Operation Watchtower | Chapter Eight: Project Delphi
The World Behind the World
Agent Nicholas Grayson. Where were you before you realized you were suspended in darkness? How much time passed before you became aware of the darkness? And what triggered the passing from the experiential you to the analytical you, the you that is an I? The authorial I. And why?
There are glints in your eye. Impossible glints. Mauve. Blood red. Green like deep forest at dusk. But there is no light. No light to glint from. And still, they glint.
You are a boy. It is night. Indiana. Cornfields. Overhead, the thing hovers. Motionless. Waiting. For you.
Darkness.
You are a man. Inside a gas station. A scream. Dogs barking. Rocío yells “Fuck!” Sharp with fear and warning and a thing unnamed.
Darkness.
You are younger. Before you, the oil towers. They burn like altars. Among them, a shape. Something not born of man. Arms too long. Head low. Watching.
Darkness.
Kurt Maurer claps your back. The sound like meat on butcher’s block. His hair red, cropped. His beard saltbitten. He laughs. Opens the door. Inside, the gang bang awaits. Fat men inked like war gods. Women straddling them, roaring. The end of the world a carnival of flesh.
Darkness.
Corinne holds a card to her brow. Her eyes fixed on you like she’s looking through your skull to the brain it contains.
“Now, darling. Tell me. What shape do you see?”
You squint. The world swims.
“It’s a green … star?”
She flips the card. A perfect golden circle. Her breath slow. The faint crease of disappointment.
“Let’s try again.”
Darkness.
You are in the safe house in Chula Vista. South Glass, Carrick called it. The room reels. At your feet, the dead infant dissolves into the filthy, concrete floor. It’s flesh bubbles and sizzles. And then it is gone, leaving a greasy smear.
From outside Rocío again.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Repeats the word like it’s a mantra.
Carrick bolts for the door.
“Ro?”
His voice full of fear and concern.
“You okay?”
But no one is. Not now. Not ever.
You have no idea how long you have been asleep. Your pants still stick to you from your nocturnal emission from your nightmare. The air is frigid. Your breath streams from your mouth.
The blue plastic tarp hangs slack between you and the girl. Belle. Motionless.
She gasps.
A small sound. Sharp. Alive.
But she says nothing. She does not move. As if the cold has claimed her, too.
You step outside. Streetlights buzz. Somewhere distant, a siren winds down. The neighborhood dogs bark wildly. From windows, backyards, porches. They bark like they smell blood. Or something worse.
Carrick stands with shoulders squared, speaking low and calm like he’s handling a spooked animal. Rocío backs against the chainlink fence, her breath coming fast. One hand grips her thigh for balance, the other clutches her gun, not quite aimed—but ready.
She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t speak at first. Her mouth moves, then—
“It came through the wall.”
She jerks a thumb over her shoulder toward the rear wall of the safe house. Carrick says something, quiet, trying to steady her. Ro cuts him off with a sharp gesture.
“It came through the wall, Carrick! I saw it.”
She shakes her head. Her eyes are wide and glassy.
“It was a woman. I think. The shape, anyway. Large. Masiva. No face. Just this… torso. Black. Not shadows—like it ate the shadows. I swear to God, it passed right through me. Then, through the fence. And then—then it went into the building. Across the street. Like it knew where it was going.”
She points. Light from a window flickers once, then goes dark.
No wind. No voices. Just barking. And a silence that feels loaded. Like the world holds its breath.
Carrick turns to you. “You see anything, Grayson?”
“No.” You say.
Though the night is cool, you feel the sweat bead on your skin.
Woman. Shadow. Torso.
The words pull you backward. Not gently. Not with mercy.
To the days when you were fresh out of the Corps. When your hands still remembered the rifle like it was a part of you. When you still believed the war had an outside to come home from.
You see the halls again. The classrooms. University of Southern California. The sunlit corridors of the surface world and the dark things buried beneath it.
Project Delphi.
Where you first learned a shadow could speak
And you?
You listened.
The air in Los Angeles hangs warm in the lungs, thick with exhaust and orange blossom. It’s September of 1991, and the skies over USC shimmer with that Southern California haze, the kind that makes everything feel like it’s waiting to become something else.
You stand at the edge of campus, your backpack slung over one shoulder, boots scuffed from sand and tarmac. You have been out of the Marines for barely three months.
