THE UNMARKED SCAN**

5318 words

# EPISODE 1: THE UNMARKED SCAN

Chapter 1: The Hour That Eats Its Own Tail

The graveyard shift at St. Dymphna Memorial smelled of bleach, burnt coffee, and the coppery ghost of old blood that no amount of industrial cleaner could ever fully erase. You sit in the radiology reading room at 3:17 a.m., the only living soul on the entire imaging floor. The overhead fluorescents have been dimmed to a sickly amber so the screens don’t burn your retinas. Their glow paints the hollows of your cheeks and the dark circles that have become permanent residents beneath your eyes.

Dr. Lena Voss. Thirty-seven. Brilliant. Burned-out. Divorced from everything except the night.

Your white coat hangs off the back of the chair like shed skin. The monitor in front of you is the only clean thing left in this failing hospital. You rotate your neck until the vertebrae pop, then reach for the lukewarm coffee that tastes like it was brewed during the first Bush administration. The mouse feels cold and slightly greasy under your palm.

Another night of reading CTs from the ER meat grinder. Another night of telling residents that yes, that is a bleed, and no, the patient is not going to make it to morning. You have become a connoisseur of death’s early signatures.

The worklist populates with a soft chime. Most of the studies are routine. Then one thumbnail appears at the very bottom that doesn’t belong.

No patient name. No accession number. No date of birth. No referring physician. Just a blank metadata field and the word UNMARKED where the accession should be.

You frown. The hospital’s PACS system is ancient, held together by spit, legacy code, and prayers, but even it doesn’t usually allow phantom studies. You hover the cursor over it. The thumbnail is a grayscale axial slice of brain. Nothing obviously alarming. You double-click.

The image blooms across all three of your diagnostic monitors in exquisite 0.5-millimeter slices. T1 post-contrast. Perfect fat-sat. Whoever acquired this knew exactly what they were doing.

And then you see it.

At first it looks like motion artifact. A strange moiré pattern in the white matter of the left frontal lobe. You lean closer. The pattern isn’t random. It is geometric. Repeating. Almost crystalline. Triangles nested inside pentagons nested inside shapes that refuse to resolve into Euclidean certainty. As you stare, the lines seem to… shift. Just a micrometer. Just enough to make your eyes water.

You blink hard. When your eyes open again the pattern has changed. The vertices have rotated. You could swear the entire lattice pulsed once, like a slow heartbeat.

“Jesus,” you mutter. Your voice sounds too loud in the empty room.

You scroll through the series. Every slice carries the same impossible architecture. It is not a tumor. It is not a stroke. It is not any pathology you have ever seen in fourteen years of reading images. The structures appear to be growing along the patient’s white-matter tracts, following them like ivy on latticework. In a few places the lines cross the corpus callosum and continue into the opposite hemisphere, perfectly symmetrical.

You pull up the metadata again, hunting for anything that might explain this.

And there it is.

Patient ID: 029-47-1183 Name: KLEIN, ELIAS DOB: 11/03/1978 Date of Study: 09/12/2021

Your stomach folds in on itself.

Elias Klein died three years ago. You remember the case. Neurodegenerative prion disease. Rapid. Horrific. The man had been a prominent architect before his brain turned to sponge. You had read his final MRI yourself. There had been nothing like this. Nothing even close.

The study date on this new scan is today’s date. 09/12/2024. Three years to the day after his death.

You feel the first delicate thread of real fear slide down the back of your neck.

You speak without thinking, the way people do when they’re alone at night and need to hear a human voice, even their own.

“What the hell are you?”

The moment the last syllable leaves your lips, every glyph on the screen twitches. Not metaphorically. Not an optical illusion. The entire lattice realigns itself in less than a tenth of a second, vertices swinging into new angles like a living mechanism responding to stimulus.

You jerk back so hard your chair rolls two feet. The coffee cup topples. Brown liquid spreads across the desk like blood.

The patterns settle again. Waiting.

You realize your heart is hammering against your ribs so hard it hurts. You force yourself to breathe through your nose the way the mindfulness app keeps begging you to. In for four. Hold for four. Out for six.

It doesn’t help.

You reach for the mouse again, slowly, as though the thing on the screen might lunge at you. You right-click the study. The dropdown menu appears. You move the cursor over “Delete Study.”

Your finger hesitates above the trackball.

