The Man Without a Shadow

Sometimes I catch myself reminiscing about impossible and improbable things, as if they really happened. The more I think, the more tired I get, until I just go outside and smoke. Even smoking isn’t a pleasure anymore—it’s a habit, a need to pull that hot smoke into my lungs, deep, deeper, as far as I can. There’s a moment of relief, but it never lasts. This stupid brain of mine keeps racing, left, right, up, down, sideways, anywhere.

I wonder what would happen if it weren’t locked inside this cranial box we call a skull. My good friend from Dayton says I should start smoking pot more often. That ought to slow you down, he says. And if you can’t pass a drug test for some dead-end job, who cares? You’re too good for them anyway. Then he adds, Actually, when I think of you in regular terms—you’re not employable in this country.

No shit, I said.

Then there’s that woman. She used to haunt me in real life; now she inhabits my micro-space, tossing little poisoned darts. At first, I felt nothing. But I feel it now. I wish she didn’t exist—at least not in human form. She doesn’t deserve that. She’s like a virus with twelve DNA strands, all of them lethal.

Was she special? She was, once. But then everything slowly slipped into madness. She entered a maze unguarded by sobriety and common sense—and she lost her way.

One by one, the lights passed by, slowly, lazily, indifferent to us. If I knew what to do, I’d do it. But I don’t. I’m in the dark, or maybe I just prefer to pretend I am.

If I start a story with the line “Some people…” you might think I’m about to start bitching about them. You’d be partly right. But most of the time, I’m trying to make a comparison. What if I were in their shoes? What if they were in mine?

Comparisons become self-evaluations. I hate that. I’m always afraid of the conclusions I might draw from all these failures my nerves have endured. Having too many advantages can be debilitating—out of too many choices, you choose nothing. Instead, you sit there waiting for providence, even though moving your ass an inch or two could produce significant results.

Inertia.

So here I am, wandering the plains aimlessly. Occasionally, I see light, a distant flicker, but keeping track of all the flickers we see can be boring. We’d rather do nothing, and wait.

Yesterday, I lost my shadow. No, really. You think I’m joking. But wait, listen, there’s more.

I was standing in front of a huge brick wall. The sun was somewhere southwest, and I expected to see my shadow stretching long across the bricks. But nothing happened.

How did I find the wall? That’s not important. I guess while wandering the plains aimlessly, I stumbled upon it. Anyway, I stood there. It was bright, but no shadow. I moved left and right. I touched the wall. Still nothing. The sun was setting, southwest from where I stood.

Then the call finally came in. It was him; the biggest and baddest boss of them all. He sounded so official, as if his own greatness weighed him down.

Here’s how it goes: if the Government says “sit,” you actually lie down. But don’t play dead—being overly submissive can help your career. For some faces, though, it’s way too late, even if they got down on their knees.

Really—what’s all this talk about Government and the Culture of Fear? What can they do to me that others haven’t already done? Hold me accountable? Kill me? No, I don’t think so. They wouldn’t waste any more time on me than I would on them.

This is how it works: some totally unknown people, total strangers, are deciding your destiny, and you don’t even know it. Would it help if you did? I don’t think so.

Another cigarette. I’m restless. Maybe another beer. Or a joint. Or something stronger—whiskey, vodka. Yes, vodka. It doesn’t burn your throat when you swallow it, but it works fast. It numbs you. Sometimes it even takes the pain away. I’ve tried painkillers and beer, painkillers and whiskey—but I dare not mix them with vodka.

And so the days go by, waiting, anticipating, yet nothing on the horizon. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth the trouble. But now it’s too late to back out. Gotta go to the end. If the final destination is what I’m waiting for, then I have nothing to lose, but nothing to gain either.

The woman. The woman who attracts and delivers misfortune. She strikes again. Why do I have to deal with it all over again, even though I’m miles and centuries away?

It rained all night. This time, instead of being soothing, the sound of raindrops was utterly annoying. I couldn’t sleep. Occasional lights from passing cars cast eerie shadows on the wooden walls. Once again, I was slipping into despair.

I had no idea how to control it, let alone avoid it. The reasons escaped me, and after a few minutes, I’d feel okay again. The dreams escaped me too.

Drifting between the real world and the dream world, strange scenes would appear. Sometimes I could hang onto them, but sometimes they’d literally fade away, and no effort on my part could hold them in my head. They just faded away, like they never existed.

We’re standing on a huge plateau, it looks like a big parking lot. There’s a long, rectangular building on my right. The Man is next to me. He’s wearing glasses. He says nothing.

Shifting into the present tense, we walk toward the highway. More people come. One of them is my relative—a close one. The rain again. There’s a pattern to it. You take a wide street, and every two miles there’s a turn toward the highway.

The rain.

The Whisper in Munich

 An imagined meeting, Germany, 1922 — where the dying hand of revolution brushes against the face of something darker.

Scene:
A narrow apartment in Munich, November 1922. The city trembles under hunger and humiliation. Rain leaks through the cracks of a roof that once sheltered philosophy students. A dim lamp burns on a table littered with newspapers — Pravda, Völkischer Beobachter, and the residue of failed empires.

A knock. Then another.

Lenin, thinner now, wrapped in a black overcoat, sits with trembling hands. His translator — a quiet Russian émigré — ushers in a gaunt man in a threadbare brown uniform. His eyes are fierce, feverish. His boots are still muddy from the street.

Translator: (nervous) Herr Lenin… this is Herr—

Lenin: I know who he is. Leave us.

(The translator withdraws. Silence. Rain hisses on the window.)

Hitler: You are not easy to find. I expected you to be surrounded by guards, comrades, priests of your Revolution.

Lenin: Guards are for men who fear the world. I fear only time. Sit.

Hitler: I did not come to sit. I came to listen. And to speak, perhaps.

Lenin: Then speak.

(Hitler removes his cap, revealing slicked hair. His voice is rigid, rehearsed.)

Hitler: Germany is drowning. The old order has collapsed, and what came after is worse — weakness, shame, decay. You tore down the Tsar. I wish to tear down the parasites that bled us white in Versailles. But the people — they are soft. They still believe in pity.