You met up with Whittaker when you got into town. He’d joined the academy, said the uniform felt like armor and the badge like a weight he could carry. He took you out drinking. Got you good and wrecked. You threw up behind a bar that didn’t have a name worth remembering.
What surprised you wasn’t the drink. It was that he didn’t drag you out chasing tail like he used to. No strip clubs. No neon sin. Just two men in their youth, sitting with the silence that comes after the bottle runs dry.
He let it slip between drinks. Said he was seeing his high school girl again. Said he might marry her this time. Like saying it out loud made it real.
Then he looked at you. Asked if you were seeing anyone.
You told him no.
And it was the truth. Because a relationship wasn’t just far from your mind. It was buried. Under rubble. Under ash. Under the part of you that still dreamed of coming back whole.
The gates of the University of Southern California rise like something out of a brochure. Brick buildings trimmed in white stone. Lawns clipped with precision. Palm trees motionless in the late heat. Students drift past with Walkmans and textbooks, laughter rising in easy waves.
But you are not here by accident.
Back at the Greyhound station, an envelope waited for you, with a return address you didn’t recognize. Inside was a one-way cab voucher, a student ID with your photo already laminated, a class schedule heavy in psychology and law, and a seminar cryptically labeled “Special Research—DLPH.”
Alton Rusk, the agent who first pulled you out of staging in Qatar and offered you the “civilian transition package, told you flatly: “You’re an investment now. General Virek made sure of that. Your tuition’s paid. Your housing’s arranged. All you have to do is show up and sharpen.”
You had asked to sharpen what.
Rusk lit a cigarette and looked out the car window. “Whatever edge you came back with.”
You walk past the Leavey Library, where the windows reflect only sunlight and nothing else. You pass the Grace Ford Salvatori Hall, where the air feels colder, and the shadows stretch too long. You feel the eyes on you before you see anyone watching.
A professor in a linen suit nods without smiling. A student hands him a flyer without a word—something about lucid dreaming and group consciousness.
None of it feels real. And yet, none of it feels unfamiliar.
At the edge of the science quad, a woman with platinum blonde hair in black sunglasses pauses as she passes you. She speaks without turning her head: “Welcome to the world behind the world, Mr. Grayson.”
Then she’s gone.
Your first week at USC adjusting to civilian life goes by in a blur
You sit on the edge of your mattress. White walls. Linoleum floor. Government-issued sheets. You hold a book in your lap—The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Your reflection in the darkened window looks older than your ID says you are.
The next day, the campus sprawls like a map too neatly drawn—red-brick buildings, bell towers, palm trees lined like soldiers at ease. Students laugh and drink coffee. Radios play Nirvana and Ice Cube. There’s sun in everything. Different than the sun in The Desert
You’re in a classroom. Violet Adorno, or “Vi” as she likes to be called, sits backward in her chair, camera already rolling. Bleached hair tucked under a thrift-store Dodgers cap. Eyeliner smudged into defiance.
She studies you and says, “You look like someone who’s been edited too many times.”
She films you.
One afternoon, a protest forms near Tommy Trojan. Cardboard signs. Drums. Tie-dye. Sunglasses. Hand-rolled cigarettes.
Jonah Cheevers, one of your classmates, approaches barefoot, holding out a plastic bottle of water.
“Nice to meet you. Seen you in class.” He says, “You don’t seem like the protest type.”
“I’m not. What are you protesting?”
“What do you got? “He jokes. “But seriously? Government’s killing people over oil, and they’re working on some sort of trade agreement that’s going to take away jobs and ship them to third-world countries. You’ll see”
“That sounds like so much foolishness.” You pronounce.
“Okay, man.” He says. “You ever change your mind? You know where to find me.”
He turns and walks back to the protest, shaking his fist.
During your Chemistry Lab, Elena Cao frowns at your notebook. She’s in a lab coat, gum clicking between her teeth, tattoos of neurons peeking out from her sleeves.
“You missed a decimal. Unless you’re trying to blow us both up.”
You correct it. She doesn’t thank you.
One night on the campus, Vi points her Super 8 at you as you sit on a bench, eyes closed, focused on your breathing. The camera whirs. You open your eyes and see her.
“This is for my project. Working title: The Last Honest Face in Los Angeles.”
The gaze of the camera eye makes you uncomfortable, as does the subject of her film. You get up and walk away. She doesn’t follow. Just keeps filming.
