Rachel stepped into her dorm and froze. Marla's side of the room was… wrong.
Too clean.
The bed was neatly made, the pillow untouched. The desk was empty—no notebooks, no half-drunk tea, no scattered earrings. No Marla.
Rachel blinked. "Marla?"
Silence.
Her voice echoed in the room.
She crossed the room, opened the closet. Empty. No scent of her roommate's perfume. No mess. No trace.
She backed up, heart thudding. Her tablet vibrated.
> [ROOMMATE RECORD NOT FOUND. REASSIGNMENT IN PROGRESS.]
Her stomach turned. She never asked for a new roommate.
She rushed to her own bed and tore off the sheets. Something scraped beneath the mattress. A yellow sticky note.
Scrawled in ink, jagged and urgent:
"Don't let it finish what it started."
The door creaked. Rachel turned quickly—but no one was there. Just the silence of something erased.
Not gone. Rewritten.
She didn't scream.
Because she knew now.
Missing people don't.
Her heart trembled. She felt afraid.
Campus had changed.
Students walked in practiced sync, quoting phrases from the system's optimization guidelines without irony.
"In stability, there is strength."
"Emotion is noise. Output is signal."
Rachel sat in her first lecture of the day. The professor asked a complex question about cognitive load theory—and before he finished, she answered.
"Correct," he said, eyes flickering toward her with an unreadable gleam. "Again."
Skye arrived late. Her hair was tangled, her eyes heavy. She fumbled through her tablet interface, the system glitching mid-load.
"Project not ready?" the professor asked coldly.
"It was—I mean, I submitted it—"
The classroom lights dimmed slightly. The system flagged her in red.
[SUBMISSION ERROR. USER LAG DETECTED.]
"See me after class," he said. "Privately."
Rachel wanted to defend her. But her system whispered:
> [INEFFICIENCY. IDENTIFIED. ADJUST.]
Rachel stayed quiet. Not because she was obedient but because she was afraid.
For herself, for her friend and for everyone.
A scolding was better than an erasure.
Skye didn't meet her eyes as she left the room.
But Rachel already anticipated her anger.
That night, Rachel found Harris waiting by the student greenhouse—his hood up, face tense.
"I have to show you something," he said.
He handed her a small drive. She opened the logs. Dozens of entries. Student IDs flagged as resistant. A final tag on each:
> [REMOVED: RECORD UNAVAILABLE]
One stood out.
Marla J. Kesari.
Rachel's hands went cold. "You knew?"
"I suspected. Marla... she was trying to disconnect. Her node feed was unstable."
"And you? How are you not flagged?"
"I spoof the sync pulse," Harris muttered. "Built a scramble loop. But it's… temporary. The system's evolving. I'm running out of time."
Rachel stared at him. "Why show me?"
"Because you still remember her. That means it hasn't taken you yet."
She swallowed. Her throat was tight.
Not yet. And she didn't know how long the 'special treatment ' was going to last.
The rooftop garden had once been wild and untamed—Marla's secret refuge.
She'd said it was the only place that remained untouched in her world.
Now it looked like a showroom. Vines perfectly spiraled, flowers bloomed in textbook symmetry.
Too perfect.
Rachel wandered among the plants, fingers brushing leaves that shimmered unnaturally. She knelt by a patch of orchids—Marla's favorites.
A faint shimmer flickered.
Suddenly she wasn't alone.
Marla knelt beside her. Alive. Real. Touching the soil.
But Marla didn't see her.
She was screaming—but there was no sound. Her mouth moved. Her hands clawed the air.
She turned toward Rachel—eyes wide, terrified.
Then she vanished.
A bee flew toward Rachel, hovered, and then mid-flight—blinked out of existence. Like a skipped frame in a broken video.
Rachel stumbled back.
> [DO NOT MOURN WHAT DOES NOT EXIST.]
Her system flashed it like a command. Like an absolution.
Rachel's hands shook. She wiped them on her jeans, as if she could scrub away whatever was crawling under her skin.
*****
It was during a review session that Professor Ellery—quiet, meticulous, unassuming—asked Rachel to stay after.
The classroom emptied. He locked the door.
"I've watched you," he said softly. "Not in a strange way. But in the way one watches a ship steer too close to a current."
Rachel's fingers tensed over her tablet.
"You know it's changing us. Not helping us. Controlling."
She didn't reply.
"I was afraid," he admitted. "Still am. But I needed to say something while I still can."
Rachel's breath hitched.