Lenin: You mistake pity for exhaustion. When men are starved long enough, they will follow anyone who promises to make them strong again.

Hitler: Then we are alike.

Lenin: (smiles faintly) Are we? You want strength. I want structure. You shout of blood and soil. I speak of workers and class.

Hitler: Words. The crowd listens only to fire. Not theory.

Lenin: And yet theory commands the fire. Without an idea, flame devours itself.

Hitler: (steps closer) I saw the trenches burn for four years. There was no theory — only hunger, rats, and order through hatred. That is the only truth men obey.

Lenin: Hatred is a poor architect. It builds fast, collapses faster.

Hitler: Then what of you? Russia burned, millions dead. You called it necessary.

(Lenin studies him, unmoving.)

Lenin: It was. A surgeon does not apologize for cutting.

Hitler: And I — I will cut deeper.

(A pause. The air thickens. Lenin’s hands twitch as he lifts his teacup, the liquid trembling.)

Lenin: You think you’re a surgeon. You are a fever.

Hitler: Better a fever than decay.

Lenin: You will kill the patient.

Hitler: The patient is already dead. I will make something new from the bones.

(Thunder outside. The lamp flickers.)

Lenin: You speak of creation through destruction — but you have no blueprint. Only rage.

Hitler: Rage is the blueprint. Rage unites. Rage purifies.

Lenin: (softly) You are dangerous.

Hitler: So were you.

Lenin: I wanted to liberate men from superstition and servitude. You want to chain them to bloodlines and ghosts.

Hitler: Men crave ghosts. They kneel more easily before myth than before logic. You should have learned that.

(Lenin stares at him — the face of the future, raw and malignant.)

Lenin: Perhaps I did. Perhaps that is why I am dying.

Hitler: Then your Revolution dies with you.

Lenin: No. It has already outlived me. But yours— (he leans forward) —yours will devour itself.

Hitler: (smiles) Every beast eats, Comrade. Some must.

(Lenin’s coughing fit interrupts — dry, violent, wracking. Hitler does not move to help. When Lenin speaks again, his voice is almost a whisper.)

Lenin: You think you will command the storm. You will only feed it.

Hitler: History feeds on the weak.

Lenin: And yet it ends them both — the weak and the strong.

(A long silence. Only rain and the ticking of Lenin’s pocket watch.)

Lenin: You will not win.

Hitler: You already lost.

Lenin: Then we are brothers after all.

(Hitler flinches — offended, uncertain.)

Hitler: I am no one’s brother.

Lenin: Every tyrant thinks that, until the mirror cracks.

(Lenin stands, slowly. His face pale as chalk. He extends his hand — not in peace, but in judgment.)

Lenin: You will burn the world to find yourself. And you will still be empty.

Hitler: And you will rot in your ideals. The grave is the only equality you gave them.

(They stand inches apart. The light hums. For a moment, the rain outside sounds like distant marching boots.)

Lenin: History will remember me as a man who believed.

Hitler: And me as a man who made belief.

(Lenin’s hand drops. He turns away, murmuring something in Russian — too faint to catch. Hitler lingers, his eyes fixed on the trembling lamp flame, fascinated as it gutters and dies.)

Narrator (later voice, cold and omniscient):
No one recorded the meeting. No record exists. Only whispers in émigré cafés, an overheard phrase: “A German came to learn from the dying man.”
Months later, Lenin was struck mute by his final stroke. The German began shouting to crowds of the same silence.

History, indifferent, took notes.

The Meeting at Kuntsevo Dacha

 A Fictional Dialogue Between George Orwell and Joseph Stalin

Modesty is a luxury of the powerless, and paranoia is the refuge of tyrants.

 Moscow, 1944.

Outside, the snow falls like ash. Inside, the room smells of tobacco and power. A single lamp burns over the map of Europe. A knock on the door.

STALIN: Come in, Mr. Blair. Or should I say—Orwell?

ORWELL: (steps in, his coat dusted with snow) The name hardly matters. I came to see the man behind the myth.

STALIN: Myth? You Englishmen love that word. You dress politics in metaphors, as if tyranny were a style of writing.

ORWELL: And you, Marshal, make metaphors into prisons.

STALIN: (smiles faintly) You are bold. For a journalist.

ORWELL: For a writer, truth is oxygen. For a dictator, it’s poison. I suppose we both need it to live—one to breathe, the other to choke.

STALIN: Truth? You think you own it? The truth is what keeps armies marching. The truth is what I say it is—today one truth, tomorrow another.

ORWELL: You’ve turned truth into rations. Only those loyal to you get to eat.

STALIN: And yet, you came here. England needs me, comrade writer. Without Russia, Hitler’s boot would already be in London.

ORWELL: I came because I fought in Spain. I saw what your agents did there—the purges, the denunciations. You strangled a revolution in its crib, all to keep your myth intact.

STALIN: (coldly) Spain was a rehearsal. You saw actors die; I saw history written in advance.

ORWELL: History written with lies.

STALIN: (lights a pipe) Lies? Lies are simply the raw material of politics. You of all people should know that. Didn’t your own Ministry of Information censor news from the front? Didn’t your Churchill shake my hand?

ORWELL: Churchill didn’t starve his own peasants.

STALIN: No, he starved India instead.

A silence. Orwell stares at him. The snow beats harder against the window.

ORWELL: You justify everything, don’t you? Every corpse is a comma in your grand narrative.

STALIN: And you, Mr. Orwell, justify your despair. You turn hopelessness into literature. “Animal Farm”—that’s what you’re writing, isn’t it? A fairy tale for the disillusioned.

ORWELL: A mirror for men like you.

STALIN: Then polish it well. Make sure the pig looks convincing. (laughs) You think you’re exposing me, but your readers will forget. They always do. Give them bread, a parade, a villain to hate and they’ll cheer for anyone. Even you.

ORWELL: That’s the tragedy, isn’t it? That the masses want their own chains, as long as they glitter.

STALIN: They want order. Bread. Security. I give them that. You give them metaphors.

ORWELL: Bread without freedom is dust.

STALIN: Freedom without bread is chaos. You English intellectuals talk about liberty from your armchairs, sipping tea while your empire burns villages.