One day, before dawn, you bolt upright in bed, gasping. Sweat on your back. Blood in your mouth from biting your tongue. There’s no sound, but you think you hear breathing in the corner of the room.
In the library, Elena sits across from you, books spread out. You stare through a page. Your hand shakes.
Elena punches you in the shoulder. Hard.
“Hey,” she says, “Come back.”
You exhale. Nod. But in your mind, you’re still in The Sandbox.
One night on the campus, Jonah sits cross-legged under a jacaranda tree and sees you walking by. “You’re not the same man every day,” he says. “You know that, right?”
“What do you mean” you snap.
“Whoa, easy buddy. None of business, but you look like you’re going through something. And it show.”
It’s afternoon, and you’re at the campus cafe.
Vi edits her short film. In the frame: you looking away from the lens. Smoke curls behind you. For a second, you look like someone else entirely.
She rewinds it.
Watches again.
And then… the basement. The unmarked door.
You stand before a nondescript door beneath the psychology building. Your hand hovers over the knob. A whisper of cold air leaks from the seam.
A plaque reads simply: RESEARCH – DLPH
You enter.
The room beyond is a hollow square of cinderblock and silence.
One long table under a bank of flickering fluorescents. The air still. Stale. Smelling faintly of salt, dust, and old sweat. A camera mounted in each corner, unmoving. A mirror runs along the back wall.
There are four others already seated.
One sits like a soldier at rest. Back straight. Hands folded. You like her military bearing. Her braid drapes over one shoulder like a black rope. Her boots rest on the floor. Her eyes—pale, silver, unreadable—watch you not with surprise but calculation. She gives the slightest nod. A concession. Or a warning. The sticker on her blouse reads SOFIA VALENTE.
Seated next to her, the man leans forward slightly, fingers pressed together. His skin bears scars. Ceremonial, you think. You think they look badass. His robes hang loose. His gaze lifts to you slowly. There is no expression. But something shifts behind his eyes—recognition or dread. Or both. He breathes through his nose and lowers his head, as if in prayer. His sticker reads EZRA DACOUR.
Next to him is a girl who grins the moment you enter the room. Her orange hair frizzed like static. Black mesh sleeves torn at the elbows. Definitely someone you’d like to get to know more of. She chews bubblegum. Blows a bubble, then pops it. She winks. Blows a kiss. Then laughs.
“Oh, good. The knife showed up,” she says, tapping her pink Hello Kitty backpack like it contains something alive. The sticker across her Slayer t-shirt is upside down. It reads MARA ELLISON.
Then—last—Silas Mercer.
He sits at the far end of the table.
His hair short and neat. His hands folded on the table. His posture perfect. Like a photograph of a man in stillness.
But his eyes—green, bright—fix on you with the full and terrible weight of attention.
Not curiosity. Not threat. Recognition.
He does not blink. He does not smile. He simply says, in a voice quiet: “Took you long enough.”
Mercer once told you that if you ever laid a hand on him again, he’d kill you. You knew he meant it. For a split second, you don’t know whether to bolt or rip his throat out. You know Mercer saw the hesitation.
You take the last chair. It is cold. Steel bolted to the concrete beneath.
The table before them is unadorned.
The lights above hum and flicker. Then stop flickering.
A door opens at the far end. Three people enter.
The first is a man of lean constitution. Tall. Gaunt. His suit charcoal. Shirt white. Tie black and narrow. Black nitrile gloves on his hands though there is no surgery to be done. His face like something printed too many times. Hair combed flat, not a strand out of place. Eyes pale and sharp as broken glass. He does not walk so much as unfold forward. He hasn’t said a word and already he commands your respect.
The second walks barefoot.
Hair silver and bound into a long braid. Desert camo jacket open over loose black linen. His eyes do not match—one soft and brown, the other a milky glass orb that moves on its own. He nods once. That is all. You’ve seen his type before, and you’re not impressed.
The last is a woman.
She wears a black sheath dress and red lipstick like warpaint. Her platinum hair swept back in a perfect coil. Her heels clack on the floor.
She walks past you and winks—not playful, not cruel, but knowing.
And you know her.
She is the one from the quad. The one in the sunglasses. You straighten. She has your complete attention.
They stand across from the students now.
Each still. Each watching.
The gaunt man in the black suit speaks first. A German accent.
“I am Dr. Emil Albrecht. Project Delphi is a protocol. You are its subjects. Its tools.
