The segment hits at 7:03 p.m., and the first thing I register is sound—the room’s quiet breath as the anchor says it the way we rehearsed: “Pattern Concordance, Not Truth.” The second thing is my phone vibrating like a trapped insect. The third is the smell—salt off the bay pushing through my kitchen window, braided with disinfectant from the hall and the hot sugar of a neighbor’s late pastry experiment. I stand at the sink with a glass of water, but I don’t drink. I watch the chyrons, the spectrogram, the interface terms I stole with my lungs held.
“You did it,” I tell the empty room, and the room replies in a different language—pings, buzzes, little teeth in glass.
I put the water down and open my inbox. The first line: Bless you for saying it aloud. The next: Monster pretending to be measured. A cascade of subject lines clogs the top: Healing is compliance, You edited your mother, We can help your brother, Die slow. My hand floats above the trackpad, useless as a lifeguard whistle in a riptide.
The reputation score widget on my home screen ticks from 72 to 68 in a gentle animation meant to soothe. Then to 66. 64. Families trade these numbers like weather; tonight I become the storm map they refresh over dinner.
I screenshot the dip and send it to no one. I don’t want Jonas telling me he warned me, though he did. I don’t want Sera asking who will believe us if we don’t perform healing when the market sells forgetting as cure. I want a breath that belongs to me.
A push alert cuts across the others: Statement from Halcyon Beverage: We support science and condemn misinformation. Another: Curalis partners reaffirm commitment to ethical care—the halo icon glinting in the press card like a good-luck ring. On my TV, elevator screens from a drone b-roll whisper headlines between floors, the copy soft like lint: Questions raised… counseling offered… viewers urged to avoid online harassment while seeking clarity.
Micro-hook: The blimp’s lights smear across my window, and for a second I think of my mother’s thunder—how the sound softened pain—and then the notifications hammer again, harder than weather.
I switch my phone to Do Not Disturb and the trolls find a way around it—calendar invites titled APOLOGIZE ON AIR and MEET TRUE SCIENTISTS; AirDrops with links to a forum where my face has been mapped into a compassion meme. I decline, decline, decline, and the act of refusing feels like sweeping out the tide with a broom.
A number I don’t recognize calls with a label the carrier adds for my safety: Likely PR. I let it ring out. A voicemail arrives: “Mira, Dr. Gray here.” The warmth is manufactured but expensive. “I watched your piece. You’re in pain. I can help you not misinterpret the tools you touched. I can help your family. Call me before others use you.”
I press the phone to my sternum, a childish shield, and glance at the clock—Ten Days glowing on the corner of the station’s website ticker. I hit play again to hear every suture in his voice.
“You’re brave,” he says in the second half, and the word pulls a thread through my ribs. “Bravery without guidance is how people get hurt.”
“I have guidance,” I tell the room. “I have receipts.” I open a folder: CHAIR_UI, KITCHEN_CONSENT_1.wav, DEPO, AUTHORIZED_BENEVOLENCE. My mouse hovers over ShoreWitness. The last message from them still sits above the fold: Window small. Chair access tonight. After last night’s drop into linen and alarms, they went quiet.
My buzzer hisses. I startle, then laugh at the volume of my own jump. I press the intercom. “Who is it?”
“Courier,” a voice says. Neutral. Paper over gravel. “Legal service.”
Brave, I told the room; shaken, my hands say, as I buzz the door anyway. I walk down the narrow stairwell, the wood groaning under the weight of my choices. The city’s smell folds around me—salt and hot sugar and the sterile lemon from the lobby mop bucket. The halo icon winks at me from a receipt stuck in the corkboard near the mailboxes: purity rings stamped where rent should live.
The courier waits on the stoop in a gray jacket, fog damp on their shoulders, a news blimp drifting above like a slow surveillance moon. They hold a thick envelope banded with red: HAND DELIVERY—LEGAL. My name is block-printed, my address correct, my fate sealed in adhesive.
“I need a signature,” they say.
“I need a cure,” I say before I can stop my mouth. “Not the kind you sell.”
They don’t blink. I sign on a cracked screen with a stylus that leaves my name jagged, a seismograph of my pulse. The envelope is heavier than apologies. I thank the courier because manners are the last rails on a road they keep moving.
Back upstairs, I clear a space on my table between microphones and a plate that still remembers cinnamon. I slit the envelope with a butter knife. The paper inside smells like a printer that wants me dead. CEASE AND DESIST shouts in a font with shoulders; below it, Dr. Lucien Gray in the elegant calm of someone who buys truth by the pound.
I read aloud so my fear can hear it.
“You are hereby directed to cease publication of false statements regarding Dr. Gray, the Curalis Clinic, and related entities. You are cautioned that continued dissemination may result in injunctive relief, damages, fees, and sanctions. Your misapprehension of therapeutic technologies has already caused harm. We hope to resolve this amicably. We can help you avoid harm.”
I hold the letter between my fingers until the edges go soft with sweat. I flip to the exhibits. Screenshots of my spectrograms with a caption: Misinterpreted Artifacts. A pull quote from the anchor’s segment with “Pattern Concordance” highlighted in red like a sin. A final page with a proposed statement for me to post: I regret contributing to misinformation. I will seek guided care. The halo icon floats in the footer like a blessing that bites.
My phone rings again. Dr. Lucien Gray spells itself across the screen, caller ID burned into my retinas from a hundred specials. I answer because hiding won’t mute the segment that just aired.
“Mira,” he says, and the syllables pat my head. “I worried you’d pick up a worse call first.”
“I already did,” I say, and I touch the envelope so he can hear paper. “You sent company.”