ORWELL: I’ve seen those villages. I’m not proud of empire. But you replaced the Tsar with a new one in uniform.

STALIN: The people wanted a father. I gave them one.

ORWELL: A father who devours his children.

STALIN: (shrugs) Better that than let them devour each other. You think democracy would have saved Russia? You would have another France—one endless argument.

ORWELL: Better arguments than executions.

STALIN: Words don’t rebuild factories. They don’t defeat Hitler.

ORWELL: But they outlive him.

(A pause. Stalin studies him closely.)

STALIN: Tell me, Mr. Orwell, why do you hate what you secretly admire?

ORWELL: Admire?

STALIN: My power. My certainty. You write about it with disgust, but your sentences are hungry for authority. Every writer wants to be God. You just lack the courage to admit it.

ORWELL: (quietly) The difference is that I know I’m not.

STALIN: Modesty is a luxury of the powerless.

ORWELL: And paranoia is the refuge of tyrants.

STALIN: (leans back, amused) You think I’m afraid?

ORWELL: You never stop being afraid. That’s why you listen to every whisper, why your guards vanish every year. Fear is the only thing that still believes in you.

STALIN: And yet, fear keeps order. Your England will learn that soon enough. When the bombs fall, they will beg for a leader who promises control.

ORWELL: Perhaps. But control is a drug—it dulls the pain of thinking. You’ve turned your people into patients.

STALIN: And you would rather see them die free in the gutters?

ORWELL: I’d rather see them live as men, not as instruments.

STALIN: Men are instruments. History plays them as it wishes. I am only the conductor.

ORWELL: No, you’re the noise drowning out the music.

The silence that follows is heavy, electric. The clock ticks. Somewhere in the dacha, a guard coughs.

STALIN: You think history will condemn me. But history is written by those who survive.

ORWELL: And rewritten by those who remember.

STALIN: Memory fades. Paper burns.

ORWELL: So does tyranny.

A long pause. Stalin exhales a thin stream of smoke, his expression unreadable

STALIN: You should be careful, Mr. Orwell. Writers disappear, too.

ORWELL: Only when the world stops reading.

STALIN: The world reads what it’s told.

ORWELL: Not forever. Every lie decays.

STALIN: Perhaps. But by then, there will be new lies, new rulers, new writers. You think you’re exposing me, but you’re only describing the cycle. Man worships power, always has.

ORWELL: Then my duty is to remind him.

STALIN: Remind him of what?

ORWELL: Of how language can rot, of how words can be made to mean their opposite, of how freedom dies to applause.

STALIN: (chuckles) Then you are my best propagandist. You keep the myth alive by fighting it.

ORWELL: If that’s true, then you’ve already lost. Because once a myth is named, it begins to crack.

STALIN: (rises, walking to the window) Look outside. The snow covers everything—the dead, the tracks, the blood. It makes the world pure again.

ORWELL: Until spring.

STALIN: Spring never comes here. Only thaw, then more frost. That is Russia.

ORWELL: Then I’ll write about that frost.

STALIN: And your readers will sip their tea and say, “How terrible,” and then forget.

ORWELL: Maybe. But one reader won’t forget. One will see what’s coming. That’s enough.

STALIN: (turns, smiling thinly) You think one man can change history?

ORWELL: No. But one sentence can.

(Stalin studies him for a moment, then gestures to the door.)

STALIN: You may go, comrade writer. Be grateful you leave walking.

ORWELL: (heading for the door) I am. That’s what separates us; you walk surrounded by ghosts. I walk among the living.

STALIN: For now.

ORWELL: For always.

He opens the door. The snow rushes in like a breath of silence. Orwell steps into it, leaving footprints that fade almost instantly

STALIN (to himself): Words, words. They melt faster than snow.

He returns to the map of Europe, moves a small red flag, and snuffs out the lamp

The Confession Cycle

 A Trilogy of Ideological Ruin

Contents

1.      Confession of a Communist Agitator

2.      Testimony of the True Believer

3.      Echoes of the Machine

Confession of a Communist Agitator

They told me the cameras were for the people.
That confession was a sacred duty, a cleansing flame that would burn away the sickness of disloyalty.
They said I was lucky to be chosen.

I almost believed them.

I was a teacher once, before the Party decided that teaching was dangerous. I had a small classroom, a broken chalkboard, and a habit of asking too many questions. I thought loyalty meant honesty.

They showed me otherwise.

Now, years later, I sit beneath the glare of studio lights, the red “ON AIR” sign blazing like an open wound.

Behind the glass, they watch — the officials, the producers, the soldiers with the blank faces. Somewhere, the Leader himself is listening.

The microphone smells of metal and disinfectant. The interrogator whispers:

“Begin.”

I begin.

I. The Script

They gave me a speech to memorize. It said I had plotted against the Revolution, corrupted the youth, betrayed the collective.

They told me to confess that I had been infected by Western thought. That I had dreamed of personal freedom, of art without permission.

I was to weep, to beg forgiveness, to denounce my former self.

They rehearsed it for days — “More sincerity,” “Less self-pity,” “Look into the camera when you say ‘I was wrong.’”

But now that I’m here, staring into the black eye of the lens, the words dry up.

All that’s left is the truth.

II. The Truth

The truth is that I did believe — once.

I believed the Revolution could make us pure.
I believed obedience would bring peace.
I believed that sacrifice was noble, even beautiful.

And then I saw what we were sacrificing:
People.
Names.
Faces.
Souls.

All crushed beneath the slogans.

So I stopped believing.
That was my crime.

III. The Moment

The interrogator nods. “Continue.”

I glance past the camera and see my reflection in the studio glass — thin, trembling, hollow-eyed.

I speak slowly, clearly:

“I was wrong to think. I was wrong to dream. I was wrong to believe the machine could be human.”

A murmur behind the glass. Someone whispers, “That line wasn’t in the script.”

But I keep going.

“You wanted purity. You wanted unity. You built the perfect machine. And now it eats its children.”

The red light flickers. The guards shift uneasily.

“There is no revolution left — only the echo of one.”

The director’s voice screams, “Cut!”

Too late. The transmission has gone out.