You are not here to be educated. You are here to be measured. Unmade. Reconfigured. Your pasts are irrelevant. Your futures are conditional. We are not interested in who you are. We are interested in what you can become once that is removed.”
He folds his hands behind his back. The room is silent.
The man in the desert camo shakes his head faintly, then speaks.
“What my brother in the grave suit is tryin’ to say is this: You’re not students.
You’re receivers. You’re gonna get stripped down to the part of you that listens, not speaks. Gonna float in silence. Gonna sweat in shadow. You’ll dream things that make language run backward. You’ll wake up and not know whose eyes you’re seein’ through. And that’s the point, man. You ain’t here to pass. You’re here to fracture—just enough to see through the cracks. Oh, and Commander Isaiah Reams. But you can call me “Bluebird.”
He smiles like the Buddha might if the Buddha carried a bayonet.
The woman with the platinum blonde hair speaks last.
“And I am Dr. Corinne Voss. Don’t be afraid. Everything that matters will hurt. That’s just how transformation feels. You’ll experience cognitive dissonance. You’ll hallucinate. Dissociate. You’ll feel eyes in the mirrors. You’ll forget your own name and be better for it. And if you’re very lucky… you’ll see the thing that lives beneath the floor of the world. The truth that bleeds through time.”
She smiles.
“And when you do…” she says “I’ll be right here. Waiting to ask you what it looked like.”
Bluebird
The walls are cinderblock. Cold and humming. The light overhead sputters. There is a chair in the center of the room. Worn leather. Bolted to the floor.
You sit. Barefoot. Shirtless. Wires fixed behind each ear. Electrodes along your spine. A band across your chest recording every breath.
Bluebird walks barefoot across the concrete floor. His braid swings like a pendulum. His field jacket open, his hands empty. His glass eye scans the room as if it sees something moving beneath the paint.
He sets a metronome on the table. Worn wood. Brass hinge. Ticks like a heartbeat trying to remember its rhythm.
He speaks.
“All right, brother. We’re in the deep now. No maps. No mission brief. Just you. And what’s left when the noise runs out. Thoughts, man… They’re meant to be thought. Not worn. Not carved into the body like truth. Circumstances? They ain’t stable. Don’t treat them like steel. They’re driftwood. Subjectivity—flexible. Stretchy. A mood ring, not a compass. No worldview of fact, Marine. Only usefulness. Only what works until it don’t.”
He circles you, slow. Measured.
“You start treatin’ yourself like an object among objects,” he says “You give up the game. Free will? Maybe. But not if you’ve already sold the soul for a discount on predictability. Belief—belief calcifies. It installs reason like drywall and calls it architecture. But it’s still hollow behind the walls. Ain’t no fact in worldview. Just workings.”
He adjusts the electrodes slightly. You flinch.
“Now dig this. The world’s got a new sacrament, and it’s numbers. It wants to count you, track you, box you up in a spreadsheet, and call you person. You get examined like meat, brother. Labeled. Filed. Coded for storage. And a person? A person is a thing that agrees to be predictable. A person is a system of compromises. But a soul…”
Bluebird is silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts before he continues.
“A soul’s wild, man. A soul grows from within. It is messy. It don’t comply. It don’t accept pre-described forms. A soul moves. And when you ignore it, you break.”
He steps in front of you, crouches. You catch a scent of sandalwood.
“Grayson,” he says “You are the expression of a biological actuality. And I say soul because it’s got weight. It’s got mystery. You ain’t a thing. You’re a becoming. Experience held in momentary cohesion. That’s all we ever were.”
Bluebird places a warm, dry hand lightly on your chest.
“This? This is the shell.” he says “The vehicle. But what’s driving it—that’s the question. And the soul? The soul don’t care if the answers hurt. It only cares that you ask.”
The metronome ticks. The wires hum. Your breath slows.
A flicker of something moves across the wall. A shadow without a source. A form without definition.
Bluebird continues.
“Mental health, brother, is a handshake with the culture that raised you. But what if the culture’s sick? What if the picture it paints don’t fit the world you’re standin’ in? That break you feel? That’s the beginning of truth. At first, it’s pain. Then it’s hunger. Then it’s revelation. We teach people to be persons. Persons are manageable. Predictable. The soul? Soul don’t play by those rules. And in a broken world, the soul is the last honest witness.”
Honest. There’s the word again.
The air grows colder.
