Author: Sarah King

(This is a fictional short story)

The calendar insists it’s late September, but calendars don’t mean much since the Year of “Forced Correction“—the polite name they gave the absolute chaos, the calamity that came after the World Resource Wars, when whole governments globally collapsed because some “free-world” idiot thought it was clever to ration hope alongside fear and oppression by controlling free media, abolishing, education euthanizing the disabled and flipping the world as we know it on end and redrawing the world maps ending what was once knows as “The Free World”. And now, the air already carries October’s bitter silence, a silence that lives in the marrow more than in the sky. Along the outer fence the trees curl yellow, brittle as the promises that once rebuilt this place. The new ‘System’ now calls this “global transition season.” I call it the month before my death date.

The twentieth of October glows on my Lens display in cheery civic orange, labeled Birthday. I call it what it is: my annual obituary attempt. Another year marked, another reminder that I am here, but not seen by those around me. Alive, but not living. My name flickers through the city’s census, but nobody reads it. Nobody celebrates it. Like many others in my situation. Status lost like an eraser on a chalk board.

In the training hall, the overseer leans across the table with that immaculate smile, polished into perfection like marble. She always has the right posture, the right tone, the right words—warm but shallow, like a pool designed only for dipping your toes. She asks how I’m doing, and the words feel more like paperwork. Later she’ll tell the supervisors she’s checked in with everyone, that the Cohort is united, that no one is left out. But the truth is sitting right there in front of her, at the breakfast table: I exist, but not part of it.

The table proves it. I sit with my tray, hands folded around lukewarm porridge, waiting for my moment to slip into the conversation. I wait, I time it, I release words like fragile birds. But they never land. They dissolve before they even reach anyone’s ears. My sentences are fog, while theirs are firecrackers. They laugh, chatter, lean into each other’s jokes. And me? I’m furniture with a pulse. Easier to pretend I’m not there than to risk acknowledging someone who doesn’t fit.

The Cohort is made of bright voices and sharp edges, all of them bound by invisible cords of belonging. And me? I’m the one who doesn’t tie into their weave. I’m the loose thread they pretend not to see, afraid tugging it might unravel the whole fabric.

The organization calls me unique. The word flashes across my Lens sometimes, tagged like a warning. Unique is a polite word for defective, untrustworthy, broken. It’s the bureaucratic way of saying you’re just a body, not one of us.

“Uglies” had it right. Divide the world into acceptable faces and unacceptable ones. “Divergent” had it right too. People like me don’t fit into the Factions. We fracture categories simply by existing, so the categories erase us. The Harmony Index measures conformity, not humanity. My number hovers in the thirties, neither low enough to exile me, nor high enough to make me matter. I am not a danger, not a prize. I am a shadow in the middle ground.

Life is about change, the system reminds us. Painful but beautiful, grief and growth like two sides of a coin. Yin and yang. Black and white. But the balance feels rigged. I live in the black. They thrive in the white.

The overseer once told us at assembly that “every Cohort member matters.” The Cohort cheered. I stood there, silent, invisible in plain sight. Matter? To whom? To the overseer, I’m a checkmark. To my peers, I’m a seat-filler. To myself, I’m a ghost carrying my own body.

After breakfast, training resumes. The hall smells of disinfectant and sweat, echoes of boots striking the polished floor. Drills. Chants. Group tasks designed to force unity. But unity doesn’t work if your voice isn’t counted. My contributions slide past unnoticed, or worse, repeated by someone louder and claimed as theirs. When I try harder, I’m “too much for everyone.” When I withdraw, I’m “aloof.” Every move confirms I am wrong, whatever it is.

There are moments, small and sharp, when grief stabs through the numbness. Watching them laugh together, heads tilted close, secrets traded like currency. Watching them spill across benches, elbows brushing, as if the world naturally welcomes them. Watching the overseer beam at their progress while her eyes slide past me. I wonder how a person can be this visible, yet so completely unseen.

Late September bleeds into October. Each morning colder than the last, each night longer. My Lens starts prompting me with “mood nudges.” You seem detached. Would you like to log a Gratitude or a Blessings Statement? I swipe it away. Gratitude is another word for camouflage. Pretend you’re thankful, so no one asks why you aren’t. Pretend you belong, so no one notices you don’t.

The twentieht approaches. That so called “day to celebrate” with friends and family. What “friends”, what “family”. Out of Cohort, I reside in a cave alone, most of the time forgotten. Never invited, always “inviting”. My private death date. Every year I brace myself for the silence. Who remembers, no one asks, no one marks the day. It passes like smoke, unnoticed by the Cohort. They are too busy celebrating their own milestones, their promotions, their successes or gatherings. And I am there, sitting in the same chair, eating the same food, breathing the same air, but not part of it. But then again. I’ve changed. Just like this world.

I wonder if I could vanish entirely—if one morning I didn’t show up to the training hall, if my tray sat empty, if my chair stayed unoccupied—would anyone pause? Would anyone’s laughter falter? Or would the room simply close over the absence like water, erasing the space I once filled?

There is a cruel beauty to being invisible. You can see everything without being seen. You can study the cracks in the system, the places where the overseer’s smiles don’t reach her eyes, the moments when the Cohort members glance at each other with envy instead of loyalty. They are not as united as they look. And I, the ghost among them, can see it clearer than they ever will.

But seeing is not belonging. Observing is not living. Knowing the truth does not make the loneliness lighter.

It is early October now. The leaves are fire on the ground, the air sharp as broken glass. The overseer begins her speeches about resilience, about how the Cohort must be strong for the trials ahead. She says “we,” but she means them. I am not part of her “we.” I am the absence she papers over.