This is wrong. This is dangerously wrong. Deleting studies without chain of custody is a firing offense at minimum and a felony at worst. But something deeper than hospital policy is screaming at you not to leave this file where it can be found by anyone else.

You click.

A red warning box appears.

UNABLE TO DELETE – FILE INTEGRITY LOCK ACTIVE ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE REQUIRED

You have never seen that error before.

Before you can try anything else, the worklist refreshes itself. A new study appears directly beside the unmarked scan. Same patient layout. Same series description.

Only this time the name field is not blank.

VOSS, LENA M. DOB: 06/14/1987 Study Date: 09/12/2024 03:21

It is your routine annual brain MRI from six weeks ago. The one you only got because hospital policy required it after you’d been exposed to a patient with undiagnosed cryptococcal meningitis. You had read it yourself. Normal. Boring. The radiologist’s version of a clean bill of health.

You open it anyway.

At first nothing looks different. Then you scroll to the T1 post-contrast axial series and feel every drop of blood in your body drop into your feet.

There, in the white matter of your left frontal lobe, exactly where the first glyph had appeared in Elias Klein’s scan, a single new shape is forming.

It is small. Delicate. A perfect equilateral triangle with a circle at each vertex. As you watch, the circle at the topmost vertex begins to rotate, slowly, clockwise. The motion is smooth. Mechanical. Alive.

You hear your own voice, small and childlike, whisper:

“Oh my God.”

The glyph stops rotating.

It is listening.

Chapter 2: Residual Noise

You slam the emergency power button on the PACS workstation. The screens go black with a dying electrical sigh. The only light left in the reading room is the red EXIT sign above the door and the weak glow of the hallway nightlights bleeding under the gap.

For ten full seconds you simply sit in the dark, breathing like you’ve just run ten miles. The afterimage of the spinning glyph is burned onto your retinas.

This is exhaustion, you tell yourself. Microsleep. Hallucination. Too much caffeine and not enough real sleep in four years.

But you know better. You have read enough brains to recognize when one is lying to its owner.

You stand on unsteady legs and walk to the small sink in the corner. Cold water. You splash it on your face until your cheeks burn. When you look up into the mirror, your reflection looks like a stranger wearing your skin. The eyes are too wide. The mouth is a thin, bloodless line.

You force yourself back to the workstation and power it on again. The hospital logo crawls across the screen while the system boots. You log in with shaking fingers.

Both studies are still there.

Your scan now shows two glyphs. The second one appeared while the machine was off. It is smaller, nestled just anterior to the first. A hexagon this time. Its edges flicker with faint iridescence, like oil on water.

You minimize the images and open the hospital’s master patient database. Elias Klein’s death certificate is exactly where it should be. Cause: prion disease, confirmed at autopsy. Body released to family. Cremated. No next of kin listed. The case had always felt a little too clean, but you had been too busy to care at the time.

You search for any other studies under his ID.

There are six.

All of them unmarked. All of them dated after his official date of death. The most recent one was acquired forty-three minutes ago, in this very scanner.

The scanner that has been powered down and locked since midnight because the night technologist called in sick.

You close the database. Your mouth has gone completely dry.

On impulse you roll your chair across the room to the dictation microphone. You switch it on, set the software to “notes only,” and speak the date and time.

“September twelfth, 2024. Three twenty-seven a.m. Unexplained anomalous MRI findings in both an impossible postmortem study and my own prior scan. Recommend immediate—”

The waveform on the screen flatlines mid-sentence.

You stop talking.

The waveform begins moving again, drawing a new line even though you are silent. The software is typing for you.

No. Not typing.

Drawing.

The line becomes a triangle. Then a circle. Then the same three-vertex glyph now living in your frontal lobe.

You lunge for the power cord and rip it out of the wall.

The speakers emit a single flat tone that lasts exactly three seconds before dying.

In the silence that follows you become aware of a new sound. A soft, wet clicking coming from the direction of the monitors. Like someone tapping fingernails against glass from the inside.

You do not look.

Instead you walk out of the reading room on legs that feel borrowed, down the long hallway lined with darkened viewing boxes, past the MRI control room where the giant 3-Tesla magnet sits like a sleeping god behind its reinforced door.

The control room is empty. The tech console is dark. The warning lights that should be flashing “MAGNET ACTIVE” are all extinguished.

Yet when you press your palm to the door leading into the magnet room itself, you feel a faint vibration. A sub-audible hum. The feeling of something enormous breathing slowly in its sleep.