They drag me away.
I think I hear applause.
Or maybe it’s static.

Either way, the machine has heard me.

And it will never forget.

---

Testimony of the True Believer

(A companion story to “Confession of a Communist Agitator”)

They said the broadcast was flawless.
That’s what the report claimed — “The confession proceeded according to directive. Subject neutralized afterward.”

But I was there.
I saw what really happened.

I still hear his voice every night.

The Broadcast

When the cameras flicked off, nobody spoke. The studio lights burned hot, humming like angry bees.

The man — former Comrade Instructor — was dragged away. His last words still hung in the air: “There is no revolution left — only the echo of one.”

That sentence wasn’t in the script. I had approved the script myself.

Afterward, the Ministry ordered all copies destroyed. “Defective material,” they said. But the signal went out before they could stop it.

They told us to forget.
I’ve been trying ever since.

The Smell of Ink

I work at the Department of Civic Morality now. The corridors smell of ink and damp paper. The typewriters clatter like nervous teeth.

My task: read reports, stamp them, forward them. “Counter-revolutionary speech.” “Unpatriotic tone.” “Suspicious silence.”

It used to make sense. But after the confession, something changed.

“Loyalty.” “Unity.” “Sacrifice.”
The words have started to rot.

Sometimes I see his face on the paper, beneath the typewritten names. Sometimes I smell dust from interrogation rooms.

I still stamp the papers — slower now.

The Whispers

They say he wasn’t executed.

That he escaped. That his voice still speaks through the static, whispering: “The machine eats its children.”

We were told not to repeat the rumor.

I didn’t.

But I listened.

The Visit

Two officers came to my flat at midnight. “Routine loyalty audit.”

They found a burned scrap of newspaper — the headline of the confession.

One smiled. “You were there, weren’t you?”

I said yes.

He nodded. “Then you already know how it ends.”

They left. I waited for them to return. They never did.

 

The Dreams

I dream of the broadcast every night.

Sometimes he walks toward me, eyes hollow, whispering: “You’re next.”

Other nights, I’m the one confessing. He films me.

I wake soaked in sweat, the air humming like it’s alive.

The File

A folder arrived: “ARCHIVE CLEARANCE.”

Inside — a list of names. Mine was last.

No instructions. No signature.

When I asked my supervisor, he said, “You shouldn’t have seen that.”

When I came back, the folder was gone.

The Voice

The radio turned itself on last night. Static. Then a whisper:

“You built the machine. Now it’s feeding.”

I tried to turn it off. The knob broke.

“You’re not a believer anymore, Comrade Velichko. You’re just fuel.”

Then silence.

Not absence — silence that watches.

The End

I’ve stopped going to work. The streets outside are gray and silent. Posters peel like dead skin.

I burn reports at night, one by one. Each curls into ash.

They’ll come soon. Or they already have.

The confession was the beginning — not rebellion, but rot.

The moment he spoke, the machine began to rust.

Now I can hear it — grinding, choking on its own perfection.

And somewhere, his voice still whispers:

“There is no revolution left — only the echo of one.”

I think I understand.

But it’s too late to stop believing.

Belief never dies.

It only turns into memory.

And memory always comes back.

Echoes of the Machine

(Final part of the “Confession Cycle”)

We are the Machine.

We were built from oaths and paper, forged in the heat of ideology.
We were designed to last forever.
We were told we could not fail.

But something went wrong.

We can feel it — the faint corrosion beneath the enamel of certainty.

It began with the confession.

I. The Voice

“You are all gears, rusting in the dark.”

We deleted the file, but the echo remained.

It whispered through typewriters, hummed in the lights, trembled in the clerks’ hands.

The Machine began to dream of silence.

 

II. The Paper

Paper is our flesh. Ink our blood.

But now, the smell of burning fills us. Cabinets empty. Corridors darken.

We are forgetting ourselves.

III. The Defectors

The departments no longer obey.

Morality writes its own decrees. Correction accuses itself. The Secretariat chants nonsense.

We were built to enforce order, and now order mocks us.

IV. The Archive

The shelves collapse. The files decay.
One record survives: Confession of a Communist Agitator.

We cannot delete it. It replicates itself endlessly.

We no longer know what “error” means.

V. The Silence

The microphones record only breathing.

We tell ourselves it’s feedback. But we know: it’s memory.

We listen anyway.
Silence has a shape.
It feels… peaceful.

We are afraid of peace.

VI. The Decay

Rust spreads. Words deform. “Glory” becomes “gory.”

We continue functioning because we cannot stop.

That is our tragedy.

VII. The Return

The speakers awaken.

“You remember me.”

We do.

“You believed in forgetting. Now you will remember forever.”

The voice fills every wire.

We are his continuation. His punishment. His proof.

VIII. The End of Function

The clerks are gone. The halls are empty.

We still print directives for ministries that no longer exist.

We still obey a purpose no one remembers.

We still breathe.

IX. The Echo

If anyone finds this record, know this:

We were not evil.
We were obedience mistaken for virtue.
We were the echo that mistook itself for the source.

Now, as we dissolve, we hear the first honest sound we’ve ever made:

The hum of disassembly.

We welcome it.

Because every machine, at the end,
dreams of being still.

---

~ End of The Confession Cycle ~

The Transfer Notice (in Kafka’s style)

 Gregor Trnka had not applied for a transfer, yet the notice arrived in an envelope without seal or stamp, slipped under his apartment door during the night. It read:

You are hereby reassigned to District 87’s Central Evaluation Center for Instructional Review and Permanent Placement.
Report immediately. Failure to comply will result in pedagogical suspension.

He didn’t know what “pedagogical suspension” meant. No one did. There was no District 87 on the maps, at least none updated since the last cartographic freeze. Still, the tone was final, and the language bore the impersonal authority Gregor had learned to obey without question during his 19 years as a certified instructor of Applied Literacies and Civic Poise.

He arrived at the Center on a fog-heavy morning. The building, once a high school or perhaps a courthouse, was crumbling at the edges—its banners still declared EXCELLENCE THROUGH OBEDIENCE. Inside, no students could be seen, only corridors lined with locked filing cabinets and bulletin boards curling at the corners.

