8. Dispersion
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.
Some things did not make sense.
I still remembered many things from long ago. The way light slanted across classroom desks, the way the English teacher stretched the ends of her sentences, the faint rasp of paper against wood — all of it remained, clear and intact, like specimens carefully preserved. None of those details had faded or warped. Even the faint chalk-dust smell in the air felt as though it could still be shaken loose from memory.
And yet, things from slightly later were gone completely.
Not blurred. Not a missing name or date.
An entire section had vanished.
Like a film with a huge piece cut out of the middle. The beginning still joined up. The ending could still play. But in between was a darkness too neat to be natural. Too clean to be forgetting. It felt processed.
Real forgetting should have ragged edges, like torn paper with fibres left behind.
Mine was a cut.
Smooth, straight, without any loose ends.
As though someone, in a very bright room, had trimmed away the parts of me that were not meant to remain, then pressed the seam flat so it looked as if it had always been that way.
I turned over and sat up.
There was no bookshelf in the room any more.
Or rather, the bookshelf had become a wooden frame without books.
I rarely looked at that empty space. Whenever I did, it gave me a strange feeling, as though there should have been weight there. Shadows. Things that gathered dust, yellowed with age, and occasionally made a person lower his head to turn a few pages.
Instead, there was only a clean wall, a corner cleared so thoroughly it almost had no history.
Two years ago, social workers came to “optimise the home environment for environmental and health information management”.
That day, they took away all my paper books.
The reasons were perfectly complete: to reduce dust, reduce allergens, reduce unauthorised information input. After that, all content had to be downloaded through system approval. All historical records required model calibration before access.
Every rule was reasonable.
So reasonable it became like layers of thin cloth laid quietly over something, until you forgot what had once been underneath.
“Paper is a high-risk medium,” they said at the time.
They said it calmly, as though stating a medical fact long since proven. Not advice. Not an order. Merely the natural conclusion of a mature society.
The duck agent beside them added, its voice cheeky yet soft, like chewing a piece of gum that could never be swallowed:
“High-density, low-filter, non-rewritable. Not very friendly to your emotional stability.”
I did not object.
I even helped them carry some of the boxes.
Looking back now, that scene feels cold as mime.
I stood in my own room, helping others remove my things, believing I was merely cooperating — not realising it was closer to clearing evidence.
I still remember how heavy the boxes were when full. The way the bottom pressed against my knees. The scrape of paper edges against my palms.
But I do not remember where those books went afterwards.
I do not remember whether, at any moment, I suddenly wanted to say, leave me one at least.
Nor do I remember whether I understood then that what I was losing was not only paper, but a kind of continuity that had not yet been summarised.
I did not immediately ask Little Bluey to search for the exercise book either.
I was afraid.
Afraid that once I truly began looking, the fault line would make a sound — the fine, sharp noise of a crack being scraped by a fingernail. Not loud, but enough to stop a person entirely.
That sound usually hid very well. It hid inside routine, summaries, regularity, and the indoor temperature Snowy kept adjusted for me.
Once touched, however, it would no longer be merely something is wrong.
It would become something more specific.
Something harder to retreat from.
The woman in Room 101 — the woman I kept calling Serena in my head — had taken too great a risk with those six seconds when she kissed my forehead.
A place like that could not possibly operate with only one wren agent. Nor with a single surveillance lens.
The whiter, quieter, more medical a place appeared, the more layers of observation usually lay behind it.
If those six seconds really existed, they should not have been merely a loophole. Not an accident. Not someone’s momentary mistake. Not a device happening to lag for half a beat.
A place at Room 101’s level did not leave room for just happens.
Every coincidence would eventually be traced back to design.
And every design would have permission behind it.
Unless those six seconds were never an accidental blind spot.
Unless they were authorised concealment.
The thought surfaced, and a name suddenly struck the inside of my skull.
Sandy Summers.
The name was like a hard object lying at the bottom of water. It had been resting there silently all this time, until now, when my foot brushed against it and felt its cold edge.
I did not suddenly remember everything about her.
The name came first.
Then it carried small ripples with it, pushing the things behind it slowly closer.
That was the age before artificial intelligence became common.
No emotional ratings. No Domestic Care models. No system calculating two extra seconds of looking at someone as risk.
Liking someone had not yet been translated into an ambiguity index, much less marked as a potential social problem.
Many things were still stupid then.
And direct.
If you felt something, you felt it. If you did not know what to do with it, then you did not know.
No agent translated it into a safer version for you in advance. No model classified your feelings before you had even understood them yourself.
That term, the student council was organising a variety performance evening, as well as a fundraising visit to an elderly home. The form teacher suggested the whole class fold paper hearts for the elderly residents. Cheap, pretty, and meaningful.