You shiver. Your eyes close. Your body stills. Your mind opens.
The metronome ticks on. Like a clock counting down. To the moment you are no longer what they told you to be.
You’re gone. For how long, you don’t know. Time folds. Slips its leash. But slowly, the world begins to return. The room comes back first. Then the man in it.
Bluebird.
He stands above you, still as stone. You feel strange. Enlarged. And somehow heavier, like you’ve been filled with something old and mineral and permanent.
When you first met Bluebird, you wrote him off. Another soldier turned hippie. Another casualty of too much war and too much silence, chasing ghosts in incense and riddles. His talk of the soul didn’t match the God you were raised with. Didn’t match the man you’d become. But now, when he speaks, it rings.
Not like belief. Like memory. Like something you knew once and buried.
Things you’ve taught yourself since coming back from The Desert. Things they don’t print in any manual. Things you whisper in the dark when no one’s listening.
Bluebird says nothing. He moves slow. Unfastens the band across your chest, the electrodes from your back, the wires threaded through your scalp. Gentle, like closing the last page of a book read under firelight.
Not procedure.
A ritual.
The end of something.
Or the beginning.
Dr. Albrecht
The room is square and steel. No windows. The walls are lined with cables that vanish into conduits overhead, all humming with unseen current. The floor is seamless concrete, sloped for drainage. The air smells faintly of copper and ozone and something older. There are no lights save for a dim coil above the table.
In the center: a chair made of brushed steel. Thin black straps dangle from the arms like tongues. Beneath it, a grate.
You sit in the chair, wrists bound. Electrodes fastened to your scalp, your chest, behind your ears. A small tube snakes into your nostril, delivering something cold and vaporous. Your eyes are open. Barely.
Across the room, behind a glass partition, Dr. Emil Albrecht stands.
He does not blink.
He wears a tailored charcoal suit buttoned at the throat. Black nitrile gloves pulled tight. His tie is straight.
He presses the switch. The lights pulse once.
You twitch in the chair.
Albrecht speaks into the intercom, voice flat and dissected. “State your name for the record.”
“Nicholas Alexander Grayson.” you reply.
A brief flicker crosses Albrecht’s eyes, as if noting something incorrect.
“What was your mother’s favorite song?”
“Uh, ‘American Pie’.” You realize you’re unsure if it was her song or a song someone told you was hers. Albrecht does not react.
“Do you remember the first time you lied?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“What was the lie?”
You recall the memory. Tell him. “I was with my dad. We were out with our rifles. He told me to shoot a bird. I deliberately missed and told him my aim was bad.”
Albrecht considers your response, then asks, “Are you sure it was the first?”
“What?” you sputter.
The lights buzz.
“What color was the sky the day you were born?”
“I don’t—how could I possibly know? Bright blue, I guess?” you say.
“Not to you.” Albrecht states matter of factly.
Suddenly, you remember screaming—newborn eyes wide—as you beheld a spiraling black aurora above the hospital, seen only by you.
“Which memory did we remove in 2009?” he asks.
“I don’t understand. 2009? I don’t —I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know we removed it?” asks Albrecht. “Have you ever been in this room before?”
“This room?” you ask. “No. Never.”
Albrecht smiles faintly. “Check your left forearm.” he commands.
You look down. There, barely healed, a line of script: “YOU WERE HERE.”
“Who dreamt of you before you were born?”
Your pulse quickens. Your mouth is dry. “What are you talking about? I don’t understand these questions.”
“The question isn’t for you,” he says, writing something in his notebook. “If you walked backward from the day of your death, how many times would you meet yourself?”
“Uh, 7,000?” You say weakly. Your hands begin to shake.
“Which version of you is answering this question?” he asks.
“Me. Me. I’m the only version!” you snap at him. A cold sweat forms.
“The one that’s still pretending.” Albrecht responds. “Last question: What is the last word you will say before you cease to exist?”
“Oh, God.” you groan.
The temperature of the room drops. Your breath comes out of your mouth in whips. The mirror on the wall fogs. A single word appears in condensation: “Corinne.”
Albrecht’s voice in the intercom is flat. “Stimulus cycle one. Phase zero-zero-one. Memory destabilization protocol commencing.”
The lights flicker. Your breath shallow.
“We are not studying thought. Thought is irrelevant. Thought is froth on the surface. We are digging for impulse. Root-level cognition. What the machine of you hides from its own operating system.” he tells you.