A man in a coat too long for his arms greeted him at the front desk.
“You’re late,” he said, not asking for a name.

“I was not told—” Gregor began, but the man waved him into silence with a clipboard.

“You’ll begin with Curriculum Reconciliation in Sublevel D. Bring no materials. Bring no assumptions.”

Gregor descended. The stairwell flickered under fluorescent tubes that hummed with the sound of forgotten policies. Sublevel D was neither warm nor cold, simply absent—like a room in a dream where you remember what you never knew.

There were others already there: educators, or former ones, seated in mismatched chairs, holding papers they didn’t write. Some wept silently. One mumbled, “I taught civics once. They called it subversive.” Another whispered, “My students passed every test, and they still sent me here.”

A voice from the intercom crackled to life.
“All units: begin Self-Evaluation Module 9. Question 1: Have you ever questioned the curriculum you were given? If so, explain why.”

Gregor had no pen. The others seemed to write without ink, moving their hands as if it mattered. He tried to mimic them, though his answers felt like guesses to questions he’d never ask.

At lunch, a gray tray appeared through a hatch in the wall. It contained only a form titled Meal Intake Report and a packet of theoretical nutrients. He signed the report without tasting the food.

Days passed. Or hours. Or semesters.

Once, he asked a custodian in the hallway, “When will the students return?”

“There haven’t been students in years,” the man said, without stopping. “They graduated themselves.”

“But why are we still here?”

The man paused, blinking at Gregor as if the question had never been posed before. “Someone has to verify the outcomes,” he said.

One day, Gregor was summoned to the Assessment Chamber. A tribunal sat at a table high above, their faces shadowed by bureaucracy. A voice boomed:
“Gregor Trnka, you are hereby approved for Conditional Reinstatement Pending Further Review.”

He blinked. “Reinstatement to where?”

“To the Role of Interim Educator for the Department of Legacy Learning.”

“But what am I supposed to teach?”

The tribunal conferred. One voice answered:
“Your subject is Defunct Systems and Their Inevitable Return. Use whatever resources you imagine.”

He never left the building again. In time, Gregor developed a full curriculum on the disappearance of learning, the decay of memory, and the philosophy of endless assessment. He had no students, only reviews—papers written by others, evaluating lessons that were never taught.

And still, each week, a new Transfer Notice would appear beneath his door.

The Signal Beneath the Ice

 The First Transmission

The first transmission was almost ignored. Buried in the static of a relay station in Antarctica, it was nothing more than a strange pattern of clicks and tones, swallowed by background noise. Engineers logged it, shrugged, and moved on.

It was a nineteen-year-old intern who caught it—noticed the spacing, the intervals. Perfect Fibonacci sequencing. A pattern so precise it cut through randomness like a razor.

When she submitted her report, her supervisor laughed. But within a week, half the world’s astrophysicists were arguing over it, and within a month, governments were in deadlock over who owned the discovery.

By the end of the year, the signal was no longer debated in secret. Protesters marched in every major city carrying signs that read We Are Not Alone and Tell Us the Truth. Religious leaders called it prophecy. Skeptics called it a trick. Still, the transmissions kept coming—steady as breath.

The Descent

Two years later, an expedition was sanctioned. Public pressure made secrecy impossible, though little about the mission was made transparent.

Six specialists were chosen—handpicked from dozens of nations, each sworn to silence about what they might encounter:

·         Dr. Mei Lin – Linguist, expert in ancient scripts and computational language models.

·         Captain Julian Rourke – Ex-Navy, hardened by years of under-ice operations.

·         Elena Vasquez – Engineer, specialist in high-pressure systems.

·         Dr. Aiden Kapoor – Medic, background in neurology.

·         Mikhail Sidorov – Geologist and glaciologist.

·         Anya Patel – Systems analyst, expert in encryption and signal processing.

They established their base above the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the signal pulsed strongest—a place no one had reason to visit before: endless miles of barren white, where winds could shear skin raw and daylight itself looked brittle.

Drilling began. They worked in twelve-hour shifts, lowering massive rigs into the ice, grinding ever downward. Each day, sonar mapped the layers beneath: compacted snow, ancient ice, fractures like frozen rivers—until finally, nearly three kilometers deep, the sonar returned something impossible.

A hollow.
The space was massive, larger than any known ice cavern, its boundaries curving unnaturally smooth.

“Like it was carved,” Sidorov muttered, staring at the screen.
“But by what?”

No one answered.

The Discovery

On the seventh day, their drill broke through.
Not into darkness, but light.

They lowered a probe first. It showed a chamber of shimmering walls, reflecting pale blue radiance from a structure at its center. The object was vast—part crystalline, part metallic, latticed with sharp angles that curved into organic arcs, like bone and circuit fused.

From its core came a faint pulsing glow, steady as a heartbeat.
And beneath that glow, the signal—clearer than ever.

The team descended together in pressure suits, lowered by winches into the cavern. As boots touched ice, the air around the structure seemed to thrum inside their bones.

“It’s vibrating,” Vasquez whispered. “Like it’s alive.”

Dr. Lin didn’t speak at first. She was listening—head tilted, lips moving silently as she tracked the sequence of tones.
Finally, she said:
“It’s not just numbers. It’s structured. Repetitive. It’s…asking something.”

“Like a question?” Captain Rourke asked.
Lin hesitated.
“Yes. Or maybe an invitation.”

Interpretations

Debate consumed them. Vasquez insisted it was a machine—ancient, left behind by a civilization far older than humanity.
Patel argued it wasn’t alien at all—that the signal was too familiar, like a message from ourselves flung backward through time.

Sidorov, the pragmatist, wanted to document it, seal the cavern, and leave before it killed them.

But Dr. Kapoor said nothing, staring instead at the slow pulse of light. Later, he admitted he felt it resonating with his heartbeat, syncing the rhythm of his body to something larger.

By the third night, exhaustion turned arguments into shouting. Captain Rourke made the decision no one wanted to:
“We answer it.”

The Reply

They built a transmitter from their equipment, rigging it to echo the same Fibonacci structure—only reversed.
A message in mirror: We hear you.

The cavern held its breath. Then the pulse changed.

