Speaker 1: Hello. I welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. It wasn't until after two a m.
That I heard the elevator door shutter open in the
administrative wing. By then, the upper floors had settled into
their gray varred hush, the soft hiss of oxygen rubber
sols gliding across the hallway linoleum, the wet hum of
distant mop buckets echoing into broken tile. I could feel
the yur in my chest, heavy boyed by the fluorescent
glow pooling behind my small reception counter, just enough to
paint puddles of light out into the gloom. The rest
of the wing was a collage of gray, only half
lit by malfunctioning fixtures, the unseen always at my back.
I was fiddling with paper clips, glancing up at the
television screen, looping security feeds, when something metallic kicked the
counter before me, a faint metallic chuffing, almost polite. The
new delivery driver stowed barely inside the pale ring of
suspendid light, unremarkable, face lined, hands kept tightly at his sides,
as if afraid to brush the counter's plastic surface. He
wore no id badge, just the old navy uniform with
reflected stripes and a heavy cat that couldn't quite high.
Tired eyes said to leave this for you, miss, he said,
words muffled. He gently placed a medium size out of
brown package between us, his hands coasting a few inches
above its scuffed taper as a floath to touch it
a second longer. There were faint stains marking the corners
for us, maybe old water damage. The paper label was torn,
but the address came through bold. Doctor Cameron Blake roomby
twenty one sub level. I looked for a signature line
refix Is this for medical or admin delivery? He gave
a vague shake of the head, didn't say, just follow
what it says. I thought he crossed himself, but his
fingers just hovered over a wurst A flipped through our
directory beneath the counter as he lingered. Now, Doctor Cameron
Blake asked all through both staff, full time, part time, tempts,
even the records for people long since retired or in
one flat case, medically discharged. I tried to call up
the electronic entry for room assignments and felt my pulse
bike there was no be twenty one on the current maps,
just the old archive plant from decades past. That office,
if it existed, was deep under the west Admin when
a hallway I had never been done except in orientation,
and only then clotted with drop costs, ladders, spare furniture.
Most staff joked about it. Some muttered, don't go poking,
Marvin liked to say, shaking his head. ADMIN doesn't like
guests in their dead end. Driver watched me as I
scrolled juicelessly. I gotta go more runs. He left his
clipboard and touched as darting to the far corridor, as
if it pained him to see past the sickly yellow
of the nearest emergency lamp. I hesitated, fingers hovering above
the old fashioned pushed to talk at was action. I
could log the package, send a note for morning admin,
maybe even phone maintenance. But as I thunder the receiver,
the line clicked to static, a low warbling noise and
mayer insistent as a faint hotbeat. Maybe the line was
always weird at night. Brenda, the senior nurse, joked that
someone of something must be chewing the wise again, but
in that moment it made the wing feel hollowed. Watched
When I glanced back at the camera feeds, three screens
blinked out. Only the corridor view remained flickering. I dropped
my eyes to the package once more, felt as haf
with both hands heavier than it appeared, something metallics sliding within,
no clear rattle, but a presence that seemed to press
back against my palms. I wrote a deliver to beat
twenty one, admined suboval two thirteen eight in the lock pen,
trembling harder than I'd like to admit, my thumb tingled
after the pen left the paper, a static bone rising
up through my hand. For a moment, the temperature in
the office felt noticeably lower. The hospital usually contained its
strangeness to whispering vents or fleckers of motion in the
corner of my eye, but standing there, with that package
between me and the endless dark, I felt abruptly visible,
as if the act of writing the name, that impossible name,
pulled something dormant into alertness. The lights overhead flickered twice,
an indistinct shuffle at the far end of the corridor,
a shadowed crossing behind fridge pale glass. I leaned forward,
half risen from my stool, and knease throtting up my neck.
When silence deepened rather than broke, I made my choice.
I drew my cardigan tight, lifted the heavy box, and
slid from behind the counter, already directing my eyes down
the corridor, passed the glass where the old ministrative hole
gaped open like the mouth of a long unused tunnel.
Any thing I could hear then was my own breath,
slow and shallow. As I stepped up beneath the half
broken lights, the package pressed firmly against my chest. For
a moment I nearly turned back, every instant, scripping wildly
beneath my robes. But the sound of something movement may
be down at the end of that corridor decided for me.
None of the loopbooks or passwords prepared me for the
stillness that settled as I pressed on toward be twenty one,
crossing for the first time into a part of the hospital.
No one wanted to claim. Earlier that evening my world
had been smaller and better lit. I'd signed in for
the shift at seven fifty eight p m. A full
two minutes early. There was nothing special about the act,
But after two weeks in the city I had begun
to treat punctuality as a minor superstitionous shallow bull work
against contagions. I couldn't name my life before this place
had been an accumulation of short term jobs, ought eyos
and sleep stained rooms with miss coals blinking on cracked
phone screens. Reent was due in four days. My only
friend in the city, a college roommate i'd messaged out
of desperation, had yet to reply with more than a
thumbs up emoji. The hospital was supposed to be stopgaps,
somewhere to pass the dark IROs and keep myself in visible,
out of reach of prying eyes, family questions, or my
own repeated failures. Nobody learned your name unless he botched
a log or radio the wrong code. I could disappear
into the routine. Check the monitor, lock the late night
admits and discharges, keep coffee warm, keep my voice quiet.
Brenda had shown me the ropes with the practice, dry wit, cool,
silver hair, and the patience of someone who'd seen the
weird and stayed anyway. She'd warned me about two things.
Never let visitors back without a badge, and never ever
go down the old admin corridor after midnight. People don't
come back from there, she'd said the first night, stuffing
her hands into her white coat. She'd flicked at glance
over her shoulder, joking. I thought, then the whale lifers
in any job of vented Richel's and ghosts to break monotony. Marvin,
the gangly, orderly with nervous hands, made a sign of
something over his chest whenever Brenda was out of sight.
He preferred pushing loaded supply carts through the bustle of emergency,
not the soft hum of empty edmin westernholls got a
shill to it, he'd mutter, voic feathersoft saw Jude in
a Sudan that wants only seats. I see he had
got a badge, and he disappeared when I blinked. But
on most nights routine rulled. The IT system never worked
at the same speed. Twice the nurses filed by insilent knots,
and lights from upstairs spelled into the marble floors, WoT
by the uneven glass. My desk, tucked between defunct fire
evacuation maps and peeling safety posters, became my center. My
hands knew the feel of the chipped keyboard. I recognized
the distant cough of the fifth four heating unit. I
became familiar with the greenish cast to the clocks, the
slightly two long cycles of the elevator, the way the
vending machine flickered out if he leaned knee against its
metal door. I told myself the rumors of missing names
and bad luck halls were just the vocabulary of night tradition,
necessary sults scattered against a heavier darkness. My family had
grown up practical, my father with a graveyard chip on
his shoulder, my mother with a small town nurse skepticism.
The world was made up of understandable problems, mechanical headaches
and occasionally tragic luck. Bad wiring, bad bosses, bad bread.
No room for things that watched from around corners, no ghosts,
no curses. The thing I didn't expect was how quickly
a s the lation crept in, how swiftly the hospital's
or geography remade my sense of self. The long holes
were roberated with the empty out of noise. The later
the iro got after midnight, there was no one to
make small talk with, no one who recognized me in
the trained home, not even a pet to demand company.