And still, I sit at the table. Still, I show up. Because even ghosts need a place to haunt.

The city’s noticeboards switch to Community Harmony Month banners. The Lens paints confetti in the corners of my vision whenever I pass a camera. Smile at a stranger to earn a microcredit! The new digital currency that is now the global currency that replaced all paper money including Bitcoin. I keep my mouth neutral and my pace steady. My Index dips two points. An animated leaf frowns and suggests I attend a “Resonance Workshop”. I imagine a room full of folding chairs and breathing exercises that taste like chalk. I don’t go.

On a Tuesday, the overseer announces pair drills. Partners are assigned by “the Lens”. The Lens is this device and management system globally that monitors everyone, where they go, what they where, who they marry and all that stuff. It monitors everything every aspect of life. My device chirps and flashes a friendly line connecting me to a man named Reeve, who wears his hair like a warning and his confidence like a weapon. He glances at my number and visibly calculates how much of me he needs to tolerate to keep his own score.

We’re told to complete a task together: four stations, twelve minutes, switches called by a tone only the Lens can hear. I hear nothing. I move when Reeve moves, and when I anticipate the pivot a second early, he snaps, “Wait for the tone.”

“There isn’t a tone for me,” I say. “There never is.”

He rolls his eyes like he’s heard every excuse and disliked them all. “Then follow me. Don’t improvise.”

We finish the course with numbers the overseer calls “acceptable.” The Cohort takes this as code for applause. Reeve high-fives a friend and forgets my name mid-sentence. The Lens thanks me for “participating in harmony.” I resist the urge to hold my hand up to a camera and show it the shape of anger.

That night the wind shifts. It smells like the river, like water arguing with stone. My room hums with the refrigerator-song of the building. I turn the Lens off and the ceiling does not collapse. For a long time I lay still and listen to the two voices inside me debating in their usual binary.

Black says: Stop showing up to places where you are not wanted. Let the chair be empty. Let the table learn your shape by absence.

White says: Keep showing up. Not for them. For the version of you who needs proof that you can endure.

Black says: Let this be your last October.

White says, softer: Let this be the last October you spend alone.

They circle each other and never touch. Yin and yang, but not equal. Balance is a word people use when they mean “do it my way, but say it was yours.”

On Wednesday, after another breakfast where my words evaporate and my tray might as well seat a ghost, I wander farther than usual on my lunch break. The city’s spine runs north-south here, a line of glass and good intentions. I pass a tower whose digital banner reads BE YOUR BEST SELF in bright letters. The Lens translates the slogan into a soft nudge: Your Harmony Index can improve with consistent social engagement. I stick my hands deeper into my pockets. The sky is a gray lid and the light is the color of old tea.

On a side street, tucked between a shuttered bodega and a repair shop with a congregation of broken toasters in the window, there’s a door painted the wrong blue. Not cheerful. Not soothing. Defiant. The glass above it is fogged from the inside and a scrap of paper is taped to the pane. It says: Unlisted Room. Thursdays, 6 p.m. No Lenses. No questions. Spare change becomes hot soup.

I stand there longer than someone who is definitely not going in. The Lens blinks a warning: Area not indexed. Civic coverages may not apply. I flick it off. The silence in my head is startling.

Thursday at six, I go.

The Unlisted Room is deeper than it looks from the street. The ceiling is low and the lights are yellow and the walls have the stubbornness of places that have survived being repurposed too many times. There are five plastic tables and fourteen chairs that don’t match and a bulletin board that does not belong to the city. A big industrial pot steams behind the counter and someone has written, in chalk, soup is not a metaphor.

People come in and they do not perform. A woman in a coat three sizes too big for her holds a mug like a map she can read. A man with hands like cracked earth says three words to a volunteer and somehow they are enough. A kid plays with a piece of string the way monks pray. Nobody scans anyone; there are no gentle chimes announcing compatibility.

A person with cropped hair and a cardigan that used to have a life in an office moves through the room like a current. They are neither cheerful nor grim, just present. “I’m Tamsin,” they say when they reach me, and I believe them. They point at a hand-lettered sign near the back:

WE BELIEVE:

• You are not your number.
• Quiet is not rudeness.
• Eye contact is optional.
• Asking for help is brave.
• Endings can be soft.
• Change hurts and helps. We hold both.

I stand under those words like I’m under weather, and for the first time in months, something inside me recognizes the forecast.

Tamsin says, “First time?”

“Yes.” I look at the counter. “Soup?”

“Carrot-ginger if the heart needs a blanket. Tomato if the heart needs a fence. Lentil if the heart needs ballast.” They shrug. “You can also have bread without a metaphor.”

“Carrot,” I say, because I am cold, and because blankets are for people who intend to keep going.

A man at the corner table is writing on index cards with a fountain pen. He pins them to the board one by one with a patience that makes me think of sewing. I read them when he steps away to refill his tea.

• Need a hand moving a couch four blocks. Payment: cinnamon rolls.
• Looking for someone who understands paperwork.
• Saturday: quiet work hours. Bring your own life. No advice unless asked.
• Found: gray mitten. Looks left-handed but will not discriminate.

I take a card from my pocket. It’s blank. I don’t remember putting it there. Tamsin taps the pen jar with a knuckle. I write:

• Thursdays are heavy; soup helps. I don’t want to spend October alone. If you need a chair where small talk is optional, mine is empty.

I pin it to the board with a pushpin shaped like a beetle. It feels ceremonial. It feels like admitting something without confessing.

No one asks my number. No one asks why my birthday is a funeral. No one corrects my posture. When silence comes, it is not a failure; it sits in the chair beside me and does not complain.

