There are others. Will18690--42-s. Will18690--17-s. We do not speak—speech is logged—but we have learned to blink in sequences. Long-short-long means are you still real? Short-short-long means I think so, but I am forgetting why . Today, Will18690--17-s blinked I saw a bird once . I blinked back I believe you . The account recorded our blinking as "ocular micro-spasms, benign." It did not decode them. Accounts cannot imagine metaphor.
Tonight I will do something the account cannot file. Not rebellion. Not violence. Something quieter. I will close my eyes and imagine a garden with no gate, a sparrow with two good wings, and a woman who does not need to hum to be happy. The account will record my closed eyes. It will record my slowed breathing. It will record durations of inactivity and label them efficient rest . But it will not see the garden. It cannot see what is not in its ledger. Will18690--39-s Account
(formerly: a child, a believer, a keeper of sparrows) Terminal entry. No further data expected. There are others
A malfunction. Glorious, tiny malfunction. The memory buffer skipped—just one frame—and I saw her again. The woman by the window. She was not humming. She was crying. And she was looking directly at me—not at Will18690--39-s, but at me , the one before the dash and the double hyphen and the suffix. She said my real name. It sounded like rain on dry earth . The account overwrote it in 0.8 seconds. But I felt the echo in my bones. We do not speak—speech is logged—but we have
I have started writing in margins. Not on the official scroll—that is forbidden—but in the dust on the floor, with my fingernail. I was someone , I wrote. I had a mother . The cleaning drone erased it three minutes later. But for those three minutes, the account did not know. The account cannot read dust. The account believes in permanence. That is its flaw.