28 May The Last Tape

Part I

You can always tell the first-timers by their hands. The ones who fidget, who pull at threads on their sleeves or drum the desk like they’re waiting for a verdict they already know is bad.

Me? I stopped noticing hands years ago. I stopped noticing a lot of things.

Name’s Vince Ashcroft. Been working the East Corridor Office of the Watchtower Division going on twenty-one years now. I show people how they’re going to die. That’s the job. No metaphor, no marketing fluff, no dramatized pitch with blinking lights or mystic robes. Just a sterile monitor, a play button, and four to seven minutes of absolute finality. Sometimes more, depending on how slow it happens.

I wasn’t always in this chair. Before all this, I played rhythm guitar for a sludge-metal outfit that barely scraped the surface of the Tampa scene. We were loud, angry, broke, and high most of the time. Had a decent following—nothing chart-worthy, but the kind of local loyalty that earned you free drinks and backroom stitches if things went sideways at a show. Which they usually did.

I died once. Or I should have. Van flipped on I-275 after a set in Ybor. Our drummer lost half his skull to the guardrail, and our bassist got folded into the frame, instantly rendered unrecognizable except via dental records. I crawled out with a broken arm and no pulse for six and a half minutes. I don’t remember the light or the tunnel. I remember cold asphalt, wet with gasoline. I remember screaming. But more than anything, I remember the smell—like hot copper and burning rubber. Then nothing.

When I woke up, someone from the Division was waiting. Said I had “potential.” That was their word. Not talent or skill, but potential. As if I were a seed buried in some rotting soil, just waiting for the right rain to sprout into something useful.

I’ve been here ever since.

The job doesn’t start with death. It starts with silence. Most folks sit in that chair, staring at the monitor like it’s going to change if they squint hard enough. Some cry. Some laugh. Some bolt before I can even log in. But the ones who stay—the ones who lean forward, who mutter “Let’s just get it over with”—they carry something heavier than fear. Something like resignation, or maybe recognition. As if they already know what’s coming, and they just need the footage to make it official.

The Company doesn’t explain where the videos come from. That’s above my pay grade. I don’t film them, I don’t edit them, and I don’t vet them. I’m not supposed to. I’ve asked, once or twice, back when I still thought curiosity might earn me something other than migraines and reprimands. All I got was a cold look from the archivist and a copy of the employee handbook with the “Do Not Inquire” clause highlighted in red.

The one thing I do know—the one thing they tell us, right from the start—is this: the video is always right. Doesn’t matter how much it hurts, how absurd it looks, how unlikely the scenario. If it’s on screen, it happens. Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But it comes, eventually.

I’ve shown people everything from elevator accidents to septic shock. One guy got struck by frozen sewage falling from an airline at cruising altitude. A literal blue ice bomb from the sky. He laughed so hard he vomited. Came back a week later, still grinning, said thanks. Said it let him live free. Two months later, the headline made national news.

I’ve had some rough ones. Children. Newlyweds. People who ask for specific days—birthdays, holidays, anniversaries—hoping I’ll say not then, as if I can make it easier. I can’t. I’m just the messenger. The playback guy. The final act’s usher with a tie that doesn’t fit and a badge that says “Consultant.”

Today started like most. Window open, cigarette burning, the scent of wet concrete and wilted grass wafting in from the park across the street. I don’t get many visitors to my floor, so I stopped caring about policies like “smoke-free buildings” years ago. Hell, most people don’t even know this wing exists.

I checked the day’s log on my terminal:
9:30 AM – Mary Peters (F/31)
2:00 PM – Eric Vance (M/38)

Mary was flagged green. New intake. Likely to watch. No known mental disorders, no history of violence, just another young woman with anxiety and too much curiosity for her own good. Probably heard about us from a “friend of a friend.” That’s how most of them come—urban legend referrals. Whispers at parties. Muffled questions in therapist offices. “Have you heard of the place that shows you how you die?”

There’s no official signage on the building. No receptionist. No floor directory. Just a nondescript door at the end of a long hallway, a security pad that buzzes when it wants to, and the faint smell of paper and ozone that never quite fades. If you find it, it’s because you were meant to. Or because someone nudged the system in your favor.

I closed the schedule window and leaned back in my chair, watching as the morning walkers passed by in pairs and clusters. Dogs barked, coffee steamed, pigeons pecked at crusts on the sidewalk. If this job has taught me anything, it’s that none of it means you’re safe. I’ve seen twenty-four-year-olds drop dead in their kitchen, and ninety-year-olds go out giggling in their sleep. There’s no pattern. No mercy. Just footage.

A flicker of movement caught in the reflection on my office window—someone stepping inside behind me.

I didn’t have to turn to know it was Mary Peters. Her shoes were too quiet, her breath caught somewhere between hesitation and apology.

“Hi, I heard you know about death?” she asked, voice tight around the edges.

“Well, I know enough,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette in the ashtray I kept in the top drawer.