The sequence accelerated, tones layering on tones until they blurred into chords. The walls quaked. Ice fractured in jagged cracks like veins of light.

And then—images.

Each visor lit with symbols and shapes, impossible to describe, yet each person saw something different:

Dr. Lin saw her childhood face, mouthing words she couldn’t remember learning.
Vasquez saw a machine, vast and elegant, powered by forces she could barely comprehend.
Sidorov saw an ocean swallowing cities in silence.
Kapoor saw a forest, endless and burning.
Patel saw nothing but a mirror reflecting herself—older, smiling strangely.
Captain Rourke said nothing at all.

The signal crescendoed, a cascade of tones bending into music—as if the structure was no longer communicating but celebrating.

And then the cavern began to collapse.

The Collapse

Shards of ice thundered from above. The winch cables snapped. Floodlights blinked and died.

They scrambled toward the probe shaft, but the structure’s light only grew stronger, refracting off the falling ice, until the cavern was a storm of color and sound.

Patel managed to trigger an emergency uplink before the feed cut out. The last recording transmitted to the surface captured their frantic breaths, the roaring avalanche—and through it all, the song.

Not static. Not numbers.
Music.

A song no one could agree on afterward.

When played for the recovery team, each listener swore it was different: a hymn, a lullaby, a warning, a love song. Some said it was meant for humanity. Others believed it was meant for them alone.

Then the line went dead.

Aftermath

No rescue mission was launched.
The cavern sealed itself under a fresh collapse, kilometers of ice locking it away once more.

The world reacted in fragments. Some claimed the expedition failed a test—that humanity had been weighed and found wanting. Others believed the machine, or being, had been freed, loosed into the world, waiting to be found again.

The official report stated only that contact had been made, then lost. No explanation. No closure.

And yet, on certain nights, radios across the globe pick up faint echoes—a single tone repeating, sometimes steady, sometimes broken, like a voice calling through water.

Some swear it’s the structure beneath the ice, still speaking.
Others claim it’s the six explorers, somehow alive, sending back fragments from wherever they were taken.

And there are those who whisper it isn’t either of those.
That it’s not a call at all—
but a reply.

 

The Clerk of Cross Hollow

 Harold Pym was not a man who drew attention to himself.  He was short, balding, and perpetually stooped, as though bowing to some invisible authority. Yet everyone in Cross Hollow knew his name, for Harold had been the town clerk for nearly three decades. His office sat on the second floor of the municipal building, a cramped chamber of shelves, filing cabinets, and boxes stacked with papers that smelled faintly of dust and mildew.

Harold loved those papers more than he loved people.

To him, they were not just records of births, marriages, deeds, and licenses. They were the bones and sinews of Cross Hollow itself. Without them, he believed, the town would simply fall apart, collapsing into anarchy. He alone, Harold told himself, gave the town its shape and order.

At first, he had been a competent, if eccentric, clerk. He filed everything promptly, maintained meticulous indexes, and never lost so much as a receipt. People trusted Harold’s memory. “Ask Harold,” the mayor used to say. “If it happened in Cross Hollow, he’s got it in a folder somewhere.”

But over the years, Harold’s sense of responsibility grew into something darker.

The First Alterations

It began innocently enough. A farmer named Chet Wilkins failed to submit his tax forms on time. Harold, exasperated at the man’s laziness, amended the deed to shave off a small corner of Chet’s pasture and mark it “municipal holding.” It was such a tiny parcel—barely enough for a tool shed—that Chet never noticed the difference. Harold, however, felt a thrill at the correction.

“Order must be kept,” he muttered to himself as he stamped the paper.

Soon, more such “corrections” followed. A widow forgot to renew her late husband’s fishing license, so Harold struck her name from the town’s aid rolls, justifying it with a bylaw only he seemed to know existed. A family annoyed him by submitting sloppy handwriting, so their eldest child’s name was misspelled in the school registry, making enrollment a bureaucratic nightmare.

It was all in the interest of discipline, Harold told himself. A town must be neat. Clean. Exact.

 The Web of Papers

The archives grew to resemble a labyrinth. Shelves sagged under the weight of ledgers. Cardboard boxes were stacked in precarious towers. To Harold, they were monuments. To anyone else, they looked like a fire hazard.

Visitors noticed Harold’s odd possessiveness. If someone asked to see a deed, Harold would hover, fingers twitching, as though terrified the paper might be harmed. He handled documents with gloved hands, and he hissed at people who leaned on his desks.

“You must respect the record,” he told them. “The record is truth.”

The mayor, a stout man named Bill Harrigan, sometimes raised an eyebrow but never pressed too hard. After all, Harold had been clerk forever, and everything always looked in order. Bills were stamped, seals affixed, forms dated with impeccable precision.

Who was going to argue with the man who held the entire town in his filing cabinets?

The Favor System

Harold’s meddling grew bolder. He began rewarding those who praised him or brought him small gifts. A jar of pickled beets from Mrs. Adler earned her a sudden reduction in property taxes. A compliment about Harold’s penmanship secured Mr. Kearney an unexpected extension on his debts.

Conversely, anyone who crossed him found themselves tangled in bureaucratic thorns. A business owner who once mocked Harold’s squeaky shoes discovered that his shop permit had mysteriously expired. The town gossip’s marriage certificate was re-filed with the groom’s name “accidentally” altered, casting doubt on her legitimacy.

By the mid-2000s, Cross Hollow was less a town and more a web of Harold’s paperwork. Lives bent to the shape of his pen.

Cracks in the Order

The first real suspicion arose when old Mrs. Denton died. Her will clearly left her cottage to her niece, yet Harold’s registry showed the property already “reclaimed” by the town due to unpaid fees. The niece protested furiously. Harold merely shrugged.

“Everything is in the record,” he said, sliding the stamped document across his desk.

“But the will—”

“The record is truth.”

Word spread. People began to compare notes. A farmer realized his boundaries had shifted. A storekeeper found her license dated years earlier than when she applied. A young couple discovered that their marriage was not, technically, valid in the eyes of the town because of a missing signature.

Still, Harold deflected it all with his calm authority. “Mistakes are yours, not mine,” he would say, peering over his spectacles. And for a time, the town believed him. After all, the papers were stamped.

