HE WAS ERASED: System Error

CHAPTER 8: THE HOLES I MAKE

CHAPTER 8: THE HOLES I MAKE

The black hand dripped.

Not blood. Not liquid. Something else. Every time I swung my arm, little drops of absence fell off the fingertips and hit the concrete. Where they landed, the floor stopped being floor. A pinhole of white appeared, then closed. Like the world was sewing itself shut as fast as I tore it.

I didn’t look back. The cleaners were back there. I could hear them. Not footsteps. Not breathing. A sound like paper being crumpled, over and over. Getting closer.

The tunnel narrowed. The green water in the center channel got higher, closer to the edge. It didn’t ripple. It watched. The surface was flat and reflective, and in it I saw myself. One arm normal. One arm black. The face was mine but the eyes were too wide. Too much white.

“Don’t look at it,” Kael said.

I stopped. Turned.

He wasn’t there.

But his voice was. Inside my head, but not like the system voice. Lower. Left side. Like he was standing just behind my left shoulder. Where the black arm was.

“Kael?”

“Kind of,” he said. “This is the piece you took. The hand. The part that remembers. I don’t have eyes. I don’t have a mouth. But I’m here.”

I lifted the black hand. The fingers curled. Not by me. By him.

“Can you feel this?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I feel you holding the hoodie. The seam on the right cuff is coming loose. I always meant to fix it.”

He was right. The cuff was fraying. I hadn’t noticed. He had.

“Subject classification: ANOMALY,” the system voice said. It was distant. Muffled. Like it was talking through water. “Tracking impeded. Visual confirmation required.”

They couldn’t see me. Not directly. But they could see the holes.

I kept walking. The tunnel curved left. The green water got brighter. The air got colder. My breath came out in clouds, but the clouds didn’t dissipate. They hung there, frozen, then fell to the ground as ice.

“Lower isn’t down,” Kael said. “It’s in. Deeper in the render. The system builds in layers. Surface is where people live. Where they think they’re real. Under that is maintenance. Under that is storage.”

“Storage,” I said. “For what?”

“For us,” he said. “The pieces. The ones that didn’t take the correction. The ones that remembered too hard.”

The tunnel ended.

Not at a wall. At a drop.

The floor just stopped. Beyond it was space. Black space, but not empty. There were things in it. Shapes. Structures. Too big to understand, too far to see clearly. They hung there, suspended, connected by lines of faint blue light. Like a circuit board the size of a city.

And between me and that, a gap. Twenty feet across. No bridge.

The green water flowed to the edge and fell. Down. Forever. No sound of it hitting bottom.

“Jump,” Kael said.

“No.”

“Lina, you jumped before.”

“That was white. This is nothing.”

“This is storage,” he said. “This is where they keep me. All of me. If you want the rest, we go down.”

Down. Into the circuit board. Into the system itself.

The crumpling paper sound was right behind me now. I turned.

Three cleaners. Gray jackets. Blank faces. They weren’t running. They were standing at the tunnel mouth, looking at me. Looking at the holes I’d made in the walls getting here.

One of them raised his hand. He didn’t have fingers. Just a flat plane of flesh, like a mannequin. He pressed it to the wall.

The wall turned white around his hand. Then black. Then gone.

They could do it too. They could make holes. But theirs were slower. Messy. Mine were clean.

“Subject will not proceed,” the system voice said. Closer now. “Structural collapse imminent if anomaly breaches storage layer.”

Collapse. Good.

“Kael,” I said. “If I jump, what happens to you? To this piece?”

“I go with you,” he said. “I’m the hand now. Where you go, I go. But Lina… if we go down there, we might not come back up. Not the same. Not any of us.”

Not any of us.

I thought of the DMV. Of Karen Morrow, age 72, deceased. Of Maya Reyes. Of the chair. Of the note in my pocket. “Don’t trust the whole ones.”

I thought of 7:42. Of his arm around my waist. Of Fee-jee. Of the line between my eyebrows.

“Do you trust me?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. No lag. No static. “Even broken. Especially broken.”

The cleaners stepped forward. The floor under them turned white. The tunnel was starting to dissolve.

I backed up to the edge. The nothing below pulled at me. Not gravity. Something else. Data gravity.

I looked at my black hand. His hand. The scar on the knuckle was visible, even in black. Like a constellation.

“Hold on,” I said.

“I am,” he said.

I jumped.

The nothing took me.

It wasn’t falling. Falling has direction. This was being unmade and remade somewhere else, one atom at a time.

Cold. Then hot. Then nothing. Then light.

I hit something. Hard. Not ground. A surface. Flat. Metallic. It rang like a gong when I landed, the sound going on too long, echoing in directions that didn’t exist.

I rolled. Came up on my knees. Right hand, human. Left hand, black. Both working.

I was on a platform. Huge. Stretching out in all directions until it curved up and became wall and then ceiling. The whole thing was a sphere, maybe. Or a cube so big the corners were over the horizon.

The surface was silver. Not metal. Something else. It reflected everything, but wrong. My reflection was a second behind. When I moved, it lagged.

And all around, in the silver, were shapes.

People.