I'd catch my own reflection in a dark window, and
feel a sense rising through my gut that I already
hovered half out of frame, half erased. I was lonely, exactly,
just drifting, half unseen. It was a kind of anonymity
that suited me at first. There's a comfort in being unremarkable,
in neither expected nor miss. But the price was a
hollowing that even routine couldn't quite fill, and as had
soon discover, even the most cautious in visibility wouldn't chield
me from what the hospital wanted to forget. The administrative
corridor leading to the west sub level didn't begin so
much as it fell away from the main thoroughfare, lising
brightness and sound. As he walked deeper, my trainers made
Dolhoffing noises with every step, too loud, embarrassingly alive. The
chill there was different from the rest of the hospital,
as if someone had locked autumn behind the doors. I
passed stack boxes labeled and fading marker, an antique wheelchair,
and at the very end, the warped glass nameplate caught
only a sliver of light Beat twenty one. The writing
beneath was almost illegible, the scroll a mingled script of
a doctor see Blake. Thus clung to the door like fur.
I rested the heavy box at the base of the door,
fingers pursing down to muffle the sound. For a moment
I thought I heard movement beyond, something scraping. Then still,
I waited, intent on the moveled hash, My breath held,
willing myself to believe it was nothing. As I turned
to go, the corridor page just overhead shrieked a statburst,
then warped, sliding tones speaker clicked off. I felt the
fine hairs on my arms rise. Hurrying back, the darkness
seemed to tug against my movement, a thin pressure at
the backs of my knees. The corridor behind me felt
longer with every step. I remember glancing at the security
camera perched above the corner as I passed, and feeling
the sudden conviction that the black lens was angled just so.
Tracking my retreat ixhaled as I cleared the wider, brighter
intersection by the elevators that should have ended it. But
as I passed the folding doors, a strange kind of
blankness swept in the well. Thinness single stacutta blink and
Suddenly I was back at reception. The package gone loked
as delivered, hands empty. Thirty minutes had passed, according to
the pale green digits on the clock, two fifty two
way m I stared disoriented. My memory offered only flashes.
The corridors called, They blinted the door. The click of
my trainer was on linoleum, an odd sense of resistance,
as if the air got thick of the further I went,
But then nothing, not walking back, not rounding the corner,
only the anxious beating of my heart and the faint
norse of lost time. The reception phone rang, the abrupt
sound rattling me so sharply. A practically fumbled the receiver. Emily,
do you copy Brenda's voice, the gentle exhaustion of someone
working the floor and fending off disaster. Ah, yes, sorry,
lost track. I managed security feeds just blipped. She said,
you okay? You sound white as a sheet. Her laughter
creased the line, an effort to cut fear. Stay awake
up there, honey, I don't want to come scrape you
off the keystrokes. In the morning afterward, as I served
the security feeds for reassurance, I noticed something uncanny the
footage covering the sub level during my abs, since it frozen,
statical lines crawling the length of the corridor, view a flicker,
a half minute bleed, and then the image would snap
back as if nothing had happened. I replayed the tape
twice before finally making peace with it. Some systems were
just broken, that's all. When I finally lay down on
Colcott at sunrise, fifful dreams cleaned me. Endless corridors, all
lined with doors bearing the unfamiliar name Blake script repeating
runs out of reach and somewhere just beyond a barrier
of glass, something watching. I woke slick with sweat, heart
pounding a pretty certainty, though I knew it was only
a dream, that if I turned over, I'd find some
one else's badge pinned to my chest. Curiosity is a
dangerous thing, especially when braced by boredom and then spoken
dare of Tabur. By the beginning of my third shift,
the delivery, the missing half Iire, and the strange dream
had become tangled in my thoughts, repeating in quiet cycles.
I told myself I wasn't superstitious, But when I saw
Marvin pause by my desk at the start of the
next night, his hand resting on a janitor's cart and
his eyes flicking sideways down the western hull. I couldn't
resist you ever hear about a doctor Blake, I asked,
keeping my voice low, trying for casual. He wins, fiddling
with the laces on his carp That's a name that
gets you in trouble. Best keep quiet about it. He
reached up, scratching at his temple bril or not rooms
down there eat people, Brenda pass catching the tail end
of the exchange. He don't want to know em, as
the quiet room downstairs always been led out, and worry
about their mess. She handed me a stack of outdated
incident reports, voice dropping further, Just don't log anything over
there under your name. Shrugging off their unease, I turned
to the HR system During a lull, I typed a
Blake into the staff directory, but nothing came up. Growing
more determined, I started flipping back through the physical shift logs.
Pattens popped up, not so much in what was listed,
but where there were gaps, whole clusters of mist enterers
shifts with the Tempidee never tied her face. Pages were
the handwriting abruptly changed mid sentence, as if someone had
left their shift halfway through, never to return. There were
abrupt resignations, sometimes only filed under no reason given the
foreman signed. Entire stretches were marked sea adendum, but there
was no d endum, And always wherever the East or
West administrative corridor was mentioned, there was the heavy pen's
stroke of omission, a blankets more troubling than a simple absence.
Pressing further into the digital logs, I found lists of
Kika's assign tost staff that didn't appear anywhere in HR,
the user idea out of step with any known hiring pattern.
I've tried to print a record, but my desktop glitch
screen freezing pulsing in negative colors, then forced me out
to the login screen. When I returned, my saved list
was gone, as if I'd never type a thing. Late
that night, in the break room, I found myself listening
and on a pair of janitors. The man with the
brumwold enough to claim tenure with a voice wheezed by
years of mob water and deluted bleach, crooked out a story.
But someone named Blake who just never clocked back in
after an overnight, everything left right there in the office,
he said, lipt working around his tupic coffee is still warm.
Admitt told us nothing but the keys turned up in
the supply been a week later. Ye find the things
you leave them be. That's how you get to keep
working here. The next night, on shift, perking through the
dusty mail logs out of stubbornness, a trace package after
package adressed the same way over the last several months,
same non existent staff, same sub level room, some received,
some logged as undeliverable. All of them circled back up
stream to the same silent up box. But the shift
was done with me. Yet, for the third time in
as many days, the line between the ordinary and something
else snapped. I was making the rounds, checking in on
the storage closet, at the edge of admon, walking in
clipboard balance, thinking only of inventory. Then darkness, my vision
cut the world, contracting to bear sensation, hands pressing into metal,
cold against my palms. I came back to myself, all
my knees in the cleaned out spy closet, head split
with ache. In my clenched left hand, I found a
wad of a Marquis Dull brass worn by dozens of
hands on my palm in a faded stutter of near
permanent marker. Someone, nor maybe I, though I couldn't recall,
had written one urgent line, don't let them forget you.
Our blinks wept from my eyes, pulse throbbing at my temples.
The sense of being watched so strong annually tore down
the shelving. The door behind me was wedged, as if
something had pressed against it. When I made it out, trembling,
I immediately I noticed a slip of paper on the
floor near the admin station at horn brown edge photograph,
the kind hospitals used for staff on boarding decades ago.
At first it appeared generic. Dozen people lined up in
white lab coats, standard complaints about Uglee uniforms visible in
their four smiles. But half the faces had been scored
up by some sharp object. The names, once letter neatly underneath,
had been violently scraped away, except for one see Blake,
still legible but flecked with old blood. I pocketed the
photograph out of some automatic habit. It felt, in that
moment more like evidence than a personal belonging, something that
proved that, if nothing else, someone else had walked this
path before that. I wasn't the only one being scrubbed
out of hospital memory. By the time my next shift
rolled around, had abandoned any pretense of routine. The strange events,
lost time warnings, the sense of erasureating at the ages
of perception all converged behind my eyes in a haze
of mountain dread. I'd started keeping notes, only scraps of paper,
and sticking them deep in my pockets, as if writing
could chield me. I spent most of that night hovering
near the main admin desk, watching the empty security fees
and feeling the itches vance. There was no sign of
the package, not an inventory, not in any return bin,
not left outside. Beat twenty one, I forced myself down
the corridor again, driven by the tension between fear and curiosity,
so tight in my throat I could barely swallow. The
air grew colder, sickly the deeper I walked, the smell
of old antisepticying just beneath the moldy undertone of water
damaged walls. I flicked on my phone's flashlight, pulse skittering,
and pressed my free hand to the ring of keys
at the lock. Beat wenty one door. The key slid
in without resistance. The sound of the bolt turning made
me WinCE. Mettle complained hinges singing. As I forced the
door back, I braced myself against the bitter chemical tang
Inside the office, if that was what it had been,
was disused, but not abandoned, just motswaan thick. The bare
bulbs overhead, casting harsh geometric shadows. The old package was gone.