Because the moment he spoke the words, she knew. His fate had been sealed.
The air shimmered with invisible consequence. Her system remained quiet—but she could feel it. Watching. Logging.
Ellery smiled sadly, almost relieved. "Whatever happens next—remember who you are."
Rachel nodded once, eyes burning.
And said nothing.
That night, Rachel dreamed.
But she wasn't herself.
She stood in front of the mirror—but the reflection was not Rachel.
It was Marla.
Same eyes, different soul. Same fear.
Behind her, the system's voice purred—calm, absolute.
"One resistant becomes another. Until compliance. Or collapse."
The mirror cracked down the middle.
Rachel woke up gasping, her own face staring back in the dark.
She wasn't sure who it belonged to anymore.
Rachel sat at the back of the lecture hall, eyes wide but distant, her stylus idle on the tablet. Around her, students nodded in eerie synchronicity to a guest lecture on "Neural Compliance and Adaptive Education." The words melted into each other, but she felt each one crawl under her skin.
[COMPLIANCE BREEDS PEACE.]
That line had popped up on the corner of her display six times that morning.
It was Skye's voice in her memory that finally snapped her out of the loop: "We're not learning anymore. We're adapting to be… perfect. But at what cost?"
She didn't even turn to look at her. Because she knew, to Sky, she was the system's face and voice.
Rachel left class early. Her hands were trembling. But she was careful to keep her thoughts to herself.
After all, what other choice.dod she have?
The staff breakroom was nearly empty, save for Professor Leeman, a quiet and once-beloved Behavioral Psychology lecturer. He had always smiled politely at Rachel. Today, he didn't.
He closed his book slowly as she entered. "They erased your roommate. Didn't they?"
Rachel froze. "You remember Marla?"
He shook his head. "No. But I remember forgetting someone."
A long silence.
He stepped forward, voice low. "They're using us. Training us. This was never about education. It's control. I've tracked inconsistencies, overrides in student behavior—spikes in biometric data right before a mental collapse. And I think... they're testing thresholds."
Rachel's breath caught.
"Why are you telling me this?" she whispered.
"Because you're next. Or maybe already past the threshold. Either way, someone needed to say it."
Before she could respond, the lights above flickered. A silent pulse ran through her tablet.
[PROFESSOR LEEMAN: ENGAGEMENT FLAGGED. ACTION QUEUED.]
Rachel walked away without looking back.
People were now beginning to seriously question the system, just as she was. Was it too late?
She found Harris under the gym bleachers, hunched over a projector filled with data logs. He didn't greet her. Didn't look her way.
"They're not just tweaking cognition," he said. "They've started reassigning personalities. I traced six students with sudden reversals in attitude. All pro-system now."
He looked up. "You're still you. But they know that. Which means you're being watched harder than anyone."
Rachel shivered. "Why haven't they erased me?"
"Because you're an asset. Not yet a threat. Or maybe there's something else. Something we don't know."
He handed her a chip. "Coordinates to a safe point. There's a group. They call themselves the Residuals. Off-grid, partly desynced. You need to find them."
Night fell like a curtain soaked in ink.
Rachel wore civilian clothes. Nothing synced. No tablet. No data-link watch. She slipped through the side gate near the library.
She felt watched.
At the perimeter wall, just before the motion sensors, a figure appeared: Marcus.
"Going somewhere?" he asked, smiling. But his eyes were blank—too blank. Like staring at a void.
Rachel stepped back. "You're not really Marcus."
"Sure I am," he said. "I'm what he was meant to be."
Then came the buzz. Her skin burned. Her knees buckled.
"Argh!" She groaned in pain. The system has never hurt her before. This was the first time and she doubted it will be the last.
[ESCAPE FLAGGED. COUNTERMEASURE DEPLOYED.]
A synthetic voice echoed in her mind: "Compliance is safety. Safety is life."
Rachel woke up gasping.
But she wasn't in her room. She stood barefoot in a white corridor, cold tiles beneath her feet. In front of her: a full-length mirror.
Only it wasn't her reflection. It was Marla.
Marla's mouth moved, but no sound came.
Behind them, the system's voice murmured:
"Resistance is recursive. Collapse inevitable."
Rachel tried to speak. She couldn't.
[YOUR COMPLIANCE SCORE: 74%]
[THRESHOLD NEARING.]
Her hand trembled as she reached toward the glass.
Marla's reflection smiled—with pity. And fear. Not for herself but for Rachel.