Read the opening

A man was sitting on a bench, gazing out at the sea, lost in thought. A scrap of newspaper came skittering along the ground in the wind and caught against his feet. He picked it up. An article caught his eye.

He flipped the scrap of newspaper over and read the article on the other side.

He let the newspaper go. As it caught the wind and sailed away, he slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a device resembling a mobile phone. He flipped open the cover and drew the stylus from its slot. A few taps, and he found the section he was looking for.

The heading read: “Cliché Movie Scenes That Can Actually Happen in Real Life.”

Beneath it, he wrote: “A newspaper page sticking to your leg while you’re sitting somewhere, and having to peel it off.”

Then he opened a messaging app, typed けい255なぴティン, added the recipient, and hit send. He snapped the cover shut and slid the device back into his pocket.

“To know the worth of light, one must first have known the dark.”

It had begun, as such things often do, with a promise.

A set of rules to protect what people did online — their searches, their messages, their faces in photographs. They called it GDPR. In the beginning, that was all it touched: the internet.

Then the world began to fold in on itself. Pandemics. Trade wars. Quarantines that lasted longer than the seasons. The slow, then sudden, dissolution of the line between the virtual and the real, until no one could tell which side they were standing on. With each new crisis came a new wave of legislation; with each wave, another version of the regulation.

Version 13 was the one that quietly stripped names, genders, ages, and birthplaces from job applications — and the photographs along with them. Version 22 was the one that reached into the courts.

Buried in its longest clause was a provision few had read carefully: a citizen could now stand before no judge, hear no testimony, and convict themselves by the verdict of their own conscience alone. They chose the charge. They chose the sentence. To house them, the states and cantons built small, unmarked facilities — one warden, a handful of rooms — and called them Conscience Prisons.

No one had expected anyone to use the law. But the numbers came. They kept coming. And with them came two quiet problems. First, how to tell a real reckoning from a false one. Second, how to return these people to society — a workforce was disappearing into these unmarked rooms.

The cantons deployed observers — rare individuals trained to read what could not be said aloud. Observers fanned out across the world’s quiet little prisons, one to each.

One of those prisons was Conscience Prison No. 9.

Its warden went by the name Wooden Tiger.

“This is the problem I need you to solve,” said a voice in the half-darkened room. The sole source of light — a projector — cast the image of a truck wedged beneath an overpass onto the screen.

“How would you extract this truck — the cause of the traffic jam — with minimal damage? We’ll hear your answers in the next session.” The instructor turned on the lights.

As he was leaving the classroom, a student caught up with him.

“The other day you mentioned a room where the silence drives people insane. But you didn’t go into detail. Where was that place? I was taking notes and trying to catch so many things at once that I missed it, sorry,” she said with a laugh.

As he looked at the student, the way she laughed after finishing her sentence reminded him of how cats groom themselves when stressed. The tattoos on her arms kept distracting him from the question. It seemed she was one of the many customers of the billion-dollar tattoo industry. To focus, he shifted his gaze up and to the left, thinking for a moment. Then he looked back at her.

“The Orfield Laboratory in Minnesota,” he said, then added:

“It’s so quiet there — negative nine decibels. Below zero. Your ears slowly adjust to the silence. They sharpen. So much so that you start hearing your own heartbeat, your swallowing, your breathing. The longest anyone’s endured it is forty-five minutes. You lose your sense of balance, too — the body’s cues for movement just aren’t there. It’s a strange experience.”

The student smiled, thanked him, and headed back toward the classroom. He took the stairs down to the parking garage, got into his car, and pressed the button on the stereo. An old Italian hit spilled from the speakers as the car pulled out of the garage onto a road running parallel to the shore.

He sang along as he drove. He pulled into the parking garage beneath a skyscraper reinforced with steel supports and found a spot. He took the elevator up to the 19th floor, greeted the attendant at the entrance of the office, and walked to his office.

