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.

The Dimming

 The first signs were so subtle most astronomers dismissed them as bad data.

Stars vanished—not with supernovae or graceful fades into white dwarfs, but instantly, as if an eraser dragged across the fabric of the sky. One moment they twinkled in telescope viewfinders, the next there was nothing. No light, no residue, no measurable radiation. The space they had occupied seemed… thinner, somehow, like worn cloth fraying at the edges.

When the Perseus arm lost three clusters in a single night, the panic began.

Dr. Kieran Amsel hadn’t slept in forty hours. He sat hunched over his console at L2 Station, the massive orbital observatory built to peer into the deepest regions of the universe. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes as the monitors refreshed again and again, each pass showing more absences than the last.

“Don’t you see it?” he whispered. “It’s eating inward.”

His assistant, Marla, shifted uneasily. “The models don’t allow for that. Space can’t just… collapse. There’s no mechanism.”

Kieran tapped the screen where a jagged crescent of black cut across a starfield. The absence wasn’t circular, nor did it look like a singularity. It was ragged, like torn fabric curling inward. Around the edges, the light of nearby stars warped and smeared, drawn toward the void before winking out.

“No mechanism we understand,” he said.

The collapse spread faster than anyone predicted. What had looked like a slow encroachment at first began accelerating geometrically. Whole constellations disappeared. By the time Earth’s governments acknowledged the truth, a tenth of the visible universe was gone.

The news broadcasts tried to soften it—cosmic phenomena, natural cycle, no threat to us yet—but people weren’t fooled. Telescopes were everywhere now. Backyard astronomers streamed raw images to the web: proof of the unraveling. Memes turned apocalyptic. Religions proclaimed judgment.

And still, the blackness spread.

Kieran was among the first to notice the dreams.

At first, he thought it was exhaustion. He dreamed of corridors without walls, endless stretches of darkness where stars should have been. The void whispered in pulses, faint vibrations that rattled his bones and teeth. Each time he woke drenched in sweat, his ears rang with silence.

Marla admitted she had the same dreams. So did half the staff at L2 Station. No one wanted to log it officially, but the rumor spread: the collapsing regions weren’t empty. They were speaking.

Earth grew dimmer.

Not visibly at first, but instruments detected it. Cosmic background radiation—the faint microwave hiss left from the Big Bang—was vanishing. What had been a steady echo of the universe’s birth grew patchy, filled with holes. Space itself seemed to be unraveling from the edges inward, like a film reel disintegrating as it played.

Kieran recorded a message to the global council:

“If collapse continues at this rate, projection models suggest it will reach our galactic coordinates within twenty months. But I don’t think we have that long. The collapse isn’t moving through space—it’s consuming space. The void is closer than our measurements imply. Distance itself may be shrinking.”

He never received a reply. Communications grew unreliable, distorted by static that had no terrestrial source.

The dreams intensified.

Kieran now saw shapes in the black corridors. Not forms in the human sense—more like shifting geometries, outlines that bent perspective until his eyes watered. They waited at the edges, silent but expectant. Every night, they were closer.

One morning, he found Marla in the observatory dome, staring at the collapsing frontier through the great telescope. Her eyes were glassy, her lips moving in murmured syllables that didn’t belong to any known language.

“Marla?” he said.

She didn’t look at him. Her voice rasped: “They’re not destroying. They’re taking it back. The space was never ours.”

Before he could stop her, she opened the airlock and stepped into vacuum.

Earth governments launched desperate projects: particle shields, gravity nets, exotic energy weapons meant to push back the void. None succeeded. The collapse ignored every barrier. It simply advanced, unmaking space, swallowing matter and energy alike.

Refuge ships fled toward the galactic core, as if huddling closer to the dense starfields could delay the inevitable. But Kieran knew it was pointless. The collapse was everywhere, and the whispers in his dreams told him there was no “safe distance.”

The whispering grew louder. No longer pulses—now words, or something close. He could almost translate them, though the meaning slipped through his mind like oil through fingers.

Not destruction. Not death. Return.

One by one, the planets disappeared. Neptune blinked out first, then Uranus, then Saturn’s rings shattered into nothing. Through telescopes, Jupiter looked wrong—its storms stretched thin, as if painted on rubber being pulled too tight—until it popped into blackness.

The solar system shrank inward, the void licking at the asteroid belt. Soon only Earth, Mars, and Venus remained. Mars was next. Kieran watched it vanish, a red ember snuffed out like a match.

The sky was no longer a sky. At night, fewer than fifty stars remained visible. The rest was a flat curtain of dark, seamless and infinite. Yet it did not feel infinite. It felt close. Claustrophobic.