In its place, a tape of corridor sat squarely in
the center of a warped desk, its mechanical in its
humming low. Beside it a stack of disordered binders, the
contents torn into minus skeel shreds. I pressed play on
the recorder, crackling warp voices, sometimes overlapping of first all
I could make out was a course of confusion, workers
talking over one another. I don't remember how I got here.
A woman's voice at trembling, who brought the last shipment?
Another man, urgency slurred with exhaustion. A lane spiked out
of the static tiney and desperate. If they'd ask you questions,
don't answer, don't sign your name. Another drier voice. They
study memory, They study forgetting read a proof I ran
my hands over the binders. Every physical photograph had been
cut out or burned. The one staffless remaining tapped up
near the back was modeled with brown water stains. My
own name, written in faded blue ink, appeared in the
lowest corner, then had clearly been erased, scratched out, and
nearly illegible. My fingers went untouching it. On an impulse,
I checked my phone. Nothing, no calendar reminders, no trace
of my employment record in h R, my personnel file,
which I had reviewed only the day before, nashow my
shifts as canceled, and beside my name miss files temp
I furroze. I see panic setting into something registered in
the warped mirror glass across the desk, my own face
but older blanche. I was rinned and bruise, gray mouth
moving in real time to words. I couldn't hear the
surface flex, and for a shattering instant, it was as
if I stood outside myself, figure doubled by surveillance, seemed
both as me and someone fading inch by inch. I
staggered back, knocking the chair aside, desperate for the clear
air beyond the door. The lights flickered again, plunging the
room into momentary night. As I felt my way along
the wall, one last voice, my own, came from the darkness, whispering,
remember me. I jolted awake on cold tile, my breath
hoarse and sure if I had lost seconds or ires.
When I finally sat up, the world outside the admined
corridor had shifted. If I focussed, I could just discern
the faintest shapes behind my eyelet's endless corridors, electric static,
the faces of stuff half disappeared. The ordinary world wasn't
gone exactly, but the boundary between what the hospital wanted
to remember and what it had tried to erase it
thin dangerously and now inexorably. I understood on some level
that I was part of it. I called backward out
of BET twenty one's icy threshole, the narrow beam of
my phone's flashlight spinning wild shapes on the wall. The
corridor behind me felt different now. The silence suddenly taked.
My legs trembled as I forced myself upright, pressing my
palm against the colcinder block, stealing myself against another abrupt
loss of time. The harsh overhead fixtures above the atmin
wing flicked, humming long and low, then steaded from somewhere
behind about of doors. I caught the faint to stecko,
a creek, or maybe a sigh that could have been
an engine straining far below. Breath coming ragged, I pushed
myself back down the corridor, one deliberate step after another.
I half expected, after such a threshold that something would
change the ethecher the wholl way along, getting my mind
folding in on itself. Instead, without fanfare, the familiar desk,
in the thin blue light of reception came back into view.
My chair remained turned a strange angle, the impression of
my absence in the crumbled pages I had left scattered
near the edge. A few tentative footstepped on the gnoleum
anounced Brenda's perch. She hestad before round in the corner,
arms knotted over her chest, her eyes always shrewder than
she let on. Fixed on the hand, I pressed flat
to the counter. You look like Cal's wheetheart. She care,
her voice light, but her glance flicked down toward my
shaking hands. Long shift or did security have you run
a mile? I made a big gesture my be coming
down with something. The air down there, It's like it's thinner,
I paused. Do you ever get turned around in this place?
Like you leave a room and it's not quite the
same when you step out, She hesitated, a shadow passing
through her face. Too many nights in the fall will
do that. You start thinking the wall's breathe, drink something,
sit a bit. If you need to clock out, Elly, nob,
you'll blame you. I wanted to say more, to tell
her about the tape recorder, my name scratched from the roster,
the voice that was maybe mine, But nothing in Brenda's
expression in badded secrets. She just patted my shoulder lightly,
as if warning me not to put the bruise any further.
Don't lose yourself chasing their mistakes, she murmured, no larger
than an exhale. Marvin's distinct shuffling step soon joined us.
He approached a reception desk with a laundry bin in tow,
face pale, and gazed nervously, avoiding the administrative wing. When
he reached my side, he kept his voice to a
bay whisper. Someone's been hanging a round down the west hall.
Not staff, at least, not any one I know I
saw a uniform passed by the window before dawn, but
all I got was the back of the head. Figured
it was a tempt but now I dunno. I tried
to press him for details, but he pulled away, muttering
about deliverers and doors that locked behind you A feelinger
too long. I watched them both melt back into the
hospital rhythm, the ordinary tide of tasks that could, with
enough repetition, to mooth over almost anything. But as I
tried to follow suit, the certainty pressed in. There was
no way to slide back into routine, not after hearing
my voice echo from that tape. Warning was at me
or someone like me, against answering questions, against ever letting
a name be written twice Still, when my shift ended,
as the faint blue of morning pushed through the city's haze,
I gathered my things, logged out as always. The others
were elsewhore shells in other rooms, absorbed by their own distractions,
briefly under the law be skimming with early sunlight, the
weight of the night retreated. I almost convinced myself it
was stress. What As I exited through the sliding doors,
I turned for a last look, half hoping for a
rational sign, half treading notice nothing, just the blank sheen
of glass, the endless A noble ardors Linda Yella. I
paused on the sidewalk, pinching the staff photo through the
lining of my coat. My nails traced the name that
remained Seat Blake, the impression of blooded edges itched under
my skin. I home, sleep proof, slippery, my dreams locked
in endless administrative mazes. I woke late afternoon, parched with
only a handful of sticky note Surgeant check rosters who
are tem body to shaw? I tried to map fats
out of fractured memory. The next night, as the eye
was pulled dicky toward midnight, I found myself methodically checking
the staff records, again, unable to shape the conviction that
the hospital itself was knowing. At the edges of reality,
names appeared and vanished from digital locks without warning. Scheduled
shifts already written in my notebook from the previous day
now bore different initials, different units. The hr gasp bould blinked,
and certainly Marvin's names stuttering into nothing. On the third
scroll through the night roster, a maintenance request came through
my phone at suba of a lighting Beat twenty one
wing with no sender time stamp mark one thirteen E
impossible since I had just checked that can't clean ten
minutes before. The requests directory locked for staff outside of Admin,
open for me, then resisted. When I tried again, I
scowled it down on one of my notes, sitting back
as the monitor flickered. For an instant, a silhouette some
one in a white jacket ghosted across the Beat twenty
one camera feed. There were times, especially before dawn, white
poles outside the old Admin elevator, listening for movements at
the end of a corridor. Sometimes I'd hear nothing but
the fans useless grind, others a distant scrape, chairs pushed, doistried,
muffled coughs with no clear source. Despite every logical warning,
I kept sliding a little deeper, taking longer to do rounds,
asking after names, and knew I shouldn't. On the fifth night,
I waited until Brenda's break before trying once more to
press her for information. She was seated in the crump
kitchenette nursing a cup of vending machine soup. Brown added Brenda.
