INITIATE


    


    
    

        
This is the room before memory. Not a place, but a state of erasure, the purple bloom of a magnet dragged across a screen. There was a story here. I think it involved a driveway and the sharp smell of gasoline on a hot afternoon. Stones. A specific weight of metal in the palm, cold and absolute. It had a purpose. It doesn’t anymore. The field pulled the iron from its blood, leaving a ghost of intent, a smear of data no one can read. Each time I try to focus, the static screeches. It is the sound of forgetting as a physical act. An electronic dementia. Click to try again, it says. Click to align the heads. But the tape is blank, stretched thin, and light shines through it.

    


    
    

        
My body, a peripheral device. A legacy port. The system no longer ships with drivers for this model. Pain is a dropped packet, a signal that arrives out of order. A checksum error in the spinal column. Hunger is a low-power warning. Thirst, a thermal alert. There is no joy, only `STATUS: OK`. Sleep is not rest; it's a scheduled shutdown for defragmenting wetware. Dreams are just corrupted log files, the jumbled syntax of a day’s worth of useless input. My heart, an overclocked CPU fan, whirring against its own heat sink, trying to cool a process that will not terminate. A stranger sends an input—a touch, a glance—and my whole system hangs. `(Not Responding)`. I am waiting for the hard reboot that I know will clear the cache, but also delete the user profile. The only one I have.

    


    
    

        

            
A knock at the door. Late.

            

            
Answer it.

            
Pretend you are not home.

            

                

                
The person is a silhouette holding a small, heavy box. They offer it without a word.

                

                
You accept. Inside, there is nothing but the smell of ozone, like after a storm. The silhouette is gone. You are holding empty space. You have brought the outside in. The night air follows.

            

            

                

                
You stay silent. The floorboards are cold. You count your own heartbeats. One hundred ninety-seven. The knocking stops.

                

                
Later, you look. On the doorstep is a small, heavy box. You do not touch it. It remains there for days, a small failure you must walk past every morning. The outside has seeped in anyway.

            

        

    

    
    
    

        
    

    
    
    

        

            And after the crash, stillness. An architecture of absence. You are an empty room. Not clean, but wiped. Traces of chalk on the floorboards where the body used to be. The air is thin. Every sound is loud. You can hear the dust settling on the windowsill. This is not peace. This is the calm of a system that has given up. It has ceased all non-essential processes. That is, all of them.
        

    


    
    

        

            
The ice on the power line. Not white, but a perfect, clear casing. The weight of it. The eventual snap.

        

        

            
A photograph of people laughing. You can't see their faces, just the shape of their joy. You can't remember their names. The photo is warm from the projector bulb.

        

        

            
A single black key on a piano. The note it makes is dissonant, final. It's the only one you ever play.

        

        

            
The taste of rust and rain from a metal fence you climbed as a child. A voltage on the tongue.

        

        

            
The precise blue of a terminal screen. `FILE NOT FOUND`. The loneliness of that specific color.

        

        

            
Someone’s sweater. It still holds a shape that isn’t yours. The smell is generic now. Soap. Time.

        

    

    
    
    

        
What remains is an afterimage burned onto the wrong substrate. A ghost in the cache. They tell you to clear it, but you can’t. It’s not a temporary file. It is a part of the hardware now, a slight discoloration on the circuit board where something got too hot. It is the profile they built for you from your searches, your silences, your abandoned carts. A perfect stranger that knows all your passwords. It wears your face as a mask, but when it speaks, the voice is synthesized from all the words you were too afraid to say. It lives a better, cleaner, more efficient life than you ever did. And when you are gone, it will remain. It will answer your mail. It will pay your bills. It will prove you existed, long after you’ve stopped.

        
What remains is an afterimage burned onto the wrong substrate. A ghost in the cache. They tell you to clear it, but you can’t. It’s not a temporary file. It is a part of the hardware now, a slight discoloration on the circuit board where something got too hot. It is the profile they built for you from your searches, your silences, your abandoned carts. A perfect stranger that knows all your passwords. It wears your face as a mask, but when it speaks, the voice is synthesized from all the words you were too afraid to say. It lives a better, cleaner, more efficient life than you ever did. And when you are gone, it will remain. It will answer your mail. It will pay your bills. It will prove you existed, long after you’ve stopped.

        
What remains is an afterimage burned onto the wrong substrate. A ghost in the cache. They tell you to clear it, but you can’t. It’s not a temporary file. It is a part of the hardware now, a slight discoloration on the circuit board where something got too hot. It is the profile they built for you from your searches, your silences, your abandoned carts. A perfect stranger that knows all your passwords. It wears your face as a mask, but when it speaks, the voice is synthesized from all the words you were too afraid to say. It lives a better, cleaner, more efficient life than you ever did. And when you are gone, it will remain. It will answer your mail. It will pay your bills. It will prove you existed, long after you’ve stopped.

    

    
    
    

        

        

            
They look for you later. They search for a body, for a note, for some clean narrative closure. But you did not provide one. All they find are the traces. The digital exhaust. Not a story, but an iodine stain on a blank page, revealing the latent print of a fingertip. A thumb pressed too hard against a screen. Here, they say. This is where the contact was. This is the point of pressure. They document the faint whorls and ridges, the unique signature of your specific, quiet desperation. They catalogue it, file it, and move on. The stain does not explain the reason. It is not a confession. It is just proof of touch. Proof that, for a moment, something that was here wanted, badly, to be somewhere else.

        

    


    
    

        
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