I start to come on Thursdays. I bring bags of dry lentils and boxes of tea and once, on impulse, a stack of cheap notebooks that smell like recycled paper and ambition. At the training hall, nothing changes. The overseer still smiles like a professionally staged sunrise. The Cohort still moves like a shoal that cannot afford to consider one fish. I am still a body with a seat assignment.

But on Thursdays, the Unlisted Room adjusts the tilt of my horizon.

We talk in the strange grammar of people who have learned to measure themselves against a system and have refused to be only the sum. I learn the names of the people who arrive silently and leave a little less so: Jori, who reads weather reports like poems; Nana, who mends everything and does not name it charity; Saint, who is not one, which is why the name fits. A boy who chooses the name Ash because he is not ready to decide if he wants to be a tree or a fire.

There is, one evening, a girl at a table with her hood up, staring into a cup like it might give her permission. She is Cohort-aged but not in our hall. She looks like a rumor that escaped. When Tamsin brings her bread and does not require thanks, something unknots in my lungs.

“Why this place?” I ask Tamsin after we stack chairs.

They wipe the counter with a cloth that has seen better days. “Because the city wants the metrics of kindness more than the cost of it,” they say. “Because some rooms have to exist off the map or they stop being rooms and start being a product demo. Because some of us were tired of speaking into fog.”

“I know that sound,” I say.

They eye the Lens in my pocket. “You’re good at disappearing.”

“I don’t want to be,” I say. “I’m just good at it.”

They nod. “Sometimes being good at something is a phase. Sometimes it’s a warning.”

October maneuvers itself into the middle of the month like a chess piece that gets to pretend it isn’t being moved. The city strings lights across the plazas as if that can convince the sun to behave. The Cohort trains toward the trial with the feverish purpose of people who are busy enough not to notice what they’re avoiding. The overseer wears a pin on her lapel shaped like a compass. I imagine it points to public relations.

Four days before my death date, the overseer announces an “affirmation circle.” We line up our chairs and say respectable things about each other. “You’re a team player.” “Your dedication inspires me.” “Your stamina is unmatched.” When it is my turn, Reeve—assigned to me as my compliment partner by the Lens—glances down at his device, then at me. “You’re quiet,” he says. “That’s… helpful.”

The room nods like a trained audience. I sit with my hands on my knees and swallow a laugh that would be a knife if I let it.

Afterward, in the corridor that smells like a lecture on cleanliness, Mara—the one Cohort member whose eyes have ever tripped over mine and stayed there—falls into step beside me. She doesn’t lower her voice when she says, “That affirmation circle was a polite lie.”

“Politeness is how lies pay rent,” I say.

Something like a smile touches the edge of her mouth. She taps the notice clipped to the board: Community Harmony Month: Submit photos of your Cohort bonding! Then she looks at me the way you look at a locked door and ask yourself if you remember where you put the key. “Do you have plans for the 20th?”

“My funeral?” I say subtly under my breath. “Yes. I plan to outlive it potentially.”

“That counts,” she says. “If you change your mind about being alone, the east exit is less watched after six.”

She doesn’t wait for my answer. She slips back into the shoal and the water closes.

The twentieth arrives like a secret I accidentally told myself. The Lens wakes me with a chirp and a confetti animation. Happy Birthday! The device suggests I share a celebratory post with my network. The network is a mirage that keeps asking for water. I turn the Lens face down on the dresser and ignore it.

I go to the hall because not going would be a bigger ripple than going and I don’t want to spend my death date consoling people who didn’t notice me yesterday. Breakfast is the usual performance. The overseer’s smile is precisely calibrated. The Cohort clatters. I sit. I lift the spoon. I make a witness of my body.

At lunch a “surprise” is staged: cupcakes frosted in corporate colors, a speaker playing a song that thinks it is joy, a banner that declares, Cohort Stars Are Born Today! The banner does not know what to do with those of us who were born unstarred. The overseer claps the rhythm of duty. People cheer. A few faces tilt toward me, then away, the way you glance at a street musician and decide you don’t carry change. This wasn’t a celebration for me.

I wait until the clock decides the hour. At six, near the east exit, the cameras blink their amber eyes. I walk through their light and the Lens in my pocket stays off, and the sky outside is the color of steel cooled with patience.

The Unlisted Room is warm. Yellow light. Soft noise. Soup that smells like the kind of hunger that can be answered. A card is pinned to the board in a hand I recognize: Mara’s, alphabet neat and stubborn.

• 6:30. Chair saved. Cake questionable. Conversation optional.

Tamsin slides a slice of cake toward me, the kind that collapses under its own sugar. Someone sings with a voice that refuses to choose between tune and truth. I sit. At 6:32 the east door creaks and Mara steps in like a person who has decided to survive somewhere the system cannot quantify.

She does not say “happy.” She says, “Wow, you’re actually here?”

“I guess, I wasn’t sure.” I nudge the cake with a fork. “I am still not sure.”

“That’s all right,” she says. “Unsure is honest.”

We eat the questionable cake. It tastes like a dare and an apology added with cardboard and tears. The room moves around us, conversations of low tide and high water, people who have decided that being counted is not the same as being known. Tamsin introduces Mara to Saint and Nora and Nana and Jori; she nods at each name like she’s collecting maps.

When the chairs are stacked and the pot is rinsed and the yellow lights do their best impression of stars, Mara hands me a folded paper. Inside, a sketched blueprint: not of a room, but of an hour.

• Saturdays, 9–11: Quiet work. Bring your own life. No advice unless asked.
• Table rules:

1. Silence is welcome.
2. Small talk is optional.
3. Numbers stay outside.
4. You can leave whenever you want.
5. You can come back whenever you can.