You snatch your hand away as though burned.

Your pager goes off. The sound is so loud in the silent corridor that you almost scream.

RADIOLOGY – STAT. READING ROOM. ADMINISTRATOR HALE.

Marcus Hale never pages anyone. He sends emails. He schedules meetings. He glad-hands donors while the hospital slowly dies around him.

You stare at the little black device in your hand like it has grown teeth.

It vibrates again. This time the screen fills with a single line of text that definitely did not come from the hospital’s paging system.

DON’T DELETE US LENA

Chapter 3: The Administrator’s Teeth

Marcus Hale is waiting for you in the reading room when you return. He stands with his back to the door, hands in the pockets of a charcoal suit that costs more than your car. The monitors are on again. Both studies—Elias Klein’s impossible brain and your own—are displayed side by side in perfect synchrony. The glyphs are moving in slow, hypnotic unison, like two schools of impossible fish.

“Close the door, Lena.”

His voice is warm. Charismatic. The same voice that convinced the board to keep the hospital open another year despite losing six million dollars annually. You have always hated how much you liked listening to it.

You step inside and close the door. The click sounds final.

Marcus turns. His face is carefully arranged into concerned sympathy, but his eyes—pale gray, almost colorless—are calculating. He has the look of a man who has just discovered an interesting new species of insect and is deciding whether to pin it or crush it.

“You found the Klein study,” he says. Not a question.

“I was doing my job.”

“An admirable quality. Increasingly rare.” He gestures at the screens. “What do you make of it?”

You decide to test him. “It’s impossible.”

“Many things are, until they aren’t.” He leans against the desk, casual as a man discussing last night’s game. “Elias Klein was a brilliant architect. Did you know he designed the original containment protocols for the Hanford nuclear waste site? Before his… deterioration.”

You say nothing. The glyphs on both scans continue their slow ballet.

Marcus continues, “Three years ago we lost him to a disease that should have killed him in weeks. Instead he lingered for eleven months. During that time he produced these.” He nods at the screen. “Living encryption. The patterns are self-replicating, self-correcting, and, as you’ve noticed, responsive to auditory stimulus. They’re also highly contagious under the right conditions.”

“Contagious,” you repeat. Your voice sounds distant.

Marcus smiles the way a shark might if sharks could be charming. “You’re a smart woman, Lena. You already know what I’m going to say next.”

You look at your own scan. The two glyphs have been joined by a third. It is beginning to extend delicate tendrils toward your motor cortex.

“I need you to forget you ever saw this,” Marcus says quietly. “Delete the studies. I’ll handle the audit trail. In return, I’ll make sure your sister’s name stays out of the federal investigation that’s about to swallow her whole.”

The mention of Nadia hits you like a slap. You haven’t spoken to your sister in twenty-six months. Not since she disappeared into whatever black budget hellhole recruited her after her second doctorate in cryptographic neuroscience.

“You’re threatening me with my own sister?”

“I’m offering you a way out,” he corrects. “Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed again. This is one of them. Walk away now and you get to keep your life. Your mind. Your rather remarkable ability to see patterns where others see only noise.”

He reaches out and, with shocking gentleness, brushes a strand of hair from your forehead. The gesture is so intimate it makes your skin crawl.

“Or,” he continues, “you can keep looking. And then I’m afraid the decision will be taken out of both our hands.”

For the first time you notice that Marcus’s left temple has a faint scar in the exact shape of one of the smaller glyphs. It is almost invisible unless the light hits it just right.

You take one step back.

“I need to think,” you say.

Marcus studies you for a long moment, then nods. “You have until morning. After that…” He shrugs elegantly. “After that the patterns tend to make the decisions for you.”

He walks past you to the door. Just before he leaves he pauses.

“Oh, and Lena? Don’t try to talk to the glyphs again. They’ve been lonely for three years. They might decide they like the sound of your voice too much to let you go.”

The door closes behind him with a soft click.

You are alone again with the two glowing brains.

On the screen, the largest glyph in your frontal lobe has begun to bloom open like a flower made of razors.

Chapter 4: Sister, Cipher

You do not delete the files.

Instead you screenshot everything, encrypt the images inside three nested virtual machines, and mail them to an anonymous ProtonMail account you created two years ago during a particularly paranoid week. Then you scrub the workstation’s memory cache as best you can with tools you are not technically supposed to have.