She looked like most of them do—young, tired, already grieving something she couldn’t name. I motioned for her to sit, and she did so with the grace of someone trying not to run.

That session came and went. She watched. They usually do, if they make it past the door. It’s not my place to talk about the contents of the videos once they’re seen. Let’s just say hers wasn’t quick. And it wasn’t painless.

She didn’t cry. Some part of me respects that.

I signed the nondisclosure paperwork, gave her the customary advice—”spend time with loved ones, try not to dwell, and don’t speak of this place again”—then saw her out.

When she was gone, I pulled up the 2:00 appointment and made a note to myself: “Eric Vance—yellow tag. High volatility potential. May require containment.”

I sighed and cracked my knuckles, muttering to no one, “Let’s hope New Jack hasn’t locked him up yet.”

Part II

The hallway to New Jack’s office always smelled like ozone and melted laminate. That burnt-plastic tang that clings to your nostrils and makes your sinuses itch just enough to distract you from the flickering fluorescents overhead. It was the only corridor in the entire East Wing that never seemed to lose power, never accumulated dust, and never registered anything less than perfect temperature calibration on the building’s climate grid.

Some of us figured it was rigged that way—sterile, quiet, and controlled to the decimal. Others said the hallway bent a little around New Jack’s door if you walked it long enough and paid attention. I never noticed the bend myself, but I stopped staring too hard a long time ago.

New Jack’s office was a near replica of mine—modular desk, twin monitors, same gray ergonomic chair we were all issued in Year Four of the Restructure—but his space always looked untouched. No coffee rings. No dented ashtray tucked into a drawer. No photos, posters, or mementos. Even his digital clock still blinked factory green, frozen at 12:00 like it had never been set.

I knocked once. A courtesy. I was already opening the door before he answered.

He looked up from his screen with that flat, too-wide stare he’d perfected over the years. Eyes like wet glass marbles. He didn’t blink for at least four seconds, and even then, it seemed more like a mechanical twitch than a reflex.

“Vince,” he said. No smile. No inflection.

“Jack,” I returned, easing the door shut behind me. “You got one in Holding again?”

He nodded slowly, then gestured toward the closed secondary door on the far wall—the one that led to what we used to call the Observation Room. Now, most just called it The Box. Soundproofed, lightproofed, probably lead-lined. No one without Clearance Tier B or higher was supposed to even know it existed. I’d used one myself in the early years, but that was before HR rewrote the ethics clause.

“He’s… resistant,” New Jack said. “Refused the first offer. Got physical.”

“Did you report it?”

He tilted his head, just barely. A fraction of movement that suggested both affirmation and something more elusive. Hesitation, maybe. Or calculation.

“Not yet,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

“You ever think maybe these holdovers are happening too often lately?” I asked, walking to his desk and leaning over the terminal. His screen still showed the default login interface. He hadn’t even queued up the footage for playback. “That makes three this month for you alone.”

“I only follow protocol,” he said. “If the subject refuses the video, containment is authorized.”

“Sure. But containment doesn’t mean isolation and a full psych freeze without report.”

New Jack didn’t flinch or defend himself. For the longest time, he just stared at me.

Eventually, he spoke. “I had a swimmer last week,” he said.

I straightened. “A swimmer?”

“Mid-thirties. Ice fishing trip. Tape showed him falling through and drowning. Classic hypothermia spiral. Struggled. Sinks. Standard.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “That’s not what happened.”

“Two nights ago,” he said, turning his monitor to show a news article with a coroner’s photo blurred out. “Self-immolation. Downtown alley. Witnesses say he poured kerosene on himself. No indication of mental illness prior. Tape was reviewed three times before presentation.”

I scanned the article, noting the name. Devon Kaltz. I remembered the intake. Quiet guy. Hesitated. Watched the whole thing without comment.

“You think he was trying to beat the death on file?” I asked. “Change the outcome?”

New Jack shook his head. “I think the outcome changed without him. I think the video was wrong.”

“That’s not supposed to happen,” I said finally.

“I know,” he said.

I leaned down and looked closer at the monitor. It was still logged into the Company’s internal vault. He hadn’t scrubbed his access logs. Rookie mistake—except Jack wasn’t a rookie. He was the cleanest file in the building. Never late. Never flagged. Never questioned.

“Jack,” I said. “Have you been pulling auxiliary files?”

He didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.

“Off-record branches? Crossfade timelines?”

Still silence.

“Unauthorized previews?”

“I needed to understand,” he said quietly. “I needed to see if it was happening to others.”

“And was it?” I asked.

He nodded.

“How many?”

His fingers tapped the edge of the desk, slow and methodical, as if counting invisible lines on his palm.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“Seventeen mismatches?” I asked. “You sure?”

“Some were small. Wrong date. Different setting. Others were… severe. One subject had no death recorded at all.”

I stood still for a long moment, watching him. Watching the faint twitch in his jaw as he processed something silently. There was no sweat on his brow, no panic in his posture. In spite of that, I could see the tension pulling at the edges of his mouth.