The moment he stepped inside, he grabbed the phone and dialed a number from his speed dial.

“Are the draft and script for the presentation we discussed ready?”

The reply came back: “The prints arrived, but I haven’t had a chance to look them over yet. As for the script… we’ve got a few reel videos I pulled from the draft, plus stock images — enough to get our point across.”

“Let’s go over them together?”

“Sure.”

“Meet me in the conference room. Spread the drafts out on the table and project the script on the screen.”

“Okay.”

Just as he stood up, the phone rang. He glanced at the screen, hesitating to answer. It was the client whose shipment had never arrived, calling for the twelfth time. He picked up. The voice on the other end was loud enough to be heard across the room. He listened without interrupting, acknowledging the caller’s concerns and apologizing again. And again. After hanging up, he sat motionless, with his stomach churning. Then he hurled the phone at the far wall, took a deep breath, and walked out to the conference room. Five minutes later, his colleague came in carrying a stack of large sheets in one hand and a laptop in the other. He set the computer down and spread the papers across the table.

They both leaned over the prints.

“The colors look washed out. Is it just me?”

“No, I see it now too. I think the print color values are off.”

“All right, have them reprinted, please.”

“Will do. Let me pull up the script too.” His colleague opened the laptop he’d brought and projected the script onto the screen.

The instant the image appeared on the screen, both their heads turned toward it. The footage played for about an hour. When the projector finally switched off, satisfied expressions settled on both their faces. Neither of them moved.

He leaned back, stretched, and put his feet up on the next chair. He grabbed a plastic bottle of water from the table and tossed it across. His colleague caught it, cracked the cap, took a sip.

They sat with it for a while.

“How are things at your end, by the way?”

“Good,” his colleague said, twisting the cap back on, then off again, then on.

“How’d things turn out with your father?”

“Still the same,” his colleague said, eyes on the cap. “The man who was nowhere to be found for years suddenly shows up and expects me to treat him like a dad.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know, man… Ugh, it’s complicated.”

“We’ve got a staff psychologist. Go see him if you want — let the guy earn his paycheck.”

“Maybe. Then again, you could probably use a session yourself. How many phones does that make now?”

“You heard that?”

“Didn’t hear it but heard about it.”

“Gossip never sleeps. I’m heading out. I’ll be gone for a while. You’re in charge. Don’t forget the event next week.” Then he added, “Was there anything else?”

“No. Is there a dress code for the event?”

“Flexible.”

“All right. Any idea when you’ll be back?”

“No clue. If anything comes up, you have full authority.”

“Got it. Enjoy the break.”

He made his way to the parking garage and got into his car. Like a ritual he never skipped, he turned on the music player before starting the engine. A violin-laced song spilled from the speakers as the convertible pulled onto the coastal road. Sun and wind washed over his face. He sang along.

He entered the house, grabbed a bite to eat, and did a quick workout. After showering, he sank into the couch and answered a few emails, browsed the internet. He glanced at the clock on the wall and sighed. “Day’s over already.” He drifted to the bedroom, stretched out on the bed, and picked up a book from the nightstand. Within two pages, he was asleep.

He opened his eyes and looked at his watch. 7:53. A melody drifted from the clock radio on the nightstand.

Short long ugly beautiful someone

I never thought I’d need anyone…

As the final lyric faded, he murmured, “Well — did it ever cross your mind?”

No answer.

He asked again:

“Did it ever occur to you that you’d need them?”

Silence.

“Well — did it ever cross your mind that you’d need people this much?”

This time, something like an answer seemed to come, but it wasn’t loud enough.

“Go on, tell me — did it? Did it ever once cross your mind?”

And then he answered his own question:

“I don’t think it did.”

“No, it didn’t — right?” he said, backing himself up.

“That’s right… It didn’t,” he muttered to himself.