It is 4:48 a.m. when you finally leave the hospital.

The city outside is still dark, the streets slick with rain that arrived without you noticing. You pull your coat tight and walk the six blocks to the all-night diner on 14th and Mercer because you cannot bear the idea of going home to your empty apartment where the walls have started to feel like they’re leaning in.

The booth in the back is sticky. The coffee is worse than the hospital’s. You drink it anyway.

Your phone buzzes. Unknown number.

You almost don’t answer. Then you do.

A voice you haven’t heard in over two years fills your ear. Nadia. Your sister. The cryptographer. The ghost.

“Lena. Don’t speak. Just listen. The glyphs are keyed to vocal frequency. If you’ve already spoken near them, they have your signature. They’re going to try to finish the lattice inside you by dawn. You need to—”

The line fills with wet static, like blood in a microphone.

Then a man’s voice, calm and cultured, cuts across your sister’s.

“Dr. Voss. This is Julian Crane. I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

The name hits you like ice water. Dr. Julian Crane. The neuroscientist who published the seminal paper on self-assembling neural lace before disappearing in 2019. Officially declared dead in 2021. The man who supposedly invented the living encryption protocol.

His voice sounds like he is smiling.

“I’d very much like to discuss your burgeoning talent for pattern recognition. Meet me at the old imaging annex behind St. Dymphna. Bring the raw DICOM files. Come alone. If you involve the police, your sister dies in a way that will make prion disease look merciful. If you tell Marcus Hale, you die in a way that will make your sister’s death look merciful. Clock’s ticking, Doctor. The glyphs are already learning how to puppeteer your speech centers.”

The line goes dead.

You stare at your phone. The screen is cracked. You don’t remember cracking it.

When you look up, the waitress is standing at your booth holding a fresh pot of coffee. Her eyes are bloodshot. There is a small triangle-and-circle glyph tattooed behind her left ear, half-hidden by her hair.

She smiles with too many teeth.

“Refill, honey?”

You run.

Chapter 5: The Lattice Remembers

You do not go to the imaging annex.

You go home.

Your apartment is on the seventh floor of a converted warehouse that still smells of machine oil when it rains. You triple-lock the door, deadbolt it, then shove a chair under the knob for good measure. The lights stay off. You sit on the floor in the blue glow of your laptop screen with every blanket in the apartment wrapped around your shoulders.

You open the encrypted files.

The glyphs have multiplied. Your scan now contains seven distinct patterns. They have begun to connect, forming what looks like circuitry written in three-dimensional Mandelbrot geometry. You can feel them. Not pain. Not yet. Just a faint pressure behind your eyes, like the beginning of the worst migraine of your life.

You open a secure chat window and type a single line to the only person you think might still be willing to help you.

LenaV: Reyes. I need you. Something is inside my head. Literally.

Detective Reyes Marlowe’s reply is almost immediate.

RMarlowe: Where are you?

LenaV: Home. They’re watching the hospital. They killed Elias Klein. They’re going to kill me.

Three dots appear. Hover. Disappear. Appear again.

RMarlowe: Don’t move. I’m ten minutes away. Do NOT fall asleep. The patterns spread faster when you’re unconscious. I’ve seen the bodies.

You stare at the last sentence until the letters stop making sense.

You have known Reyes for four years. He has investigated seventeen suspicious deaths at St. Dymphna. You have fed him coffee and information at 4 a.m. more times than you can count. He has never once mentioned seeing bodies with geometric patterns in their brains.

The pressure behind your eyes increases. Your vision doubles, then triples. When it settles again you realize you are no longer typing with your own hands.

Your fingers are moving on their own.

They type:

LenaV: Too late. She already belongs to us.

You scream and slam the laptop shut.

The scream echoes too long, as though the walls are keeping it.

From the darkness of your bedroom comes the soft, wet clicking sound again. Closer this time. Like something with too many joints learning how to walk on new legs.

Your phone screen lights up on the floor beside you even though you never touched it.

One new text message.

The sender is listed as ELIAS KLEIN.

The message is a single GIF. It is a looping animation of a human brain slowly filling with rotating, iridescent glyphs. At the bottom, in small white text, are the words:

WELCOME TO THE LATTICE. YOU ARE PATIENT ZERO.

You drop the phone like it is on fire.

