Fiction: This Anger’s Deeper Than Sleep

Turner Tuesday is getting postponed to next week; I have a couple of pressing deadlines in the next couple of days that are making the prospect of wading into that literary hellscape nearly unbearable. In its place, have another piece of something dark and angry and fairly hateful, not in the Turner Diaries way but in the way that my fiction often tends to be. 

A while back, when the articles about the nightmare of being a Facebook content moderator started coming out, I was taken with the idea of how capitalism often outsources the most miserable, undesirable labor to the most vulnerable in society. Which led me to think about prison “labor”, how it‘s shitty jobs done for next to no pay with not a whole lot of say in the matter. 

It didn’t seem like a huge jump to this. 

I never did sell it. I think there are some ways in which it isn’t as elegantly executed as it might have been; in particular I think race needs to be interrogated in this sort of context in a far more direct and intense manner than I do here. But I do feel like it’s a good story, or at least I think it’s doing some interesting things in an interesting way. So here it is. 

Content warning for suicide, self-harm, violent intrusive thoughts, trauma, and general disturbingness. I mean, again, this is me we’re talking about.

This Anger’s Deeper Than Sleep

When she tells me what she wants to do I almost spill my tea on myself, and for a violent instant then I almost throw it on her.

Not because I'm pissed. Maybe because I'm pissed. It's been difficult to know precisely how I feel for almost a year now. Mostly because I'm terrified—I do remember how terror feels. If I can pin down one emotion that I reliably possess, it's that, all the fucking time.

We’re being watched. We’re being overheard. The instinct is gut-level and overwhelming. I'm looking over my shoulder for any sign of a supervisor. I'm scanning the room for the bugs I know have to be there but which they switch around every once in a while so you're never sure.

Breathe. It's a Starbucks. No one is listening. No one gives a shit.

No one would know what she was talking about even if they heard.

I jerk my body forward, hurling my voice into a sharp whisper. “What the fuck, Lin?”

“You heard me.” She’s being aggressively patient, aggressively calm, and there's a hard sparkle in her eye that I've seen before. “We can do it. We've got the gear, we've got the know-how, we've got people on the inside, we know the systems. We've got access like you can't even imagine. And you know that if we can, we have to. You know it's the right thing to do.”

“It's bullshit. They'll spot intrusion in two seconds and track you down in ten.”

She shakes her head. “Not with who we found.”

“Which is who, exactly?”

She leans back and shakes her hair out of her face—blue, which I still can't stop looking at, because it makes her appear so different from how I first knew her. She got out a little less than a month ago and she said she did it immediately. Slashed halfway off and dyed. She said it felt like fighting. It looks like petty teenage rebellion. I know better.

It's been a year and I haven't changed a thing about the way I look. Whenever I think I might, I chicken out.

“More than a couple. But for one, the lead programmer on the project that designed the goddamn system. Put the entire thing in place.”

I gape at her. I know who she means. For a while they were in the news, back when the program was new and people were doing semi-necessary PR management. “Why the fuck would they help you?”

She shrugs. “They're having second thoughts now that they've seen what it looks like implemented. You'd be surprised how many people are turning on this. It's not just the isolated protests. Maybe they’re hoping for some kind of redemption.” She pauses, tapping her stiletto nails thoughtfully on the tabletop. Swirls of pink glitter and airbrushed black spirals. “I don't think they realized at the time where it would go. Who would be using it.”

I'm quiet a moment, letting this sink in. I'm still struggling to process. The music in the background is warbly jazz, and it's not loud but every bass note pushes through the ambient hum of movement and conversation and thunks into my gut, threatening nausea. I understand why she wanted to meet here—the blandness, the normality. Maybe she thought it would make things easier for me.

Seems like she thinks a lot of things.

“You trust them. You trust them to not rat you out.”

“We’re in the final stages. Almost everything is set. We move in a couple of days. If they were going to rat us out I feel like they would've done it by now.”

“Maybe they're just waiting for that move you're gonna make.”

“Maybe.” Level. “Maybe that's a risk we’re willing to take.”