The lights dim. A speaker hidden in the wall crackles. Low-frequency pulses emerge.
“What you are experiencing is the reduction of subjectivity.” Albrecht continues. “Your memories do not belong to you. They were installed. Constructed from sensory residue and assigned significance. We will strip them. We will locate the raw feed.”
He adjusts a dial. You wince. Blood runs from your left nostril.
“You are not Nicholas Grayson.” He says, “You are a collection of identifiers. An image formed through repetition. We intend to disrupt the loop. Erasure of name. Then intention. Then structure.”
He turns another dial. A faint strobe flashes from a slit in the ceiling. Irregular. Hypnagogic.
“What is left after narrative is function. What is left after function is void. You are approaching the void.”
You gasp. Your mouth opens but makes no sound. Your eyes roll upward.
“There.” says Albrecht, almost delightedly. “There it is. No language. No boundary.”
He leans forward toward the glass. His voice drops an octave, smooth and insectile. “This is where the useful versions of you begin. And the rest? We will burn away. As we must.”
The lights buzz faintly. The hum of the machines levels out.
Albrecht straightens his tie. Presses the button again. The lights go out.
What happened next, you cannot say. Cannot recall. Only know that you let Albrecht shape you.
Dr. Voss
Dr. Corinne Voss sits across from you, legs crossed, hand resting on a black lacquered box. The room hums low like it’s holding its breath.
She opens the box.
A deck of cards slides onto the table.
“Nicholas… Have you seen these before?” she asks.
She fans the cards in a slow, theatrical gesture. Green Star. Gold Circle. Black Square. Red Cross. Three Blue Wavy lines.
“No, ma’am.” You tell her.
“They were designed in the early 1930s.” she says. “Psychologist named Karl Zener, working with a man named Rhine. Parapsychology, darling. ESP. Clairvoyance. Telepathy. Mind reading, if you’re feeling vulgar. All the things men like our friend Dr. Albrecht call statistical noise. But let me tell you a little secret. The cards weren’t really made to test clairvoyance."
She sets the deck down precisely.
“These cards weren’t really made to measure psychic power. They were made to find cracks.”
She folds her hands. Her voice dips—confidential, almost intimate. “You sit across from someone. You guess the card they’re holding. You get it wrong. You get it wrong again. And again. And somewhere between the fifth and the fiftieth card… you start to wonder if the failure is yours or the system’s.”
She leans forward just slightly.
“And eventually,” she says, “you stop asking if the card is a star or a circle. You start asking if the problem is you.”
She smiles. It’s small and sharp.
“That’s the trick of the Zener deck, Nicholas. It’s not a test of perception. It’s a test of belief. Do you trust what you see… when nothing makes sense? Do you trust yourself to be right, even when you’re always wrong?”
She smiles.
“That’s the real trick of the Zener deck, Nicholas. It doesn’t reveal power. It reveals cracks. And darling… you’ve got plenty.”
She picks up the top card. Doesn’t show it. Corinne holds a card to her brow. Her eyes fixed on you like she’s looking through your skull to the brain it contains.
“Now, darling. Tell me. What shape do you see?”
You feel ridiculous, but you concentrate on the card. “It’s a green … star?” you tell her.
She flips the card. A perfect golden circle. Her breath slow. The faint crease of disappointment.
“Let’s try again.” she says.
She draws the top card. Holds it face-down.
“What shape?” she asks.
“Three wavy lines.” you say after a moment.
She flips it, revealing a black square.
She makes no comment. Shuffles again. Her slender fingers move over the cards.
This repeats. Over and over. Dozens of draws. Hundreds. You guess slightly better than chance. But never beyond it. Three out of five. Then two. Then three again. Enough to suggest something. But not enough to prove it.
She changes the shuffling pattern. Twice. Your success rate does not waver.
The clock on the wall ticks.
“You know, you are not failing. You are avoiding. There is a difference.” she says.’
She shuffles once more, then stops. Her hand rests on the deck.
Her eyes lock on yours. They stay there. The air in the room changes. Warmer, denser, charged like the air before a storm.
“Grayson.” she says.
She does not blink.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You are too much in your head.” She tells you and pushes the deck aside.
Her voice drops—slow, certain. “We need to shake things up. We need to fuck.”
“What?!? I don’t—I don’t know what to say. Are you sure?” You feel your face redden, radiating heat.
