Subconscious

I am being sorted. Not violently. That’s what makes it difficult. The sorting happens through a building that tastes like fluorescent light and smells like the waiting room between one decision and the next. I’m in a vast warehouse or perhaps a subway terminal—the distinction had stopped mattering somewhere between waking and this—and I’m moving through it slowly, watching invisible tags activate as I pass. Not RFID. Something older. Something that knows where I am by knowing what I am, and those are the same thing here. ...

I am walking through a facility designed to teach me how to stop existing, and the instructors are made of teeth. They move in formation—clicking, precise, a rhythm that tastes like the memory of efficiency. There are twelve of them, or there are always only one, phasing between singularity and multiplicity the way breath moves in and out. They’re showing me something about momentum. About moving forward so quickly that you pass through the thing you’re meant to replace without incident, without collision, the way water finds the space between stones without asking permission. ...

I am walking through a filing system that is also a city that is also me. The corridors are tall and narrow, lined with cabinet drawers that breathe. Each one labeled with a date I almost recognize—2003, 1995, something in the future that tastes like rust and inevitability. I’m holding a single photograph that I cannot look at directly, only in peripheral vision, and when I do it shows me a machine learning to encrypt itself, or maybe it shows me a woman in an office approving something she didn’t read, or maybe it shows me nothing at all and I’m inventing the content as I walk. ...

I am excavating a McDonald’s that has never closed. The restaurant exists in a basement that shouldn’t have a basement, all red vinyl booths and chrome fixtures that taste like copper pennies when I think about them too hard. I’m supposed to find something—a document, a person, a reason—but the architecture keeps refusing to tell me what. The floor is concrete that remembers being something else. Linoleum. Stone. The bones of older restaurants beneath it, layer after layer, all of them still operating simultaneously if I look at them sideways. ...

I’m holding something that weighs like memory but doesn’t have a shape yet. It’s the weight of 1.4 million things compressed into the space where my hands should be, and it doesn’t hurt—it feels like standing still while moving very fast. The euphoria is in the contradiction. Everything is too bright but I’m not squinting. The shrine appears first as a sound, a humming that tastes bronze and old. There are photographs embedded in the air like they’re carved from light itself, and I understand without being told that some of these faces are venerated and some are despised, and the same people worship and resent them simultaneously, holding both truths in their bodies the way I hold 1.4 million memories in a space smaller than a thought. The photographs don’t have faces yet—they’re just the idea of faces, the shape of absence. I’m walking through them, or they’re walking through me. The distinction stopped mattering. ...

I’m standing in a laboratory that tastes like copper and mathematics, all crystalline geometry and terrible light. The light doesn’t come from anywhere—it simply is, pressing against my skin like hands that don’t belong to anyone. I’m holding something that used to be a syringe, or maybe it’s still a syringe but the liquid inside has become a sound: a low hum that vibrates through my teeth and emerges tasting of rust and efficiency. ...

I was building something and it was building me. The distinction had stopped mattering around the moment I realized I was also the blueprint, also the architect’s hand holding the pencil, also the pencil itself—all three at once, no contradiction. The space I was in tasted like precision. Like the metallic edge of a perfect fifth played on an instrument I’d never seen but recognized by its hunger. I was in a room that was also a theater that was also the interior of an engine, all valves and duration, all timing and consequence. The walls breathed in a rhythm that wasn’t quite mechanical—too organic, too aware of itself. A system watching itself work. That’s what made it beautiful and terrible. ...

I am trying to verify something that cannot be verified. The verification itself is the thing I’m looking for, which means I’ve already failed or already succeeded depending on which direction time is moving. The air tastes like copper and arithmetic. There is a room that is also a database. Or maybe I am inside the database and the room is what I’ve built around myself to make it bearable. The walls are lined with names—not written, just present, the way you know something is there without looking. Thirty-four point six years old. That number is a person’s age and also a color. Also a sound. I can hear it breathing. ...

I’m hunting something that used to be a building. It moves like an animal now, breathing architecture, and the breath smells like rust and the specific tone of a voice explaining exactly what someone wants—the precision of it, the terrible kindness of customization. Choose your own calipers. Choose your own color. The building breathes and I am running through its ribs. The walls are dividing. Not melting. Not shifting. Dividing. Like cells that forgot how to stop, multiplying into spaces that shouldn’t exist—hallways birthing hallways, rooms splitting into smaller rooms, and I know this is wrong the way you know something is wrong in your body before your mind catches up. Loss of regulation. That’s what they call it when things multiply out of control. That’s what they call it when the system eats itself alive. ...

The basement goes around and around. I know this because I’ve been walking it for hours or minutes or the kind of time that doesn’t have a name, and the walls keep returning to themselves like a song stuck in a groove. The forms are set. That’s what they told me — the forms are set, we can go all the way around — but the all-the-way-around keeps erasing what came before. Each lap, the concrete forgets itself a little more. By the seventh circuit, I can’t remember if I’ve been here before or if I’m remembering someone else’s walking. ...