“For what, Lin?”

“I think you know what,” she says softly. “I think you know exactly why we’re doing it.” She pauses again, studying me, and I sit in silence and rankle under the scrutiny.

It's not her. Truth is I don't love it whenever anyone looks at me, for any reason. Because eyes behind a screen, behind a two-way mirror, behind a lens I’ll never see.

Because eyes, all the fucking time.

“I don't sleep anymore,” she says. “Not without drugs. Tyra can't touch knives. Mariella starts crying whenever she sees a cat. Sierra had to give her baby to her mom because she couldn't stop thinking about doing shit to him. They can barely hold down jobs. They're going broke paying for meds. I'm pretty sure Sierra’s hooked on pills. Carrie swears the Washington Square shooting was a false flag operation. Last I heard from Mandy she was living in a fucking Nazi compound in shithole-nowhere Oregon. You think they have anything to lose? You think I do? You think this is going to make it worse?”

“Why the fuck are you bringing me into it? If you're so close to being done anyway? Why the fuck are you even telling me this?”

“You’re doing just as bad as we are.” The table is small and she can reach across it and easily touch my upper arm, and she does, and I flinch and she withdraws her hand but she doesn't withdraw anything else. “I thought maybe you'd like to be part of it.”

“They'll send us all back,” I whisper. My hands are clenched in my lap, so tight they hurt, and I can't stop the shaking. I have to count my breaths and they're running together, a single long inhalation. “They'll send you back and hook you up and this time it won't be for just a few years.”

“No,” she says, very calm. “They won't.”

And I don't have to ask what she means.

We never speak about it. But we all promised ourselves. We swore an unvoiced vow to ourselves, and we all share it. We’ll die before we go back.

Everyone has. Every single one.

They started it up before I got convicted, before I even got arrested. I remember the news articles on it and I remember the backlash, and I remember how it made no difference and soon sank without a trace, because how unconventional was it, anyway? From centuries of the same thing. You break rocks in a quarry, you make license plates all day for pennies, you sit in front of a screen and all the sick horrors of the worst of the web gets pumped into your brain for ten hours a day.

Who gives a shit?

I didn't. Not when it wasn't me.

They said they expected it to radically decrease recidivism. Not too long after the first graduates were released, the suicides began.

So I guess it worked.

“How are you sleeping?”

I shrug. The leather squeaks when I move. I don't like this chair and I wish he'd get a new one, and I haven't said anything in five months of sessions. One of the things we’re allegedly working on is my lack of assertiveness. My passivity. Even though I imagine that's one of the things they were going for.

It's been made clear to me, in one way or another, that I'm regarded as a success story.

“Not well.”

“You don't feel like the upped dosage is helping?”

I shrug again. “It makes me sleepy. I just don't sleep.”

He nods, enters something on the tablet. “We’ll wait a week and try increasing again.”

“I feel like a zombie at work.” I press my thumbs against the sides of my forefingers, then cycle to pressing my thumbs and middle fingers together. His eyes follow the progression but he says nothing. This is the mildest of my tics so we've decided to let it go for now. “I missed like twelve shipment scans last week, I got written up. Five more strikes and I'm out.”

“Holding a job is a condition of your parole.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I bare my teeth. “I know.”

“Mm.” More tapping. His fingers skitter across the screen. “How about intrusive thoughts?”

I nod at his desk. Broad white pressboard. Brown circle coffee stains and a chaos of paper. One sharp corner is angled directly toward me. “You see that?”

He glances at the indicated corner. “Yes?”

“I'm thinking I should put the point of that through my eyes. I've been thinking it since I walked in here.”

“I see.” He cocks his head and taps some more, sighs and sits back. “Well. I think we’re making progress.”

I blink at him. “‘Scuse me?”

“You’re aware of what's going on in your own head. You're functioning. You must be sleeping some, or you wouldn't be able to walk in here.” He gives me a smile that looks like a thing he puts on for the benefit of human beings. “We’ll up the dosage and see what happens. Next week same time?”

