I take the stairs because the elevator whispers headlines into your skull even when you don’t want them. The legal clinic sits over a salt-rimed pho place; the hallway smells like broth and disinfectant trying to compromise. At the end, a frosted door reads Patient Advocacy—Intake in letters that try to be kind. I knock, and a voice tells me to bring in whatever is burning.
“It’s not burning,” I say once I’m inside. “It’s glowing.”
The lawyer laughs once—air through teeth, no joy. She wears a cardigan too bright for the room and a pen clipped to it like a scalpel. “Let’s see the light show.”
I spread the addendum on the battered table. The halo icon sits in the header—two rings promising purity while hiding capture. I can’t stop looking at it the way you can’t stop pressing a sore tooth. She pulls a pack of highlighters from a drawer: neon yellow, magenta, toxic-sea green, and a blue that pretends to be calm.
“I’m going to color this like a carnival,” she says. “Carnivals tell truth about power.”
“Gray calls it therapy,” I say.
“Gray calls gravity ‘hugging,’” she says, already sliding ink over a paragraph. Yellow floods curated recall guidance until the words look radioactive. “This phrase waives your right to challenge context manipulation. They don’t say ‘implantation,’ they say ‘guidance.’ That’s two steps from hypnosis, one from script.”
I point with my nail at therapeutic discretion. “And this?”
“Magenta,” she says, uncapping with her teeth. “This allows them to adjust stimulus and environment ‘in service of clinical objectives.’ If a studio show is an ‘environment,’ and reconciliation is a ‘clinical objective,’ they can mix the two.”
“The law lets that stand?”
“The law doesn’t see a show when a hospital logo is nearby,” she says. “It sees a clinic offering care. Care gets deference. ‘If you felt better afterward, what’s the problem?’—that kind of deference.” She blots a margin with green. “Here’s your trapdoor. Data fiduciary exception: they owe duty to your ‘wellbeing,’ not your narrative accuracy.”
“Wellbeing according to whom,” I say, throat tighter than I want.
“Sponsors,” she says. “In practice.”
She flips to the signature page and circles my wristband ID with blue. “This is persistent. It keys across systems—triage intake, studio staging, billing, even publicity liaison.” She draws arrows. “Your band is a passport other people stamp.”
I take the band out of my pocket and lay it on the table. Its gray eye wakes and watches us. “I put it in the freezer earlier.”
“It remembers being cold,” she says. “And it remembers being yours.” She highlights irrevocable license to derivative analysis so the words scream. “Translation: they can synthesize a version of your responses and claim it’s still you because ‘pattern.’”
“Even if the version of me sells my brother a tranquilized lie.”
She caps the green and leans back. “Especially then. Family outcomes make new customers. ‘Healing’ is a growth market.”
Micro-hook: The highlighter scent sweetens the room until I taste hot sugar, and I remember the bakery downstairs, and I understand they’ve learned to make consent smell like a treat.
I run my fingers along the page where the ink warps the fiber and think of my mother’s linens. “If I challenge this…”
“They’ll say you’re anti-science,” she says. “They’ll ask why you signed. They’ll offer mediation with soft chairs. Legally, the only fast wedge is misrepresentation—prove they used assets outside declared protocol.”
“I can point to a frame,” I say, hearing the single tick of the red insert in my mind. “A one-frame override tied to Lab Seven’s library.”
“That helps,” she says, careful. “But you need provenance and motive. The law loves a tidy chain-of-custody and hates hurt feelings.”
“I can deliver chain-of-custody,” I say. “I can deliver motive if we translate their mercy into money.”
She smiles, first time with light. “Good. Now your next risk: time.”
I look where the yellow bleeds into magenta, how the colors pretend to merge into some new permission. “How much time?”
She nods toward the corner where a television hangs like an apology. It is muted, but the crawl is still a voice. Below stock tickers and weather-to-worry-about, words pass that take the room’s small oxygen: TruthScan: Family Edition—Two Weeks. Graphics show a luminous halo like an angel’s steering wheel.
“There’s your clock,” she says.
The crawl spins more details. The studio gleam spills into this cramped office and paints my addendum a fame color I don’t have a name for. I hate that I can tell which panelist they booked from the typography—compassion theater has a house font.
“They want me back,” I say, and my skin tightens because the sentence touches every nerve. I pull the band away from the paper where it has been warming a corner crease. The halo icon flares and then dims, reflex or hunger.
“They want a story arc,” she says. “A redemption, a displeased sister coaxed toward alignment. They’ll promise ‘closure services’—have they called your family yet?”
“They harvested Sera already,” I say. “Offered to stabilize her score.”
Her pen stops moving. “Then they have leverage.” She circles reputation smoothing in the billing appendix so hard the tip squeals. “They’re allowed to liaise with platforms as long as they phrase it as ‘harm reduction.’”
“So if I don’t play, they let the trolls feed.”
“Or they feed them themselves,” she says, unblinking. “But with soft hands.”
I don’t realize I’m gripping the chair until the wood protests. The city’s wind finds a gap in the window frame and threads the room with salt. Fog thickens beyond the glass; drones blink and then go blind along the marina’s wind tunnel. A news blimp, off-course, tilts toward the bay and then steadies, rerouting like a bird that remembers it was designed by a committee.