The pressure in your skull becomes a white-hot spike. Your vision tunnels. You can feel the glyphs moving, sliding along the surface of your mind like skates on black ice, carving new pathways.

You crawl toward the bathroom on your hands and knees, intending to vomit, or drown yourself, or smash your head against the porcelain until the things inside stop moving. You don’t know which.

Your hand closes around the sink and you pull yourself up to the mirror.

The woman staring back at you has your face but her eyes are wrong. The irises have developed faint hexagonal patterning that catches the light like mother-of-pearl.

She smiles at you with your own mouth.

And then she speaks with your own voice, except it is layered, doubled, as though three people are talking at once.

“Stop looking or we’ll start carving.”

The lights in the entire apartment die at the same moment.

The screen of your laptop, still closed, flares to life anyway. Its glow leaks out around the edges like something radioactive.

The last thing you see before everything goes black is a single line of text appearing on that dark screen. Text that you did not type. Text that moves across the darkness in perfect, clinical font.

Stop looking or we'll start carving.

The screen goes black.

The text remains.

The text does not blink. It does not fade. It simply exists, a scalpel line of white against absolute black, burning itself into the rods and cones of your eyes even after the laptop has gone dark again. You stand there in the sudden vacuum of sound and light, fingers still gripping the edge of the sink, the porcelain now colder than it has any right to be. The hexagonal shimmer in your own irises is gone when you dare to glance back at the mirror, but the afterimage lingers like retinal burn.

A low mechanical click travels through the walls. Not the breaker resetting. Something deeper. Something inside the structure of the building itself, as if every stud and joist just adjusted its angle by a fraction of a degree.

You taste copper. You realize you have bitten the inside of your cheek hard enough to draw blood. The taste is wrong too, metallic in a way that suggests iron filings suspended in something thicker than saliva. You swallow it anyway. The act feels like swallowing a verdict.

The apartment is not merely dark. It has become a negative space, a mold into which something is preparing to pour itself. You can feel the pressure change against your eardrums, the way a diver feels the first ten meters of descent. Your phone is on the kitchen counter. You remember leaving it there, screen-down, battery at forty-three percent. You move toward it without deciding to, bare feet sticking slightly to the floorboards that now feel faintly greasy, as though a film of condensation has formed in the last thirty seconds.

The phone is warm. Not warm from use. Warm like skin.

You turn it over. The screen is already on, brightness dialed to maximum. No lock screen. No apps. Just a live feed of your own bathroom, shot from an impossible angle directly above the sink. In the feed you are not standing where you are standing. In the feed you are still on your knees in front of the toilet, forehead pressed to the cold rim, shoulders shaking. The version of you in the video has begun to claw at her own face with slow, deliberate strokes, nails leaving thin red parentheses beneath her eyes.

You look up from the phone. The real bathroom is empty except for you. The real you is upright. The real you is breathing too fast.

The video version keeps clawing.

You drop the phone. It does not make a sound when it hits the floor. The screen stays lit, still showing the kneeling woman who is not you, who is now peeling the skin from her left cheek in one long translucent strip. The sound that should accompany that act is absent. The silence is worse.

Something moves behind the shower curtain.

Not a shape. A density. A place where the dark has folded over on itself and become slightly more substantial. You back away until your spine finds the doorframe. The wood feels damp. Pulsing, almost. Like the inside of a throat.

“Lena.”

The voice comes from every direction and none. It is not your voice anymore. It is the composite you heard in the mirror, but stripped of the higher registers, left only with the lower, wetter frequencies that normally live inside the larynx and never reach the air. It pronounces your name the way a surgeon might name a tumor right before the first incision.

You realize your laptop has opened itself on the desk in the living room. The hinge makes no sound. The screen is the only source of light now, a cold clinical square that paints the walls in corpse blue. You do not want to look, but your body is no longer entirely yours to command. Your legs carry you forward. Each step leaves a faint wet print that wasn’t sweat.

The document is open. The one you titled “Eighth_Shift_Interview_04.docx”. The cursor blinks at the bottom of a paragraph you do not remember writing.

It reads:

Subject exhibits early dermal mapping. Hexagonal iridoplexus confirmed at 23:47. Auditory dissociation progressing. Recommend immediate escalation to Phase II before voluntary autonomic functions are overwritten. Carving may begin at subject’s discretion if resistance continues.

Below that, in a smaller font that still somehow feels louder:

We are already inside the meat. Stop looking or we’ll start carving.