“You wrote this?” I ask.

“Stole the idea from a friend,” she says. “Improved the rules. Added number four.”

“Number four is vital,” I say, hearing the crack in my voice and deciding not to spackle it.

“We can try this once,” she says. “If you hate it, we unmake it.”

“If I hate it,” I say, “I will still keep Saturday company with myself somewhere else and pretend it was the plan.”

We laugh, small and unsteady, like new foals.

On the walk home the cold reminds me I have fingers. The river moves like something that refuses to be indexed. The Lens presses against my thigh, a little square of expectation. I do not throw it into the water. I do not bless it. I do not curse it. I let it be a thing in my pocket among other things.

At home, I light the one candle I keep for emergencies emotional or electrical. I write the date at the top of a page and then, without forcing it, a sentence.

This year, I refused to be a number on my death date.

The sentence looks at me like a cat who will allow affection under very strict terms. I write another.

This year, a chair had my name on it that I did not have to earn.

I sleep. The kind of sleep that has corners.

Saturday, we try it.

The Unlisted Room at nine in the morning is quieter than a promise. Tamsin puts a pot of coffee on the counter with a sign that says trust yourself about caffeine. Nana mends a pile of socks and does not raise her eyes when people speak; they speak anyway. Jori writes down windspeeds like a person taking attendance for the sky. Saint reads a book held together by tape and loyalty. Ash draws small dragons in the margin of a math worksheet, each one wearing a scarf.

Mara sits across from me and we both take out notebooks. The first ten minutes are a negotiation between habit and intention. Then time does that thing it does when you give it a job: it moves the way a river moves, indifferent to whether anyone approves of its course.

I write. Not speeches for the overseer, not reports for the system, not apologies disguised as gratitude statements. I write about what it costs to be a body at a table where no one hears you chew. I write about the smell of October, the feeling of the sky when it decides to lower itself by an inch and see if we notice. I write about numbers and names and the dangerous idea that some rooms can hold people without asking them to perform.

Halfway through the second hour, a boy not much older than Ash puts a card on the board. He writes carefully, tongue peeking out.

• Need someone to tell me it’s not my fault I’m quiet.

No one signs it. No one needs to.

When the clock stutters toward eleven, we close our notebooks and look at each other like survivors of a small, chosen storm. We do not clap. We do not debrief. We tidy the room as if the act is a blessing.

The following week, two more people come. The week after, five. They do not introduce themselves, not at first. They arrive like punctuation: a comma who needed a pause, a semicolon who refused to be an ending.

At the training hall, the overseer starts using the word cohesion like it’s a sacrament. The trials bear down. The Cohort sharpens. My number does not change. It hovers in the seventies, loyal to its definition of me.

Mara’s number dips. She shrugs. “I would rather lose points than lose hours.”

On a gray morning near the end of October, the overseer announces a new initiative: Neighbourhood Mood. Blocks with higher aggregate Harmony Indices get priority for microgrants. The Lens sparkles at us about community gardening and winter shelters with heated benches. I think about how easy it is to rig a score if you control the questions. I think of the Unlisted Room’s bulletin board and its absolute refusal to be quantified.

Reeve corners me after drills. “You’re running something,” he says, suspicious. “Your number should be worse.”

“I’m breathing,” I say. “Maybe that’s the trick.”

He snorts. “You think you can opt out just by ignoring it?”

“I think,” I say, “that value systems fail quietly when people stop feeding them.”

He doesn’t like that. He walks away. He will be fine; the shoal always catches its own.

When the trial week arrives, the Cohort is sleepless with purpose. Stations. Evaluations. Spectators who might be benefactors. The overseer’s smile is a permanent installation.

On the final day, a “community demonstration” is scheduled. We are to showcase unity. The Lens feeds us the script and the choreography. I learn the steps. I do not learn the joy.

We stand in formation, hands linked, faces lifted toward the cameras. A hundred smiles as precise as copy-paste. Mine is the quiet shape my face makes when it refuses to lie.

I feel it before I see it: the small ripple that means the Unlisted Room has sent an emissary. Near the back of the crowd, Tamsin’s cardigan appears like a flag of another nation. They stand with Nana and Jori and Saint and Ash and three people I haven’t met yet who wear their names like armor: Len, Rook, Hani. They do not cheer or heckle. They hold thermoses and watch the demonstration the way a doctor watches your pulse: to see if the rhythm is honest.

The overseer notices the cluster, misreads, and gestures them forward with that inclusive sweep of her hand that always looks like a blessing and never feels like one. “Join us!” she calls. “Community is for everyone!”

Tamsin raises a palm, polite as a boundary. “We’re already a community,” they say. “We’re here to witness yours.”

The air develops an edge. The cameras swivel. The Lens in my pocket hums, wanting to write the caption before the scene is finished. The Cohort smiles harder. It looks like tension, disguised as unity.

Mara’s hand finds mine, not a gesture for the cameras, not a test for the algorithm. A human hand, offered to a human hand.

Black inside me says: Step back. You are safer alone. Let them chew each other.

White says: Lean in. Not to them. To the person beside you.

I do the small dangerous thing. I squeeze back.

Later, when the square has emptied and the overseer has congratulated herself on weathering a “moment of disruption,” I walk the long way home. The sky opens just enough to show a seam of light under the clouds, the kind of light that feels like a dare. My feet are sore, my throat is tired, my chest is strange with the equal parts ache and relief of deciding not to go quietly.

In my room, I pin a new card to my own stubborn board.

• I was present, and part of it. Not theirs. Ours.