I said foyspitch carefully. If someone you worked would just vanish,
would there be a way to check what happened? She stirred,
expression unreadable. Depends what you mean by vanished. Got sick.
Most folks who leave overnight usually left for their own
down good reason, And not like that, I insisted quietly,
some one whose name just drops from the log, whose
badgery assigns, whose mail keeps coming anyway? She half pushing
her soup away. Some places you don't want to know
the answer, you hear me. If a badge ends up recycled, well,
maybe it's because new blood needs it. Maybe Admon ran
an experiment and decided we didn't need to know the details.
Don't go looking to solve the building's old debts, not
unless you were set on paying them out yourself. As
she stood to leave, her hand lingered at my elbow.
He started forgetting things, important things. Call me before you
write anything down. Writing it makes it worse. Sometimes a
cold shiver truce my spine. Shiffs began blending together. Marvin
started avoiding me, his eyes taking on a hunted look.
I caught him outside the stairwell, once, his grip tight
on the steel railing sweat pricking his brow. Hey, have
you lost something recently? I asked, hating how I sounded
like a conspiracist. He shook his head furiously, but there
was fear behind it. Too many questions in this place.
Don't look for what you've lost, You might lose yourself.
Next he disappeared down the stairs before I could press further,
wheeled cat groaning behind him. By my sixth night, anxiety
had transformed into a kind of tunnel vision. I have
hearde obsessively over security footage, ignoring the mundane flow of
forms and visitor logs. The admin corridor view, when it worked,
never looked right. Each feed lipped just half a second,
two long, as if time doubled up near the door
to be twenty one. I noted every pausing figure, every
flicker of motion that no ordinary foot traffic could explain.
In the process, I nearly missed the changes. At my
own desk. It began with harmless, seeming errors, a stapler
out of alignment to coffee stain that grew across each
page of my notebook, lik ink in water twice. My
own badge blue background Emior disappeared from its land yard,
then reappeared clipped to a different pocket with no memory
of the move. Once in the bathroom, I got a
brief reflection in the mirror. My body hunched over, arms, crossed, eyes,
focus and distant, and for a heartbeat, is swore my
hospital jacket board embroidered name Blake. I snapped away, hart pounding.
No one had witnessed it phonly me trapped and the
lulla comes Just before disaster. That same night, a nurse,
a barely new brought a tray of char folders to
the counter. Her voice hestant, someone keeps logging entries under
your ID, but on units you don't cover clerical mix up.
She looked sheepish, and when I checked, sure enough several
late night admissions real patient, by the look of it,
had been signed in by E. R. Blake. My fingers
trembled so badly I could barely type, nearly sending the
records to OK ever worse, alerting admin to my confusion. Instead,
that printed the screen, stashed it in my pocket, and
made up some excuse about split shifts. When Brenda returned
for her break, her mood was darker still. She sat
across from me, bracing herself as if about to share
a confession. You ever feel like you're repeating someone else's night,
she asked, voice brittle. Some weeks, I get dejavus so
strong it staggers me, like another me somewhere nearby, keeps
making the same mistakes. Her eyes glistened in the dull
over light. Whatever's haunting this wing, It's not like any
good story I ever heard that admission. The unguarded horror
in it cut up my veneer, the unspoken dread that
whatever operated through the hospital, whatever gnawed up memory, was
worse than a simple haunting, An unspoiled reality twisted Recho's
raised lives, not by malays, but as a function of
its own entire bureaucracy. Storm battered the city that night,
the glass humming with wind, brainsluicing in shot bursts against
the high windows. The empty receptionary felt for the first
time like a bunker. Unable to shake my fixation, I
scavenged for physical evidence, sifted through the night garbage for
anything a data scrubbing might miss. Near the beat wenty
one junction, I found another id badge. The name had
been partially dissolved. Wave aar hard was all that remained,
But on the reverse was a stuttering line of numbers, times, dates,
with weeks long gaps beneath a faint scrawl, make records
outside paper holes longer. Back at my desk, I found
my staff vhotor seemingly untouched since the last ship. But
this time my face was smashed gray, a thumb print
pressed into the glossy surface. Idly, I traced the edge's
heart hammering. At that moment, a tax appeared on my
phone from an unknowns ender. Did you deliver the package?
C D? The only reply I could manage was panic. No,
not just banick. The cold, dawning horror that perhaps I
had delivered not just an object, but a message, a
permission slip that let something dormant begin to wake. Adrenaline
drove me to hunt for some weapon of certainty, anything
to tie my identity into the world again. I called
my own number from a back phone. The line buzz
then played a faint, looping audio, my own voice recorded
days before. Missus Emily leave a message. After the tone,
only on the third loop, my name shifted, voice breaking
into static. This is Blake leave, then silence. I left
work early, feigning illness, stumbling out into the rain. I
half expected to see the city's hospital to solve. As
it rose behind me, the lit windows blinking in and out
of floors, rearranging themselves with every passing hour. I made
my way home on foot, umbrella left forgotten at the
welcome mat. Sleep was restless, patched with half remembered instructions,
write your full name, watch for absences, do not accept
delivers after midnight. Just before waking, I dreamt of bet
twenty one. In the dream, the door hung open inside
a rusted swivel chair waited and tucked into its seat,
A foul marked personnel blake a slash incident insolved. I
reached for the folder and heard impossibly Brenda's voice behind me.
Turn around, m you're not supposed to be here. They'll
take you next to if you forget. Waking felt like
breaking the surface of a too deep At noon, with
the sun hot against the window, dread lingered as a
gray behind my eyes, I tried to call Brenda. She
didn't answer. Her internal hospital line went straight to Sisteremaire.
At shift the following night, her absence was marked by
illness and schedule. Marvin was there, but his usual nervous
banter was gone. He carried himself as if he had
forgotten where he put his own hands. I approached him
before clocking in. Did you see Brenda? Is she ok?
He only shrugged, refusing to meet my gaze. Shut hern up.
People always do eventually, don't they. But his tone was brittle.
He crushed paper cups so hard I feared he'd collapsed too.
With Brendagonna no friendly eyes to anchor me, I poured
myself into the scattered tangible remains of my existence. The
photo my printed staff entries, the stubs of old pens,
the bloody staff photo that night shift dripped with foreboding,
the minute hand of the wall clock, dragging rooms standing
out their emptiness. I haunted the ABMIN record's room after three.
The computer there was old, predating the digital logs, and
his was static. When I booted it, the log and
windows still accepted my ID, though I say, spected it shouldn't.
Names flickered each time I typed, briefly, showing Blake sy
thin flickering back to emilyar Than a jittery slighter. Frantically,
I began printing personnell less arcuve mimos, shift logs and
complete and full each fresh page made me feel more real,
weighed down by the ink of my own story. A
board nurses bent scold. Emilyar was here night shift, affixed
the date lined up beside the others. I heard footsteps
in the corridor light and certain not quite matching any
living gait. I pressed my back against the wall, clutching
the still damp print uts to my chest. The footsteps
stopped A moment later. At the overhead Pia satted a
week A slow horse voice dragging over the speaker, colde
gray staff report. The rest dissolved in static. The intercom
light blinked off. Ix haaled breath, steaming the glass. As
I peered out toward the reception, no shadows except my own,
multiplied in the vintage glass by the low slung emergency lights.
I made one last round near bet twenty one. Someone
had left a pair of late excloves at the threshold.
Fingers curled the tape of corder, which I had left
in the desk on the I was before or now
sat perch in the mail books outside the office, red
leg lowing. I snatched it up almost against my own well.
As I pressed play, my blood ran cold. A jumble
of voices mine, Branda's, and a third lower and shuddering,
overlapping with context of snippets. Don't let them files, need
to bring them at Blake, Blake, Blake, any one there.
