WORLD OF FICTION (WOF)

The registration clerk handed Elias a housing form and kept the pen.

"Name."

"You printed it at the top."

"Say it."

"Elias Vance."

"Room preference?"

"I’m dead, unemployed, and legally provisional. My standards have survived none of those events."

The clerk waited.

"Near a bathroom."

"Reason?"

"Optimism."

The clerk marked the form himself.

Elias watched the pen move. It was a plain instrument, dull steel with a black grip. No glow. No breathing cover. No obvious hunger for reality.

He wanted it badly enough to feel embarrassed.

"Can I fill out my own form?"

"No active writing."

"That means fiction."

"It means writing."

"What if I need to make a shopping list?"

"You don’t have purchasing access."

"A letter?"

"Dictation grille."

"My signature?"

"Thumb mark."

Elias looked at the black square waiting at the bottom of the form.

Before dying, he had signed almost nothing. Rental agreements. Delivery receipts. A birthday card for his mother he had mailed two weeks late.

Thirty-one Chapters carried his name beneath the title.

That had counted for more.

He pressed his thumb into the square.

Artificial Ink climbed into the ridges of his skin and left a sharp black print.

The clerk turned the page away before Elias could read what had appeared underneath.

"Room Eighteen. Intake housing."

"How long am I there?"

"Until placement changes."

"Temporary."

"I didn’t say that."

The clerk passed him a thin metal tag.

ELIAS VANCE.

PROVISIONAL EXISTENCE.

RESTRICTED.

The final word was larger than his name.

Mira waited beyond the registration counter with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a ring of keys clipped to her belt. Her right shoulder no longer wore a bandage, though she kept the arm close to her body.

She looked at Elias’s tag.

"Put it under your shirt."

"Why?"

"Some doors scan it. Some people stare."

"Which is worse?"

"Depends on the person."

She handed him the bag.

It contained two grey shirts, trousers, underclothes, socks, a towel, a bar of soap without a wrapper, and a pair of soft black boots.

No paper.

No labels.

Even the clothing sizes had been stitched into the inside seams as patterns of raised thread rather than numbers.

Elias held up the boots.

"Do these fit?"

"They should."

"That’s confidence."

"It’s measurement."

They walked through the intake level.

The Errata was larger than Elias had understood during the emergency. Corridors intersected at angles that should have returned them to places they had already passed. Some ceilings opened onto additional floors built upside down. Doors carried brass plates engraved with titles instead of room numbers.

MEDICAL INTAKE.

OBJECT QUARANTINE.

CROSSING MAINTENANCE.

A red door stood alone between two blank walls.

Elias slowed.

"What’s in there?"

"Nothing you can access."

"That answer makes it worse."

Mira kept walking.

He followed because his tag had already flashed red when he drifted too close to an unmarked stairwell.

People passed them in different uniforms. Grey coats like Priya’s. Black-and-silver robes like Achebe’s. Workers in brown aprons pushing carts filled with sealed objects.

One cart held a jar of rain falling upward.

Another carried six swords chained into a bundle. Each whispered a different person’s name when Elias passed.

He kept his hands in his pockets.

"That’s the first sensible thing you’ve done today," Mira said.

"I’m learning."

"No. You’re afraid of the swords."

"That can also be learning."

His room sat at the end of a short hall with twelve identical doors. The metal tag opened Number Eighteen after rejecting him twice.

Inside waited a bed, a washbasin, a narrow wardrobe, and a desk.

Elias stopped in the doorway.

The desk held nothing.

He set the canvas bag down and ran a hand across the bare surface.

Mira leaned against the frame. "Problem?"

"No."

"You said that like a problem."

"I used to write at a desk."

"This one is for meals and approved work."

"Which I can’t do."

"You can eat."

"A full creative life."

Mira’s face did not soften.

"They removed the drawer."

Elias looked beneath the tabletop.

She was right. Faint screw holes marked where a drawer had once been attached.

"For me?"

"For restricted residents."

"How many are there?"

"I don’t know."

"You have keys to all the rooms."

"I have keys to the doors. That isn’t the same as knowing the people."

She put a folded schedule on the desk.

Elias reached for it.

Mira kept one finger on the paper.

"You can read it. You cannot add anything."

"I understand what restricted means."

"You touched an active Canon after being told not to."

"I was pulled into it."

"You stepped between two swords after that."

Elias looked at her hand on the schedule.

"Do you want to supervise me, or punish me?"

Mira considered.

"Today? Supervise."

She released the paper.

The schedule listed meals, medical checks, equipment issue, basic physical training, and something called entry discipline.

"Priya isn’t on this."

"No."

"Dorian?"

"Medical housing."

"Toby?"

"Records."

Elias folded the schedule.

"Am I allowed to know where they sleep?"

"Yes."

"But?"

"But I’m not telling you tonight."

"Why?"

"Because Dorian asked not to see you."

The answer hit with no drama attached.

Mira walked away.

At the door, she stopped.

"Medical check in twenty minutes. Wash first. They’ll inspect the ankle."

Elias looked down at his right boot.

The black ring lay hidden beneath it.

"It hasn’t changed."

Mira’s gaze stayed on his face.

"I didn’t ask."

She left.

The door locked after her.

Elias took his first shower after death.

The water came from a brass pipe with no controls. It adjusted to his skin, warm along his shoulders and cooler over the rib wound. The medical seal remained dry.

He sat on the stone bench because his ankle began hurting as soon as the boot came off.

The black ring circled the joint.

He raised his foot.

The ring remained on the floor.

For less than a second, a perfect black circle stayed behind where his ankle had been.

Then it snapped upward and rejoined his skin.

Elias stopped breathing.

He lowered the foot.

Lifted it again.

The mark lagged.

This time, the heel went slightly transparent before the ring caught up.

He thought of the medical ward. Black restraints. Instruments fading near Dorian’s arm. Achebe’s word: containment.

He imagined a new tag.

OBJECT.

He imagined losing the room, the training schedule, doors he could still open.

He imagined someone deciding that an ankle which did not remain attached to its own mark was too dangerous to belong to him.

The medical check form waited inside the wall grille when he finished dressing.

A voice asked questions from the other side.

"Pain level?"

"Four."

"Loss of sensation?"

"No."

"Changes to Blank boundary?"

Elias stared at his ankle.

The ring remained in place.

"No."

"Visual delay?"

His mouth went dry.

"No."

A pause.

"Any concern you have not reported?"

Elias put the boot on.

"No."

The grille clicked shut.

His first deliberate lie in the Errata entered the record as stable.