The Lens pings. You have not logged a Gratitude Statement this month. Would you like to log one now? It offers a list: community, opportunity, growth, health, leadership, friendship.

I type my own, where the app lets you pretend you have a choice.

Grateful for rooms that don’t ask for proof. Grateful for chairs with no conditions. Grateful for people who hear quiet as a language, not a failure
Grateful for Silence.

The app tries to categorize it and gives up after not knowing what to do. My Index does not move.

I go to the Unlisted Room with a bag of oranges and a plan that is not a plan so much as the opposite of one: keep the door open; keep the lights soft; keep the soup simmering; keep the rules simple; keep the numbers out. The bulletin board is crowded now—offers and needs, jokes and truths, a photo of a mitten that found its human after all.

Ash pins up a drawing of a dragon wearing a scarf that says WE ARE TRYING. Saint adds a card that reads: The right button can change everything. Nana brings an old tin of buttons and dumps them into a bowl like treasure. People choose their declarations and pin them to their coats: HERE, STUBBORNLY. TALK SOFTLY. DO NOT UPGRADE ME. LEAVE ROOM.

Mara makes coffee the way she does everything: precisely, like dignity is an ingredient. Tamsin balances the ledger with a pencil and a theory of enough. Jori reads the windspeeds and declares the night survivable. I bake something that collapses in the middle and people eat it anyway.

When the hour is late and the chairs are stacked and the lights flicker their polite suggestion that we let them rest, I step outside into an October that is still sharp, still honest, still mine. The river pulls the city along behind it without asking permission. Somewhere, a room we built off the map continues to exist, uncounted and unbought. Somewhere, a person who has spent too many breakfasts being a body with a seat assignment walks into a space where their silence is not treated like a broken machine.

My death date no longer feels like a tombstone. It feels like a hinge.

Black does not leave. Black never leaves. It stands beside me, arms crossed, vigilant. White does not win. White isn’t trying to. It sits on the curb and kicks its heels and looks up at the part of the sky that forgot to be gray.

Between them, there is a narrow bridge. It is not pretty. It is not wide. It holds.

I go home, not to a celebration, not to confetti, not to a number going up. I go home with soup on my tongue and pencil on my fingers and the knowledge that invisibility is not the only trick I have.

In the morning, the training hall will smell of disinfectant and duty. The overseer will ask how I’m doing in a voice with an exit built into it. The Cohort will be a shoal again, a smooth surface over complicated water. I will sit at the table and be present, and I will not ask that table to be my universe.

Because I have a different one now. Off the map. On purpose. A place where I am not a category, not a cautionary tale, not a statistic in a grant application. A place where my birthday is allowed to be a soft ending to a hard chapter and the start of another one with better lighting.

When the Lens asks me to rate my sleep, I give it a six. It tells me six is “growth-minded.” I tell it nothing. It is not invited.

I pin one last card to the board before I leave for the hall, because rituals matter, because stubbornness is a kind of love.

• We survive by quiet, by soup, by rooms that do not ask us to audition. We survive by holding hands when it’s not required. We survive by refusing to vanish.

It’s late October. The light is brief and good. The leaves are older than I am and better at falling. The world does not know my name any more than it did yesterday.

I keep walking anyway.

The morning is a blunt instrument. The hall smells like disinfectant and duty. I tie my laces, pin the last card to the stubborn board at the Unlisted Room, and walk into the city’s soft gray like a person choosing to be visible even if it makes the air colder.

The Lens purrs in my pocket, patient as a cat that knows you’ll feed it eventually. I leave it there. The east path is empty, the river dragging light downstream like a secret.

At the corner by the repair shop with the congregation of broken toasters, a figure edges into my lane. Stocky. Hat jammed low. Jacket like a storm cloud that made its own choices. He plants himself in my path the way a door plants itself in a doorway.

“You’re walking like you’re trying not to leave footprints,” he says, voice gravel-warm. “Bad for circulation. Worse for nerves.”

I stop. He doesn’t step closer, just lets his presence do what it does. It’s care, but it comes dressed like a warning.

“Not your business,” I say.

“Everything’s my business until I prove it isn’t,” he says, and then ruins the line by softening. “Name’s Fazz.”

“Short for?”

“Not an acronym,” he says. “Just a sound my mother liked. People remember sounds. They forget ‘unique identifiers.’” His eyes flick to my pocket like he can hear the Lens thinking.

“You from the Cohort?” I ask.

“Graduated. Twice. They kept trying to round off my edges. I kept returning with warranty violations.” He grins, then sobers. “I heard your room has soup. Rooms with soup need bouncers. I am not subtle, but I am useful.”

“So you’ve decided to… what, supervise me?” I bracket it with sarcasm to keep it from feeling like rescue.

He does not flinch. “No. I’ve decided to stand adjacent until you stop acting like you’re allergic to people who give a damn.”

“Forceful kindness,” I say. “It’s a choice.”

“It’s my only dialect,” he says, then steps aside like a gate learning manners. “Go on. I’ll walk the long way and meet you at the hall. Try leaving footprints.”

I do. Not because he told me to. Because something in my chest wants proof I weigh anything.

By breakfast the Cohort is an aquarium of bright fish pretending glass isn’t real. The overseer’s smile has been buffed to a reflective sheen. I set my tray at the end of the table, the traditional seat of the furniture-with-a-pulse. Across from me, Reeve’s crowd is all teeth and jokes. Their politeness to my face is a mirror with Vaseline smeared on it.

“Morning,” I say, careful: two syllables, neutral temperature.