Each fragment felt like a piece of memory at lost,
trapped on plastic and magnetic tape. I gripped the recorder
until my fingers ached, then slipped it, trembling into my
coats inner pocket. On my way back up. For the
first time, the elevator's buttons failed to respond. I pressed
all over and over, watching the panels light cycle through
impossible floors nine two six B, then nothing. The sensation
of being both present and erased, a redundancy in a
system feverishly self correcting, nearly dropped me to my knees.
The air inside tightened, pressing my existence into the smallest
possible space. I fumbled the old keys from my pocket,
gripping them with road desperation, as if their age and
grit could anchor me. The elevator finally hissed open at
the main floor doors, potting on a now deserted lobby.
When the lobby doors guided open, I half expected to
see someone waiting security, a supervisor, even a patient looking
for directions. Instead, the reception area was emptier than usual,
the only movement a shimmer of city light along the
burnished floors. I moved quietly, aware that every step felt loaded,
as if I was trespassing in my own story. That's
how it always began. I decided, not with sudden violence,
but with an arrowing, a slow squeeze, until the ordinary
world seemed less and less able to hold its shape.
I ducked back behind my usual counter, gathering the things
I'd left scattered at the end of last shift. My notebook,
a half full cup of cold coffee, the strip best
staff photo, now bearing no faces at all, as if
the memory of each person had been sunded off by
something relentless and systematic. The tape or corridor loitered in
my coat pocket, heavier than before, humming faintly against my ribs.
For a few minutes, I just sat and breyed, But
every time my mind threatened to drift its snag done
one thing. The last time I checked my employee profile,
my names flickered between Emily R. And Sea Blake. Every message,
every call, every encounter since arranged itself around that raw uncertainty.
Was I being watched or forgotten? And which really was worse?
I didn't have long within the first IRA. The late
night Riddam returned in miniature and nurse banged open the
stairwell trailing, muttered curses about broken machines. The vending machine
clicked and spat out a can that the hospital felt
lighter on board as than normal shifts, missing phones, unclaimed schedules,
and knots. Brenda's absence gourged a deeper hole than I
wanted to admit. I logged into the ICHA terminal with
numb hands, mind reeling. This time, I went methodically cross
referencing every temp contract, every sudden resignation, every retired or
terminated listing from the past decade. I wasn't tracing a
list of people. I was tracing the moments where people
stopped existing, at least as far as the hospital was concerned,
and patterns surfaced. Every few months. Names would vanished from perile,
schedules would reset, badges would be recycled. Sometimes an entire
week's worth of logs would shuffle were assigned to your temp.
These windows of disappearance correlated precisely and chillingly to intervals
when the B twenty one office had logged though strange
misdirected packages, patient wreck of s, tangled with staff files,
operations notes, ran up against memos for research. Do is that,
at least officially never happened. I scribbled everything down, filling
page after page in my notebook, anchoring each rendered name
with details I could touch for Brenda sharp laugh, Marvin's
anxious hands, the janitor's low warning, my own sleepless routines.
With each detail added, something inside me quieted, a shallow
defiance press between the hospital's bureaucracy and whatever works leeplessly
to scrape the memory of its forgotten stuff. When the
security footage for sub level admin came online, something it
had refused to do for days, I took it as
a sign I watched for I was if you added
up all the private margin between runts, always the same
few frames, always the same stretch of corridor, but occasionally
a shimmer, like a piece of foam skipping with static
and light. I'd always write before that shimmer, a shape,
white coat, pale face, moving just out of sync with
the camera, never fully legible, but always crossing from the
old elevator to the door marked B twenty one one
fee time stamped a week before, showed a loop of
someone impossibly familiar in gait leaving a package of BET
twenty one and walking away. I froze the frame. It
could have been me. Iurs later, when the floor was
truly empty, I tried accessing internal maintenance locks. Most records
were sealed, but I found enough requests for sub level
sound testing, four night phase isolation compliance, all dating to
a decade or more back. The name signed off or
nearly always initials, and more disturbingly, some appeared as both
staff and patients at different times, like Brenda's or a
variant of Marvin's. My own name variously reached bar Emily
and peculiarly e Blake's surface attached to the most recent requests.
Their formatting was skewed, as if some one had typed them,
and while being erased from the system in real time,
every discovery ballooned my sense of unreality. Worse, I found
my own handwriting in places I didn't remember, look books
signed by me on nights I should not have worked.
Chiefs apparently split between me and Acy Blake, the line
between us narrowing. At some point I realized I had
been staring at my own Chift notes so long that
the words had begun slide and out from under my pen,
the boundaries between recent memories and some one else's nights
blurring dangerously. I closed the notebook, fingers pressed hard into
the cover, joking with effort. A knox sounded. I flinched
when I looked up. Brenda stowed at the corner of
the Abmin lobby. Her face was drawn paler than usual.
The tired crinkle at her brow had deepened, but she
smiled a wounded, careful thing, as if I'm surer whether
she was recognized. You're working late, she said, glancing over
my scattered papers, or is it early now? I looked
at her, unable for a moment to match the memory
of the Brenda I knew with the person before me.
She watched me closely, as if trying to gauge whether
I remembered her at all. Are you all right, I asked, too,
aware of how brittle the question sounded. Brenda shrugged. Suppose
I'm as fine as any one on this rotation gets.
I don't always remember part of the nights, you know.
Sometimes there are gaps, like I stepped out for air
and came back different. Her hand trembled as she smoved
her badge against her jacket. I saw the outline of
an old star photo poking up from her Pocketadges, yellowed
corners curled faced her into the wall. I think I
used to work here, Brenda said, barely above a whisper
under a different name. She acitated, I have this memory
of a package left for some one who didn't exist
except on paper, to being told not to ask, not
to write anything down. It's all jumbled up with these flashes, meetings,
all tape reels, isolation rooms, and forms never signed. I felt,
dear Tidan, me too, I confessed, I keep finding versions
of myself buried in these systems, names, overlapping, wreckers, we're writing.
I don't know if I'm copying someone else's footsteps, or
if I've already forgotten things I swore i'd never miss.
Branda pressed her knuckles against her mouth. Have you spoken
to doctor Ferrell, she asked. I shook my head, afraid
he's always gone at night. If he's here, he never
signs the logs. Brenda lifted her eyes, expression flat. He's here,
he has to be it took us an iro to
track him down. The hospital was quieter than usual two kite,
but we found doctor Ferrell in a crump wrecker's office
just off the main admin wing. He looked up as
we entered, closing a file with a practice calm that
radiated warning trouble sleeping. Doctor Ferrell asked his glunting behind
his rim as glasses. Brend spoke before I could. We
need to talk about the lower admin corridor, He pursed
his lips. Whatever you've heard it's old hospital myth. Your
time's better spend in the present. I forced myself to speak.
We've found reck as staff. You should be here, but
aunt packages delivered to rooms that don't exist, night locks
that change on their own, and gaps in our own memory.
Doctor Farrell regarded us with the wary patience of some
one indulging a symptom he considered clinical. Let me give
you the best advice I can. Let it go. Leave
those storers where they belong if you want to keep
working here. Don't ask questions about the West corridor. This
is a busy hospital, not a haunted house. We don't
encourage obsessions. I pressed, who was doctor Blake? He didn't blink.
There's no blake on staff, not now, not before that
flat Missaitu Smith denial gave me pause. Branda looked ready
to snap, but she just shook her head and as
showed me out, doctor Ferrell's voice echoing behind us, some
things you're better off not remembering. Let the old administration sleep.
Back in the supply closet where Branda's stashed her brakes,
she pulled out a battle love boos. I haven't shown
this to any one, she said softly. Inside we're half
dozen I d badges, old tarnished names, half scratched away.
