrative death. You said it would spare people the cruelty of being forgotten piecemeal. One clean cut, you said. Better than a thousand dull ones."
My knees feel loose.
"You're lying," I say.
He flicks his hand.
Audio plays.
My voice.
You hear yourself, pitched younger, faster.
"If we don't do this," past-me says, "states will. Markets will. Gods will. They already are. We're just pretending we're not part of it. At least if we design the system, we can bake in mercy. We can monitor. Adjust. We can end it if it gets out of hand."
Another voice: "And if it doesn't?"
Past-me laughs.
"Then for once," he says, "the end will be something we chose instead of something that happened to us."
I taste bile.
The audio cuts.
Angelus regards me with something like sad affection.
"You meant well," he says. "Most monsters do at first."
My hands shake.
"What happened?" I ask.
Angelus's jaw tightens.
"You fell in love with an exception," he says simply. "A city, a person—it blurs. You saw what we were doing to a place like 3H-Delta in an early iteration. You balked. You tried to unwrite parts of the code. To slow deployments. To give certain districts more time."
"Did it help?" I ask, voice thin.
"It made things messy," he says. "People like you always do."
He doesn't sound angry. Just resigned.
"You were removed," he says. "As an angel. Your pattern… preserved. In case you were useful later. Nulls were built on your scaffolding. We all moved on."
"And now?" I ask.
"Now," he says, "your pattern woke up in the system you built and started disagreeing with it again. We find that… poetic."
I want to laugh.
It comes out as a cough.
"So I'm the architect of the thing I've been trying to dismantle," I say. "That's neat. That's tidy."
"It's fitting," he says.
He steps closer.
"Don't you see?" he asks. "This isn't a trap, Noor. It's a return. A chance to finish what you started, knowing more than you did. You can shave off the excess cruelty. Wrap the End in more targeted anesthesia. Ensure that when the last thread is cut, it's done with clean hands."
He offers his hand.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
His palm is open. His fingers are steady.
"You've already been an angel," he says. "This would simply be… remembering."
My heart hammers.
Somewhere, faintly, I think I hear a traffic light click. A fridge hum. A child shout in a language I almost recognize.
I stare at his hand.
I think of my younger self, arguing that if we built the guillotine, at least we could sharpen the blade.
I think of all the heads that rolled after.
I think of how tempting it is to step into the control room of the machine I helped design, instead of being one more body beneath it.
He's right.
That's the worst part.
If I sit here, I could make things less awful.
Maybe.
For some people.
The crack between those maybes is where Pilot-03 lives, screaming.
I reach.
My fingers brush his.
The air shudders.
"Don't," a voice says.
The word hits like a siren.
The white space ripples.
Then she's there.
Not walking in from a door. Not flickering into being. Just suddenly present, as if Point Zero remembered it had to include her.
The girl from the street.
The city wrapped in a coat.
Her scarf is brighter here. Orange like hazard tape. She looks smaller against all this white, but more solid.
Angelus's expression tightens, the first true crack I've seen.
"You're not permitted here," he says.
"Neither are rivers," she says. "But they still flood basements."
She strides up to us, boots leaving no marks on the floor-that-isn't.
She looks at our hands, almost touching.
"Noor," she says. "Do you really want to be the one tightening the noose this time?"
"I could make it looser," I say weakly.
"Not for long," she says. "Systems have inertia. Angels have bosses."
"I am one of the bosses," Angelus says coolly.
"You're middle management with a halo," she snaps.
He smiles thinly.
"Always so ungrateful," he says. "We gave you structure."
"You gave me scars," she says. "And then you tried to pave over them."
She turns back to me.
"You think sitting up here will save anyone?" she asks. "You'll be looking down at people drowning and telling yourself the policies will catch them. That's not salvation. That's commentary."
"I can't stop the End," I say. "Not alone."
"Who asked you to be alone?" she says sharply.
I flinch.
Her eyes soften a little.
"You're good at this," she says. "Making yourself the only one who can fix it. It's an ego thing dressed up as martyrdom."
"I don't want to be a martyr," I say.
"Then why do you keep volunteering for crucifixions?" she asks.
Angelus watches, arms folded, expression neutral.
"Notice," he says mildly, "that she is not offering an alternative. Only outrage."
She glares at him.
"You're offering an alternative that keeps you in charge," she says. "That's not a solution. That's brand management."
She grabs my wrist, pulling my hand away from his.
"Do you know what angels do when they get nervous?" she asks.
"Quote philosophy?" I suggest.
"They accelerate," she says. "They call it mercy. They say, 'Ah, things are bad, better get to the end faster before someone makes it worse.'"
She squeezes my wrist.
"You did that once," she says. "You thought you were saving the world from its own chaos. You sped up the guillotine. Look how that turned out."
I stare at the floor.
"I didn't remember," I say.
"Your bones did," she says. "That's why you can't walk past a broken thing. That's why you signed up for every small, exhausting job that made no difference alone. You've been trying to pay off a debt you can't name."
Angelus makes a small, impatient sound.
"This melodrama is unnecessary," he says. "We are beyond good and evil here. We are in the realm of systems."
"Systems are made of choices," she says. "And you hate being reminded."
She looks at me.
"You want to stop endless death?" she asks. "Don't sit in its heart and help it count. Go where it doesn't know how to go. Into the mess. Into the cracks. Into the places that aren't being measured yet."
"That's… vague," I say.
"Of course it is," she says. "Life is vague. That's what he can't stand."
She jerks her head at Angelus.
"Say yes," he says quietly, eyes on me. "And you can see every thread. Every person. You can know them. All of them. You can carry them in a way no human has ever carried anyone."
There's longing in his voice, disguised.
"You will never be alone in your guilt again," he adds.
The temptation is a physical thing. A pressure behind my eyes.
If I say yes, I can stop wondering if I've done enough. I can become effort itself. I can sacrifice myself so completely that there's no Noor left to disappoint anyone.
"Or," the girl says, "you can stay human. Fail individually instead of collectively. Love a few people badly instead of everyone abstractly."
She smiles, crooked.
"I'm biased," she says. "I live in the places your Great End refuses to map. I'd prefer if there were still humans there in a century."
My throat hurts.
"I don't know how," I whisper.
"How to stop it?" she asks.
"How to be anything else," I say.
She lets go of my wrist.
"You learn," she says simply.
Angelus sighs.
"This is pointless," he says. "We both know what you are."
He steps forward, eyes sharpening.
"Noor," he says. "You can pretend you're just some tired case-worker's son from a drowned neighborhood. You can wear this life like a costume. But underneath, you are what you built."
His words feel heavy, like they're landing in somewhere deeper than my ears.
"You were an angel long before you ever learned to call yourself Noor," he says.
Act Thirty-Ninth's End – "The Angel watches from the high tower of elasticity."