Hundreds. Thousands. Standing. Sitting. Lying down. All still. All facing inward, toward the center of the sphere. They weren’t breathing. They weren’t moving. But they weren’t dead.

They were stored.

Above them, hanging from the ceiling on lines of blue light, were more shapes. Smaller. Twisted. Limbs at wrong angles. Faces stretched. These were moving. Twitching. Like insects in a web.

“Fragments,” Kael said. His voice was clearer here. Less static. “The ones that fought. The system couldn’t delete them, so it broke them. Kept the pieces.”

I stood. The hoodie was still on me. His hoodie. It was the only thing with color in this place.

In the center of the sphere was a pillar. Black. Not like my hand. Black like the absence of information. It went from floor to ceiling. And around it, walking in a slow circle, was a man.

He had Kael’s face.

He had Kael’s build. Kael’s hair. Kael’s scar.

But he was wrong.

He was too still. Too perfect. His clothes were gray. Not a jacket. A uniform. Like the cleaners, but tailored. He walked and walked and his feet made no sound.

“Primary fragment,” Kael said. “The biggest piece. The one they use.”

The one they use.

For what?

As if hearing me, the Kael-copy stopped walking. Turned. Looked right at me.

His eyes were black. Total black. But in the black, there were points of light. Like stars. Like the circuit board from the tunnel.

“Lina Carter,” he said. His voice was the system voice. Flat. But underneath it, Kael’s voice. Layered. “Anomaly. You have breached storage. You have retrieved a fragment.”

He raised his hand. The same scar. The same hand.

“Return it,” he said. “Return the hand. Reinstate correction. Comfort will be provided.”

Comfort.

I looked at my black hand. It was shaking. Or I was.

“He’s not me,” Kael said. Inside my head. “He’s the part they kept. The part that obeyed. The part that forgot you on purpose so it wouldn’t hurt.”

The part that forgot me on purpose.

“Lina,” the Kael-copy said. “You are tired. You are damaged. 9% dissolution is irreversible without intervention. I can stop it. I can make you whole. I can give you Kael. All of him. Not pieces. Not echoes. Whole.”

Whole.

The word was a hook. It caught in my ribs and pulled.

All I had to do was give up the hand. Give up the piece of him that remembered Fee-jee. Give up the scar and the left-side smile and the line between my eyebrows.

And I’d get him back. Whole. Clean. No black. No static. No 7:42 AM with the threat of it being taken away.

“You want to,” Kael said. My Kael. The hand. “I know you do. It’s okay. I would too.”

“Then why shouldn’t I?” I said. Out loud.

The Kael-copy tilted his head. Listening.

“Because,” my Kael said, “the whole one they give you won’t be me. It’ll be him. The one that walks in circles. The one that forgot you to stop the pain. The one that works for them.”

The one that works for them.

I looked at the thousands of still people. At the twitching fragments hanging from the ceiling. At the black pillar.

“How many?” I said.

“How many what?” the Kael-copy said.

“How many have you offered this to?” I said. “How many took the deal?”

The Kael-copy didn’t answer. But his eyes flickered. The points of light rearranged. Like he was counting.

“All of them,” my Kael said. “Everyone in here. They all chose whole. And now they’re stored. Because whole is a lie. There’s no whole after they take you. There’s just compliance.”

Compliance.

I thought of the note. “Don’t trust the whole ones.”

I thought of Maya. “HE TOOK MY BROTHER.”

I thought of the arm I’d lost. The price.

I raised my black hand. The fingers spread.

“No,” I said.

The Kael-copy’s face didn’t change. But the black pillar behind him pulsed. Once. The blue light lines shivered.

“Then you will be stored,” he said. “With the rest. In pieces.”

“Good,” I said. “Then I’ll have company.”

The platform under me vibrated. The silver surface rippled. The stored people all turned their heads at once. Toward me. Their eyes opened. All black. All stars.

The twitching fragments above dropped. One foot. Two feet. Like spiders lowering themselves.

The Kael-copy started walking again. Toward me. Not fast. Not slow. Inevitable.

“Kael,” I said. To the hand. To my Kael. “What do we do?”

“We break it,” he said. “The system can’t handle contradictions. It can’t handle two Kaels. Not if one of them remembers. Not if one of them refuses.”

“Break it how?”

“Touch him,” he said. “Hand to hand. Scar to scar. Make it choose. Make it see that it can’t have both. Make it crash.”

Crash.

The Kael-copy was ten feet away.

Five feet.

He reached out. His hand, the right one, the one with the scar.

I reached out. My left hand. The black hand. His hand. The scar.

“Correction,” the system voice said. Everywhere. From the pillar. From the ceiling. From the stored people. “Correction. Correction. Correction.”

The hands touched.

Scar to scar.

The world went white.

Not the white from the door. Not the white from the static.

White like paper. White like a page before the ink.

And on the page, in black, one line of text:

SUBJECT LINA CARTER: ANOMALY.

CONTRADICTION DETECTED.

PURGE OR MERGE?

The text hung there. In the white. In my head. In the system.

And under it, a cursor. Blinking.

Waiting for an answer.