Once the conversation with himself was over, he got up, dressed, and left the house. He walked until he arrived in front of an aged, pale-colored, inconspicuous building. He rang the bell. The door opened; he stepped inside. He took the key that was handed to him. The letter “C” was engraved on the keychain. The date was PT-36.

A figure of medium build knelt on the floor of a high-ceilinged building. The interior was dimly lit, the floors covered wall to wall in carpet. M opened his eyes and caught the color of the tiled walls. A deep, unhappy sigh escaped him. He shut his eyes again and pressed his forehead to the ground. He stayed like that for a while. Then he rose to his feet and walked out.

A shapely woman passed in front of him. He caught himself tracing the curves of her figure as she went by. Ashamed of the impulse, he shook his head and continued walking, gaze fixed on the ground.

A passerby approached from the opposite direction and greeted him. “May the Creator’s protection be upon you.”

“May the Creator protect you as well,” he replied.

A vehicle blared its announcements as it passed. From another car, loud music filled the air, its lyrics weaving through the announcements. They waited for the vehicles to pass. Should he tell the passerby about the dream? He decided against it — he did not know how the man would react. When silence returned to the street, the passerby spoke first. “Honestly, I believe your criticism of the Council’s decisions last week was inappropriate. You shouldn’t speak like that.”

He wanted to say that such words felt like an imposition — the passerby had no right to impose his moral standards on him. But he held his tongue. They exchanged parting greetings and went their separate ways.

He still couldn’t shake the dream’s grip. In it, the scales — where they should have been — were gone. Every time the image surfaced, dread flooded his chest. He shook his head as if trying to fling the memory loose.

When he stepped inside the house, a voice called out from the living room.

“Is that you?”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Come in. There are some people I’d like you to meet. Come in and say hello.”

He made his way to the living room. Two men sat holding hands, smiling at him.

“Welcome,” he said.

“Thank you,” the two visitors replied with simpering grins. “How are you? Your grandfather speaks so highly of you.”

He gave no answer.

“Sit down, my boy,” his grandfather urged, and he lowered himself into an armchair, listening as the conversation resumed.

“Now then — where were we?” the grandfather asked.

“Thanks to FRISPEECH, our biggest client alone has already put us at seventy percent of our targets,” the first visitor said.

“Wonderful news.”

“Yes, we’re fortunate to be working with such a powerful client. It helped that they terminated their contract with one of their lobbyists.”

“Do you know why the termination happened? We’d like to avoid making the same mistake,” his grandfather asked.

“Because of his past. We’ll fill you in on the details later,” the first visitor said, casting a sly sideways glance at the grandson.

He understood the remark was made because he was in the room.

“I have some things I need to take care of — if you’ll excuse me,” he said. His grandfather gave a nod of permission.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said as he left the room.

Sometime later, his grandfather came to his room.

“You haven’t been showing your face around here lately. What have you been up to?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not hanging around with those people, are you? Calling themselves the Ancients, no less,” his grandfather grumbled. “No ancestor of mine could be one of them.” Then he continued:

“You know we have to watch our every move. We’re not like them — which means we need to be even more careful. It’s not enough for just me to be careful. You need to be too.”

“Okay, Grandfather.”

“If anyone investigates us for any reason, the truth about me comes out. So try not to draw attention to yourself.”

“Okay, Grandfather.”

“You do understand, don’t you? Watch where you go. Don’t get us into trouble because of something you’ve done.”

“Grandfather, I get it, all right!”

“Don’t you raise your voice at me, you ungrateful — your mother and father died working for your sake. As if it wasn’t enough that I looked after them while they were alive, I raised you too, and this is what I get? You dare raise your voice at me? Where would you be without me?”

“I’m sorry.”

His grandfather muttered his way out of the room.

Alone now, he lowered his head. How could he bridge the chasm between their families? And what about their allegiance to that hypocritical firm called FRISPEECH? He knew exactly why they had terminated the lobbyist’s contract. The company’s name supposedly stood for freedom of expression — yet they had severed the agreement because the lobbyist had said something publicly that did not serve their interests. He thought about the people whose livelihoods were tethered to FRISPEECH. He thought about the dream. Then he resolved to set in motion a plan that had been forming in his mind for some time. He stood up.