“A formality,” he says. “Legal loves their rituals. I prefer conversation. How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” I lie, because I don’t owe him my tremor.
He exhales a sound like a therapist turning a page. “Your segment invites harm to families who need peace. You’re brave to accept that weight. Bravery without context is cruelty. Let me give you context. Coffee, somewhere neutral. The Strand has a booth where cameras behave.”
I picture the food hall—the etiquette sign that forbids filming at communal tables, the way everyone still liveblogs from the edges. I taste brine and frying batter, the air thick with arguments disguised as orders. “You want a stage,” I say.
“I want you to stop making yourself a target,” he says. “I want to heal what was hurt in those hospital nights.”
My jaw tightens. Vinyl, citrus, the interface menu—comfort masquerading as consent. “I need raw data,” I say. “And a way to pull my brother out before you turn him into content.”
“No one is content,” he says. “We serve participants. Your brother asked for peace.”
“He asked for quiet,” I snap. “I can hear the difference.”
Silence stretches like plastic pulled thin. “You cannot win this alone,” he says finally. “You can be folded into something softer. Or you can be broken for refusing to bend.”
“I choose neither,” I say, and I hang up before his voice finds another seam in me.
Micro-hook: The window fogs from my breath and for one heartbeat the halo icon on the letter reflects in it—two rings hovering where a face should be—then the condensation slides and the rings disappear.
I need to check ShoreWitness. I need a sign that I didn’t burn my only bridge to the back end of the machine. I open our encrypted app. The thread shows User not found. The avatar—just a wave cut into a circle—is gray. Messages remain, but the handle is gone, like a tooth pulled and the mouth trying to remember how to speak.
I scroll slower, looking for anything I missed. At the top, a thin bar offers: Recovered Drafts? I tap and the app presents a single unsent line preserved by accident or grace: Locker 12C, Marina West, wind tunnel stairwell, dust inside palm—leave, take, don’t wait. There’s a timestamp: 28 minutes before my after-hours crawl. Below, a faint map thumbnail—fog‐whited, the locker bank a smudge. My throat unlocks with a small sound that might be gratitude.
I stand and gather what I can carry that won’t betray me if grabbed—pen recorder, linen-wrapped drive, wallet with the three storm words copy, a hat that makes my face less mine. I slide the cease-and-desist into a zip bag as if plastic can make it less wet.
On my screen, sponsors continue to issue statements in their brand voices: “we value healing,” “we regret confusion,” “we trust science.” View counts climb. A friend texts a screenshot from a forum: Mira Vale: red until mom died—the worst fight already cut into a short. The city’s attention licks like flame. I let the phone’s brightness dim to protect my eyes and not my heart.
I check the peephole. The hallway is empty but smells like bleach and pasta. I step into the elevator, and the screen whispers Ten Days in a tone that wants to be pity. The doors open to a lobby reflecting fog; the marble makes me look like a smear trying to organize. Outside, the bay coughs a fresh sheet of white across the street; drones blink and reroute, news blimps yawning like bored whales. Families on the corner trade reputation scores under their breath, code words for scan outcomes tucking between sentences about soccer and rent.
I pull my hood up and walk toward the marina. Wind catches the edges of the cease-and-desist in my bag and flutters it like a trapped moth. I pass the Strand and feel cameras at the periphery like weather. I pass an ad where the halo icon crowns a carton of sparkling water—purity on ice. I hear my mother’s thunder in the parking garage above the seawall, the way it used to soften pain. I name what I can smell to keep my legs: salt, disinfectant, hot sugar.
The marina wind tunnel funnels air until it whistles against the metal rails. The fog here is different—directional, purposeful, a curtain that chooses its scenes. Gossip stalls at the turn where blimps avoid the turbulence; a delivery drone hangs, confused, then scoots away like a chastened pet.
I take the concrete stairs down into the locker alcove. The motion sensor lights stutter and then settle into a watery glow. My fingers slide along cold paint until the numbers rise under my skin: 12C. Dust sits in the little chrome cup of the lock. I lick my finger and press it into the palm-sized hollow beside the handle, like the draft instructed. My fingerprint leaves a smear in the dust, a signature for ghosts.
The locker opens with a hinge that complains. Inside: a hard case with tape around its middle labeled SEAMS in block letters I don’t know; a hospital wristband stamped by the halo; a folded napkin that smells faintly of citrus and audience anxiety; and a single earbud wrapped in a twist tie. The earbud cable ends in a tiny inline mic—cheap, easy to miss.
I listen to the tunnel breathe. Footsteps pass above—wet squeaks, then nothing. I put the earbud in and press the inline button. It plays a single, compressed sentence, ShoreWitness reduced to a grainy whisper that could be mistaken for ocean. “If I vanish,” the voice says, “don’t trust the comfort; follow the seams.”
The light flickers. The fog thickens in the mouth of the alcove and then draws back like it inhaled and changed its mind. I tuck the case into my bag, pocket the wristband, leave the napkin for whoever waits after me. I close the locker and wipe the chrome cup with my sleeve until dust tells no story.
The cease-and-desist shifts against my ribs like a living thing. My phone buzzes once—new email: From: Legal@Curalis; Subject: Opportunity to Clarify. Another buzz: From: SponsorRelations@HalcyonBeverage; Subject: Correction and Partnership. Another: From: Unknown; Subject: We saw you at the lockers.
I stand very still. The wind tunnel makes a note like a flute with a crack. The city’s breath moves around me, counting me in.
I ask the fog a question I can carry: When I lift this case to daylight, will the seams hold—or will the machine sew me shut?