“You didn’t report this,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“They would’ve wiped my access.”

He was probably right. The Company didn’t entertain anomaly reports from Tier C personnel. You had to file them through a handler, and the handlers were all relocated when the Reconciliation Protocols went into effect two years ago. That left us—the last generation of direct presenters—without a voice at the table.

“Anything else I should know?” I asked.

New Jack turned to the wall-mounted cabinet behind him. It was flush with the drywall, coded to his biometric ID. He pressed his palm to the surface, and a soft hiss followed as the door retracted.

Inside were several data cartridges—old models, mostly glass-encased quantum cores used during the last analog-digital bridge cycle. One of them was matte black, unlabeled except for a silver seal with a single initial etched into it: V.

He handed it to me without speaking.

I stared at the cartridge, a chill running down my spine. I knew I was holding something meant to remain unseen.

“That’s not the one I watched,” I said, swallowing hard.

“I know,” he replied.

“Where did this come from?”

“I found it in the archive,” he said. “Your original death file was replaced in the master stack sometime around your fifth year. This was buried in a shelf tagged for compression.”

I stared at the cartridge, unsure if I should pocket it or smash it against the wall.

“And you watched it?” I asked.

New Jack didn’t answer.

Instead, he turned back to his desk, opened a blank intake form, and said, “Vince, I think we’re not showing people how they die anymore. I think we’re telling them.”

The door buzzed behind me. My next appointment.

I didn’t move.

I slipped the cartridge into my jacket pocket and left without another word.

Part III

The elevator to Sublevel 3 groaned like it hated remembering it still had to move. Most days, the building’s lower levels felt as if they were resisting gravity, not succumbing to it. The walls grew narrower the farther down you went, and the lighting shifted gradually from fluorescent white to that dull, soulless amber that looked like it belonged in a fallout shelter. They never piped in music. Just the low churn of old hydraulics and the occasional groan from pipes that hadn’t been serviced since the Nixon administration.

The Archive sat behind a steel-plated vault door, reinforced during the Continuity Security Act of ‘87. At least, that was the last year etched into the registry panel. Everything else had been updated digitally—except the man who operated it.

Gellar was a fixture here long before I was. Nobody knew his first name, and I doubted he remembered it himself. He was thin in that way that didn’t look like weight loss but like something had carved the fat out of him on purpose—wire-frame limbs, translucent skin, and a pair of eyes that never left the monitors unless he had a reason. Rumor had it he hadn’t stepped outside in twelve years. Still carried a pocket watch. Still kept analog backups of all incoming death codes on microfiche.

He was sitting in his usual rolling chair, back hunched, habitually twirling a stylus between his knuckles. His workstation spanned half the chamber, layered in tiers of glowing blue holo-sheets and shelved reels—some marked with codes I’d never even seen in the protocol handbooks.

“Mr. Ashcroft,” he said as I stepped across the threshold. “You’re late.”

“I wasn’t aware I had an appointment.”

“Neither was I,” he said without looking away from his screens. “Yet here we are.”

I held up the black cartridge. “This come from your stacks?”

Gellar’s fingers froze. He didn’t take the cartridge from me. He just leaned forward and sniffed once, as though scent alone might validate its origin.

“Matte-finished synth-glass. No branding. Internal seal broken. No metadata registration. Access tier… unrecorded. But yes, that’s ours,” he said. “Or it was.”

“It’s tagged for me.”

“I can see that,” he replied. “And I assume you’ve already deduced that this was not the file shown to you upon entry.”

“I have.”

“Then the question becomes: why was it stored where only a clearance-voided operator could find it?”

“That’s one of several questions I have,” I said. “You up for an exchange of favors?”

Gellar sighed, set the stylus down, and finally turned to face me. His eyes were the same color as static—washed out and slightly misaligned, like his pupils didn’t fully agree on the shape of the world. He studied me for a long time.

“You’ve heard the term redundant vectoring, I assume?” he asked.

“Used to show up in the old tech manuals. Something about overlapping timelines.”

“Redundant vectoring,” he began, rising from his chair and moving to a wall of vertical drawers, “is what we call the unavoidable fractalization of universal potential. Every life—every choice, every second—casts probabilistic echoes. The videos we store aren’t predictive models. They’re actual outcomes. Tangible records harvested from adjacent instances.”

“So they’re real,” I said. “But not necessarily our real.”

Gellar gave a small, bitter smile. To me, it appeared more like a grimace, rearranged to fit polite society.

“Precisely. Our job has never been to predict death, Mr. Ashcroft. We curate it. We assign the most probable, most stable outcome to each subject in order to reinforce local continuity. We are reality’s spine surgeons. We ensure no limb twitches where none should exist.”

“That’s a hell of a metaphor,” I said.