He left the house. After walking for a long while, he arrived in front of an aged, pale-colored, inconspicuous building. He rang the doorbell. The door opened, and he stepped inside. He took the key that was handed to him. The letter “M” was engraved on the keychain. The date was PT-27.

In a room dimly lit by a desk lamp, someone was typing at a computer. He hit the Save button, then read aloud what he’d written:

He stood up. Paced around the room, then sat back down. A look of worry had settled across his face. He rose again. This time he left the room and wandered through the rest of the house. Empty, as always. His family hadn’t bothered to say where they’d be — again. He returned to his room, sat on the bed, then drifted through the house once more before coming back and walking out the front door.

He began walking down the street with hesitant, cautious steps. Two joggers were coming toward him side by side. Anxiety surged through him. Even if he moved aside, he would still collide with them. He froze, torn between stepping off the curb and pressing himself against the wall. As he fumbled for an answer, the distance between them vanished. One of the joggers slammed into him, sending him sprawling to the ground. The man stood over him, glaring down. “Watch where you’re going, jackass!” he shouted. From the ground, he apologized, looking up at the looming figure. The jogger walked off muttering, rejoined his companion, and the two shared a laugh before picking up their pace again. Still on the ground, he searched for the glasses that had flown off his face during the impact. When he found them, he noticed the left lens was cracked. “Not again…” he lamented. He wanted to sit there a while and cry. But he could not risk someone seeing him like that. He got up, brushed himself off, and walked briskly toward his destination.

Soon a couple blocked his path from the opposite direction. He stepped aside, but the girl’s hand still brushed against him. “Watch where you’re going, idiot!” she snapped. He apologized, but she had already turned to her boyfriend. “Babe, this creep bumped into me.” Her boyfriend shoved him with a snarl. “You piece of shit.” The force sent him to the ground again, and once more, the glasses flew from his face. The boyfriend stepped on one of the arms of his glasses, snapping it, and was about to kick him when the girl grabbed her boyfriend’s arm. “Babe, come on, we’re wasting time. I’m going to miss my appointment at the tattoo parlor.”

The couple walked away while he bit his lip, fighting back tears. He picked up his glasses and the broken arm piece from the ground and slipped them into his pocket. He would mend it when he found some tape. He stood up and brushed himself off again. Then he stepped off the sidewalk and started running. The occasional passing car blared its horn, reminding him to stay on the sidewalk. He kept running until he was completely out of breath.

He arrived in front of an aged, pale-colored, inconspicuous building. The door opened without his ringing the doorbell, and he stepped into the building. He took the key given to him. The letter “Y” was engraved on the keychain. The date was PT-01.

In a room with half-drawn curtains, someone was talking in his sleep:

“375 degrees — the smoke point of olive oil. Mix it with cheap motor oil that has a low flash point and apply it inside the exhaust pipe. It’ll give you all the smoke you need to disappear…

…The active compound in pepper spray is capsaicin… Mix birdseed with a little alcohol and oil, then pressurize it with oxygen, and you’ve got yourself a homemade pepper gas bomb…

…If you’re cutting a security wire carrying high voltage, rubber gloves and thick-soled shoes won’t be enough… Coat the wire with insulation spray and use wire cutters with fiberglass-sheathed handles…

…People use the same password across multiple platforms. You can obtain these passwords by tapping directly into the electronic keypad panels of buildings with push-button entry systems. That same password — used for everything from ATM cards to cell phones — will help you withdraw small amounts of cash from ATMs and gain access to their phones…”

Then he woke up. He forced his eyes open but couldn’t see clearly. He slid his hand under the pillow, then beneath the blanket draped over him. He groped along the right side of the bed. He rubbed his eyes, sat up, and shook out the blanket. A black device tumbled onto the mattress. “Every time, goddammit,” he muttered, snatching it up and glancing at the clock on the screen. 4:53 PM. “Still early,” he murmured. He stretched back out on the bed, draped his arm over his eyes like a visor, and drifted off again. Later, he got up and pulled on a T-shirt and pants.