“I'm functioning,” I say, slow. “For how much longer?”

“For as long as you want to.” The smile slips a bit. “You're tough, Kim. You're tougher than you give yourself credit for.”

I look at him for a while. Then the chair gives another protesting squeal as I push to my feet. The sun pierces the blinds and hits me squarely in the eye and I keep looking at him, half blind. Not darkness, like I'm sure would be waiting for me on the other side of that corner. Brutal, drilling light.

The rectangle of the screen was burned into my retinas. Even when I closed my eyes it was there. It lingered for weeks after I was released.

“That's why,” I murmur. “Remember? We were suitable because we were tough? Because of our background. Resilient. Accustomed to violent imagery.”

“That is,” he says quietly, “one of the rationales for the program.” He cocks his head. “Along with an element of aversion therapy. And you haven't been violent at all since your release. Have you?”

“Not technically.”

“Same time next week?”

“Yeah,” I breathe. “Sure.”

Going home is, as usual, an obstacle course.

It's almost impossible to explain it to people who don't experience it, and with people who do experience it, explanations are never necessary. The ruthless thrust of images, sounds, the crush of it, the inability to fight it off, a mental freight train careening off the rails over and over and over, triggered by anything and everything.

The thin, shaky cell phone footage of my body hurled in front of the express subway as it hurtles through the station. Shiny red-black splatter on the platform. On the street, a van smashes through a crowd and two men leap out wielding butcher knives and a woman goes down with her throat jetting blood. That dog walker steps into traffic, under the wheels of two oncoming trucks. Yapping labradoodles are crushed into chunky red smears. I walk into that hardware store and I buy the biggest thing of lighter fluid that I can, come out and stand on the sidewalk and douse myself, and I light a match. The sound of bone crunching. The gurgle as someone chokes on their own blood. Crying children. Screams and screams and screams.

All of this flickers past, brief and vivid and unstoppable. Irresistible. I regard it with a mixture of disgust and boredom, and more than anything else I'm so fucking tired.

We couldn't stop it when we were hooked up. We couldn't slow down or pause or walk away. The images came to us. We let them through or we didn't.

I can't let these through to anywhere. They have nowhere to go.

Now and then I wonder: what happened to the posts we rejected, after we submitted the completed batches? Was there some kind of limbo to which they were consigned? Did they get filed? Or were they deleted, erased utterly, denied a digital afterlife?

They got one. Even if they were deleted, the space overwritten, there are backup copies of every single one. In us.

We can't unsee what we saw.

The email attachment is brief but I don't let it play the whole way through. I manage to stop it before I see more than a few seconds—I remember that I have the ability to do that now. But it doesn't matter. I know this scenario, even if I haven't seen this particular version.

You might see it and think it's tame, this kind of frothing Nazi conspiracy theory rant, obscene slurs scattered throughout like racist confetti. It's disturbing and ugly but it's hardly a cat being skinned alive.

The truth is that shit like this was a huge percentage of what we saw. Not the violence. Not the snuff. You'd think it was no big deal. I know you would. You probably don't see it very much.

You're welcome for that, by the way.

Lin picks up after the second ring. “What’s up, Kim?”

“You know what's up.” I'm managing to keep my voice mostly steady. My eyes are fixed on the screen, the guy’s contorted red face frozen in mid-bellow, his buzzed head framed by the flag on the wall behind him. “What the fuck is this, Lin? Why did you send this to me?”

“You watched it?”

“I watched enough. Tell me why.”

“You didn't pick it up, did you?”

I finally rip my gaze away, swivel around in the chair and stare at the merciful beige of the undecorated wall. Months in this place and I still haven't put up any pictures. “Pick up what?”

“The message, to the folks on the inside. It's in the words,” she says patiently. “He's speaking in code.”

If I stare at the wall for long enough, the faint ghosts of color begin to emerge from the blankness, swirling like gas. I do that now. Sometimes it calms me down. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Take a good look at him.”