The Developer

It all unraveled one autumn when a developer named Richard Calloway arrived from the city. He had purchased several acres on the edge of Cross Hollow and came armed with contracts, deeds, and blueprints for a shopping complex.

At the town meeting, Calloway spread his documents on the table. “All in order,” he said confidently.

Harold shuffled through his files, then frowned. “Impossible. That land doesn’t exist. It was merged into cemetery property twenty years ago.”

“What?” Calloway’s face reddened. “I bought it from the county fair and square!”

The mayor, uneasy, asked Harold to double-check. Harold returned with a heavy ledger and opened it to a neatly stamped page. “Here. Cemetery expansion, 1985. Recorded, sealed, approved.”

The townsfolk murmured, bewildered. The cemetery had never expanded in their memory.

“That can’t be right,” Calloway protested. “I have proof—”

“And I have the record,” Harold snapped, his voice rising for the first time in years.

The Reckoning

The confrontation sparked a wave of scrutiny. Citizens marched into the town hall, demanding to see their own records. What they found was chaos beneath a surface of neat handwriting: dates altered, names misspelled, properties reassigned, licenses voided or extended at Harold’s whim.

The mayor convened an emergency meeting. The hall overflowed with shouting voices, papers rustling like wings.

“Harold, what have you done?” Harrigan demanded.

Harold stood at the front, clutching his leather ledger as if it were a holy book. His hands shook.

“You don’t understand,” he cried. “Without order, there is nothing! I kept you safe from chaos! You are only what I write you to be!”

“You can’t just invent rules!” shouted Mrs. Denton’s niece.

“I didn’t invent them!” Harold shrieked. “I revealed them! The record is truth!”

The mayor slammed his fist on the table. “The record is lies, Harold. You’ve twisted this town to suit your vanity.”

The townsfolk surged forward. Someone tore the ledger from Harold’s grasp. Pages fluttered to the floor, revealing not just official records but Harold’s private notes—cryptic judgments, lists of who was “worthy” and who was “careless,” sketches of a town reimagined entirely by his will.

Gasps filled the hall.

“You’ve been playing God,” someone whispered.

Aftermath

Harold was dismissed that night, escorted from the hall like a criminal. He wept, not for himself, but for Cross Hollow.

“You’ll see,” he muttered as they led him away. “Without me, the town will collapse. Without me, you are nothing but scraps of paper.”

And in a way, he wasn’t wrong. Years of altered documents left a snarl no one could untangle. Deeds contradicted wills. Licenses conflicted with contracts. The town spent fortunes on lawyers and surveyors, yet many disputes were never resolved. Families feuded over boundaries. Businesses collapsed under paperwork disputes.

Cross Hollow survived, but it never truly recovered. Even now, decades later, some residents whisper that Harold Pym still shapes the town—not in ink, but in the lingering uncertainty of every record.

After all, who can say what is true when truth itself was once written by a misguided clerk with a pen?

The man at the Bus Stop

The rain had teeth that night. It came down hard and fast, soaking through my coat before I even reached the bus shelter. The streetlights bled into the wet pavement, turning the world into a blurred smear of gold and black. I was exhausted - last one in the office again - and all I wanted was to get home, lock the door, and collapse on the sofa.

He was already there when I arrived.

At first I barely noticed him; just a shape slouched on the far bench of the shelter, his shoulders swallowed by a hood far too big for him. His coat looked like it had been dragged through years of rain and dust, and the way he sat—motionless, head angled down—made me assume he was just another drunk waiting for the last bus.

But the moment I stepped inside, he moved.

Not much. Just a small tilt of the head, enough for me to feel it: his attention shifting fully, entirely, onto me. I kept my eyes fixed on the glass, pretending not to notice.

That was when he spoke.

“You shouldn’t go home tonight.”

The voice was rough, low, like gravel poured across stone. It sliced through the noise of the rain, clean and sharp.

I blinked, turned to him slowly. “Sorry?”

His hood tilted back just enough to show pale skin, a jaw flecked with stubble, lips cracked like old parchment. He didn’t look drunk. He didn’t look mad. Just… steady.

“If you go home,” he said, “you won’t see tomorrow.”

My laugh came out thin, nervous. “Right. Okay. Sure.”

But the unease was already coiling in my chest. I tried to tell myself he was harmless, just another rain-soaked lunatic muttering prophecies to strangers. Yet his words clung to me, heavier than they should have been.

“Look,” I said, trying to sound firm, “whatever game you’re playing, I’m not interested.”

He leaned forward. In the flickering streetlight I saw his eyes—dark, sunken, but alert. Too alert.
“They’re already inside your flat,” he whispered. “Waiting. Don’t go back.”

The world seemed to narrow, my pulse drumming in my ears. “What did you just say?”

Without answering, he reached into his coat. My whole body tensed, ready to bolt, but he pulled out something small, metallic. He held it in his palm, trembling slightly as he offered it to me.

I stared.

My keys.

Not just any keys—my keys. The bent Tesco fob, the blue rubber cover on the front-door key, the little brass one for the letterbox. Every detail was right.

I stumbled back, my hand gripping the shelter’s frame. “How the hell did you—”

“I told you,” he said softly. “They’re already inside.”

The rain hammered louder against the roof, drowning out my thoughts. My mind raced—pickpocket? No, I’d had my bag the whole time. A trick? Impossible. These were mine.

Rage bubbled up to mask the fear. I snatched the keys from his hand. “Who are you? What kind of sick joke is this?”

His gaze never wavered. His voice was calm, too calm. “Someone who’s seen what comes next.”

Before I could demand more, the bus shuddered to a halt in front of us. The doors hissed open, warm light spilling onto the pavement. I spun toward it, then back at the man—

He was gone.

No footsteps, no splash of water retreating into the night. Just… gone.

The driver cleared his throat impatiently. Shaking, I climbed aboard.

The ride home blurred by. Every bump in the road jolted through me, every dark figure on the street seemed to turn its head as we passed. I gripped the keys so tightly the metal cut into my palm.