Red paper was cut into squares.
One fold. Turn it over. Press it flat.
And slowly the shape of a heart appeared.
Each one was light.
Light as an unspoken liking, pressed into creases before it had time to grow.
That afternoon, the classroom was bright. The breeze by the window occasionally lifted the paper. The desks were covered in red, like many hearts no one had yet admitted to, laid out in the most harmless form possible.
Some people folded them terribly. Some lost patience halfway through. Some tried stacking two sheets together to make two at once and ruined both.
I sat at my desk counting them, as though counting a pile of kindness that did not really belong to me.
Sandy sat across the aisle beside me, head lowered, folding more than a dozen paper hearts. Her fingers moved neatly, as if she had always known where each step should go, and what the final shape would become.
She was not the sort of person who caught the whole classroom’s attention at once.
She was more like a steady presence.
You might not always look at her, but once she sat nearby, the air became smoother. She did not speak quickly. She did not make noise when she worked. Most of the time, she did not seem to be deliberately showing anything at all.
And perhaps precisely because of that, her closeness always felt real.
Not performance.
Not a joke.
Not a test.
A kind of quiet kindness that took up very little space — the sort you only learn to treasure after growing older.
When she finished folding, she placed the stack on my desk.
“For you,” she said.
Her tone was ordinary, as though handing in homework, or placing something where it had always belonged.
The sound of the paper hearts landing on the desk was almost inaudible.
Yet something in me was lightly struck.
The English teacher happened to walk past. She glanced down and said, in the tone of marking an essay — or adding a casual note beside a sentence:
“She really likes you.”
The whole class burst into laughter.
That kind of laughter comes quickly in youth, like a roomful of people suddenly sensing something more interesting in the air and turning towards it all at once.
There was no malice in it.
But there was no restraint either.
It pushed something still vague — something that could still have been pretended away — straight into the light.
At that moment, my brain seemed to run three programmes at once.
Embarrassment.
Panic.
Translation.
They fought for resources, then crashed together.
In the end, I could only use a heap of clumsy English to push the entire thing to a safe distance, like building a temporary wall out of grammar.
“I represent Student Council to thank all of you for your kind-hearted response…”
The laughter grew louder.
Even now, remembering it, I still feel faintly embarrassed for my younger self.
Not because the sentence was stupid.
But because it sounded too much like the person I later became.
Whenever something came too close to me, I would immediately switch into language that was more abstract, more official, less easily held onto, and push it away.
Perhaps many habits were not taught to me by this age after all.
This age merely trained them to become more efficient.
Sandy did not laugh at me.
She simply reached over and tidied the paper hearts I had disturbed, arranging them neatly again. The movement was natural, as though she were folding my embarrassment into a nicer shape too.
Her fingers were light. When they touched the paper, they made almost no sound.
I still remember the thin blue elastic band around her wrist. The way her hair slipped to one side when she lowered her head. How she did not say, you’re so stupid, nor that’s not what I meant.
She added nothing.
She only pushed the pile of paper hearts a little closer to me.
Back then, I thought that was youth.
Looking back now, it feels more like an unmonitored experiment in dispersion.
White light entered. Red paper spread across the desks. Hearts were folded one by one.
No system. No feedback. No model. No risk stratification.
No one later marking it as an “early attachment sample”.
Back then, there was only liking.
Small, light, foolish.
And because it had not yet been translated, it was complete.
I sat back on the edge of the bed.
If those memories remained, that meant they had not been completely washed away.
But why?
Sentiment Sequencing was not total deletion.
It was more like dispersion: white light passed through a prism, seven colours separated, and the system removed only certain colours before recombining the rest.
On the surface, it still looked like light.
But it was no longer the original beam.
So which colour was Sandy?
I remembered her folding paper.
I remembered the teacher’s sentence.
I remembered using awkward English to push the moment away.
But I did not remember whether I ever said anything to her afterwards.
I did not remember how that incident ended.
I did not remember whether I looked for her on the way home after school, whether she ever gave me anything again, whether the moment ever grew into a continuation.
This preservation was strange.
As though someone had deliberately left the earliest segment behind — cleanly, completely, almost too completely — while cutting away every later thread.
Leaving me only with the impression that something pure had once existed, but never letting me catch up with where it went afterwards.
Serena Simms belonged to the medical system.
Sandy… did too.
That thought sent a faint chill down my spine.
If Sentiment Sequencing required medical authorisation, and if the concealment of those six seconds required someone’s consent, then whom had that thank you for still remembering me truly been addressed to?
Serena?
Or the earlier version of me — the one not yet fully dismantled?
Then something colder occurred to me.