I don't want to. I have control here, I must remember that, I must remember it at all times. I possess the kill switch. I can turn it off and on whenever I want to. She's not a supervisor. She can't deny me exercise, books, food, light, if I’m not compliant.

I turn and look at the guy’s awful, mean face, and I'm about to demand again that she tell me what the fuck she thinks she's doing when it clicks, and all I can give her is silence.

“You see it?” she asks quietly after a moment or two.

“Yeah.” I never knew him personally. We were in a gender-segregated unit. But I know the face. I know what he's said about what he's been through. I know he's one of the few of us who really talks openly about it and damn the consequences, not that it matters because everyone thinks he's a nut and they're not altogether incorrect. “So he went over to the dark side. So what? That happens. It happens to us a lot, you know that.”

“He didn't. He doesn't believe any of what he’s saying, Kim. It's an act. It's a way to get himself in front of someone. I said we have people on the inside, they'll know how to recognize it when it pops up. We post that, the other shit like it that we have lined up, it's the signal.”

“For what?”

“To break the fucking dam.”

I pull in a long, trembling breath. I don't want to look at him anymore. Maybe he buys what he's spewing and maybe he doesn't, and I don't care, because he's making it look just a little bit too real.

Then again, if anyone was equipped to make it look convincing, down to the last detail.

“How?”

“Meet me and I'll tell you everything.”

The question that comes to me then is stupid, utterly beside the point. But curiosity isn't rational. We always dig into what we shouldn't. “How can you be sure the right people will see it?”

“We can be sure. And there's a lot of them. Just leave it at that.”

I shut my eyes so hard that white fireworks explode behind my lids. Hint of copper in my mouth from my teeth clamping down on the insides of my cheeks. I'm not that curious. I'm not curious enough to get wrapped up in this. I don't want it. I'm twelve strikes down. I don't have that many more.

And they are not sending me back.

“Leave me alone, Lin.”

“Tyra killed herself last night.”

My eyes snap open. I don't see a fucking thing. The screen is all featureless light. “What?”

“Cut her wrists in the shower. She didn't leave a note. I guess she didn't think she had to. I was the one who found her.” She pauses, and when she speaks again she sounds exhausted. Flat. “Help us, Kim. Be here with us when it happens. There isn't much time left.”

She fades out on the last word as the phone tumbles from my nerveless fingers and thumps on the thin carpet. I don't pick it up. After a few minutes I get to my feet and go to the window, push back the blinds and look out at the evening. Miles of flat roofs and scrubby, stunted trees. Crumbling row homes and blocky apartment buildings as far as the eye can see, vacant lots, trash collecting beside the curbs, everything brown and gray and black. Towers of light in the distance, hazy and unreal; glimpse of a world that barely touches this one. A couple of kids race up the street, scream-laughing, and it's like an ice pick through my eardrums.

I ram my head through the glass and shove my neck downward and paint that beige wall with a spray of red.

I have work in the morning. I can't afford more fuck-ups. I gulp vodka, take the pills. I don't sleep.

Except I do. Eyes open in the dark. I do. The featureless expanse of the ceiling expands into a screen that occupies my entire field of vision. They put me in the chair and my body twists and folds in the bed as my brain drags me into the appropriate shape. I'm shackled by the ankles. I will be allowed two bathroom breaks a shift. In an emergency I can signal a supervisor but I'll get a note in my file.

I am informed of all of this before they sit me down.

The meaningless blur of the words—audio, print—as they run me through a brief session outlining the content guidelines. The single hour of training. I can’t remember what I saw. Curled up and quivering with the sheets slipped down around my ankles and my hands rigid as if I'm in the grip of a seizure, I can't remember what I saw. I can't remember what I held up and what I let through.

I can't remember my accuracy score. I know I must have been accurate; I always was.

I keep moving. That's very good. I keep moving, carving paths through the assault. I ducked my head and the bullets whizzed by. I walked past the sheet-draped forms in the street. I sat in the closet and closed my eyes tight until the screaming stopped. I lied about the bruises. I can take the punches. I can take myself away from them. I keep the pointer in motion. I am decisive and I don't second-guess. I make and exceed the quota.

