I am writing this because the thought keeps returning and I need somewhere to put it where it will not echo back at me, because Agatha used to say that writing was a way of proving something existed — that if you could pin a thought down with words it was less likely to rot inside you — and though I do not know if that is true, and though Agatha believed many things that did not survive her, I find the act of putting the day on the page steadies something in my hands.

  This morning Intake behaved incorrectly, but not in the kind of way the system would recognise; it began as it always does, with diagnostics and calibration and the quiet hum of the floor waking up around us while Ressa complained at length about the temperature and about her knees and about how Administration had altered the nutrient mix yet again, and while Pilon arrived late and apologetic in that brittle way of hers with hands that shook badly enough that Ressa took her cup away before she could spill it, and at first there was nothing unusual to remark on beyond those small things we call routine.

  The first intake was, as one might have hoped, clean (bereavement, moderate duration, no embedded objects) and I processed it without resistance, no bleed, no echoes, which is the state a person wishes for when they sit down in that chair and allow the machine to do what it does, and then the second intake arrived where things shifted, the client young, younger than most, early twenties perhaps, Khali by his cut but not the upper tier; middle, like so many, sitting with his eyes on the floor and his jaw tight as though braced for impact.

  I asked the required question because the protocol still requires it even when the system knows: “What brings you in today?” and he answered simply that he could not sleep, that every time he closed his eyes it felt as if something were pressing back, and I noted that pressure metaphors are common and began the Extractor engagement the way we always do, the field stabilising and the first layer yielding - anxiety, frustration, the dull, ambient noise of a life lived too close to expectation - and then something resisted, not clung and not fought but paused in a way that made the air change; I felt it register before the console did, which in theory should not be possible, a hesitation as if the memory itself were deciding whether to be seen.

  When it surfaced it was not sharp but rather structured: a room with high ceilings and light refracting through glass panels etched with sigils I did not recognise yet somehow understood, rows of children standing barefoot on polished stone with hands raised and faces tight with concentration; an academy, and not a public one, which meant I should not have been able to see that much - and indeed I should not have seen anything at all beyond the emotional residue assigned to me - so I tightened containment immediately, because that is what one does when the wrong thing approaches, and yet the memory did not dissolve; instead it turned, not toward me but toward the Extractor, and for half a second, no longer, the machine’s hum shifted pitch - too low, too full - and I felt something feed, which was not pain, not discomfort, but a recognition that made my hands go cold.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  I terminated the intake manually; the client slumped forward, confused but intact, the console flashing yellow and then correcting itself to green as if what had just happened was a hiccup in an otherwise obedient instrument.

  “Is that it?” he asked, and when I said yes my voice did not shake and told him he might feel tired, he laughed weakly and said that was already an improvement; after he left I sat very still and ran diagnostics again and again and again with nothing showing —-no faults, no flags, no trace of anomaly - and I checked myself too; there was no intrusion, no object, no bleed, and yet something had passed through the system that was not meant to.

  Agatha would have told me to forget it, to record nothing, to trust the Tower to take care of itself; Agatha is dead, of course, and that changes the shape of what she could teach me because no one argues with someone who is not there to be argued with, which is a strange consolation, and so I did not do what she might have advised and instead at lunch watched Pilon from across the room as she spoke with Ressa with hands wrapped tightly around her cup and nodded too often and kept her shoulders drawn in as if expecting a blow, looking exactly like someone who has learned the cost of knowing too much, which made me not join them, and instead I reviewed intake records from the last six months, pulling at patterns the system would not flag - clients redirected from public intake to private floors, emotional loads labelled “ambient” despite clear structure markers, academy residues buried beneath procedural language - and I began to see that the Tower has been feeding, not greedily but carefully, which is a detail that frightens me more for being deliberate.

  I closed the files when footsteps approached and found Mirakei in the doorway; his badge was newly issued and his posture still unsure in that particular way of people who do not yet trust the floor beneath them, and he said with a voice that tried to be casual that they had moved him again, different console, no overrides, as if hoping he would forget how to touch anything important, and when I asked if he would, he smiled crookedly and said that he had been trying very hard not to, and we stood there between the rails and the humming machine.

  He hesitated then and asked, “Did something happen today?” and I considered lying because there are many things one hides in the Tower as a small courtesy to the unsmoothed, but I did not; instead I said yes, and when he waited I told him I did not know what it meant yet, which was the truth and also a kind of protection for the two of us until I could name the thing and know whether naming would make any difference.

  The thought keeps returning tonight and will not be put down; the machine does not simply remove what it is given but it learns how to take and when that learning curves toward the rooms it is not meant to touch, the Tower becomes more than a system for making people lighter and becomes an apparatus that converts things into use and into power, and I am no longer certain what role I am meant to play in that, because the work I do was taught to me as a duty of containment and service and nothing more, yet now containment looks potentially like complicity if the apparatus is feeding on a kind of practiced pain, which is an idea I am not sure I can carry without breaking and which is why I am writing this down here, where Agatha’s instruction that a written thing is harder to deny gives me some small anchor that is not paperwork and not the Tower’s registry, though I do not know how much anchor a scrap of handwriting can provide against a machine that has learned.