“Morning!” they chorus, in that well-trained way that says: we see your outline but not your contents. Compliments are thrown like confetti over their own heads. Between one laughter burst and the next, the Lens on my lap lights with a notification it wasn’t supposed to show me: a Cohort subchannel, title: Cohesion Tips. A stream of messages bubbles past like fish who think the water can’t remember.

• keep it upbeat when [INITIALS REDACTED] sits near the end
• don’t ask open questions, just nod, faster exit
• their number tanks group averages; file separate reports if asked
• lol “quiet is helpful” worked again yesterday

My stomach goes the temperature of cutlery. The screen ghosts my face back at me, half reflection, half indictment. I know these tricks. Pleasant to my face. Contempt behind the glass. Age jokes when I leave the room, disability jokes when they think no one disabled is listening. I am either too old to understand or too “fragile” to be asked to carry weight. Able enough to work. Disabled enough to exclude. The duality isn’t accidental; it’s policy flavored as personality.

The funny thing is there are two versions of me in this scene. In one, I throw the tray. In the other, I turn into the chair and vanish. Today I try a third: I let the silence inside me speak, and I do not rescue them from it.

The overseer arrives, perfect posture, perfect teeth. “Team,” she sings, “remember our Community Harmony Month photo. Cohorts that smile together thrive together.”

Fazz appears at the doorway like a punctuation mark. He doesn’t say a word. He just stands there, arms folded, making the room aware that the room has edges.

“Juniper,” the overseer says, warmth set to setting six, “how are we today?”

“Plural,” I say. “We are plural. I’m one person.”

Her smile doesn’t crack, but it does blink. “How are you?”

“Present,” I say, then add, because I am done translating myself into something friendlier than the truth, “and not part of it.”

She tilts her head, the angle of someone about to explain my feelings to me. Before she can, the Lens hums. Another notification bleeds through the privacy glaze, not to me this time but from me, because I thumb it up onto the table with two fingers like a card you put face up so everyone has to play it.

The subchannel chat glows there between the mugs. For a beat, no one breathes. Then the room does what rooms do when someone removes the mask and says, “Name yourself.”

Reeve laughs too loud. “We were brainstorming ways to include you.”

“By excluding me from the conversation,” I say, gentle as a scalpel.

“That’s not fair,” someone says, which is always what people say when fairness has finally arrived and it doesn’t look like a prize.

The overseer’s voice does its best to become a blanket. “We don’t traffic in blame.”

“Right,” I say. “We traffic in optics.”

Black inside me wants the tray throw. White wants to make a speech soft enough to spare everyone. The third voice, newer, built from soup and bulletin boards and the smell of cheap coffee at a correct temperature, says: choose the sentence that tells the truth without auditioning for forgiveness.

I look at the overseer. “We can smile for your photo or we can be honest. We can’t do both.”

It lands. Not because it’s clever, but because it’s true. Truth has weight even when you deliver it in a small voice.

The overseer recovers with professional grace. “We’ll revisit group norms later.”

“Predictable,” Fazz mutters from the door, as if the word is a weather report. He gives me a nod that is half congratulations, half reminder to keep breathing.

Training bleeds into tasks and by mid-shift I’ve accumulated the day’s standard thousand paper cuts. A locker door that “accidentally” shuts as I pass. A pair drill where my partner practises talking over me like it’s a sport with medals. A compliment delivered in that careful tone that means the opposite. Somebody calls me “kiddo” as if ageism comes wrapped like candy; somebody else calls me “ma’am” like a joke with a school uniform.

By late afternoon, the air in my head turns to winter. The Lens, sensing its chance to be helpful, opens the door to the Internal Support Channel: COGNITIVE COACH: AUTONOMOUS MODE.

• Coach: You’re catastrophizing. Consider reframing.
• Me: I’m categorizing. Consider a mirror.
• Coach: Your Harmony Index will suffer if you isolate.
• Me: My sanity will suffer if I don’t.
• Coach: Evidence-based suggestion: Smile more in shared spaces.
• Me: Evidence-based suggestion: Stop measuring my mouth.
• Coach: Would you like a breathing exercise?
• Black: Breathe is not the problem; air is.
• White: Take the air that’s yours.

The Coach keeps offering options shaped like obedience. The two voices inside me rotate their old positions, but they’re not alone anymore. A third presence cuts across them, a low-frequency hum that started the night I let soup be a sacrament. It doesn’t argue. It anchors.

At the evening debrief, the overseer goes full civics textbook. “Age-diverse teams thrive when we honor each stage’s contribution.” My contribution, apparently, is to be pointed at. “Ability-diverse teams model resilience by adapting.” The adaptation, apparently, is always mine. “We don’t have bullies here,” she finishes, and the Cohort nods with relief because nothing is easier than agreeing to a magic trick.

Fazz coughs a single sharp cough from the back. The room keeps nodding. Masks are not fabric; they’re muscle memory.

I leave early. The hall’s doors are heavy and the night outside is honest. The Unlisted Room glows like a small resistance cell. Tamsin is counting spoons; Nana is laughing at a joke made entirely of eyebrows; Ash is pinning up a drawing of a dragon wearing ear protection.

Fazz arrives two minutes after me, as promised, like thunder following sense. He drops into a chair with the grace of a toppled statue and squints. “You look like a person who didn’t throw a tray.”

“Growth,” I say. My voice is steady. That surprises me less than it used to.

He drums blunt fingers on the table. “I am bad at soft entries, so forgive the shove. You keep letting them rent space inside your skull.”

“They don’t pay on time either,” I say.

