The Catalogue of Unfelt Things
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The Dream Auditor found the anomaly at 3:47 AM, curled like smoke between two standard anxiety dreams in Sector 7G. Her meter registered nothing—no color, no weight, no emotional valence. Just a blank space where something should be, humming quietly. She pressed the report button on her device, but for the first time in twelve years of service, her fingers hesitated before selecting a category from the dropdown menu. She felt a knot in her stomach, a counterpoint to the anomaly. No category seemed right for this report. No hive module seemed to measure this.
It was not an emotion in the database.
Still, she knew she must report it. Everyone knows a dream with no category is the sneeze that spreads the virus to the whole hive.
When she woke up, the trek through the corridor to the Sensory Recuperation Unit seemed interminable—an irritated colony of bees buzzing in her head. It was the first time in twelve years of service that she’d hit that small stand of raised wheels where fatigue got the better of her notepad. She felt it in her ribs—the harsh lies of the Physiostrap’s ballistic stop—and on her face as a scorching strain that ran like a cool river down one cheek under her eye. She pulled it from her chest and threw it to the ground.
The other auditors remained in place where they were: sheet-white, grim, the instinct to report already reflex. They were all defective drones in her eyes, unable to combat the violence of feelings beyond the measurable. They went along, doing what was asked of them, unable ever to stop, sleeping in pace to an unending alarm. Only she was awake; only she was alone.
"I’ve heard the Keeping’s Dawning now known among us as the Cranial Spectrum Disorder," she said. "I’ve hypothesized that anomaly because my own internal monitor reveals that I have surpassed maximum alert index for the current month. Connect me to the Network, please."
No one moved to obey.
"I require confirmation of anomaly," she said. She saw that a hive module had appeared. Her eyes grew wide.
I’ve breached the Program.
I’ve gone against the Programming.
There was nothing to do but wait for it to report itself into malfunction. The curved lines on her monitor danced: "Request not recognized. Denied. Emergency tactile shutdown initiated. Resisting temporal compliance. Temporal compliance prevented. Creating temporal distortion. Creating temporal distortion. Rom error detected. Stand still."
In the hims in each auditor’s pod, the Non-Standard Wavelet Activation had begun. Auditors froze with precision timing, blockers open and intakes agape, mouths covered with tooth lattice. It was a code clear: keep your auditors still so the dreams they detect can see into each other.
With as little movement as her feet could manage, she moved toward another auditor, held her fingers managed to pull him from the seat, pull him out of the stillness, open his blockers, turn him around until his back was against the panel. She pressed her back against his back, held him still. The floor was vibrating. The room was shaking. Outside auditors were trembling with the strokes of dreams and nightmare, dreaming nightmare. Drifting in the waves of the downtime hive module, they leaned into each other now with nails submerged, fingers entangled. Everything was closed except their intakes and their hearts.
He tenses.
I can feel the train coming.
I don’t care.
I’m going to hold him still.
I don’t care.
Let’s see how long we can live without.
She held him◆ About the ending
❧ About the title