Sleepholder

(2,958 words)

Her client shuffled in like he knew the shape of the room already. Gaunt. Ghost-pale. A frame that looked like it was trying to leave itself behind. But his eyes were lucid—uncomfortably so. Not clouded by sedation. Not softened by the lulling neural taper the system usually piped in by default.

The walls gleamed soft white, scrubbed empty by the cleaners. Outside, beyond the door, the city churned with the noise and motion of the living—raw, full of possibility. Inside, the sim chamber was muted so the final architecture spun from the patient’s memory and neural scaffolds could unfold.

Siara’s role was simple: maintain affective stability, ensure session integrity, and shepherd the terminal mind across the death threshold. She wasn’t here to feel anything.

Client: Stenson, Alin. Thirty-nine. Terminal neurodegeneration. No family.

No custom sim package. No requests, no legacy transfer. Just the standard signal degradation package—default neural landscape, cognitive anesthesia, autonomic taper-down. The poor always died in recycled simscapes.

Thirty-nine. Young.

She slipped the neural harness with its lace conductive gel over his temples, locking the pads into the pre-auricular slots, fine adjusting for skin conductivity. Three taps initiated the interface sync: lace-to-lace handshake, affect channel open, cognition guardrails soft-loaded. The sync handshake lit up on her console: brain-computer interface live. No anomalies reported.

Neural hygiene was half superstition, half diagnostics. Rumors spread about things that could ride the lace. She didn’t believe them. But her skin prickled anyway. Siara adjusted the neural lace at her temples. She exhaled. The affective signal traveled into her somatosensory cortex–low-frequency neural signals guided by cortical gel contacts and pulse-synced affect modulation. Her thoughts entered the stream like a breath into cold air:

I’m here with you.

The simspace shifted into place, the perceptual scaffold built from synthetic memory nodes, projected directly into the patient’s mind; the architectural container, quiet and structured, where cognition could taper down without distress. Usually, the transition felt like stepping into fog—a diffuse onset, the echo of someone else's thoughts trailing hers. But this one hit fast.

She opened into a corridor. Narrow. Dark. Lined with concrete ribs that pulsed faintly, as if the structure had a vascular system. The lighting wasn’t hers. Neither was the air. It was sterile but hot, like a sealed server chamber gone too long without regulation.

This isn’t my entry field, she thought.

There should’ve been the ocean, the public domain one she always used. Pale sky, long grass.

She reached into her periphery for the override, feeling for the change in density against her fingers. It wasn’t there.

Alin was standing at the end of a corridor. Watching. His face was partially obscured, lit from below by a dull orange glow. His expression was too calm, too symmetrical. His body flickered slightly at the edges, as if rendered through a codec too old to parse him properly.

Siara stepped forward. “Alin, can you hear me?” A failed override might get reported. Reports turned into reviews, license suspension. Her ears rang.

No answer. But the corridor responded—a low, humming note slid down the walls.

Alin spoke, finally. Not with words. It was a tone, a shape, a code bleeding directly into her vision:

This node is misclassified. Reassign semantic frame. Input: Siara.

She took another step and the corridor expanded, unfurling like a paper structure inverted in on itself. The architecture of the space around her changed, not responding to her thoughts—his memory map was overriding the bridge. She could feel it now: the structure of it, the computational texture of his cognition: too precise. Too recursive.

He wasn’t dying. Or, if he was, he was doing it in a way that she hadn’t seen before.

“Alin,” she tried again, steadier now. “I need to terminate the session unless I can verify a stable cognitive loop.” He didn’t realize what this could cost her. Heat flared in her jaw. There would be review boards, audits, a red mark next to her name that never came off. She could be deemed unstable, blackballed from working. People who didn’t work didn’t keep housing or rations.

His voice—if it was a voice—slid through the BCI as a buried log message: I didn’t come here to die.

The floor shifted beneath her. The walls warped.

Her interface flashed. Sim instability. Boundary artifacts.