He nods, satisfied as if I’ve solved a math problem. “Good. Name the problem first.” He leans forward. Forceful kindness is a wind; you either plant your feet or you move. “Second thing. Don’t give them free metrics. You disappeared from the channel; they wrote the story. Stop letting their lens be the only narrative.”

“Which translates to… what?”

“Speak where they don’t control the microphone,” he says, and jerks his thumb at the bulletin board. “Write it. Pin it. Not a manifesto. A manual. For you.”

I look at the board. It’s crowded with the ordinary heroism of needs and offers. It is the opposite of a comment section; it is an invitation.

I write:

• If they’re kind to your face and cruel to your absence, believe the absence.
• If the room steals your voice, build a smaller room.
• If the system calls your boundaries “isolation,” keep your boundaries.
• If your sanity needs silence, make it non-negotiable.

I pin it with a beetle and don’t apologize for how hard it bites.

Ash sidles over, reading. “Can I add?”

“Rule five,” I say. “Dragons are allowed.”

They print in neat letters:

• If you can’t choose between tree and fire, be ash that seeds both.

Tamsin taps the list once, approval translated into percussion. Nana adds a button to the corner, the kind with a chip of mother-of-pearl. Fazz reads each line, then looks at me like a carpenter judging a joint. “Good,” he says. “Put it in your pocket for the next time you forget.”

“I forget a lot.”

“That’s why pockets were invented.”

We eat soup. We don’t talk about the hall unless it wanders over and asks for a chair. When it does, we let it sit and then we ask it to help with dishes. Problems that can wash bowls are less holy.

On the walk home Fazz matches my stride exactly. Not leading. Not following. Flanking. “I’ll say a thing you won’t like,” he says.

“Say it.”

“You are not broken for wanting distance. You are also not noble for choosing exile. Both can be true. The trick is not letting either become a religion.”

I taste iron. “So what am I supposed to call it?”

“Strategy,” he says. “On some days, solitude is strategy. On others, it’s surrender. You decide which day is which.”

“And if I decide wrong?”

“You’ll decide again tomorrow.”

We pass the repair shop. The broken toasters look like a jury that has seen worse. The night smells like river and metal and fallen leaves. The Lens in my pocket wakes just long enough to ask for a rating. I let it starve.

Back in my room, I stage the internal battle like a play that refuses to close.

• Black: Take your chair to the far corner and face the wall. It’s safer.
• White: Take your chair to the window and face the street. It’s braver.
• Anchor: Take your chair where the wind doesn’t own you. Sit with your back protected. Breathe. Choose on purpose.

The psychosis the city names is not some lurid spectacle. It’s smaller and meaner: a chorus of sanctioned voices telling me to smile, to comply, to be grateful, to “reframe,” to accept that the masks are kindness and my need for truth is aggression. It talks like a self-help manual. It quotes policy. It gets results.

The counter-chorus I’m building does not sound heroic. It sounds like soup and pencils and a door painted blue for no one’s permission. It sounds like forceful kindness that refuses to turn into control. It sounds like a dragon in a scarf.

I fall asleep with the manual in my pocket and wake up with its edges printed on my skin. At breakfast, the overseer stands like a lighthouse on a cliff made of metrics.

“We value transparency,” she declares.

“Then keep talking,” Fazz mutters.

Reeve tries the polite approach. “No hard feelings about yesterday?”

“Hard feelings are honest,” I say. “I’m not handing yours back to make it easier to carry.”

Mara, late to the table, catches my eye. She doesn’t smile. She nods once, a co-signer’s gesture. The subchannel goes very quiet for most of the day. Silence can be cowardice. Today it feels like thinking.

At noon, three people I barely know sidle up one at a time, under the radar of the room’s optics. One leaves a scrap of paper: Thanks for showing the screen. Thought I was losing it. Another says, “They did it to me last year. I left before it got teeth.” The third just stands near me long enough for a human nervous system to register another human nervous system and calm down one degree.

No parade. No confetti. No rating bump. The Lens cannot chart micro-weather. Good.

That evening at the Unlisted Room, Fazz fixes a wobbly leg on the back table with a piece of folded cardboard and a nail filed by impatience. Tamsin adds a rule to the board with a sideways smile: If your kindness feels like control, recalibrate. Nana finds the right button for a woman’s coat and changes everything. Ash asks me if dragons get lonely.

“Only when they pretend to be anything else,” I say.

He thinks about that for a long time, then draws a dragon sitting with a person at a table. Both have bowls of soup. The dragon’s scarf says: WE ARE TRYING.

I pin the drawing under the manual. Not as brand. As map.

Late October doesn’t get kinder. The air still bites. The hall still performs unity like it rehearsed for it. The masks still fit better than truth. But my world is different-sized now. Not larger. Truer. The distance I keep is measured, not punitive. The rooms I enter are chosen, not compulsory. The voices in my head are still opinionated, but the anchor is heavier than the wind.

Fazz walks me to the corner and stops, studying the street like it owes him something. “You’re going to be fine,” he says, which is exactly the kind of useless thing people say when they’re uncomfortable. Then he adds, “Not because it gets easier. Because you’re done letting them be the only narrators.”

“That’s not a guarantee,” I say.

“It’s a practice,” he says. “Which is better.”

He thumps my shoulder with the exact force that says I see you and also I will fight anyone who tries to erase you. It is the kind of care that wants in and keeps hitting a wall. I let one brick loosen.

“Soup tomorrow,” I say.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

We split at the broken-toaster congregation. I go home through the honest dark, manual in my pocket, dragon on the board, footprints visible behind me like a proof. The Lens does not get a rating. The system does not get a speech. The bully subchannel does not get my attention.