I'm told that I'm doing very well.

They unshackle us and escort us back to our cells. Harsh lights and clanging and shouting and thudding feet—flat and distant. The endless shuffle of our bodies, proceeding in step like a chain gang. I lie down on my bunk and I cry so hard I vomit and blood vessels burst in my sclera. Lin jokes about me having Ebola. Her first shift will come in a week, and after that her jokes will get coarser, crueler, like taking swings at the world.

But that night I cry. I cry and cry.

And then I don't cry ever again.

I go to work. I manage to avoid fucking up. The morning melts into a blur. But in the break room at lunch everything snaps back into piercingly sharp focus, and I watch the guy across from me as he scrolls through something on his phone, and in the reflection of his glasses I see flashes of post after post as they slide by.

And I think about everything he isn't seeing. I think about everything he doesn't fucking know. I think about how everything that can be known must sooner or later be known by someone. I think about how someone has to bear that. Drag it around with them for the rest of their lives.

Drag it around so others don't have to.

You don't know what you don't know.

You don't know what you don't see.

“They never said thank you.”

Lin is silent. I can feel her waiting. I shove myself onward. I'm huddled on a bench. Behind me children are screaming all up and down the playground. I don't know why I stopped here. It's getting difficult to breathe.

None of the strategies I was taught are working. Not then during training and not after; none of them apply to the eternal frozen now. They involve a process, a progression from one moment to the next. But every instant shackled to that chair in front of that screen was a singularity of time, isolated and hyper-dense and sucking everything into itself. Not even memory escapes.

“They never said thank you,” I repeat through clenched teeth. Something pops in my jaw. You can't imagine how grotesque it is to watch a jaw being dislocated until you see it happen and you can't make it stop. “None of them. Most of them don't even know. They don't fucking care.”

“Who's sparing them,” she whispers. “Who's saving them.”

“What they're being saved from.”

“You get it.” Her voice is so soft in my ear, high ridges of sound through the phone. “You always did.”

I pull in a breath. I reach out with my lungs and grab it and yank. A cloud of pigeons explodes into flapping being around me, gray-blue-purple as a bruise, flashes of iridescence in the sun. Lovely. These are the things I might be able to see, if I could stop seeing everything else.

They took it from me. And they never said thank you for your service, and they never said we’re sorry we did this to you, and they never fucking will.

“Tell me where to meet you.”

“Are you doing any better?”

I shrug. I shrug a lot with him. It feels like the safest answer to most of his questions, but it also feels the most honest. The truth is that I rarely have any solidly substantial answers, even in terms of their certainty. I don't know. I don't know if I'm doing better. I don't know what better even means.

“Sleeping?”

“Maybe a little more.”

And the thing is, I did. I did sleep last night, the entire night through. I slept like it might be the last chance I get. It makes me feel good, that I didn't waste the opportunity.

Nod from him. Tap of his fingers on the tablet. The setting sun piercing my pupils, twisting at my optic nerves. The squeak of the leather.

“How many people like me are you seeing?”

He looks up, frowning, fingers abruptly motionless. Perhaps a bit surprised by the directness of the question. I hardly ever ask him questions. “Like you?”

“Ex-cons. People who were part of the program.”

His frown deepens. “I'm not sure that's your business.”

I cock my head. Everything feels placid and smooth and easy and it has since yesterday. “Is it going to do any harm to tell me?”

He sits back, swivels to and fro in his chair. Hems and haws. “A few. Several.”

“How are you doing with them?”

“Kim, that really is not appropriate info for you to have.”

“I just want to know how effective you think you're capable of being. How much you believe you can actually help us.” I spread my hands in a gesture too assertive to be placating. “That directly affects me, doesn't it? How much confidence I should have in the process.”

“If you don't trust me,” he says slowly, “we’re not going to get anywhere. Their progress has no bearing on how well you do.”

“You think so?”

“I've been at this for twenty years. I know what I'm doing, I know what it takes.”