“It’s not a metaphor,” he replied, returning to the console and pulling up a schematic. Onscreen, I saw what appeared to be a branching neural map—veins of light twisting into fractals, some marked in green, others in red, and a rare few blinking amber. “This is what happens when a subject receives an unapproved vector. They begin to resonate with the wrong layer. That causes bleed—feedback loops, probability collapses, nonlinear behavior.”

“Reality gets confused,” I said.

“Exactly,” he confirmed. “And confusion is intolerable to the system. Eventually, something must collapse to reconcile the contradiction.”

I thought about New Jack. About his swimmer. About the alley fire that shouldn’t have happened.

“And you’ve seen this happening more often?” I asked.

Gellar leaned back, drummed his fingers once on the panel, and pulled up a new interface—an access log.

“Four months ago, we began receiving trace anomalies in the L3 stack,” he said. “Initial assumption was data corruption from the 7xA compression algorithm. But then we traced the breaches back to operator usage. Tier C, East Wing.”

He tapped twice.

Operator ID: J_RN103
Alias: New Jack

“Jack’s been pulling off-vector reels,” I said.

“Not just pulling them,” Gellar said. “He’s been cross-tagging alternate deaths to known clients. Feeding them incompatible endpoints. Some were close enough that the system didn’t flag them immediately. But others—”

He tapped again. A thumbnail appeared. It was labeled KALTZ_D_02X-LT, tagged with a red triangle.

I didn’t need to open it. I already knew the contents.

“Why?” I asked.

“Unknown,” Gellar said. “But it’s not just Jack. We’ve recorded three other operators with unauthorized retrieval events in the last twelve months. One in Osaka. One in Geneva. One flagged but not yet identified. The pattern is spreading.”

“And no one upstairs has done anything?”

“We’ve submitted three escalation reports. No response. Either they’re ignoring it, or they’ve been compromised.”

I leaned on the console, staring at the logs. I spotted one with a timestamp that didn’t align with anything I’d seen on the public ledger. No name, just a numeric string followed by a designation I hadn’t seen in years: C6V-ASH_OLD-PRM-OBLQ.

“Pull that one,” I said, pointing.

Gellar hesitated. “That file requires executive override.”

I showed him the cartridge.

“This override enough?”

He studied me for a moment, and then nodded.

A few keypresses later, the console spat out a thin crystal shard—smaller than the cartridge, more modern. Gellar handed it over like a man passing a sealed confession.

“This is an early file,” he said. “Marked for oblique transmission, which means it was never meant to be shown. The obliques are reserved for candidates deemed potential disruptors—people whose deaths are likely to cause disproportionate ripple effects if misassigned.”

“So they buried it.”

“They curated it,” he corrected.

I pocketed the shard.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” Gellar replied. “If you’re opening that file, you’re already off the grid.”

“What happens when too many of us go off-grid?” I asked.

Gellar turned back to his screen, and for the first time since I’d known him, he looked… afraid.

“Then the grid recalibrates. Usually by deleting whatever it can’t reconcile.”

I left him there, in his den of reels and wires, his monitors flickering. The lights didn’t follow me on the way out.

They just went dark behind me, one by one.

Part IV

I always knew the end was creeping when they started assigning me trainees again.

They didn’t call it that, of course. Management phrased it as “institutional knowledge transfer,” like I was passing down recipes for meatloaf instead of procedures for preparing people to watch their own deaths. Still, the pattern was the same. You get looped into onboarding, sit through a few shadow sessions, walk a fresh recruit through the rules, and then one day, your keycard stops opening certain doors. Eventually, your login expires, and someone else takes your seat. No retirement party. No final paycheck. Just silence.

The newest one came in on a Wednesday. Mid-20s, maybe a bit younger, thin-framed with a sharp brow and eyes too thoughtful for this building. The kind of eyes that noticed everything and wanted to dissect it. His name tag read REESE, printed in that same uncomfortably cheerful sans-serif the company insisted on for all new hires.

I met him at the edge of my floor, outside the Presentation Room.

“You’re Ashcroft?” he asked, offering a hand. His grip was tight but lacked confidence.

“Yeah,” I said, not returning the gesture. “You’re early.”

“They told me you’d be the one walking me through it.”

“I am. Don’t expect a syllabus.”

He smiled thinly and followed me inside.

The Presentation Room hadn’t changed since the first day I saw it—low ceilings, neutral-gray walls that looked soft under artificial lighting, a viewing monitor mounted just above a bare desk. The air always smelled like laminate and printer toner, no matter how often they changed the filters. Some people said the rooms were identical in every building across the world. That wouldn’t surprise me. Uniformity was our closest thing to godhood around here.

Reese watched silently as I pulled up the client file. A woman in her late fifties. Moderate health, flagged as a probable “compliant.” She was already waiting in the reception wing, no doubt fidgeting under the flickering wall clock, trying to decide if turning around would cost her more than staying.

“First rule,” I said, “you don’t lead with the word death. You ease into it. Talk about final events, recorded outcome, whatever makes it sound less personal.”

He nodded once but said nothing. His fingers twitched, as if they wanted to take notes, but he hadn’t brought a pad.

