092124-01-10mu -

The scratching stopped. The vent went silent.

“To the world before they started erasing people. To the sky that isn’t a ceiling.” She grabbed my wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Promise me you’ll go through. Someone has to remember.”

They came at 1400 hours. Two orderlies and a woman in a white coat who introduced herself as Dr. Venn. She held a tablet and did not smile. 092124-01-10mu

The basement room was round, like a well. In the center stood a mirror, floor to ceiling. But it wasn’t reflecting the room. It was reflecting me —except the me in the mirror was older, scarred, wearing clothes I’d never owned.

My room was a six-by-eight cell with a cot, a sink, and a window that looked out onto an air shaft. The walls were the color of old teeth. I sat on the cot and waited for the assessment. The scratching stopped

But I was a linguist before the world broke. Or rather, I was a linguist because the world broke. Patterns were all that kept the static at bay.

And I remembered. All of it. The war that wasn’t a war. The collapse that wasn’t natural. The way they built the facilities to hold everyone who could still see color in a grayscale world. To the sky that isn’t a ceiling

The first session, I lasted twenty minutes. My mother’s voice came through the speakers, but she wasn’t saying what she’d really said. She was saying the approved version. “You were always a difficult child. The therapy is for your own good.”

“Patient 092124-01,” she said. “You’ve been referred for extreme semantic dissonance. Do you understand what that means?”

But that memory was a liability now. So the chamber rewrote it.

And then I heard it. A scratching from the air shaft.