There were j erals, their handwriting wavering, recounting short nights,
in the persistent sense of vanishing at the bottom, A
clutch of keys so heavy they could break skin. This
was the box I found when I started. Brenda whispered,
there was already here, locked away with all the names
nobody would claim. Every entry mentions the corridor in a
study room by names that just don't line up. I
think we were all walking an old circuit, and new
faces covering the same old erasure. We sat in silence,
sifting missing stuff, photos, more blurred out faces, grim smiles,
beneath names. I didn't recognize my own badge. Look Ron,
it's plastics off with overuse. In the sharp glow of
the kitchenette's dying ball, the line between the present and
would have her memory circled below the hospital felt impossibly. Then,
can we warn anyone? I asked, But Brenda only shook
her head, and nobody lessens, not until just then the
door crashed open. Marvin stood on the threshold, eyes wild,
hair slicked his brow. He clutched at his chest, struggling
to breathe. I saw, Marvin gasped someone down there looked
like me. He staggered inside, hand wrapping around the edge
of the table to steady himself. Brenda rose, but Marvin
jerked back. Pana, clear and raw. They're trying to take
me every time I blink, And somewhere else thou lost
an eye of Just now. I was by the mid closet,
but ended up in the janitor's office. I checked the mirror,
my badge. My name wasn't mine any more. All three
of us stared at each other, the weight of our share,
the Sulvant identities pressing in come with us. I said,
we're going to find out what's behind that door? Marvin's
eyes rolled wild. No, No, someone's following. When I looked,
he broke off, jaw working, fear flooding his features. You go,
just s, don'mp bring it back up here, please, he
fled without further word, the echo of his retreat jangling
down the hallway. The sound made my heart beat out
of step. Brenda and I exchange a look tonight, she said,
voice gray. If we don't do it now, we'll never
remember why we started. We went to the old Duvemond
office Bet twenty one, armed with the lock box of
keys in the last tape recorder, the staff PhotoPress flat
in my notebook. Each step through the sub level wing
was waited by the sense that we might not come
back the same. At the door, at the thickest of
the old brasquy slid in, turning with effort. The air
pressed cold and stale against our skin. A different light,
stranger than before, weighted for us. On the other side,
the room was mordicated than last week. Water stains laced
the ceiling and a chemical smell curled off the floor.
Medical binders, fowls, and shredded manilla envelopes were rayed in
shallow piles around about. Its steel therapy chair is final
torn open, stuffing, spilling like the aftermath of a struggle.
Electronics from three or four ears rested in a heap,
tape reels, television monitors, cereplus a via gear. The walls
held up ancient hospital print, smiling faces advertising progress and
behavioral health, but their eyes had been scratched away. At
the back, two doors stood half a jar, one leading
to a storage closet, the other blocked by a worn
file cabinet. Together we slid it aside, revealing an old
elevator panel. The buttons offered only s for a basement
lower than any I had been told existed. Brenda said,
we keep going. When the doors shook open, the subasement's
darkness poured, and like cold water. The air inside was
their qusty with old rot and the sharper undertone of
cleaning solvents. Two weak emergents. It both flickered on, revealing
more equipment stack files and a cavenists windows our cavro
mark study materials isolation protocol. Brenda held her hand out,
calling for the torch. We moved around the room circumference,
stepping over yellow folders and crack binders. On one table
sat a stack of neatly boxed cassette tapes, each labeled
session and a number. A faded memotape to the wall
read re final testing, slash, memory excision and outivation for
security clearance be only. We found more journals annotated by
careful but crumbling hand, a test cycle and complete staff
overlap observed, memorably persistent. There were id rosters, but every
name had been corrected in a different shade of pens
on crossed out and rewritten. Others simply vanished. Beside one
entry Emily R. Then see Blake scratched in the margin.
Someone had written self report lost time, confusion overlap. Brenda's
breathing sharpened. She dug out her own badge and compared
it to the entrance look. She said, here, she pointed, January,
five years ago, brand h staff number matches my own,
but it says terminated. A trembling finger moved to another
log months later, be Harris temp pessellation wing. We all repeats,
she murmured, test cycles, people get transferred, erase were written,
but the rooms stay. My head buzzed. If all these
names cycle, what was the actual study. We sifted, Brenda's
hands fluttering over pages, my eyes blurring over raw terms.
Authorized a niesure in guice, cognitive orsett security via rasure
one listing made my stomach constrict vinal group Emily redacted,
Brenda redactive participant, prepare documentation for legacy transfer. Brenda whispered legacy.
They're passing the roll armwored. Each time we disappear, something
else moves in. I jerked my hand away as a
stack of folder slid to the floor, scattering loose negatives.
One culled up against my fingers. A photo of me
or someone incredibly like me, standing at the old reception desk,
smiling the label initial subject. In take twenty nineteen, the
ink was so fresh its munched. At the back of
the room, a console of dusty tape recorders and TV
screens powered on with a lowes knee, The old master
tape lay ready, its label erased. I hesitated, then pushed
the plate back button with trembling hands. Audio poured out
of reverberating his cut through with the voices of administrators
and staff, sometimes hysterical, sometimes flat, with defeet. A man's voice,
steel edged. You will listen and record everything you remember.
If geffs persist, no time in identity confusion, a woman's
voice warbling, I don't know my name, doors keep shifting, interference,
Then a course of overlapping voices, each describing symptoms I
had already felt, loss ires, duplicate names, the sensation of
being replaced. As the recording looked, screens around us flickered.
A bag of old monitors jerked to life. On them.
I saw rooms like the one we occupied, different angles,
overlapping faces in one, brenda and a hunch beside the
tape deck. In another, staff and lap coats moved in
and out, their faces dissolving into static. Suddenly, in monitor six,
a new image appeared, a wide, distorted view of the
admin corridor. I saw myself stepping forward with a battered package, pausing,
turning as if aware that somewhere something was watching. I
can see us, I said softly, brand appaled. I think
these feeds run continuously even when we're not here. Another
voice broken from the tape horse, frantic struggling. If you
remember this, they haven't gotten ye yet. Destroy the records
before you're raised, burn them. Don't trust the systems. If
you don't they'll take your name. The lights over the
arquev buzzed, flared, and went out. We were alone with
only the trembling white flicker from the TV monitors. For
a moment, it was solid except for tapists. Then far
back in the gloom, steel door slid shut with brutal finality.
The tape began running backward, snickering out what syllables no
longer quite human. Something shifted in the center of the room.
A present slidified, a shape build out of the hospital's
own uniform fragments. Staff jacke bad swinging, blank shoe scuffed
down to the soul. Its face was wrong, a blank
above the teeth, features sliding like oil under glass. It
moved with that bureaucratic, half interested patience of the institution, itself,
undaunted by fear, just doing its work memory check. The
thing inturned, my own voice freading through It layered with
branda and a course that could have been anyone or
everyone whoever went missing on this wing. Brenda tried to
move toward the door. The thing blocked her, pursing forward.
Were ready for transfer, it said, opening an empty palm.
I stepped forward, heart in my mouth. You can't have us,
I said, voice trembling, Not yet, We're not done here.
The figure's edges flickered, white coat shimmereing against the dock
like a negative develop too long. Brenda staggered as it
touched her shoulder. Her movements slowed, face draining a wadytail.
Don't let them, as she said, voice halved, forget you.
Something gave a shift in the ear, as if every
memory of Brenda I'd over help with suck sideways, leaving
only the profile, the blank, the unfinished upline where her
friend had been. I grabbed the master tape, slamming it
against the edge of the ivy deck. The plastic shadowed
spools and spooling like intestines across the batted floor. For
an instant, the figure shimmered between frames, now faceless, now
wearing my face, then Marvin's, then nobody at all. Every
monitor blinked with static screaming, feet back pouring through the speakers.