When the woman entered, I saw the usual hesitation—eyes darting, shoulders drawn tight. She sat down slowly, clutching her purse as if it contained some last shred of protection.

I moved through the protocol the way I always did—confirm identity, explain the procedure, obtain verbal consent, then turn the monitor toward them.

She didn’t speak during the playback. Most don’t. Her death was quiet. A collapsed lung while gardening. Peaceful, if inconvenient. She nodded twice during the video, as if something about it confirmed what she already feared. When it ended, she signed the release and left without another word.

I turned to Reese, who hadn’t moved a muscle.

“Well?” I asked.

“That didn’t bother you?”

I shrugged. “You want it to bother you, at first. It means your humanity hasn’t packed its bags just yet. But you’ll find it easier if you stop trying to carry what’s not yours.”

Reese leaned against the wall, eyes fixed on the now-dark monitor. “She didn’t cry.”

“Doesn’t mean she didn’t feel it. People process differently. Some scream. Some laugh. Some collapse. She nodded. Probably relief.”

“But she can’t change it,” he said. “Knowing doesn’t help.”

“It’s not about changing it,” I said. “It’s about seeing it. Accepting it. That’s the function.”

He frowned. “The function for whom? Them, or us?”

I didn’t answer. Not out of defiance, but because the moment you started asking that question—who benefits—you were already ankle-deep in mud no training manual could explain.

“You ever see one where the death didn’t match reality?” he asked. “Like… they saw it, and then it didn’t happen?”

His tone was cautious, but not ignorant. He was probing. I didn’t care for that. Not because the question was dangerous, but because it was familiar. I’d asked the same thing once. Not out loud. Not in a room like this. But in my own head, in the quiet hours, after too many cigarettes and too few answers.

“You’ll learn to stop asking that,” I said. “Or you’ll stop working here. One or the other.”

He looked at me, a flicker of disappointment crossing his expression.

“What if someone just refuses to watch?” he asked.

“They get one chance. If they walk, we write it up, file it under ‘Insubordinate Decline.’ Then someone else finishes the job.”

“Who?” he asked.

I gave him a long look. “Don’t ask about doors you’re not ready to open.”

Reese turned away and looked toward the ledger display on my desk—where the day’s scheduled clients were listed by time and partial name.

His face shifted.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

He didn’t answer at first. His brow furrowed, and he leaned closer to the screen. His lips parted, then closed again. He squinted, and a moment later, I saw his hand reach toward the edge of the monitor like he thought touching it would erase what he saw.

“You alright?” I asked again.

He took a deep breath. “That’s my mother,” he said.

His voice cracked on the last word.

I glanced at the screen. The 4:45 PM slot. M. Reese.

He stepped back as if the name itself had burned him. His arms folded across his chest, then dropped again. He didn’t sit. He didn’t move toward the door. He just stood there in that stiff, uncertain way I’d seen in new clients who hadn’t quite made the decision to stay.

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I said, though I knew better.

He looked at me then, and I could see something breaking behind his eyes. The beginning of disillusionment. Or perhaps the start of belief.

“You knew,” he said quietly. “Didn’t you?”

“No,” I answered. “But I know now.”

“Can I… can I recuse myself?”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t raise his voice or question the system. He just nodded once and left the room without another word.

I didn’t stop him.

Some truths don’t need to be taught. They just need to be lived.

Part V

Reese wasn’t at his desk when I came in the next morning, but the ledger already showed the 4:45 intake confirmed. M. Reese. Status: Verified. Arrival: Logged. Consent: Pending.

The name hadn’t changed overnight. I’d checked it twice. There was no mistake.

I told myself I wasn’t responsible for whatever came next. That this was the system’s choice, not mine. But systems are only neutral on the surface. Underneath, they’re made of hands and minds and rules drawn by people who stopped believing in consequences a long time ago.

At 4:42, she arrived.

She was smaller than I expected. Wore a sweater with frayed cuffs and carried a bag that looked too heavy for her frame. Her hair was pinned neatly, and her glasses slid down the bridge of her nose every time she tilted her head. When she smiled—softly, politely—it was the sort of expression that came from a lifetime of apologizing for taking up space.

She greeted me by name, which meant someone had told her who I was. Probably Reese. Whether that happened yesterday or ten years ago, I didn’t ask.

“Is this the place where they show you things you shouldn’t know?” she asked, her voice calm, almost gentle.

I gestured to the chair across from the monitor. “Depends on who’s asking.”

She smiled again and sat down slowly. “I’m not afraid of knowing. Just afraid of what comes after.”

I didn’t tell her that the knowing was what came after.

The formalities went quickly. She signed the release form without reading it, nodded through the disclaimers, and folded her hands in her lap while I loaded the file.

Reese entered the room without a word. He stood behind the partition glass, arms crossed, eyes dark with worry. I gave him a brief glance, but he didn’t acknowledge it. His attention was locked on her—his mother—seated and silent as the loading bar reached completion.