She watches you. No smile. No seduction. Just truth laid out like the cards on the table. She leans in slightly. Her breath is warm. “I know.” she says “ I know that goes beyond the propriety of our relationship. But we need to think outside the box. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, ma’am, yes I do.”
The room holds still.
The deck of cards sits untouched.
The ceiling light buzzes.
She stands, takes you by the hand, and leads you out of the room.
Isolation Tank
The corridor smells of saline, machine oil, and electricity.
At the far end: four tanks. Stainless steel. Rounded edges. Lids open like coffins.
A fluorescent hum flickers overhead.
Your reflection distorts in the slick surface of Tank One, you in your swim trunks. Your name is written in black marker on masking tape.
Everyone ignores your erection except Corrine, who smiles.
Dr. Albrecht stands to your right. Gaunt. Stark. His charcoal suit is too precise, like it’s been ironed by an algorithm. Blue eyes dead and distant. His black nitrile gloves stretched over hands.
He speaks without turning.
“The isolation tank is not therapeutic. It is not spiritual. It is a controlled environment for the redaction of input and—by extension—identity. When you deprive the nervous system of stimulus, it begins to read itself. Then it begins to rewrite.”
To your left stands Bluebird. His silver hair is tied back in a long braid, his desert-camo field jacket hung open over loose linen robes. One eye is pale and glassy—always watching something beyond the room.
“What he means, Marine,” he said, “is the tank’s like a clean mirror. Only trouble is… you bring in all your fingerprints. Ain’t no noise down there. Just the sound of what you ain’t ready to hear. You float long enough; you stop being a body. You become… resonance.”
Corinne steps forward, heels clicking softly on the tile. She wears a tailored black sheath dress and a high chignon. Her platinum hair glows faintly in the fluorescent haze. She smells of Chanel and cigarette smoke.
“It isn’t about silence, Nicholas.” She tells you, “It’s about the return. The tank strips you. Memory. Identity. Language. Until all you are is presence. And then it asks: ‘What’s left?’”
A lab assistant adjusts dials and throws a lever. The tank hisses. Its lid inches wider.
“You’ll hallucinate. You’ll question time. Eventually, you may ask which you is doing the asking. That’s when the work begins.” Says Albrecht.
“Or ends. Depending on how far you fall.” Bluebird says.
“But don’t worry, darling.” Corinne tells you. “We’ll be here. Waiting to see who climbs out.”
The lab assistant taps the vein in your arms twice and injects a solution into your vein.
Corinne helps you into the tank. You lower yourself into the water. It’s warm as blood.
Bluebird puts a dry, warm hand on your shoulder.
“Listen up, cowboy, your Western notion of time’s not gonna work in there. Aztecs had a way of looking at time that might help. For them, there was no beginning or end. There was only motion. What they called time-place. It’s weave. It’s dance. For them, time wasn’t something you measured. Time’s a rhythm. It’s not that events happen in time. It’s that time-place is the event. Like cloth being weaved from threads. And every one of us a strand in the weave, timed and placed, singing our part in a song that doesn’t end. Am I making any sense, Marine?” He asks.
You see Albrecht roll his eyes through the thick lenses of his glasses.
“Absolutely not, sir.” You tell Bluebird.
Corinne looks down at you as you float. Smiles. “See you in 24 hours.”
The lid closes, and you are engulfed in darkness. You hear the murmur of them talking outside. The sound of Corinne’s heels clacking on the floor, growing fainter and fainter. And then, silence. You float. Sometime later, you feel the rush of the cocktail the lab assistant injected into your bloodstream come on in waves.
You float.
No light. No sound. No weight.
The water is body-temperature salt, dense enough to hold you like a second womb. Electrodes are clipped to you, but you cannot feel them. The tank is sealed. The world, gone. What remains is void. Unmeasured, unbroken.
Then the entheogens unfurl you. A key turned in a lock that was always there, buried in the meat of your brain. No heat. No pain. Just the opening of a door that cannot be seen.
You begin to drift. Not the body. The self.
Out. Away. Beyond.
It feels like space—not the vastness of stars, but something more intimate and ancient. It is darkness without edge, a silence older than language. There is no up, no down, just suspension, the hum of everything, and nothing all at once.
And in that dark—
Everything means everything.
Every breath, every twitch of thought, every ghost of emotion carries a weight it never had before—a superabundance—as if God is watching, not to judge but to understand.
You see your life.