Kieran sealed himself in the dome as the world outside dissolved into riots and prayer. He no longer cared about food or water. He only watched the approaching blackness.

It wasn’t absence. He understood that now. It was presence—the presence of something that had always been hidden, waiting behind the illusion of space. The universe had been a thin film stretched over their domain, and now the film was tearing.

When Earth’s moon blinked out, the whispers became a chorus.

He pressed record, his final log:

“This isn’t an end. It’s a revealing. The fabric of space collapses because it was never real—only a boundary, a thin veil to keep them apart from us. They are not invaders. They are the original tenants. We are the intruders, living in stolen corridors of distance and light.

They are coming through. No—correction—they are already here. We are the last to notice.”

The dome quivered around him. Not from impact, but from dissolution. The air shimmered, edges of the room curling into the black. His hand dissolved while he was still staring at it, the flesh unraveling into strings of light that stretched into nothing.

Yet he felt no pain. Only release.

The last thing he saw was not darkness but geometry—impossible angles folding and refolding, vast and indifferent, beautiful in ways human eyes were never meant to perceive.

Then even the thought of seeing ended.

The collapse was complete.

And in the silence that followed, something vast stirred, free again to stretch its limbs across a universe no longer cluttered with stars.

The Palm Reader

 The neon glow of District 14 flickered against the oily mist, casting jagged reflections on the wet pavement. The marketplace was winding down, though the stalls never truly slept. Cybernetic hawkers barked the same promises into the same tired crowd, their vocal modules glitching with fatigue. Amid the noise, tucked between a black-market gene-splicer and a noodle vendor, stood a stall with no sign at all—just a chair, a thin curtain, and a woman in a crimson shawl.

She was known only as The Palm Reader.

Her trade was ancient, older than the city’s steel bones. Customers slipped through the curtain, half out of superstition, half out of desperate hope, to extend their palms across the small table. But unlike the fortune-tellers of folklore, she didn’t trace lines or whisper about love and fate. Her instrument was a bio-neural scanner disguised as a jeweled ring. When it brushed skin, it unlocked fragments buried deep in the client’s DNA—ancestral memories, genetic predictions, even possible neural futures. She could read not only what had been, but what might be.

That night, as the hour slid toward midnight, a man stepped inside. He looked out of place—no market grime, no street tattoos. His coat was polished synth-leather, his hair carefully parted. Corporate. The Palm Reader studied him with the same detached patience she gave to everyone, though her mind ticked warily.

“You want your palm read?” she asked.

The man smiled, faint but practiced. “Yes. My name is Kessler.” He removed his glove, exposing a pale hand. Long fingers, manicured nails. His palm trembled slightly as he extended it.

The ring warmed as she placed it against his skin. At once, data poured into her inner lens: flickering reels of encoded ancestry, synaptic firestorms, probability branches. She had seen thousands of lives this way, most of them dull, predictable, ordinary. But this—this was different.

The first image slammed into her: the collapse of the orbital elevator. She saw towers falling into oceans, fire streaking across the night. Screams like a chorus. Then another flash: a boardroom drenched in blood. Executives turning on each other, weapons hidden in their sleeves. And then—strangest of all—herself. The Palm Reader, standing before a shattered skyline, holding out her hand to Kessler while the world burned around them.

She gasped and pulled back, the connection snapping. The air inside the stall felt suffocating.

Kessler didn’t flinch. “What did you see?”

She hesitated. She never told clients everything; her readings were curated, softened. People couldn’t handle raw probability. But his eyes—sharp, unblinking—told her he already suspected.

“I saw… collapse,” she said carefully. “Your future holds destruction. But you’ll play a part in it. A decisive one.”

Instead of recoiling, he nodded, as if confirming a report. “Good. Then it works.”

Her pulse quickened. “What works?”

He leaned closer, voice a low whisper. “The project. We’ve been experimenting with predictive strands. You see, our company—Lexion Corp—we’ve been coding scenarios directly into DNA. A way to forecast outcomes by embedding probability structures into the body itself. I volunteered as a prototype.” His lips twitched upward. “And you just validated it.”

The Palm Reader felt her stomach twist. She had heard rumors—corporations using living bodies as storage, as testbeds for quantum probability models. But she never thought she’d encounter one. And worse: she’d just confirmed his visions were real.

“You’re telling me you’re engineered to… cause this?” she asked.

“To guide it,” Kessler corrected. “Every collapse is opportunity. Lexion believes the orbital elevator must fall for humanity to ascend.” His eyes gleamed with fanatic certainty. “We’ll rebuild stronger. Better. Unified under one hand.”