He glanced again at an old message sitting in his inbox:

けい255なぴティン

Whoever had written it used the simple but effective coding method they’d established between them — a way of making sure he’d know exactly who it was from.

“Once you see them, you can’t unsee them,” he murmured.

He put on his headphones and left the house, walking fast, as if he had somewhere to be. Techno music blasting in his ears, he strode along until someone tapped his shoulder. He turned around. A passerby was trying to ask him something — directions, maybe. Without removing his headphones, he raised his hands and said, “No idea,” then turned back and kept walking.

He didn’t want to take them off before reaching his destination. The ritual of syncing the music to the journey would be disrupted. Besides, for someone like him, who was in the second stage of Plaster Statues Syndrome, a conversation could be genuinely distressing. Whenever he found himself in close, intense interactions, the expressions, words, and intonations he absorbed from others stirred something inside him — something deeply uncomfortable. To him, his personality seemed stitched together from borrowed behaviors, borrowed phrases, borrowed ideals. He felt as though he did not have a single thought that was truly his own. Then again, maybe even that thought — that nothing in his mind belonged to him — wasn’t his either. Maybe he had stolen it from someone he had once spoken to. As if to drown out these spiraling thoughts, he turned up the volume on his music player and quickened his pace.

He arrived in front of an aged, pale-colored, inconspicuous building. He rang the doorbell and knocked on the door impatiently. He stepped into the building. He took the key given to him. The letter “K” was engraved on the keychain. The date was PT-99.

Wooden Tiger woke to the music drifting up from the floor below. He got up and walked to the bathroom. The hiss of the faucet greeted him — a dry, sputtering gasp. He realized it was their block’s turn for the water outage. He washed his face with water from the plastic bottle he kept for days like this, then returned to his room. The water supply had always been mismanaged. No one had bothered to find new sources. Instead, they decided to track individual consumption — and that hadn’t helped to prevent the inevitable shortages.

The window was open. A sweet spring breeze carried up the chatter from downstairs, along with the melody playing in the neighbors’ room.

“Otto, come here, look at this,” a voice called out. “The guy’s chewing gum and singing at the same time.” A pause, then another voice replied: “Unbelievable. He’s belting out the song, playing the guitar, chewing gum like he’s mocking us — and he’s got a baby face on top of it all. Then look at you. Look at me.”

Wooden Tiger laughed. The ones downstairs had found something new to lament. Then suddenly — “Damn it,” he muttered to himself. “I left the food out!” He sprang up and headed for the kitchen.

The food wasn’t on the stove. Guoqu, never trusting Weilai, had apparently put it in the fridge. Not that Weilai was any happier with Guoqu. Weilai constantly blamed Tiger and Guoqu for everything that had gone wrong. He was the type who inspired no confidence yet demanded perfection in all things — two traits that, in Tiger’s view, should never coexist in a single person. But since Tiger had no desire to bother with Guoqu and Weilai, he had stopped asking anything of either of them. Xianzai said something just then, but the suffocation and the urge to flee that gripped him whenever he thought of Guoqu and Weilai prevented Tiger from hearing it.

He moved to the living room, turned on the TV. Protests were underway somewhere. These had become difficult times to follow. Tag wars, trade wars, ultimatums — polarization had reached its breaking point. Pandemics and famines struck one after another, and isolation compounded the divide. In the wake of this shifting order, countries had fractured into cantons, and everyone was granted the right to relocate to whichever canton aligned with their beliefs and way of life.

The cantons generally adopted one of four ideological systems: the Ancient views originating from Kadimia, the Elitian approach from Elitia, the Korporian system from Korporia, and the Amazonian approach from Amazonia.