The video began.

The image quality was unusually soft. Not pixelated or degraded, just… gentle, like it had been shot on film instead of digital capture. The scene showed her in a greenhouse—warm light filtering through fogged glass, dust motes dancing in the air. She was trimming ivy from a wire lattice, humming a tune I didn’t recognize.

Then came the collapse.

It wasn’t violent or sudden. She simply sagged against the bench behind her, clippers falling from her hand. Her expression remained neutral. Content, even. She showed no signs of distress, never clutched at her chest. There was no blood or noise.

I let the video run its course.

Reese didn’t move. His mother blinked at the dark screen, then turned to me and said, “That’s not so bad.”

I nodded.

She signed the final line on the consent tablet and thanked me. When she left, she passed Reese in the hallway. They didn’t speak.

After the door shut behind her, I turned to Reese, who had already stepped into the room.

“That wasn’t real,” he said.

“She signed off,” I replied.

“She hates plants,” he said, his voice clipped. “She doesn’t keep any. Not even plastic ones. She’s allergic to most flowering species. She wouldn’t be in a greenhouse.”

“Maybe it’s aspirational,” I said, but even I didn’t believe it.

Reese stared at the monitor, where the static had faded into the default company seal.

“I’ve been watching these with you all week,” he said. “Every one of them resembles a surveillance feed. There’s always dirt. Grain. Movement in the margins. This one felt… composed.”

I didn’t reply.

“It felt as if someone designed it,” he continued. “Like it was a memorial, not a record.”

I leaned against the wall and rubbed at the knot forming behind my right temple. “You’re not wrong,” I admitted.

He looked at me. “How long?” he asked.

“Long enough,” I said. “And I’m not the only one who’s noticed.”

I didn’t tell him about the logs. About the cross-tagged files, the compression anomalies, or the cartridge burning a hole in my desk drawer. I didn’t mention Gellar’s theory about vector collapse or the implications of curated outcomes.

I just told him enough.

“Some of the videos aren’t matching,” I said. “And not just by a little. We’re seeing changed locations, altered conditions, even… outcomes that never materialize. Deaths that get replaced.”

“By who?” he asked.

“No one knows. But someone’s editing the reel.”

He stepped away from the monitor and paced once, arms folded, jaw flexing.

“What if she’s not supposed to die?” he asked. “What if… what we just saw was a decoy?”

“It still could happen,” I said. “We can’t know which version is ‘true’ anymore.”

“But you showed it to her. That means it’s binding, right?”

I hesitated. “That used to be the rule.”

“Then what’s changed?”

I didn’t answer.

Reese stopped pacing and turned to face me. “You need to pull her file. The raw one. I want to see what it was before this.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “Only an archivist or a Tier-B handler can authorize that kind of pull.”

“Then lie,” he said. “Or better yet—don’t. Just… show me the truth.”

There was a quiet urgency in his voice that I hadn’t heard before, tension beneath the syllables.

“I’ll look into it,” I said.

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s all I can give you right now.”

He shook his head, stepped out of the room, and left me alone with the cooling hum of the idle machine.

After a while, I queued up the footage again. I let it run through from start to finish. This time, I watched closely.

The shadows on the greenhouse floor didn’t match the angle of the sunlight. The ivy lattice didn’t shed leaves when she clipped it. And for a single frame—just before her breath left her—I saw the corners of the screen jitter. Not a glitch, exactly, but more like a seam pulling tight.

I rewound and played it again. The frame held and then buckled, before finally stabilizing.

Something behind the reel was watching back.

Part VI

There’s a specific kind of silence that comes after midnight in the Watchtower building. It’s not the absence of noise so much as the soft awareness that everything mechanical has fallen still. No elevator chimes or vents humming. In the early morning hours, even the motion-triggered hallway lights seem to hesitate before flickering on.

I let myself back into my office using the analog override card—a relic from before the digital lockdown protocols. Most of the staff thought those had been decommissioned after the 2021 breach, but I knew better. Gellar had given me the last working copy, sliding it under my door in an unmarked envelope a year ago with no note or instructions.

The terminal I used was my backup—a modified unit disconnected from the intranet, never synced, never updated. It still ran the old stack reader, complete with the code interpreter for pre-flagged shards like the one I now held between my fingers. The casing was lighter than I expected, though it pulsed with a cold current that made my palm ache.

I slid the shard into the port and sat back.

The screen flared to life. No loading sequence. No authentication request.

Just an image.

An image of me.

Not the me from twenty years ago—the road-bleary burnout with roach burns on his hoodie and an arm still wrapped in gauze from the wreck. This was current me, slightly stooped, thicker in the middle, with flecks of silver running through my beard. The timestamp on the corner matched a future date—three months from now, exactly to the hour.

In the video, I walked through the front doors of the Watchtower building.

That was it.

There was no van. No fire. No screams echoing through twisted steel. Just me walking across the parking lot at dusk, a guitar case in my right hand, my badge dropped in the stairwell behind me.