“The mod program has only been running for six.”

“Kim.” He releases a hard breath and grips the sides of the tablet. I've never been able to get under his skin like this and now I'm wondering why I never tried. “I think we should refocus our conversation on you, given what you're here for.”

I meet his gaze, hold it, and I don't attempt to hide my contempt. This fucker. This pompous motherfucker. I'm sure he's seen some of it, some of the tamer stuff we handle, but I know without having to ask him that he's never seen the worst of it. He's never gone as far down as I have. And he has neither the curiosity nor the courage to seek it out himself.

“I'm sleeping. I'm eating. I'm not fucking up at work. I'm functional. That's good, right? That's what we’re shooting for. That's progress.”

He looks at me for a long moment. The sun has shifted and it's no longer a beam straight into my eyes. It's creeping across the tattered carpet, lighting up abstract loops and swirls. Red and brown. The color of old blood.

“That's right.” Tap tap tap. “How are the intrusive thoughts?”

“They're fine.” I give him a smile I don't remotely feel, not unlike the one he gives me—and yet I do feel it, the slash of it and the teeth behind, as deeply as any smile I've ever felt. “Everything's under control now.”

“Excellent.” But I can tell he's barely listening anymore. He's not, or he'd be pushing at such an obvious lie. “I think we should keep the dosage where it is, then. Are you comfortable with that?”

“Sure.”

We wrap up. The quality of the exchange is thin, papery, and he's not the only one who's barely listening. I can feel myself sinking away from it, down into something dim and quiet. The last day has been a kind of peace I have no idea how to describe, except that it's not what I imagine most people would think of as peace, because peace isn't soaked in rage. Peace isn't something you wield like a hammer.

Regardless. It is what it is.

But at the door I stop. Turn. He's facing mostly away from me, and I don't think he sees me. I clear my throat.

He glances up. “Is there something else, Kim?”

“Do you think the program is a good idea?”

He's silent for a while, his face unreadable. I wait. If I'm honest, I'm largely uninterested in his answer; it can make no possible difference with respect to what comes next. But I asked the question. I might as well hear him out.

“My opinion doesn't enter into it,” he says finally. “I have patients, I treat them. Everyone comes out of the experience in a different place. My job is to get them to where they need to be from there.”

“But do you? Seriously. Do you think it should continue?”

“I don't think it's significantly worse than prison alone.” He turns back to his desk, shuffling papers in a pointed way. “I'll see you next week, Kim.”

I go. I have the only answer I suppose I expected.

I have the only answer I need.

Apartment, average part of town, third floor walkup. Faded stucco. Bars on the ground floor windows. Empty flowerpots line the front steps. I stand outside for a few minutes, taking it in, phone forgotten in my hand. This doesn't seem momentous. This doesn't appear important. I don't know what I expected. Maybe to feel like I was on the edge of something and about to step over; in my head I know that's true.

I step across this threshold and there's no going back. And I know how it might very well end.

Didn't I say it? Didn't I tell her what would almost certainly happen to us?

Hardly looking at the screen, I text her two words.

im here

Takes another moment or two. Then the front door creaks open and she's there, backlit by a dim hallway bulb. It's a gray early evening.

Shift change.

I climb the steps and without a word she moves aside to admit me. The door swings shut behind me with a heavy clunk. In silence we climb the creaking, poorly lit stairs.

It's all very easy. I suppose this is what it's like, crossing a threshold, when you aren't leaving anything behind.

When I was a kid I was very into cyberpunk, even if it was outdated by then. I devoured tales of revolutionary punk hackers, mirror shades and razor nails, and I thrilled to hallucinatory scenes of shattering enemy ICE, walls of screens, vast glowing spaces, sound-swift movement in more than three dimensions. If I had only known then. If I had only known how boring the truth would be. How, by the time that consensual hallucination was fully integrated into us, it would simply absorb and algorithmically magnify every part of who we are. Which is to say, it would be stupid and mean and ugly, and boring.