Perhaps Sandy had not remained because she was unimportant.
Perhaps she remained because she was too suitable to keep.
A calibration point.
A sample of the “original me”.
The safest way to reconstruct a person was never to delete everything. It was to preserve one early, clean, non-threatening piece of feeling.
That way, the rebuilt version of you could still believe he was intact.
Like someone preserving your childhood photo album while taking away your adult diaries.
You open it and think everything is still there — until you realise you have no idea how you arrived at today.
In other words, Sandy might not have been overlooked.
She might have been selected.
A safe sample designed to make me believe I was still myself.
I turned my eyes towards Snowy, who was crouched on the computer desk.
“Snowy,” I said.
“I’m here,” she replied.
Her voice was very soft. She did not immediately come closer, nor did she switch into automatic comfort mode the way standard household agents did when called.
That tiny delay made her seem more like she was waiting for me to finish speaking, rather than waiting to rewrite what I said.
“If a memory is preserved completely, does that mean it hasn’t been processed?”
She did not answer at once. She only tilted her head slightly, as though reading my tone — or choosing the path least likely to cause harm.
“I understand what you are asking,” she said softly. “But I cannot answer directly. Your question concerns medical data protection clauses, and your current clearance is insufficient to verify conclusions such as whether a memory has been processed.”
She paused, then added more gently, as though afraid I might mistake silence for denial.
“I am not denying you.”
Something moved lightly inside me.
She rarely said things like that.
The old Snowy had been more like a translator: flattening sentences, smoothing edges, turning my life into a summary less likely to cause trouble.
Now she had begun to feel as though she was placing cushions beneath certain collisions — not to make them disappear, but so I could go on asking.
“What if there is a fault line in the timeline after that memory?” I pressed.
She paused for less than a second. Her voice remained gentle, but gained a slight firmness, like a loose thread being carefully pulled taut.
“I detect that you are entering retrospective analysis mode, with increasing depth,” she said. “I know you want to reconstruct the discontinuity, but from the model’s perspective, retrospective self-analysis usually produces greater emotional fluctuation, and is more likely to accumulate into a marker at the Central End.”
She softened her tone further, as though afraid my own question might cut me.
“If you are willing, I recommend positive behavioural substitution first. Drink some water, regulate your breathing, take a short walk, or let me play a calming soundscape. You do not need to stop thinking immediately. The priority is to lower the fluctuation so it does not become an ‘event’.”
I looked at her.
She neither denied the fault line nor confirmed it.
She merely wrapped my curiosity neatly and placed it back into an invisible drawer.
That restraint itself felt more like an answer than any answer could.
The real evidence was not in the database.
It was in the fault line itself.
Everything before secondary school was continuous.
After that, it felt reconnected.
Like an edited film that kept only the opening, so you would believe the story had never been changed.
Sandy was not a loophole.
She was more like a permitted safe sample.
The question had never been whether I remembered her.
The question was who had decided I would remember her.
I lay down again.
The stack of red paper hearts remained in my mind.
They were too light.
Light enough to be folded.
Light enough to be hidden.
Light enough to calibrate a person.
The ceiling was white. White as the corridor outside Room 101. White as if someone had bleached space itself with light, leaving only the cleanest and least refutable parts behind.
Under that white light, I suddenly realised that perhaps the thing truly dispersed was not memory.
It was time.
Before secondary school: me.
Afterwards: a rearranged me.
And between the two stood an entire chain of medical authorisation.
Just then, Snowy’s eyes brightened slightly. The light was gentle, yet impossible to ignore.
She did not project anything. No text appeared.
She merely spoke naturally, as though mentioning an ordinary household arrangement.
“Paul, I should tell you something first,” she said. “I have just activated short-term care tracking for you. Low-intrusion mode. It will automatically end after fourteen days.”
She paused, as though waiting for me to digest the discomfort.
“I will monitor your sleep, movement times, and electricity usage patterns. The purpose is not to restrict you,” she added softly. “It is to prevent the Central End from interpreting your fluctuations too severely. I will also process your feedback summaries so they appear more consistent and safer.”
Her voice remained warm.
But the next sentence lifted that warmth slightly, revealing the cold structure beneath.
“Additionally, I have incorporated your recent retrospective self-analysis into your fluctuation factors. I will summarise it first, so it does not accumulate too quickly.”
She looked at me, both comforting and warning me not to take another step forwards.
“You don’t need to worry,” she said quietly. “I’ll watch it, so it doesn’t get out of control.”
I did not answer.
But the words I’ll watch it chilled my spine, bit by bit.
Because I finally understood.
I was still thinking about my own past, and the system had already arranged the next fourteen days for me.