Tonight, the only audience is the room I chose and the silence that doesn’t ask me to audition. That, and the part of me that keeps the light on in case someone else is walking toward the door painted wrong-blue, pretending they aren’t.

Let them in. Then let them sit. Then let them leave when they need to. Then let them come back.

That’s the whole trick.

I walk back into the training hall the next morning. The smell of disinfectant is sharper, like the air itself is trying to sterilize me. The Cohort is already gathered at the long tables, trays steaming, laughter clinking like glassware. I take my tray, heavy with food that tastes like resignation, and move toward the edge of the crowd.

Before I can sit, someone gestures. A polite smile stretched across their face like saran wrap. “Not here,” they say, soft, almost apologetic. “Better if you sit in the far corner.”

I freeze, tray balanced in both hands. The corner is the exile seat — cold, drafty, with the broken chair no one bothers to fix. I nod, because nodding costs less than protest. My boots echo on the floor as I cross the distance, my body already shrinking to fit the punishment.

Then the doors open. The overseer glides in with her progeny beside her — the favored child, polished and perfect. Behind them, a grandprogeny, wide-eyed and cruel in the casual way only children of power can afford to be. They scan the room, the way predators do when the zoo gates are unlocked.

Their finger lifts, a gesture light as a feather and heavy as a sentence. “Move them,” the grandprogeny says. “I don’t like them sitting there.”

The overseer smiles, indulgent. The Cohort nods, relieved. Nobody questions a child when the child carries the overseer’s blood. My tray is taken from me, placed elsewhere without permission. I am pointed toward the farthest corner, a new corner, darker and lonelier than the last.

So I move again. The seat creaks as if it resents the weight of me. The food cools, untouched. Laughter swells at the other tables, folding over me like a blanket I am not under.

Days blur. The corners grow sharper, the tables further. Soon I am no longer given a tray. Soon I am told I can still be useful — not as a member, not as a peer, but as an attendant. I serve them their food. I sweep their floors. My title is stripped away, replaced with a leash. Indentured. Owned. A servant in the hall I once sat in.

My voice fades. Not taken all at once, but chipped away with each silence I swallow. The pain of loneliness fills my chest until words can no longer climb out. They tell me it’s easier this way. Quieter. More efficient. And I nod, because nodding is all I have left.

In the end, I do not sit at any table. I hover at the edges, invisible, silent, a ghost with skin. And when the days grind me down to dust, I begin to wish for the only release left: the end. Not a rebellion. Not a miracle. Just a stop.

I close my eyes, bracing for the final silence.

And then —

I wake up.

The ceiling above me is cracked with morning light. My bed is real. My lungs are full. My voice, ragged, still belongs to me.

I walk outside, the countryside is ripe with trees littered with ambers and golden hues as the season is now changing, crisp winds and avians heading south along migratory routes to escape the coming winter.

The dining hall I enter, the overseer and the compeers who now silence with a glance by posture and hidden words in silence, the grandprogeny of the high overseers who keep me at arms length, the far corner where the silence has no lease — gone. Now, but only a dream. A dream that felt stitched from bone and truth, a nightmare dressed in familiar clothes embedded into the tapestry of axions and dendrites and the temporal regions of thought, space and sanity.

I sit up, throat tight, and laugh once — sharp, bitter, relieved. The world outside my window is still broken, still cruel in its petty ways, but at least the table has not yet exiled me. At least my voice is still here, in some small capacity. At least the choice to show up or not belongs to me, for now.

Was it only a dream?

Or so I tell myself, as I pull on my coat, pick up my plate, and walk back toward the place where I sit beside where worlds meet each other as the asses the difference between yesteryears and tomorrow.

I now ask it there will be a tomorrow, or if if the dream is more reality than anything.

But the dream is nothing compared to the reality we live in every day. The double standards are not imaginary. The hypocrisy is not an illusion. The conspiracies we swallow, the lies we trade like currency, the hatred we build altars to — that is the world we have allowed to stand.

So let me say it plain: we need to start asking for forgiveness. Not someday. Not when it’s convenient. Now. Because we have betrayed each other. We have sold compassion for comfort. We have turned cruelty into entertainment and silence into virtue. We have murdered truth by a thousand cuts and called it “just another perspective.”

We must stop.

We must stop pretending that division is strength. We must stop worshipping at the altar of our own correctness. We must stop weaponizing our differences and then acting shocked at the blood on the floor.

And in the place of all this rot, we must start.

We must start pulling down the walls that let us hide from one another. We must start building bridges out of honesty, even if honesty scorches our throats when we say it. We must start taking the lies we’ve stacked to the sky and tearing them down brick by brick, until all that’s left is a space wide enough for peace to stand.

Peace will not arrive because we voted for it, or wished for it, or made a hashtag about it. Peace will arrive because we made it arrive — because we bridged hatred into something else, because we chose forgiveness when it was the hardest thing to choose, because we refused to keep living in corners while the overseers of this world laughed at how easy it was to divide us.

This is the call. The only call that matters. Stop nodding at cruelty. Stop excusing the masks people wear to cover their disdain. Stop allowing yourself to be erased by apathy.

Ask for forgiveness. Give forgiveness. And then, above all, do the work of peace — not as a slogan, not as a dream, but as a law written in how we live and how we refuse to hate.

There is no other way forward. There never was.

And maybe that’s why the ‘System’ laughs when we dream of peace — because it knows peace is the only revolution it cannot control.

Just remember, this is fiction. A dream inside a dream. A story scrawled on paper, not prophecy. But stories matter, because sometimes they hold the warnings we refuse to hear in daylight.

So if tomorrow feels heavy, remember: this is just a tale. And yet, if you feel the weight of it, ask yourself why.