No one followed or stopped me. In the footage, I crossed the lot, reached the tree line, and paused momentarily—then vanished into the woods.

The feed stopped, and I sat there, staring at the frozen frame, waiting for something more. A jump cut, or a rewind. A signature flicker that told me the reel was unfinished.

I saw nothing of the sort.

I rewound it and watched again, and got the same result.

I tried a third time—no change. This wasn’t a death reel, it was a disappearance—and that made no sense. I’d seen my original tape when I was recruited. I remembered it, every second of it. The van’s twisted roll across the median, the spark from the ruptured tank, the burst of fire climbing the windshield. I’d screamed so hard my ribs cracked. I remembered the shape of the flames licking the ceiling. I remembered clawing at the door and finding only heat. I remembered dying.

But now…

I minimized the playback window and pulled up the shard metadata.

Oblique Transmission Vector. Tier Zeta. Subject Status: NULLIFIED.

I hadn’t seen that status before. Not even during the random audits Gellar let me sit in on.

Nullified meant no fixed death. No assigned endpoint. It wasn’t a blank—it was absence. The system had no consensus about how I died because I wasn’t supposed to.

I felt the edges of something open inside me—a kind of raw psychic exposure—peeling away the excuses I’d used to justify every decision I’d made since joining.

I took the elevator down to Sublevel 3. This time, the lights stayed on.

Gellar was waiting for me.

He didn’t ask why I was there.

“You watched it,” he said.

“I did.”

“And?”

“It doesn’t end.”

He nodded, unsurprised. “Obliques rarely do.”

I leaned against the cold edge of his server bank. “You knew.”

“I suspected,” he said. “Your recruitment file was always… irregular.”

“You showed me a death, Gellar. One that burned its way into me. One I took a job to avoid.”

He said nothing.

“I’ve built my entire identity around surviving that moment,” I continued. “And now you’re telling me it never happened?”

Gellar tapped a command into his interface. A different screen illuminated on the wall behind him, displaying a recruitment chart—a flowchart of names, timelines, and vector types.

“You were given a projected death, not a real one,” he said. “Some candidates are shown staged endpoints to facilitate their entry into the system.”

“Why me?”

“Because you had the capacity to believe it.”

I stepped back, the air feeling thinner now.

“You lied to me,” I said. “You let me serve this place for twenty-one years under false pretenses.”

“We didn’t let you,” he said. “We needed you.”

“For what?”

“To be here when things started to unravel.”

He pulled up another window—system integrity reports, flagged nodes, corrupted timelines, deaths that no longer mapped to their assigned owners.

“You’re a fixed point, Vince,” he said. “An anchor. Nullified subjects don’t generate resonance. That makes you stable in ways the rest of us aren’t.”

“I’m not a person to you,” I said. “I’m ballast.”

“You’re more than that,” he said. “You’re unbound. You’re the only one who can leave without consequence.”

I thought of the footage. The simple act of walking away.

“I’m not dead in that tape,” I said.

“No,” Gellar agreed. “You’re free.”

The word didn’t feel real in my mouth. Not in this place. Not in a building lined with glass coffins and whispers that echoed backward through time.

“Why show it to me now?” I asked.

“Because you’re ready,” he said. “Because if you stay much longer, the system will find a way to assign you something permanent. It doesn’t like gaps. Eventually, it closes them.”

I left without another word.

* * * * * *

Back in my office, I sat at the desk and stared at the shard. It glinted in the dim lamplight like something both sacred and profane. Something forgotten by its maker.

I thought of Reese. Of his mother. Of the glitches. The cracks showing through the seams.

What if none of this had ever been real?

What if all the deaths were scaffolding for something we couldn’t comprehend?

What if the Company didn’t preserve fate, but created it?

And what if all I had to do… was walk?

I reached under my desk and pulled out the old guitar case. It still bore the sticker from my last show. The hinges creaked from disuse.

I didn’t play anymore, not since the recruitment, but I’d kept the case as a reminder.

Before, I’d considered it a relic. Now, it felt like a door.

The screen on my monitor dimmed, and my login session expired. The clock ticked one minute past midnight. I stood, frozen.

No alarms sounded. No red lights pulsed. No intercom barked warnings through the ceiling.

There was nothing but silence, the kind of quiet that comes before something ends. Or before something begins.

Part VII

New Jack’s door was unlocked when I got there, which was already strange. He never left it unsecured. Not during work hours. Certainly not after.

I stepped inside and found him exactly where I expected—seated at his desk, spine rigid, fingers steepled like he’d been waiting since the day began.

“You watched it,” he said. No question in his voice. Just certainty.

“I did,” I replied.

He nodded once and gestured to the chair across from him. “Sit, then. Let’s not waste time pretending we’re strangers.”

I lowered myself into the chair without looking away from him. The fluorescent lights in his office hummed too loudly, as if trying to drown out what we both already knew was coming.

“I want the truth,” I said.

“You’ve already seen it,” he answered.