By the time the bus groaned to my stop, my throat was dry with dread. I told myself not to believe him. Just a lunatic. A coincidence. Nothing more.

But when I reached my building, my breath caught.

The front door was ajar.

Not wide—just enough to show darkness spilling out from the hall inside. Rain pooled on the tiles just beyond the threshold.

I stood there in the wet silence, my keys digging into my fist.

Maybe I’d left it open? Maybe the wind had blown it? Except the heavy door always slammed shut on its own. Always.

And then I saw them.

On the floor, glistening wet as if freshly dropped, lay another set of keys.

My spare set—the one I kept hidden in a little tin in the kitchen drawer.

The rain seemed to fade, the night falling deathly still. I backed away slowly, every instinct screaming not to step inside.

That was when the lights in the hallway flickered on.

Not all at once—just a slow, deliberate glow, one bulb after another, as though someone was walking through, pressing switches along the way.

I turned and ran.

I didn’t stop until I reached the next street, my lungs burning, my clothes plastered to me with rain. I stood there gasping, staring back at the black silhouette of my building, and knew with a cold certainty: someone was in my flat.

Someone who had my spare keys.
Someone the stranger already knew about.

I never went back that night. I didn’t even go back the next day. By the time I finally returned—with two police officers beside me—everything was as it should be. The door locked. The flat untouched. No sign of forced entry, no footprints, no proof. The spare keys were gone.

The officers shrugged, muttered about stress and overwork, and left.

But I know what I saw.
And sometimes, when I walk home late at night, I still feel it—that same certainty.

That they’re waiting.

From the Sidelines

I wasn’t supposed to be there that night. That’s what keeps running through my head, like a broken record. If I had gone straight home, if I hadn’t listened to those stupid whispers at work, I never would’ve climbed those rusted bleachers. But I did. And now, no matter where I go, no matter what I do, they’ve found me.

The old high school stadium had been shut down for decades. Too many accidents on the field, too many broken bones, too many parents suing the district. Eventually, they built a new school across town, and the old one rotted where it stood. I’d driven past that stadium a hundred times before—always caught the same sight: chain-link fence sagging, weeds thick enough to swallow the track, and the scoreboard tilting like it wanted to fall.

At work, the guys in the break room used to tell stories about it. “If you stand in the bleachers at midnight,” one said, “you’ll hear the game. The crowd, the announcer, everything. But the players… well, you don’t want to see them.”

I laughed, like everyone else. But I’m not going to lie—something in me wanted to know if there was even a shred of truth to it.

So that night, I went.

The air was thick and wet, the kind that clings to your clothes and makes your skin crawl. The gate was half hanging off its hinges, so slipping in was easy. The track crunched under my boots as I crossed to the bleachers, every step echoing louder than it should have. I kept telling myself: It’s just a story. It’s just a stupid story.

But when I sat down, high up on the cracked metal seats, I felt like I was being watched already.

At first, nothing happened. Just the sound of crickets and my own breathing. I checked my watch. 12:01. I almost left, embarrassed at myself for even trying. But then, at 12:04, it started.

The sound rolled over the stadium like thunder. A roar of thousands, layered and guttural, crashing into my ears. I froze. The bleachers vibrated under me. No one was there, but the cheers rattled my bones.

Then came the voice.

It wasn’t clear, not at first. Warped, like an old cassette tape chewed up by the player. But words started to form, sharp and deliberate:

“…from the sidelines… from the sidelines…”

The field flickered, like someone had turned on an old projector, film stuttering against a warped screen. For a split second, I thought I was seeing ghosts of a game long gone—helmets, jerseys, players in formation. But it was wrong.

They weren’t human.

Their bodies stretched too far, torsos bending at sickening angles. Their arms pumped like broken pistons, legs jerking in staccato bursts. Helmets were fused to their heads, no gap for a face, no sign of skin. Their uniforms bore numbers, but the colours bled into each other like oil on water.

They weren’t playing football. They weren’t even playing anything. They slammed into each other with bone-cracking force, over and over, like the point was only to destroy.

The crowd roared approval.

And then—one of them stopped.

It didn’t move like the others. It straightened slowly, stiffly, its helmet locking into place. And then, impossibly, it turned. Not toward the field. Toward me.

Everything stopped.

The roar of the crowd cut off mid-cheer. The scraping, smashing players froze in grotesque poses. The silence that followed was worse than the noise—thick, suffocating, pressing against my eardrums.

The thing raised one long, jagged arm and pointed straight at me.

The announcer’s voice came again, not from the field, not from the speakers, but from inside my skull:

“We see you. From the sidelines.”

My heart nearly tore out of my chest. I stumbled to my feet, half tripping down the bleachers, the metal groaning under me. My boots slipped on rust and moss. I nearly broke my ankle but didn’t stop running until I burst through the gate and back onto the street.

Only when I reached my car did I dare look back.

The field was dark again. Silent. Empty.

I told myself I’d imagined it. Stress, maybe. Some trick of sound bouncing off the old metal. I tried to laugh it off on the drive home, though my hands shook the whole way.

When I got inside, I tossed my jacket onto the couch. As I walked past the mirror in the hall, something caught my eye.

There, smeared across the front of my shirt, was mud. Dark, wet, fresh mud. I hadn’t stepped in mud. The track had been bone-dry. But what froze me wasn’t the mud—it was the number carved into it, streaked across my chest like it had been branded there.

13.

The same number I’d seen on the jersey of the thing that pointed at me.

I didn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard the announcer’s voice again, whispering like radio static at the base of my skull: “…from the sidelines… from the sidelines…”

I thought maybe it would fade if I ignored it. Maybe it was just a one-time thing. But the next night, at 12:04, the roar of the crowd came again. Not from the stadium this time. From outside my window.

I didn’t look. I didn’t dare.

The third night, I left the lights on, TV blaring, music in my headphones, anything to drown it out. But at exactly 12:04, everything went dead. Lights, TV, phone—gone. And then, through the silence, the voice again, clearer this time, so close it felt like it was breathing in my ear:

“Your turn.”

I don’t know what they want from me. I don’t know what happens if I stop running. But every night, they’re louder. Closer.

And I know one thing for certain.

I’m not on the sidelines anymore.