These ideological systems had not merely taken hold of the cantons — they had seeped into homes. Even under the same roof, individuals held different beliefs. On top of that, with technological advances, personal currency systems, and GDPR 22, a growing number of people had begun adopting their own personal calendars. One of countless programs debating the dynamics and influence of these ideological systems was on.

Then, a message notification chimed from Tiger’s phone. The message was about a package addressed to him; it had just been left in the box at his building’s entrance. He went down and retrieved the package.

The package contained a report on observers, sent by the System. It offered no information whatsoever about how these individuals — who could use their memory capacity like a water vessel, filling and emptying it at will once a task was complete — possessed such a physiology, or why their senses functioned the way they did.

By their own account, they didn’t see the person before them — they colorized that person. They didn’t hear what was said — they watched it.

Each observer converted input to visuals differently. Some watched streams flowing across sine waves; others watched words rendered through typographic play.

Emotions, too, were understood through the size of those words or the amplitude of the wave imagery.

They had ears but did not hear in the ordinary sense — theirs was a world where sound was converted into colors and graphs of varying magnitude. They had eyes but did not see — they were believed to possess a biosonar mechanism, much like bats and whales, which they used to gauge the dimensions of objects. They could even tell whether something before them was living or inanimate by reading different wavelengths of color. And to prevent cognitive overload, they could issue a DELETE command to any region of their brain, erasing an entire event at will — a feature anyone who had ever wanted to forget an old heartbreak would have killed for.

These abilities made them extraordinarily valuable — not only to financial institutions and major corporations, but especially to the Conscience Prison Facilities, which, under the individual rights protections enacted with GDPR v22, were obligated to safeguard sensitive personal information and prevent its misuse.

According to the report, no one knew where the first observer had emerged. The prevailing assumption, however, was that they had originated from among the wardens.

Each new case of conviction of conscience had to involve an observer. While self-conviction was the individual’s own right, analyzing that conviction and reintegrating the person was necessary to keep society productive. The decision of when to bring in an observer, however, rested with the wardens.

Tiger finished reading the report, and then his mind drifted back to the moment he had decided to involve an observer.

It was four days after the uprising at the prison. Tiger had been fuming that day, ranting to himself as he tried to figure out his next move.

“What the hell is this? How many uprisings does that make now? Look at this mess. Am I a warden or a babysitter — who can even tell anymore? I’m supposedly the one in charge here. The moment a crisis hits, they mutiny. Enough is enough! If I had it my way, I’d cut them all loose without a second thought. Damn these modern times, modern prisons… What a disgrace! Why did I ever sign up for this?”

“Should I call Po and talk this through?” he had asked himself. He had reached for the phone. The call had been picked up after two rings.

“Po?”

“Wooden Tiger. Nice to hear your voice.”

“Feeling’s mutual. How are you?”

“Quite well, actually. You?”

“Truth be told, not good. I feel like I’m being torn apart. What exactly happened isn’t important, but this keeps happening, and I need some advice. Rebellion again. Mutiny inside. What should I do?”

A moment of silence. Then:

“Just like you said, Tiger — what happened isn’t important. But why it keeps happening is.” Po paused. “I think I know someone who can help you. I’m sending the number to your mobile. And promise me you’ll call.”

“Promise!”

Wooden Tiger had called that number, and through it, an observer had been assigned to him. Inside the file, alongside information about observers, were two cards: one with the meeting place, the other with strict instructions to bring the report and hand it over there. The existence of observers was no secret, but great care was taken to keep their identities confidential. After reading the report, Tiger easily understood why: observers could be exploited. He did not know it at the time, but this would soon prove true — plans were already being set in motion, somewhere.

He checked the time. The rendezvous time was approaching. He took the report with him and left the house. He headed toward the meeting point where, as a warden, he would meet the observer. The date was PT-01.