“Then say it out loud. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

New Jack leaned back, folding his hands across his chest. His eyes, pale and overlit, reflected nothing but the screen’s ambient glow.

“I’ve been showing people the wrong deaths,” he said.

There it was.

“Why?”

“Because the right ones stopped feeling right,” he said. “Because after a decade of watching strangers break open from seeing their ends, I started wondering if the machine had earned the right to dictate it.”

“That’s not your call,” I said, though the words felt hollow even as I spoke them.

He smiled, in that weary, exhausted way someone smiles when the weight has already crushed them and they’ve grown accustomed to their suffering.

“No,” he agreed. “But it wasn’t theirs either. The system doesn’t ask. It just plays.”

I let that settle for a moment.

“You altered seventeen files,” I said. “Confirmed.”

“More than that,” he replied. “Those were just the ones they caught. I’ve been feeding alt-vectors into the presentation stack for years. Not random ones. Not fantasies. Just… options. Possibilities they weren’t being allowed to consider.”

“You’re not the only one doing it.”

“I know.”

“Gellar said there were anomalies in Geneva. Osaka. Others.”

“There are more. Too many to contain now.”

I looked at the files stacked on his desk—slim cartridges, glass data rings, a few older reels sealed in thermal wrap. Every one of them marked with the same insignia: an open circle, punctured by a single black line down the center.

“You call them hope tapes?” I asked.

“I never gave them a name,” he said. “But that’s what they are. They’re not lies or fantasies. They’re just… alternates. Echoes the system doesn’t want acknowledged.”

“And you think showing them matters?”

“I think choice matters,” he said. “Even if the choice is just to see a different version of the end.”

I rubbed my eyes in an effort to relieve the ache building behind them.

“The system is cracking,” I said. “Gellar showed me the instability reports. There are tears forming at the branch junctions. Deaths are overlapping. People are starting to remember outcomes they never experienced.”

New Jack nodded slowly. “I know. The machine is trying to course-correct, but it was never built to process ambiguity.”

“Then why keep pushing?”

“Because entropy is better than tyranny.”

I stared at him. The quiet man I’d worked beside for over a decade. The efficient, obedient operator. Always early, always precise, now staring back at me with the calm of someone who had nothing left to lose.

“You could’ve come to me,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have listened,” he replied.

He wasn’t wrong.

“You want me to join you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I want you to leave, before the system reassigns you. Before it decides you’re too anomalous to tolerate.”

“That’s already happening.”

He stood and moved to the window, pulling the blind to one side just enough to see the parking lot below. The sky outside was flat and gray, clouds stretched over the horizon.

“You’re not meant to die here,” he said. “Not in this building, at least. Not by any vector we’ve seen.”

“I’ve seen my death,” I said.

“You saw what they gave you.”

“And now I’ve seen something else.”

He turned to face me again. “That makes you dangerous.”

“To who?”

“To everything.”

I thought of Reese, and of his mother. Of the seamless, serene death that hadn’t felt like any other I’d ever shown. I thought of the glitch in the footage. The way the image faltered just long enough to reveal the stitch holding it all together.

I thought of the van. The fire. The memory that wasn’t a memory. A nightmare gifted to me like a collar.

And I thought of the new tape. The one with no death at all.

“What happens if I walk?” I asked.

“No alarms. No sirens. No chase. This just… ends.”

“And what’s waiting on the other side?”

He shook his head. “That’s not the part we’re allowed to see.”

“I can’t fix this,” I said, standing up.

“No one can,” he replied. “But you can leave. That’s something.”

I reached for my guitar case. The latches clicked open with the same sound they always had, the hinges flexing like bones long out of use. I didn’t need the instrument inside. It wasn’t about music anymore. It was about memory. About who I’d been before this place transformed me.

I snapped it shut and slung it over my shoulder.

New Jack watched me, saying nothing.

At the door, I paused. “What happens to you?” I asked.

He smiled faintly. “I keep showing tapes, until they stop sending people. Or until the machine eats itself.”

I opened the door. The hallway was empty. The usual sounds of footfalls and buzzers were conspicuously absent. Overhead, I saw nothing but rows of dim panels, and in the distance, heard nothing but the unnatural, sterile hum of a life manufactured.

I didn’t log out of the system. I never offered a formal resignation. I simply left my badge on the security pedestal and took my leave.

Outside, the sky hadn’t changed, but it felt different. I breathed deeply, taking in the open air. The lot was still half-empty. The trees past the access road swayed in a wind I hadn’t noticed before.

I walked past the fence, beyond the perimeter beacon, past the line they told us we could never cross once we were embedded.

There was no resistance. No weight pressing down on my chest. No buzz of denial from the sensors overhead—just the sound of my boots on the gravel, and the trees waiting.

I didn’t look back.

I don’t know what waits beyond this. Maybe nothing… or maybe everything. But I know this: the tape doesn’t end with me dying. It ends with me walking.

And for the first time in two decades, that feels like living.