I fumbled for the old keys, jamming them into the
door behind us. My thoughts began to sputter and break
my name, my face, my first shift, a hundred last nights.
I knew if I pause, if I let the memories
collapse again. Not even my handwriting would save me. The
lights burst in succession, glass raining down like ice. I
clawed the door open, throwing myself into the corridor beyond.
For one last trembling instant. I saw the archive collapse
and was the convulsion of static and shadows. Brenda's shape,
half snatched by the darkness, lifted a hand in me,
warning as she was absorbed by the thing in the coat.
Administrations and finished business, dragging generation after generation into the
same spiral. I fled up the crump stairs, every footful
of prayer that my name would not be scraped up
by the time I reached the surface. Reception was different
to the gods at the desk, looking through me at first,
as blank as if searching for a shape. Their records
didn't hold. Doctor Ferrell appeared calm and stood over the threshold.
You aren't on staff to night, he said, as mildly
as one might comment in the weather. You never were.
There is no record for you. Insistent, please follow security out.
I stared at him, searching for a crack in his purse.
Veneer some corresponding at line of a person who once
would have recognized my urgency. Not a flicker passed over
his face. Security took me lightly by the arm, not cruel,
not gentle, just matter of fact, like some one returning
a shipment with the rum manifest. They marched me out
into the rain. My badge, when I look for it,
was gone. The city soldium haze blotted up the hospital's windows.
The building loomed blind to the world outside, a living
thing folding itself around forgotten names. Back in my small apartment,
I let the familiar world come back in pieces of
kettle on munk, seeming, the small tired plants on my
window sill. Yet my hands shook, my thoughts scattered. The
gaps in memory at once thought mild, now yawned. Like
Sinkle's whole years missing friends, I could recall only a silhouettes.
The constantred that I had left some other important part
of myself behind. I tried to call my own number.
It ran once, twice, then static answered. I texted Brenda's
old number, no reply. When I checked my emails, a
strange certainty welled up. Soon even these traces would vanish,
the job offerers, the rent reminders already, the names of
my contactless blood half erased. I searched the hospital website
for my own c V. Nothing. My records were blank.
Brenda too was gone, her faculty profile reassigned elsewhere, wiped clean.
I pulled out the bat of photo I had kept
hidden in my coat, tapping the edge, hoping for some
last offense against the feeling of dissolve. When my face
once was in the line of staff, there was only
a scratched patch of glossy emotion. I tried to remember
the feature's nose hair away had smiled on bad days.
But the more I reached, the less there was to hold.
My note grew heavier in my lap. I forced myself
to write down everything the package, the names, every fractured sequence,
every lost hallway and stolen badge. This at least I
could anchor, if only for a moment. But already the
words felt thin, borrowed from a story that could be
reused at keystroke. A knock came at my apartment door. Then,
as if marked in the very moment my memory slipped free,
I moved to open it, half expecting some currer to
be standing in the hole, a face as Warren and
anonymous as any hospital night driver on the threshold rested
a drat featureless parcel. My My name was typed neatly
on the torn shipping label Emily af slash Room BE
twenty one sabole beneath it anat aggressive black slashed, the
same I'd seen on all the other vanished packages. My
hands shook as I pulled the parcel inside, laying it
on the kitchened hound with a caution that bordered on
reverence so dread. It was lighter than the original, but
still gave a sense of hard coiled weight. I hesitated
to bidding what to do. I could leave it sealed,
throw it down the trust chute, try to lose myself
in the city outside. But something in my chest twisted,
the ache of responsibility, or defiance, or the desperate hope
of finishing what I started might be the only way free.
I slid my knife along the seam and pried the
box open. Inside lay the tapeer corder from Room BE
twenty one. Its physical have felt the same as before.
The sticky plastic, the etched lines, and it was already
one to play. Nestled beside it was a new staff badge.
The plastic slick and uneased, the badge read Emily administration
under the photo, though the face was a quite mine,
the jaw slightly sharper, the eyes different, the smallest tent
of age that didn't fit. Where the hospital name should
have been, there was only a line legacy. My breath caught.
I pressed play on the recorder, the tiny wheels whining
as my voice began to emerge. The tape was as
simple loop. At first, my inflection aremistakable, but the tambour uncertained,
as if filtered through several iterations. This is Emily R.
I am of the recording studter skipped looped. This is
Emily E. Blake. List of names, Harris Marvin A Branda,
Harris Blakes. Silence, the words falt, volume dropping with each round.
If you remember this, you're one of us. Now, don't
let them forget you. A burst of static, then a
new sequence begin list to begin record. They are then silence.
Only the tapes hiss, A realization sank in cold and final.
I was a new carrier for the hospital's memory, A handloer.
Now for this silent, bureaucratic content. The system always needed
its next witness, a memory bank, A keeper of a
race store is stamped in the protocol. The hospital erased,
the hospital possessed it, but the hospital never ended naturally.
I clutched the tape, trying to fix every syllable to heart.
I looked out my window down at the pimper clothed
the city. The hospital loomed impossible. At suba vallet turk
were some white th receits ouption desk, empty, waiting for
a new night's shift to begin. The puzzle on my
counter radiated significance. The choices, as ever, were brutal in
this simplicity. I could destroy the tape, snap as thin memory,
take my chances that the forgettings would stop with me.
Or I could press record my voice laid on a
fresh memo and the endless archive in a race girl
documenting her own erasure. Standing in my kitchen's half light
heart a trembling not I closed my eyes and listened again.
In the white noise, I heard the rising chatter of
other's Branda's warning Marvin's panic might own a name perdecessors
scramble plea. I understood, if only for a heartbeat, that
I was not the first, and, no matter my choice,
not the last. As I reached for the tape. Minlight
glowing cold on the hospital's highest windows. My finger hovered
just once above the red button. The wall stoled between
memory and oblivion, between being lost and being the one
who remembered. The recorder waited. I pressed down. The recorder
clicked beneath my finger. The mechanical sound crisp. A mistake
could be real. I raise it close, the tape spinning
up with the lower My breath fog at the kitchen
air for a moment, though the room was neither colt
nor warm. As the first seconds passed, the red light
glowed with mute insistence, waiting for my words, for the
one act left to anchor me and the unspooling night.
I'm still here. I spoke aloud, half a murmur. The
words came out smaller than I intended, a child's in contition,
a plea masked in side procedure, my name, my shift,
the cold edge of the parcel's memory against my palms.
It was nothing, and it was everything. I forced myself
to continue. Emily arch KnightShift Reception, Saint East's City Hospital,
B twenty one is real. The subovil exist, the staff
have been erased, But I remember. Even as the syllables
left me, there came the familiar suspicion that my own
voice was no more permanent than graphied on wader. I
dunned the whole button, stopping the tape, and played it back,
my voice speaking the same words, but thinner kind of echo,
overlaying the background hiss. I listened for accents, for that
final drift towards someone else's inflection, But for the moment,
I remain myself, a lateness gathered at the indistinct sick
attention that amidst the city's night ires. The window rattled
above the sink as trafficiss below, and I found myself
utterly unwilling to put the taper corder down. What if,
I thought wildly. I set it aside and woke to
an empty counter, New gaps in my own head, memories gone,
no evidence left except my own. Enduring the knease, I
forced myself to shower, checking every corner for flickers of movement.
Some deep part of me hungered for Normaldy's protection, hot water,
familiar towels, or toothbrush crape raw. But the mirror, edged
in dusk showed only my blur of reflection. A face
head sea marked and overwritten too many times, in too
many places. I press a palm flat to the glass, blinking,
bracing for the ripple of some one else behind my skin.