She felt an ooze somewhere in her frontal lobe—data she hadn’t queried leaking into her head. Flashes: a list of coordinates, a woman’s face—not hers—a sequence of tones warped into minor keys.

She scrambled for the manual disconnect. But the console code was blank, every admin port grayed out. He’d hijacked the bridge.

The corridor lengthened. Or maybe folded. She couldn’t tell anymore.

Every movement stretched. Input lagged in her motor control. Her footsteps no longer mapped correctly to the sim field; she took one step and landed somewhere else. Her vitals pinged in her periphery: elevated pulse, elevated cortisol, minor neural feedback.

The system had purged her patient notes. There was no session context. She was floating untethered, a cognitive ghost in someone else’s framework. Protocol should have kicked her out by now. But the system wasn’t ejecting her.

Siara reached inward, ran a diagnostic on her lace: something was pulling current on one of the channels . . . emotional pattern transfer, a stream that should’ve only run outbound. She was supposed to be the one projecting comfort, constructing the field, softening the edge of the end. But the stream wasn’t outbound.

Alin, if that was even still him, was standing closer now. No footsteps. Just there, his face glitching like a poorly interpolated dataset trying to fill in missing frames. Behind him, the corridor slumped into something wide and dark. A chamber? A gaping mouth?

She looked directly at him and said, with a growl, “You’re not dying.”

His face held, flickering once, then stabilized. His eyes were too still. Not dying. Just offloading.

Her hands moved on instinct, flailing, reaching to cut the tether. No use.

Not your memory anymore.

That voice again, deeper this time. It wasn’t his. Or maybe it was, stretched into something else, something layered.

Siara’s vision fuzzed at the edges. She saw flashes of things she’d never lived:

—A room with rusted walls and biometric locks.

—A protest sign in a language she didn’t speak.

—A needle slipping into her own neck—but from someone else’s point of view.

—The taste of blood mixed with citrus.

Her hands gripped the sides of her chair. She was back in the room, her breath sharp in her chest. Alin’s body was still, interface pads gleaming faintly under the room’s cold light. The sim hadn’t ended. She’d just surfaced for air.

I needed a carrier.

She blinked hard, trying to ground herself. “What did you put in me?” she said.

No answer. Just a deep, cold presence, something knotted into the base of her skull now.

It wasn’t a voice. Not anymore. It was a structure, a living pattern.

You’re sleepholder now.

The sever came without warning.

Siara backed against the wall and braced herself, feeling her own vitals spasm through the relay—unfamiliar feedback loops flickering at the edge of perception. Her body felt wrong. The air in the room had weight, like someone else was still breathing it. But Alin was dead.

Perfect vitals drop, no erratic spikes. The system logged it as clean. Expected. Non-eventful. Bullshit.

The terminal beside Alin’s cot read:

SESSION COMPLETED. SECURE.

But it hadn’t been secure. Not even close. She’d brought something back with her. And her nervous system wasn’t cooperating; it was re-prioritizing itself. Background programs initiating that she hadn’t meant to trigger.

Reflexes that weren’t hers. Emotional responses that she couldn’t trace.

* * *

Siara wiped her mouth, her face. She caught her reflection in the stainless cabinet. She didn’t look different. But something in her gaze felt . . . doubled. Like there was someone else behind her eyes, watching with her.

She had heard about black market firmware. Cognitive implants masked as medical aids. Political viruses buried in griefscapes. The whispers about people who’d died while smuggling information out of lockdown sectors. Memory payloads encoded in final moments. Death as transmission. She hadn’t believed it, not really. Until now.

She could feel it inside her now, heavy. This was not the product of one man’s grief. This was architecture. Composed. Slipped past security protocols because it wore the shape of a dying patient. It made sense, in a way. The one part of society no one monitored too closely: the end.

People looked away from death. That made it the perfect place to hide a revolution.

* * *

Siara walked the corridor with a stillness only part of her felt.

Overhead, the lights burned steady and hard, throwing down a heat that carried the bite of ozone. She blinked hard.

