FRAGMENT III – THE MUTE AIR
Retrieved from a decayed neural circuit in the Weave. The subject had no face — only signal. Thoughts echo like static between abandoned minds. “Everything misses me.”
the Guest
🜁 Air
[File 3.IV / Weave sector / Disconnected circuit / Signal continuity: 43%]
Recovered within the tissue of a fossil neural network, faintly active. Partial signals, dispersed. The Guest deciphered what did not ask to be remembered.
I woke in a room I didn’t recognize.
And realized it was mine.
The Weave breaks everything apart. The walls vibrate. Not with sound — but with unfinished intentions. Everything here seems to want to say something it no longer remembers how to form.
[neural echo // cross-thought interference]
The subject has no face. Perhaps he forgot it. Perhaps he has too many.
I heard a thought knocking from inside my forehead.
It wasn’t mine.
But I didn’t have the strength to turn it away.
He says he was once connected — to the Sensory Grid, to the “forced empathy network,” as some called it. Love was a shared signal. Pain, a balanced equation between nodes.
Now he hears only the space between thoughts. Each idea starting elsewhere, inhabiting him by mistake.
In the Weave, no one speaks aloud anymore. Words are thought. If the air recognizes them, it keeps them — sometimes for days, releasing them to whoever passes by.
[latency rise // retention 36h]
I found a thought curled in a corner.
It said: “You are not you — you’re what’s left after you stop searching.”
I touched it. It bit.
The subject reports he no longer feels emotion. Or rather — he receives too many. Shocks, impulses, residual desires.
I miss nothing.
Yet everything seems to miss me.
He dreams in dead pixels. The images never form, only suggest. No dream lasts more than five beats. Then he wakes. In a room that changes shape each time.
[time loop offset detected]
I look around.
I see thoughts written on the walls.
I can’t tell if they’re mine — or if I’m theirs.
Sometimes, between phrases, a strange sound slips through — пустота — half sigh, half static, the ghost of a word that means nothing but feels like loss.
The Weave moves even when I sleep. Maybe I’m only dreaming my own archive. Maybe the air was never mine.
⟟ [language: Russian]
пустота (pustotá) — “emptiness, void”; here used as a glitch of consciousness, a word that hums when thought detaches from the body.
Note from the Guest:
Here, thoughts don’t come from within.
They rise where light broke and turned to voice.
Alienation isn’t solitude.
It’s being inhabited by what you never chose.
Archive: 3.IV / Weave / Collapsed Node 3
Seal: 🜁
Recall Code: “Everything misses me.”
// Reread the archive //
the Guest