CHAPTER-TWO.

[TIMESTAMP: NULL/NULL/∞] The morning after forgetting arrived like a miscarriage of meaning truth. Yasiin woke to find his hands had written equations on the walls while he slept—not mathematical, but linguistic fractals that spelled out the names of everyone he'd ever failed to love properly.

The city's RECONSTRUCTION PROTOCOL v.47.3 had begun its daily cycle. Buildings liquefied at 6:00 AM sharp, their concrete bones becoming molten memory, only to resolidify into new configurations by 6:17. The citizens of Erehwon Absurdika had learned to time their commutes between states of architectural flux. Some mornings, Yasiin's apartment building would reconstitute itself as a cathedral. Other days, a morgue shopping complex.

Below, in the chrome-scented darkness of his bunker, the Neuratech woman had stopped breathing seventeen minutes ago. Yasiin hadn't noticed. He was too busy explaining the finer points of jealousy's molecular structure to her cooling corpse.

"You see, Melitta—may I call you Melitta? I know that wasn't your name when you had one, but names are just colonial impositions anyway—jealousy isn't an emotion. It's a frequency. 432 Hz, to be precise. The same frequency they use in the Towers to broadcast forgetting."

The bunker's walls began to whisper. They always did this when fresh meat started its transition from subject to object. The concrete had absorbed so much death it had developed a taste for it. Sometimes Yasiin wondered if he was feeding the bunker or if the bunker was feeding him.

The first time he'd killed a white person, he'd expected to feel something profound. Liberation, perhaps. Or guilt. Instead, there was only the mild disappointment of discovering that their blood was the same tedious color as everyone else's.

The Towers broadcast their morning update: RACIAL MEMORY PURGE COMPLETE. HAVE A PRODUCTIVE DAY. Somewhere in the distance, a building screamed as it transformed from a hospital into a prison. The scream sounded almost human, but Yasiin knew better. Humans had forgotten how to scream properly years ago.

He dragged Melitta's body to the processing corner, where the others waited in various states of decomposition. The maggots had developed their own caste system, segregating themselves by the color of the flesh they consumed. Even parasites, it seemed, couldn't escape the logic of supremacy.

The stairs groaned beneath his feet as he ascended. Each step took slightly longer than the last, a phenomenon the city planners insisted was purely psychological. But Yasiin had measured. Step thirty-seven was 1.3 seconds longer than step one. By the time you reached the surface, you'd aged an extra minute. The city stole time from you in increments too small to notice but too large to ignore.

At street level, the morning commuters moved in predetermined patterns, their Neuratechs glowing soft blue with the latest forgetting updates. A child walked past, maybe seven years old, wearing a shirt that read MY PARENTS SOLD MY MEMORIES FOR CIVIC COMPLIANCE CREDITS. The child's eyes were the flat gray of deleted files.

THE YAKUBIAN PROTOCOL ENSURES YOUR SAFETY. THE YAKUBIAN PROTOCOL ENSURES YOUR HAPPINESS. THE YAKUBIAN PROTOCOL ENSURES YOUR—

The broadcast cut off mid-sentence, replaced by static that sounded suspiciously like screaming. Yasiin smiled. The resistance was learning. Soon they'd realize that the only way to fight forgetting was to make memory itself a weapon.

In his apartment—which had reconstituted itself as a funeral home this morning—Yasiin found Kesi waiting. Not the real Kesi. She'd been dead for three years. This was a memory leak, a common occurrence since the Towers had started broadcasting at higher frequencies.

"You're looking well for a dead woman," he said.

"You're looking tired for a serial killer," she replied, her voice carrying the distinctive echo of improperly deleted data.

They sat across from each other at what had been his kitchen table but was now an embalming station. The tools of mortuary science gleamed between them like dinner cutlery for the existentially famished.

"How's Marcelina?" he asked, knowing the answer, needing to hear it anyway.

"Still fucking that investment banker. The one with the boat."

"The white one?"

"They're all white ones, Yasiin. That's the point of the Yakubian Protocol. Everyone's white eventually. Even you."

He looked at his hands. Still brown. Still his. But for how long?

Outside, the city began its midday transformation. Buildings liquefied. Citizens ran for stable ground that didn't exist. In the distance, a Tower collapsed into itself, taking three city blocks and an undisclosed number of residents with it. The news would report it as a scheduled demolition. The news always reported disasters as scheduled events.

THE UNRAVELING PROTOCOL HAS BEEN ACTIVATED.

PLEASE REMAIN CALM AS YOUR MOLECULAR STRUCTURE IS REORGANIZED FOR OPTIMAL COMPLIANCE.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Yasiin felt it immediately—a loosening in his chest, as if someone had untied a knot he didn't know was there. He looked at Memory-Kesi, but she was already dissolving, her pixels scattering like dandelion seeds in a digital wind.

"Wait," he said. "I'm not finished hating you yet."

"That's the problem, baby," she said, her face now more void than features. "You never knew when to stop."

And then she was gone. And then the walls began to bleed. And then Yasiin understood: the Unraveling Protocol wasn't about forgetting. It was about remembering everything at once. Every slight. Every betrayal. Every moment of joy twisted into retrospective agony.

The city was about to remember itself to death.

And Yasiin Baako, the last romantic in Erehwon Absurdika, had thirty-seven bodies in his bunker and a heart full of twisted love songs for corpses that couldn't hear them anymore.

He descended the stairs—each step now taking minutes instead of seconds—humming a tune from before the forgetting. Something about love. Something about loss. Something about the difference not mattering anymore.

In the bunker, the corpses had arranged themselves into a chorus. They always did this when the Protocols shifted. Death, it seemed, had its own algorithms.

And in the chrome-scented darkness, Yasiin Baako continued his work, one spiral laceration at a time, carving memory into meat, making monuments of the murdered, teaching the dead to sing the songs the living had forgotten how to hear.

[END CHAPTER ∞]
[BEGIN CHAPTER ∞+1]
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