Everything looked slightly wrong, like someone had copied the world from memory and missed the details: the hallway slightly too narrow, the doorframes off-axis, the floor tiles repeating in cycles of thirteen. Like she was glitching. Or the world was.

She reached the nurse’s console. The screen woke up to her presence, running facial match and routine cognitive scan. She kept her pulse low, her gaze steady.

Welcome, Siara Bell.

Next client: E. Resnik.

The system didn’t flag her. Not yet.

* * *

She swallowed the noise building behind her eyes and swiped past the patient queue. Pulled up her own session log. Alin’s file was already archived. The death flagged as normal. Sim behavior logged as “minor variance.” No trace of the recursive loop. No trace of the offload.

She closed the log. Static rolled across her spine.

Take the map.

The phrase landed in her head like a memory, but she hadn’t thought it. Not really. She ducked into the maintenance alcove and pinged her implant’s diagnostic overlay. No anomalies. No breaches.

But when she blinked, a new folder bloomed in her personal storage, tucked behind layers of false admin logs. It hadn’t been there before.

She opened it.

Inside:

—A sequence of encrypted coordinates, pulse-timed.

—A text file titled Ruin Index.

—A memory fragment, labeled Berr, Silara/6yrs/Park/Dissenter.

—A looping symbol: two interlocked spirals rotating counter each other.

—A single phrase: You are repurposed.

* * *

Siara’s breath hitched once, shallow and uneven. Silara Berr. The name cracked through her like dropped voltage, memory fragments firing before she could stop them: a cell, a uniform, blood in her mouth after she hadn’t sworn her allegiance to their flag. They made her say yes until the words blurred. They cut her name into something easier. Behavioral assent achieved. Ideological retention achieved.

She slammed the folder shut, blinked it out of view. Anyone monitoring her interface would see nothing out of spec: the payload was hiding in plain sight, riding her as infrastructure.

Siara froze in the corridor outside Unit B12. Her next patient. She hadn’t connected yet. No sync. No lace. And yet, she was in it: a field, somewhere inland. Flat earth, red grass. A woman, weeping against her own arm, teeth bared. Something sharp in her thigh. Mama. A clipboard, a stamp, a door with no return. Disposal Logistics took the woman instead of Medicine. Her disease cost more than the district would pay.

Siara stumbled back. She hit the wall, hard.

The simscape snapped back to realspace, but the emotion clung. Panic, thick and hot. It was in her bloodstream now, like a fever.

She checked her lace—still off. She hadn’t even entered the room.

A bleed? A rare failure condition. Not in the manuals. Just whispered stories in the break room. Simulations manifesting uninvited, carried like parasites from one sync to the next. The theory was always bad hardware, a neural anchor left open, lax hygiene between sessions.

Her hands shook. If she reported this, she’d be quarantined, suspended pending mental hygiene review. Everyone knew what that meant: not just deemed unemployable, but identified as a problem.

It whispered again, unbidden: This is the switch point. For you. For all of us.

* * *

Her ID buzzed red. Unauthorized. She watched as her fingers typed in a manual passcode.

The door released. She slipped out. Walked fast. Not running. Not yet. Running drew eyes. Her face was bloodless and breath came short, but her feet moved. The service corridor reeked of coolant and disinfectant. On the far wall, someone had painted in ragged black strokes:

MERCY FOR ALL, NOT FOR SALE.

The letters were in the slanting hand of someone looking over their shoulder.

* * *

One block. Then two.

Once she reached the transit hub, she changed direction and pulled into an alley. The coordinates burned in her peripheral overlay.

She followed them. Passed block seventeen. Her pulse had become erratic. She wasn’t sure where her thoughts were ending and the payload’s were beginning. Half her mind was still with Resnik. Half was remembering a protest she’d never attended.

She reached a side street. No surveillance here, not anymore. The cameras had been ripped out, wires trailing like veins from a butchered limb.

Inside. This is where it began.

She stopped at the threshold, hand against the cold metal of the door. Her breath shook. Everything in her life had run on control. On ritual. Sync. Comfort. Clean endings. Now her head was a riot. Her memories weren’t hers. Her heartbeat didn’t feel like it belonged in her body.