All of it.
Not as memory but as an event, unfurling in layers, spirals, time-compressed and widened into shape, color, and fire.
You see your mother’s womb and the moment of emergence, slipping into the cold, screaming, your father’s hands beneath you. Your mother weeping.
Above you then, even now—a dark spiral, not just a shape but a presence, a truth etched into the ceiling of the world.
You see your father and mother holding you. Then drifting apart, years stretched taut between them like glass. Shards of silence in their smiles.
Your sister, laughing beside you. A girl in church shoes.
You see them both in pews. The hymns. The lies told with love. The smell of dust and faith.
You see the recruiting office, the papers, the oath. The desert—its cruelty, its grandeur. The sun like a furnace. The sand like judgment.
You see Corrine. Her mouth. Her breath. The curve of her spine beneath your hands.
And then—
Bit by bit—
Strand by strand—
It unravels.
The thread of identity has been pulled loose. First, your name. Then, your story. Then, your shape.
The narrative collapses like scaffolding. The narrator fades. The “I” dissolves.
There is no Nicholas.
There is only that which remains.
The thing that watches. The thing that remembers. The soul is untethered, without a name, history, or mask.
And in that final stillness, it sings.
Not in sound. But in resonance. A note from the center of a being that never needed language to know itself. A truth that was waiting for silence. And found it.
Here.
Now.
Forever.
Time passes. You do not know how much, but at some point, you hear a faint sizzling sound. Eventually, you realize it is the sound of the synapses firing in your brain.
You are a boy. It is night. Indiana. Cornfields. Overhead, the thing hovers. Motionless. Waiting. For you.
You are a man. Inside a gas station. A scream. Dogs barking. Rocío yells “Fuck!” Sharp with fear and warning and a thing unnamed.
You are younger. Before you, the oil towers. They burn like altars. Among them a shape. Something not born of man. Arms too long. Head low. Watching.
Kurt Maurer claps your back. The sound like meat on butcher’s block. His hair red, cropped. His beard saltbitten. He laughs. Opens the door. Inside, the gang bang awaits. Fat men inked like war gods. Women straddling them, roaring. The end of the world a carnival of flesh.
Corinne holds a card to her brow. Her eyes fixed on you like she’s looking through your skull to the brain it contains.
“Now, darling. Tell me. What shape do you see?” she asks.
You squint. The world swims.
“It’s a green … star?”
She flips the card. A perfect golden circle. Her breath slow. The faint crease of disappointment.
“Let’s try again.” she says.
The grass wet with dew. Cold against your bare feet. You step out into the corn.
The stalks crowd close. Tall and dark and whispering. In the rows ahead something hangs. Hovering like a shadow made whole. A woman maybe. Or something that wore one once.
Its face pale. Hollow. The skull beneath near showing. A robe hangs off it like a ruined flag. Black. Tattered. Stinking of soil and smoke. It shifts in the air like a thing caught between motion and memory.
“Lo, my child,” It hisses. “To fashion thee into the instrument of mine own purpose, I must needs take the scales from thine eyes, yea, even thy innocence must I strip away. For I am the whetstone, and thou art the blade; and by mine hand shalt thou be sharpened.”
It comes down.
No sound. Just descent. Like a thought you can’t stop having.
It presses its mouth to yours. A tongue, cold and wet, snakes between your teeth.
It keeps coming. You try to breathe but you can’t. You try to pull away but you don’t. The taste is of stone. Of stagnant water.
You gag. Still, it comes.
Longer than breath. Longer than time. And still, it comes.
Your eyes are slitted. Tears roll down your face, and through them, you see something behind the thing that has its tongue down your throat.
It floats.
No wings. No sound. No wind stirred by its coming.
The thing is all curve and swell and obscene abundance. What floats before you is meat, and meat gone bad.
Its grey flesh pulses. Sick and wet. Veined with black rot. Swollen breasts hang like tumors. The belly ripples as if something beneath it still kicks, still feeds. The skin splits in places. Ruptures. Leaks. Worms writhe from folds like thoughts that should not be thought.
The head is eyeless. Faceless. Braided coils of hair molded in clotted sinew, looped like entrails. Where the mouth might be, there is only an open slit, yawning. A stink rises from it.
It drifts forward. The air grows heavy.
Low and wet and crawling through the roots of your spine.
Your body remembers.
It does not look at you.
It does not need to.
It already owns you.