“What can I do?” I ask. “Right now. Not in court someday.”
“Document harm. Build a parallel record,” she says. “Gather any internal references that show they plan outcomes—emails, naming conventions, asset structures. Show they storyboarded before scans.”
“Pre-visualized outcomes,” I say, thinking of the sponsor suite and its chilled citrus.
“Exactly,” she says, and the magenta uncaps again. She highlights a clause under preparatory materials that says visualizations may be used to reduce guest anxiety. “They’ll say a storyboard is therapy: it sets expectations, lowers stress. The law won’t call that fraud without more.”
“What if their storyboard includes the color red,” I say, and I tap the paper as if tapping could make the color leak out in front of witnesses.
“Then we ask why,” she says. “And who profits.”
Micro-hook: The halo on my wristband winks like a polite threat, and I picture the one-frame insert—its ring misaligned by a handful of pixels—waiting for me inside a courtroom projector that calls itself neutral.
We draft a plan in the margins because paper resists revision better than screens. I list my assets—Sera’s ledger for dates that line up with color overrides; the cached index that names ColorOverrides; the audio that holds the tick of the insert like a seed in a tooth. She adds witnesses I haven’t considered: the night janitor who signed the equipment log, the paramedic who wheeled a guest offstage last season, a tech whose resume mentioned Lab Seven before someone edited it.
“You publish piece by piece,” she says. “Not to win a court you don’t trust, but to build an audience a court might fear.”
“The market sells forgetting as cure,” I say. “I’ll sell remembering, but cheaper.”
“Don’t sell,” she says gently. “Give away provable steps.”
I nod, and the table nods with me. The pho below shifts to a boil smell that makes my stomach argue with my principles. I sign her engagement letter with a thrift-store pen my mother would have liked. The receipt prints; the halo icon sits in the corner because even advocacy runs on systems that worship the same rings.
I tuck the receipt into my notebook and stand, legs prickled with pins. She walks me to the elevator. Its screen stirs awake as if expecting us. The whisper-voice begins: Up next: TruthScan: Family Edition—Two Weeks—“Let the halo hold you.” The footage cuts to Gray in the soft blue of practiced empathy, saying the line I heard in the sponsor suite with more velvet. His eyes are the color of hospital paint that hides every stain.
I hit the stairwell button instead, and the doors try to close anyway like a cat pretending it didn’t mean to look at the birds. The lawyer puts her hand between the doors and smiles at me sideways.
“He calls it therapy,” she says.
“I call it theft,” I say.
She nods. “Make them pick a word on the record.”
I take the stairs. The building breathes me out into cold air that tastes like batteries. The sidewalk is a wet receipt. Across the street, a gossip stall blasts talk radio about the special; the vendor respects the food hall etiquette when he works the Strand, but out here he films everything and narrates. Families pass by comparing reputation scores—weather reports with numbers that stick. A woman says nimbus and her partner nods; it’s one of the code words for a scan outcome the platforms pretend not to throttle.
My wristband vibrates, a polite insect against my pulse. I look down. The halo icon wakes, two clean rings, and then text scrolls across the tiny display that I never gave permission to scroll anything at all: Reframing Consult—Lab 7—Thursday 9:00 AM. Confirm? The bottom offers two haptics: a long press for yes, a double-tap for no.
I do neither. I hold my wrist steady until the band gives up and saves the appointment anyway like a friend who mistakes silence for consent. Inside the rumble of traffic a faint chime—three notes—threads my ears, the same sonic palette the clinic uses when they want a brain to go where the room says “safe.”
My phone buzzes with a studio teaser. Gray’s voice again, now recorded on a set with lights that flatter bad ideas. “Let the halo hold you,” he purrs, and the elevator-smooth whisper returns in my bones even though I’m outside.
I step into the street, into a seam of fog the bay pushed inland, and watch a drone hesitate overhead, its sensor blinking confusion before it reroutes. I think about my roof, my ocean heat rule, the rasp of hospital sheets inside a thunder-night—memory the lab can’t score tidy. I think about Sera’s ledger and the dates that line up with color locks. I think about the one-frame tick that proves a hand inside the red.
I thumb a message to the lawyer: Two weeks. I’m building a parallel record. Need language for public release. Then I open a new note and write the next rule in block letters: To be believed, I will show the machine erasing me, frame by frame.
I look at the wristband again. The halo icon softens, as if it forgives me for surviving. I slide it into the same Faraday pouch and drop the pouch into my bag beside cassettes that hold a mother’s voice and a city’s wind.
“You booked me,” I tell the band, which is to say I tell Gray, which is to say I tell a system that thinks forgiveness is a product. “I’ll keep the appointment.”
My throat closes around the words that come next, but I let them out because air matters. “I’m not going alone.”
I turn toward the marina where fog blinds the drones and news blimps reroute. I taste salt on my tongue and hot sugar in the wind and disinfectant memory in my hands. The halo on the clinic’s receipt peeks from my notebook like an eye I can’t gouge out without losing evidence.
Two weeks is nothing and a lifetime. I start walking, already hearing how I’ll cut the episode that is not an episode but a map. The chime pings again—Reminder: Reframing Consult—and I smile with all my teeth so the city’s cameras can misfile it as joy.
The only open question is the one I need: if I sit in their chair on Thursday, who exactly will they try to teach me to be?