Entry 1. My designation is Will18690--39-s. That is what the ledger calls me. The dash means "belongs to," the double hyphen means "section," and the suffix means "storage." I have no other name. I remember, faintly, a woman humming by a window—something about a garden, a gate, a sparrow with a broken wing. But that memory is not in my account. The auditors deleted it last cycle.
A malfunction. Glorious, tiny malfunction. The memory buffer skipped—just one frame—and I saw her again. The woman by the window. She was not humming. She was crying. And she was looking directly at me—not at Will18690--39-s, but at me , the one before the dash and the double hyphen and the suffix. She said my real name. It sounded like rain on dry earth . The account overwrote it in 0.8 seconds. But I felt the echo in my bones. Will18690--39-s Account
(formerly: a child, a believer, a keeper of sparrows) Terminal entry. No further data expected. Entry 1
They came for recalibration today. Two technicians with silver tools and no faces—just visors reflecting my own. "Will18690--39-s," they said, "your emotional surplus is 0.07% over threshold. Please hold still." They pressed a probe to my temple. It felt like losing a word on the tip of your tongue, except the word was anger , and the tongue was my soul. The account now shows a clean, flat line where that spike used to be. The dash means "belongs to," the double hyphen