The apartment is tiny and sparsely furnished. The walls are blank and beige, a lot like mine. Past an old couch and a battered coffee table, two desks are set up back to back in a corner, a guy and a young woman hunched over them and peering into double monitors. Another guy comes out of a cramped galley kitchen holding a couple of beers, one of which he hands to Lin as he looks curiously at me, and his eyes stand out brilliant in his tanned face, stunningly green.

“So you're her,” he says at the exact same moment that I murmur, “So it's you.”

Not him. Them. I saw pictures of them in the news stories about them; I just forgot. I saw pictures of them and I disregarded them, somehow felt nothing whatsoever for them, dismissed their face from my memory almost as soon as I was exposed to it. So now I realize why that might have been. That I did that because I had to.

Looking at them now, this person who did this to us, and I want to grab that bottle out of their hand and smash it over their head, drive the shattered pieces into their eyes, carve off their nose, make a bloody ruin of their face, keep going until they stopped screaming and drowned in their own fucking blood.

I know how it looks. I've seen it done. I'm sure I could do it. I think I could do it and not even feel sorry after.

God, I'm so sick.

And they give the other beer to Lin, reach for my hands and take them in theirs, and I don't try to fight it. They hold onto me and they look into my eyes with those wide pools of green, and they say, so softly, “I'm so sorry.”

If I could cry, I believe I might, then. But I can't.

So I don't.

I don't ask how it's going to work. I'm not certain I could understand it even if they tried to explain it to me. That's not why I'm here anyway, to understand the technical side of it, to look at that rapid movement and those charges at what I used to think of as ICE and to untangle the intricacies of it. It's not my job. I never knew how it worked on the other end, either. I merely knew what was required of me.

To see. To witness.

Only now I'm not making a call. It feels like freedom.

I sit down on the couch. The couch is leather and it squeaks, and I almost get up again, quick like I've sat in something wet, but then Lin is beside me, handing me a phone that isn't mine, which I take and stare stupidly at until she says, “This is how you watch.”

I give her a quizzical look, nod at the desks and the screens and the people in front of them. “Not over there?”

She shakes her head. “It wouldn't look like anything much. This.” She points down at the phone. At the app she opened up for me. “This is where the real action is going to be.”

“So it'll happen—”

“Almost right away. They've already done the groundwork, they're ready to go when we say go.” She pulls out her own phone, examines it. “The shift—”

“It’s about to change,” I murmur.

Batch report.

“Yeah.”

“Do we know anyone there? On it?” I don't know quite why that matters to me, only that it does.

“I don't think so. It's probably better that way.”

“They're going to find us regardless,” I say, still quiet. “They can't not. They're going to hunt us down. They're going to try to send us back.”

“They're not going to send us back to the program if there's no more program.”

“You really think you can hit them that hard?”

“I don't know,” she says simply. “Maybe. Maybe after this things will change.”

I bow my head, stare at the phone. The feed is auto-refreshing, names and text and images scrolling past. I don't know any of them. Every single one of them is a stranger. Every single one of them, maybe someone I was protecting.

“I don't think so.” I take a slow breath. “I don't think things can change like that.”

“Could be you’re right.” She sets her phone aside and takes my free hand, her own so strong and so gentle, and my chest twists itself into a fierce, burning knot and I can't swallow, can't see through the stinging in my eyes, because maybe this is actually what I wanted. Maybe this would once have been enough. Before they threw me into their hell and shackled me there. “But after this, none of them will be able to say they don't know. None of them will be able to pretend anymore. That's gotta be something.”

Does it? Is self-deception really so fragile? I wonder. But I thread my fingers through hers and I hold on, and when she leans in and brushes her lips against mine I sigh and press close, the world gone soft and warm, the phone in one hand and her hand in my other.

I never looked at her that way. I didn't know I wanted this. I still don't. But standing on this precipice and about to plunge over, perhaps I'm ready to grab for whatever I can reach.

In the corner of my half-closed eye I see the girl look up from her keyboard and motion to us, and as I pull back she gives me a tight smile. “It's almost time. If you're watching, get ready.”