She swallowed. “And whose hand would that be?”

He smiled. “Mine.”

The stall seemed to shrink around her. She had read warlords before, criminals, addicts, dreamers. But Kessler was something worse: a man who believed his own engineered destiny. The images she saw—of fire, of her own presence in the ruins—rattled her bones.

“You came here to test me,” she said slowly. “To see if your… programming is working.”

“Exactly. And you confirmed it.” He slipped his glove back on. “But tell me, Palm Reader—why were you there in the vision? Why did my DNA see you?”

She said nothing. She didn’t know. She never appeared in clients’ readings before. That was impossible—or should have been.

Kessler rose, tipping his head politely. “Perhaps our paths are entwined. Perhaps you’ll help bring the world to heel. I’ll see you when it begins.”

He left as silently as he’d come, vanishing into the mist-soaked market.

For days, she couldn’t shake it. The images replayed every time she closed her eyes: towers falling, oceans boiling, her own figure in the wreckage. She considered abandoning her stall, disappearing into the outer districts. But something gnawed at her. If Kessler truly carried engineered probability strands, then events were already shifting around him. She was tethered, whether she liked it or not.

The answer came a week later, when the riots began. Newsfeeds exploded with footage of workers storming Lexion Corp facilities, furious about wage cuts and secret projects. Police drones fired stun gas into crowds. And amidst the chaos, whispers spread that the orbital elevator was unstable, its structural AI corrupted.

The Palm Reader knew it wasn’t rumor. It was beginning.

She packed her stall into a single case and vanished into the outer streets. But she wasn’t running. She was hunting.

Finding Kessler wasn’t hard. Corporate men never blended well into the chaos of District 14. She tracked him through encrypted whispers, finally locating him in a half-abandoned office tower overlooking the city. He was alone, gazing out a shattered window at the rising plumes of smoke.

“You came,” he said when she entered. His tone was calm, unsurprised.

“You’ve seen this already,” she realized. “You knew I would.”

He nodded. “The strands told me. You’re a constant. My anchor.”

Her jaw tightened. “I’m not your anchor. I’m here to stop you.”

Kessler chuckled. “Stop destiny? You misunderstand. The elevator will fall. The board will turn on itself. Humanity will enter a new phase. All your resistance will only prove the path.”

She stepped closer. “And if I kill you?”

He turned, smiling. “Then you’ll fulfill the strand. My death is part of the cycle. It doesn’t matter if I live or not. The fall is inevitable.”

Her hand trembled over the scanner-ring, her only weapon. If she pressed it to his skin again, she might glimpse another branch, another possibility. But she feared what she’d see.

“You don’t understand,” he continued, voice like steel. “You’re not outside the vision—you’re inside it. You help make it real. That’s why you were there. Without you, the collapse doesn’t happen.”

The room felt suddenly colder. Was he lying? Or was she, unknowingly, the catalyst? She thought of the countless lives she’d read, the probability seeds she’d planted in desperate minds. Perhaps she’d never been neutral. Perhaps every word she spoke nudged events closer to inevitability.

She closed her eyes, the images flooding back: fire, ruin, her own figure. And in that instant, she understood. The strands didn’t predict the future. They created it. By reading Kessler’s palm, by acknowledging the vision, she had already set the wheels in motion.

When she opened her eyes, Kessler was watching her, serene. “So,” he whispered, “will you complete the reading?”

Her hand lowered. The ring gleamed faintly in the dark.

The collapse came three days later. Newsfeeds showed the orbital elevator twisting like a spine of glass before breaking apart, raining fire into the ocean. Cities drowned. The global net went dark. Panic swallowed the world whole.

And amid the chaos, some whispered about a figure seen wandering the ruins—a woman in a crimson shawl, offering her hand to the desperate, her ring glowing faintly with unreadable light. Some said she was a prophet. Others called her a curse.

Only she knew the truth: that the lines of the palm were never about destiny. They were about choices, magnified until they became inevitable. And she had chosen—once.

The world would live in the shadow of that reading forever.

The Archivist’s Confession

You’ll forgive me if my memory drifts. The incident happened—or didn’t—many years ago, and memory is such a fragile instrument. I am, after all, an archivist, not a historian. Historians pursue truth. Archivists merely store whatever is given to us, and truth is someone else’s concern.

But I’ll tell you what I recall, though you must promise not to believe it too much.

The year was 2149—or 2150. I cannot be precise. The city of Novaterra had grown into the sky, a thousand glass towers like needles piercing the heavens. From my office on the 400th floor, I could see the drones drifting like dust motes in sunlight, delivering news, food, propaganda—it was all the same, really.

