Turn 3 of 12

Search for your own name in the program

You click into the search box and type T-E. The autocomplete does not finish your name. It does not need to. After two letters the list populates: MARCHETTI, TEODOR — 27 — SELF. The dash-self is a tag you have not seen on any other record. It sits there in the dropdown like a quiet announcement that the program knew you would look yourself up, and had a field ready.

The record loads faster than Milo's did, as though it were already cached. The top fields are mundane and correct: NAME, DOB, ADDRESS, the lot of it. Then the schema opens into the same deep, unwanted territory. SLEEP: 4.1 hours average, chronic insomnia, onset age 19. You knew that, technically, in the way you know you should drink more water. Seeing the number is different. Seeing the number is a diagnosis in a text box that someone else wrote. INSOMNIA ROOT: Will not sleep while problems remain unsolved. The field is phrased like a spec comment — blunt, structural, the kind of note a developer leaves in code they did not write but now maintain.

You keep scrolling. The feeling is not of reading your own file so much as being read by it. JOB: Underemployed developer, freelance, irregular. The word underemployed is not one you have ever typed in a CV. It is not wrong. RELATIONSHIPS lists six entries, same as Milo's, and you know every name — but the summaries are terse in a way that stings. MILO FENICK: Best friend. Influence: stabilising. Mutual reliance, asymmetric — he leans on you more than you lean on him. That may have been true this morning. You are not sure it is true now, with the zero sitting in his record and the one sitting in yours.

Then you find a field that is not on Milo's record. A field that is only on yours. It sits between SLEEP and MOOD, unlabelled in any schema you recognise, a single text box with a label in small caps: EDITED BY. The value is empty. The cursor blinks in it, willing, waiting for input. Below it, in smaller text, a line you almost miss: LAST_SYNC: pending — self-record locked. The self-record is locked. You cannot edit yourself. Someone — something — anticipated the exact impulse that brought you here, and left the door closed. The undo counter still reads 1.

You lean back in your chair. The radiator ticks once, then stops. The scrollbar for your own record is not at the bottom either, and the fields you have not yet read are below a section header that reads, simply, OBSERVED.