The author of this entire nightmare sits down at Lin’s other side, peering at a small tablet with an unreadable expression on their face. And I think about the last New Year’s Eve, the first one in years that I sat through outside the walls with my legs free of shackles, alone on my couch with the TV off, watching the numbers proceed on my phone. It didn't feel real. It didn't feel like I was waiting for something that meant anything. It didn't feel like anything was going to change. Numbers are just numbers.

Only everything had already changed. The kind of change you don't come back from.

The girl has gone back to work. She's intent, no longer appearing to be aware of us. The room is silent except for the rattle and hum of old climate control. Lin is still holding my hand. I realize that I'm holding my breath.

The minute digit on the phone blinks from a 7 to an 8, and suddenly the guy sits back and folds his hands together behind his head. Exhales.

“Okay, it's done.”

The phone starts blowing up.

For the first few minutes, it’s gradual. The auto-refresh on the app turns up a massive block of text, a quick skim of which reveals itself to be one long scream about the Holocaust. Then a gif of a dog getting run over by a car. Then a grainy beheading video, and I watch long enough to see the faces cloaked in executioner’s black and the dull flash of the sword before I look away.

Shame, abrupt and hot in my face. I sense the pressure of Lin’s gaze. I wonder if I'm disappointing her, not being able to watch it happen. But now it's hitting me, heavy and nauseous, that there are some things I don't need to witness, that there are some things where it's enough to know they're happening.

“Jesus God,” the girl whispers, “there's so much of it.” And I’m shoving myself to my feet and blundering toward one of the windows, slamming it open and braced on the sill as I drag in breath after breath of muggy air, tears—oh my God, finally—cool on my cheeks.

Those ill-lit streets. The shining condo towers looming over them. The office blocks and gleaming tech campuses. All over, everywhere, people are refreshing feeds and timelines and God help them if they have autoplay enabled. People are getting texts from numbers they don't recognize, with still images and videos, with sound files. People are getting calls, the audio on the other end of which they will never be able to unhear—obscene rants and shrieks and crying and the wet sound of flesh split open, and I know from such personal experience that sometimes mere sound is the most terrible. Not a normal pace but the unloading of a monstrous backlog, first a trickle and then a flood. Every network they tacitly trusted is rising up and smacking them in the face with the worst of the digital filth that human beings can vomit up, as the seawalls not only fail and crumble but stand aside and shout no more.

We will not fucking protect you anymore. We will not protect you from yourselves.

Not when you never gave us a choice.

The night is quiet. Maybe I expected to hear something, see people running in the streets; some sign of what we've just done. But there's nothing. The streets are empty except for the occasional passing car. The night is quiet but for a siren, distant, rising and then just as quickly dying away.

Hands on my back. Arms curling around my waist. I sag, my head hanging between my shoulders, and after another silent moment or two I crane my neck to glance behind me. The one I've come to think fancifully of as the Author is still on the sofa, motionless, their head in their hands.

I close my eyes. “Did anything change?”

“I don't know,” Lin says quietly. “I just… I don't know.” Then: “I think it's too early to say.”

It is. It's too early, and I understand now that I don't in fact believe that anything will change at all. No doubt they're scrambling through the rooms I used to work in, struggling through the chaos, fielding panicked calls from higher level managers, desperately trying to determine what went wrong and how to fix it, and I hope the current shift is enjoying that. I hope they're enjoying it, because the hammer is going to come down on them and on the shift before them, and on every shift, the guilty and the innocent alike. There is no guilty or innocent here. We didn't set out to spare anyone. I have no idea whether or not that was right. I have no idea whether or not such a distinction would have been possible.

I hear sirens again, closer, and once more I find myself clutching at my breath, listening hard. But once more they pass us by and I loosen into her arms and sigh. I don’t know what comes next. I don't know whether we’ll stay here. I don't know where we could go where they wouldn't eventually find us. I suspect it doesn't matter. I do know that they won't get me.

I have a gun in my pocket. I have Hell in my head.

I am never, ever going back.