My job was simple: catalog transmissions. Every word broadcast across the city passed through the Archives before it was “validated” for public memory. Citizens thought their words belonged to them, but once spoken aloud, they belonged to us. We polished them, filed them, sometimes trimmed them like hedges to fit the official garden. I didn’t question it at the time. Words are fragile, too—if you don’t protect them, they rot.

And then came the signal.

It was faint at first, tucked between weather bulletins and commercial jingles. Just a murmur, like static, except it wasn’t static—it was structured. Patterns repeating, numbers hidden in noise. I shouldn’t have noticed, but I did. My ears are tuned differently, perhaps. Or maybe it was nothing at all.

The pattern said: “We are still here.”

Now, I must be careful. Because I told my supervisor about the message, and he laughed. Said it was a glitch. Said I had been working too many long nights. But later, when the official records came out, I saw the signal scrubbed clean from the files. Not a trace. Which means one of two things: either it never existed, or it was too important to admit.

Both possibilities frightened me.

I began to track the signal on my own, copying fragments onto unauthorized slates. The message repeated every night at precisely 02:47, though always from a slightly different source point. Sometimes from the upper towers, sometimes from the abandoned tunnels below the city. I would triangulate, follow, almost catch it—but then it would slip away like smoke.

The words changed, too. First “We are still here.” Then: “You are not alone.”

That one kept me awake for nights. Because who was “you”? Me? The city? Humanity itself? And if we weren’t alone, who was speaking?

Of course, it is possible—probable—that I invented the whole thing. Sleep deprivation does cruel tricks. Yet, forgive me, I am convinced I didn’t.

I told Lira about it—my only friend in the Archives, though she insists she barely knows me. She said I looked pale, unwell, that I should see a medic. I told her about the repeating messages, the voices hidden in static, and she touched my arm gently. “Archivist,” she said, “you shouldn’t say such things aloud. Words have consequences.”

She was right. The next morning, my access clearance had changed. Files I’d worked with daily for years were suddenly locked. My workstation buzzed with error codes. Someone was watching me.

Or maybe that’s paranoia.

The signal grew bolder. It began to use my name. “Edran. We are still here. Edran. Listen.”

My name is Edran, yes. Unless I’ve misremembered it, too.

I know what you’re thinking: hallucination. A tired archivist losing his grip. But how do you explain the slate? One morning I woke to find a fresh recording on my desk—no entry logs, no signatures, nothing. On it, a voice spoke in a tone so calm it chilled me:

“They have rewritten your past. Do not trust the records. You are more than an archivist.”

I should have destroyed it. Instead, I hid it. And then, when I returned from lunch that day, the slate was gone.

Here my story fractures. Some say I was questioned by the Directorate. I remember no such thing. Others whisper that I was reassigned to Outer Colony duty, but as you see, I am still here in Novaterra. Unless this city itself is the colony and I never noticed the change.

I recall wandering into the underlevels, following the hum of the signal, though Lira insists I never left the tower. Down there, beneath the city, I found machines older than our records, still alive, still pulsing with thought. They spoke in light, in sound, in language so pure it felt like music. They told me—I think they told me—that humanity had built them centuries ago, then forgotten. They had hidden themselves in silence until the city grew quiet enough to hear again.

But perhaps I only dreamed it.

When I returned, if I returned, nothing was the same. Lira avoided me. My colleagues pretended not to see me. I searched the Archives for proof, but every file contradicted the last. Some histories said Earth had died in fire, others that it thrived. Some claimed Novaterra was the first city on Mars; others swore we were still on Earth, just rebuilt. Even the year in the files kept changing: 2149, 2231, 1987.

I realized then: the Archives weren’t a record of truth. They were a weapon. Reality itself was curated, bent, reshaped, until no one could tell what was real anymore. Perhaps that was always the goal.

So you see why I doubt my own words.

I sit here now, in this forgotten chamber, dictating what may be my final entry. The signal whispers in my ear even as I speak. It says, “Tell them. Someone must remember.”

And yet, perhaps there is nothing to remember. Perhaps this is all invention, the fever dream of an archivist who never learned the difference between preserving truth and creating it.

If you are reading this, I ask only one thing: do not trust me. Do not trust anyone. Seek the signal yourself, if it exists. Listen at 02:47 when the city grows quiet. If you hear the voice, then you’ll know I was not entirely lost.

But if you hear nothing, then close this record, and forget me.

Because memory is fragile. And I, perhaps, never was.