And the system, the one she had served without question, would shred her for this if they found her.

But for the first time, she understood what Alin had meant: the end of life wasn’t a void. It was a tunnel. And he hadn’t just walked through it, he’d laid the track behind him.

She pushed the door open.

Inside: dust. Silence. And a flickering terminal waiting to sync. The room recognized her. And the signal welcomed her home.

There was a hum, not the machine-hum of a facility, but lower, older. The kind that vibrated in the bone before the ear could catch it. Residual frequency.

Siara stepped through the dust. The walls were blanketed with blackout paint. Stripped tech consoles lay open like autopsied organs. But one terminal was still alive. It blinked once as she crossed the threshold. A familiar interface. Not corporate. Not clean.

AUTHENTICATION: PENDING

AGENT ID: SLEEPHOLDER-0.418, LOCKED

INITIATE MEMORY RESTORE?

The question felt rhetorical.

She pressed her palm to the reader.

The terminal hissed. Then silence. Then pain.

It hit her like fire—no narrative, no sequence. Just everything, all at once.

She collapsed to her knees. Her thoughts split open in the light:

—Release day from the re-education camp, stamped compliant.

—Two nights later, the faction waiting.

—Implanted kill codes, training exercises.

—The chair, the needles, blankness blooming.

—Her own voice saying: “Let me forget. I’ll get closer if I forget.”

—Mental Hygiene exams passed clean, each one opening another door until she wore the nurse’s badge like it belonged to her.

Siara was the disguise. The mask that made her invisible. And now it peeled away. Her memory reassembled like broken glass finding its original shape: Sleepholder. Carrier. Rebel. Returner.

The room shifted.

Figures emerged from the shadowed alcoves. Some older. Some visibly altered by biotech. None wore uniforms. None had names on display. One stepped forward, a woman with seams in her skin, purple scars turning white, eyes ringed with kohl. “We thought you were lost.”

Sleepholder shook her head. “I had to be.”

She reached into her memory—no, into the payload. It was still there, but different now. Unlocked. The recursive loop had stabilized. It was her. Silara Berr was her. Siara Bell had been her, temporarily.

She accessed the index. The offloaded architecture of a resistance movement, too dangerous to store in any known format. Years of working, building scaffolding.

“You have it?” the woman asked.

Sleepholder nodded. “Everything.”

The terminal updated behind her.

PAYLOAD DECRYPTION: COMPLETE

REV INDEX: VERIFIED

ACTIVATION NODES: 23

The room brightened, actual lights this time. Generators kicking on. Doorways unlocking. The old hospice shell had been dormant, waiting for a returning signal.

“You remember your role?” the woman asked.

Sleepholder smiled, bitter, whole. “I wrote it.”

A screen illuminated behind them, showing the city grid. Red dots pulsed, slow and steady. Then one turned white. Then another.

* * *

Sleepholder stepped forward. For the first time in years, her body belonged to her. Her breath was hers. Her thoughts were hers. And they were going to burn the system down from the inside out. For you, Mama. For the better world you should have had.

The medical system flagged its first anomaly at 03:17 UTC: session divergence in a Tier III facility. A pattern loop outside standard parameters.

Slight deviation. No cause for alarm.

By 03:22, nine other divergences.

At 03:41, one patient stood up before death. Disconnected from the lace mid-loop. Whispered a name no one recognized and died smiling. By 04:00, the pattern couldn’t be contained.

* * *

Across the city, across regions, across hemispheres, nurses began blinking too long at terminals. Dreamscapes unraveled mid-script. Low-income clients, those assigned public-domain end loops, were suddenly speaking with voices they had never used before. Words surfaced. Songs. Coordinates. Old resistance mantras wrapped in dying breath.

The system initiated review protocols. It was already too late.

Beneath all of it, Silara Berr, Siara Bell, now Sleepholder, stood inside a memory hospice wired for war. A place no one remembered. A place that remembered everyone.

The payload lived. The sleepers were waking.

And the death of the ruling class would not be clean.