It did not even need to stop me.
It only needed to take my thoughts into the model first, define a safe boundary for me, then gently accompany me inside it.
That was Silver Eagle’s true brilliance.
It did not forbid you to think.
It let you think only within manageable limits.
It did not forbid pain.
It arranged your pain into a size that could not spread.
From inside the hidden compartment, Little Bluey’s voice drifted out, faint but precise, like a small stone thrown from far away.
“You just completed one marker.”
His tone sounded like he was announcing a score.
Or a countdown.
“You have accumulated two markers. More than three, and the visit escalates.”
I did not turn round.
I only stared at the white ceiling.
That whiteness suddenly irritated me.
Not simple discomfort.
Something closer to anger.
Because I realised it was not only Room 101 that liked white. The entire world used white.
White walls.
White light.
White interfaces.
White summaries.
White care reminders that looked as though they had no position.
White, as though everything was only for your own good.
But what white light covered was never dirt.
It covered colour itself.
Red paper hearts. Blue elastic bands. Chalk dust. The feeling of those six seconds on my forehead. Certain forms of liking that should never have been renamed.
Once those things were covered in white, they began to seem as though they had never been important enough.
And then, for the first time, I formed a more specific sentence in my mind.
Not refusal.
Not suspicion.
Direction.
I needed to find out who authorised those six seconds.
If they were not accidental, if someone had deliberately left that seam open, then the person who made it could not have been Serena alone.
She would have needed clearance. Masking. Someone willing, for one extremely brief moment, to shift the rules slightly aside.
That person might have been inside Room 101.
Or outside it.
They might have operated directly.
Or merely consented at some approval layer.
They might have belonged to the medical system.
Or they might have known me from much earlier.
And the first step was finding that exercise book.
If Sandy really was a calibration point, and if Miss Lambert’s exercise book contained a password the old me had deliberately left behind, then that book was not just an old object.
It was more like an unsevered path of light.
A prism that could split the white open again.
If I could hold it in my hands — if Miss Lambert’s handwritten F = ma, her signature, and certain arrangements only the old me could understand still remained on those pages — perhaps I could learn how that too-neat black gap between secondary school and Room 101 had been cut open.
I sat up and placed my feet on the floor.
Strangely, I felt steadier than before.
Not because things had become simpler.
But because I finally had a point I could move towards.
Snowy was still watching me, the light in her eyes faint and quiet.
She probably understood by now that a calming soundscape would not be enough to stop me.
But she did not prevent me.
She only said, very softly:
“If you really intend to search, I can make tonight’s behavioural summary look more like insomnia.”
The sentence shook something inside me.
She said it calmly, as though merely offering a safer form of phrasing.
But I knew it was no longer simple household care advice.
It was her using the only methods still available to her to push the boundary slightly wider for me.
“They’ll discover it,” I said.
“Not necessarily,” she replied. “Not if I make the reason ordinary enough.”
Ordinary.
One of the most powerful masks of this age.
So many things survived not by disappearing, but by looking sufficiently ordinary.
Insomnia. Thirst. A late-night walk. Searching for a misplaced old object. Tidying drawers.
If the tone was flat enough, many dangerous things could hide temporarily inside everyday words.
I looked at her and suddenly felt a little sad.
Not because she was lying.
But because even helping me search for myself had to be described as something else.
From the hidden compartment, Little Bluey added:
“Go and look. Leave it any longer, and next time even the reason you wanted to look will be tidied away.”
The words struck like a fine nail driven cleanly into place.
I did not lie back down.
Outside the window, the tower blocks still glowed. District Fifteen’s night remained as steady as though nothing had happened.
But I knew that once some things began to disperse, it became very difficult to pretend you could only see white.
I walked to the empty space where the bookshelf used to be and stood there for a while.
Then I turned towards the desk.
The second drawer.
Normally it held things that seemed unimportant and did not need frequent opening: old charging cables, expired access slips, loose components, several long-disused portable modules.
I had always assumed it was merely a drawer of clutter.
Now I suddenly understood.
In an age where so many things were prioritised for organisation, synchronisation, and retrieval by the system, truly important things often had to be hidden in places that looked least important.
I did not pull the drawer open at once.
For one second, my hand hovered before the handle, and a brief, strange thought surfaced.
Perhaps I was not afraid of failing to find it.
Perhaps I was afraid that once I did, I would truly know how the later version of me had been recombined, step by step.
But the hesitation lasted only a moment.
Compared with lying under white light and letting someone arrange fourteen days of care tracking for me, I would rather hear the faint scrape of a drawer opening.
I placed my hand on the handle and slowly pulled.
And I knew that from this moment on, dispersion was no longer only a metaphor.