Only my own gaze looked back for now. When I
settled on my warm living room couch, with the postage
worn staff badge and a corridor beside me, the same
ambivalent circled actor or archivist Victimore witness. Even in my apartment,
the bureaucratic and reality pressed an apartment lease, receding from
the fridge, my landlord's reminders growing hazy a round the edges,
and paid bills stacking in scripts. The half faded. When esquinted,
I glanced at the new badge nestled in the box
Emily administration, the wrong face, not quite me, cheek sharper,
the suggestion of age some one too three versions gone.
It was hard not to see the roll for what
it was, and must pass down, temper loaded fresh each
time the protocll failed to contain its own ghosts. Out
of habit, out of dread, I opened the window and
listened to the city shift in the darkness. Some a
siren oscillated, far away and distant, laughter winked out under
a sharp wind. The night should have felt empty, but
instead it vibrated with a kind of breathless readiness, as
if my little act, the pressing of abuddon the leaving
of a record, had been anticipated in the paperless, ageless
rhythms of the hospitals hunger for silence. A soft shuffling
in the hallway of side startled me, for perhaps only
drew attention to its constancy. My name spoken lightly, echoing
from the apartments thin walls. I rushed to the door
and found nothing but my own echo, folded back by architecture. Instinctively,
I stepped out, half checking for the familiar uniform of
a courier or the land out of city patrols. There
was nobody, yet the smell of antiseptic clipped the corridor air,
and the lights above the stairs briefly flickered, the way
they did in the hospital's subulbuls I made a slow
circuit of the floor, listening, waiting, anxious for confirmation that
the world outside sindh Houstace still held weight in color,
doors remained shut, apartment numbers precise. Yet something followed that
thin sense of being only provisionally present, provisionally remembered. Returning indoors,
I thumbed my phone listlessly. There were two new voicemails
from one listed numbers, each silent blank, not even a
digital times damp. My contact listed trunk. Branda's name was
gone entirely, even Marvin's was replaced by a single flickering symbol.
I searched my safe foretos, desperate for some evidence, and
found my reflections staring out from the blank squires by
features in certain as if the phone struggled to resolve
my image unsettled, I pressed the tape recorder's play button
one more time. Instead of my voice, a deep, old
fashioned stata gave way to the click and hiss of
the corridor security feed. This was no memory of my own,
but rather a recording of voices layered over faint footsteps.
Admit to protocol variants subject be men A six no
return from study full record request at Barnes Marvin Harris
Blake cycle note reintegrate as applicable, clearful legacy, hands of
her faint, then a voice like Brenda's. If your listening,
remember why you began. Don't trust lists, Don't trust what
comes through records. Trust only what can bleed. The tip
snapped off at the end, the thin ribbon looping back
with a dry mechanical fail. The bridle anger belt in
me then was this? It was this what all the
cycles led to, to be an unmarked curer, forgotten by
every one, tangled in legacy, passing along a burden I
never chose. Instinct pressed me to test the hospitals hold.
I grabbed my note book, my last offense paper and
ink my own accountant, began to copy out the warnings,
the details, the specific stat if lost, would make me
as formless as the thing that haunted Sublevobeat twenty one.
I wrote, if you or me, if they erase the logs,
look for the badge, remember the colt, the keys. Your
name is not enough, but your handwriting is bearn a page.
If you have to burn the badge, if you can,
I mark the recorder with a red pen. This is me.
It's still here, not protocol, not legacy. I don't know
what a hope for. Perhaps that if my voice my
hand created enough tangible fact, I could outwait the bureaucracy
of forgetting, a sudden memory and provoked speed through me.
The security feed, leaping in atman Brenda's hand, shaking over
the old box of badges, Mauvin whispering about being chased
by his own likeness in a mirror. None of us
wanted this, none of us expected to be erased. Were
written fed through the automation of a hospital's defense system.
Gone hungry, though, as I realized only one way left
to break the cycle, I pulled on my coat, gathered
the package, and returned to the deserted after midnight city streets.
The hospital, looming as ever, presented a blank stone face
at the sleeping city. Its let windows organized the dark
into a grid sum administrative, some patient care, some the
permanent night of a news spaces. I moved determined to
the staff entrance badge and pocket tape recorded clutch tight
at the scanner, I held the new card up. It
beat in confusion for a moment, red, then flickered green.
The door swung in. Inside. The air had the electric
chill of a sever room that faint ozen and cleaner
time that had once been comforting. Now I felt the
weight of every step, the feeling that each passed through
the halls might find me reflected rom recorded out of
sequence by the administration of death. The light's hamden pulsed.
No one challenged me, not the night attendant, not the
two orderlies hovering near the coffee station. If this saw me,
they registered nothing out of place. I was invisible, or
I was exactly who the next rotation had called for.
I did not stop at security, did not stop at
my own counter, still ringed with old insulated mogs and forms.
I walked straight from the old admined corridor, each dried,
more familiar, more certain. Each echo of my shoes against
tile was a name acclaimed. The twenty one store, pained, peeling,
faded now into shadow received me. I gripped the old brusque,
feeling it pulse, not with static, but with memory, warmth,
the true weight of sequence. I entered inside. The room
waited more of an archive than ever a museum for
vanished lives. The air vibrated now with all that was
held and lost, files re arranged, nin scored and rerit
and binder was torn and mended forward or paper spotted
with faint drawing blood. The therapy chair sat in darkness,
monitor feets on low. But now as I searched, I
saw something I had not noticed. Before the other boxes
lined up handsomely anonymous with pro call slipped riding shotgun
under bands of decades, all tape. These were the legacies,
not punishment, but a burden passed and passed across the
current every time someone invisible until their moment, tried to
break free. I set my bott atop the pile, drew
my own warning onto a sticky note, pressing it atop
the badge. If you read this, you are handwriting matters.
Remember with your hands. And then with both fear and calm,
I took the tape recorder and press play, then a record,
layering my voice on to the next cycle, documenting, testifying,
refusing oblivion. For a heartbeat, the static resolved into clarity.
I was both past in present. Branda's voice laid soft
above my own, Marvin's below the chorus of the vanish
the NAILI erased, we are not gone, I whispered aloud,
recording it, knowing at last that this was a victory,
small but real. If names could be erased and faces blood,
movement through the world edged a new existence across every protocol,
I remained for the moment I remembered. I left the
recorder playing as I left Beat twenty one for the
last time, walking out into the corridor, my badge, my
real one, gloat brief under the frozen security camera's lens.
I paused, half turning, feeling the presence just behind my
right shoulder, an echo of those who've come and gone,
who might come again. If you hear this, I said,
you are not erased. Fine paper vine year name pass
it on. The lights brightened, not the flickering of interference,
but the slowestwell of morning. The hospital momentarily felt lighter,
a hum beneath my skin. Not total peace, never again,
but certainty. Even bureaucracy could not wholly claim me. Even
silence could not finish my story. Outside, sunrise traced a
thin gold edge around the hospital's towers. The city's morning
noises returned, and fits and start sambulance, distant pigeons lifting
a bus signed to halt the world pressed in, blurred
but warming. I stepped away from the hospital, my steps echoing.
I drew a long breath, feeling every beat every knew
of the memory of my name tight and threw behind
my teeth. I walked north, feeling as much as I
could after all that forgetting real. Every block a cross
was a line redrawn. I knew somewhat the porch coal
would rustle. We organized seek its next subject. Before now,
Emily R was here, walking, watching each step atch memory
that no ark, if could wholly dissolve. And as dawn
war my face at the edge of the city, I
pressed a new page into my notebook and R I
was here. The words were shaky, but they were mine,
and that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
I will see you in the next one.