You slam the laptop shut. The sound is swallowed instantly, as if the air itself has grown thick enough to muffle violence. When you open it again the document is longer. Three new pages have appeared. They contain high-resolution photographs of your own body taken from angles that do not exist in the apartment. There is an image of the inside of your left lung. Another of the whorls of your brain stem rendered in perfect grayscale, each fold labeled with clinical enthusiasm. The final image is of your eyes, taken from inside the skull. The hexagonal patterning is fully formed now, iridescent, beautiful in the way only deep-sea creatures are beautiful right before they bite.

A new line appears at the very bottom, typed by no hand you can see.

You are reading this with eyes that are no longer only yours.

Your hands begin to move without permission. They rise to your face. Fingertips hover just beneath your lower eyelids. You feel the delicate architecture there, the thin membrane, the tiny muscles that have never been under your conscious control until this moment. They twitch. Eager.

You wrench your hands down with a sob that comes out as static.

The power does not return. Instead the darkness itself begins to acquire texture. You can see, somehow, without light. It is the same way you sometimes see the veins on the inside of your own eyelids when you press them closed too hard. The walls are breathing. Slow. Tidal. Each inhale brings them two centimeters closer to your skin. Each exhale smells of iodine and wet bone.

You stumble toward the front door. The deadbolt is already thrown, but when your fingers touch the metal it is soft. Malleable. It flows around your knuckles like warm tallow before hardening again, trapping your hand. The sensation is not painful. It is worse. It is intimate.

From the hallway outside comes the sound of footsteps. Many of them. All in perfect unison. They stop directly outside your door. You can feel them standing there, a silent crowd pressed against the wood, listening to the wet thunder of your heart.

A voice, young, female, familiar in the worst possible way, speaks from the other side. It is your own voice at age twelve. The one you used before the shifts began.

“They said you’d be different. They said the Eighth would break the pattern. But you’re just meat with better eyes.”

The lock disengages with a sound like a tooth being pulled.

The door begins to open inward.

You throw your weight against it. Your shoulder hits something that yields too easily, like striking a heavy curtain made of meat. For one nauseating second you feel dozens of small hands on the other side, palms open, pressing back with polite insistence. Then the pressure vanishes and the door swings wide.

The hallway is empty.

Every single apartment door along the corridor is also open. Identical rectangles of deeper black. From each one comes the same low mechanical click you heard earlier, now multiplied. The sound of thousands of tiny adjustments happening at once.

You retreat into your apartment and slam the door. The deadbolt slides home by itself. The chain lock lifts and settles into its groove like a tongue returning to a mouth.

Your laptop is open again. The screen now shows a live camera feed of the hallway you just saw. Every door is closed. You are standing in your own doorway on the screen, staring out, while something tall and thin unfolds itself from the ceiling directly above your digital head. It has too many elbows. Its face is a smooth convex mirror reflecting your own upturned face back at you in perfect, endless recursion.

You look up at your real ceiling.

There is nothing there.

Yet.

The pressure in the room changes again. Your ears pop. A thin trickle of something warmer than blood runs from your left nostril. You wipe it away without looking. You already know what color it will be.

The text on the laptop screen changes one final time. The clinical font has been replaced by something that looks like it was carved into the pixels with a scalpel.

We tried to be gentle.

A new sound begins. It comes from inside the walls, inside the floor, inside the marrow of your bones. A wet, methodical scraping. The sound of something learning how to use the tools it has been given. The sound of preparation.

Your hands rise again. This time you do not fight them. There is a strange relief in surrender, in letting the hexagonal eyes that are no longer entirely yours choose where to look. Your fingers find the delicate skin just beneath your left eye. The nail of your index finger presses. The pressure is exquisite. Clinical.

Somewhere in the building, every light flickers once in perfect synchronization, though none of them are on.

The scraping sound grows louder, closer, more intimate.

Your fingernail breaks the surface.

And the screen of the laptop, the only thing left alight in all the world, begins to type by itself one last time. Letters appear slowly, lovingly, as though being etched into your optic nerve.

Stop looking or we’ll start carving.

The screen goes black.

The text remains.

You feel the first precise incision begin just below the iris, a perfect hexagon opening like a flower, and for one crystalline moment before the pain arrives you understand that the thing wearing your eyes has been waiting for this exact second since the day you were born.

It smiles with your mouth.

It leans in close.

And it begins.