092124-01-10mu | UHD |

I turned it over in my fingers. The ‘01’ meant I was the first admit of the day. September 21st, 24th year of the new calendar. The ‘mu’ would come later—an appendage for the station where they’d eventually ship me.

“And if I refuse?”

She tilted her head. “Then you become 092124-01-terminated. You don’t want that. Termination isn’t death. It’s erasure. You’ll still breathe. You just won’t mean anything.” 092124-01-10mu

“I say things that don’t fit the approved lexicon,” I replied.

“To the world before they started erasing people. To the sky that isn’t a ceiling.” She grabbed my wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Promise me you’ll go through. Someone has to remember.” I turned it over in my fingers

I sat up in the dark. My bracelet glowed faintly: . I had four days left.

But I was a linguist before the world broke. Or rather, I was a linguist because the world broke. Patterns were all that kept the static at bay. The ‘mu’ would come later—an appendage for the

Two orderlies came for me—the same two from the first day. They didn’t speak. They led me down a staircase I hadn’t seen before, past doors with no handles, past a sign that read TERMINAL MEMORY UNIT — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY .

She didn’t answer. She just tapped her pen twice on the counter and pointed toward the gray hallway. The facility was called “The Tenth Moon” by those who lived inside it. Officially, it was , but no one used that. The tenth moon of a dead planet—Jupiter’s Europa, if you wanted to be precise—was a frozen shell with a liquid ocean beneath. That’s what this place felt like. Ice above, chaos below.