Turn 5 of 15

Step inside and let the door close

I step across the threshold. The mesh lining brushes my arm through my jumper, cold and faintly vibrating, and the air inside the pod is suddenly ten degrees warmer, thick and electric against my skin. The receptionist reaches past me and pulls the heavy door shut with a soft, definitive click. The sound of the pop music vanishes. The hum deepens, rising through the soles of my boots and into my chest, and the blue light brightens, casting my shadow against the curved wall in sharp, wavering relief.

I press my back against the far side of the pod and watch the door. There is no handle on the inside. The seam where it meets the frame is seamless, the fiberglass blending into itself as if it were never a door at all. A thin line of light appears around the edge, then narrows, then vanishes entirely. I am sealed in. The ozone smell is overwhelming now, metallic and clean, and it makes my eyes stream. I blink hard and look up. The ceiling is inches from my head, covered in the same dark mesh, and I can see tiny nodes embedded in it, like the contacts of a circuit board.

The humming shifts frequency, dropping into a bass note I feel in my teeth. The blue light changes, streaked now with threads of white that crawl across the mesh like living things. I feel a tingling at the base of my skull, not painful, but insistent, like a foot that has fallen asleep. I try to move my hand to the back of my neck, but my arm feels heavy, distant, as if it belongs to someone standing next to me. The white threads in the light gather, concentrating into a single, bright point directly in front of my eyes.

The point expands, becoming a shape, then a pattern. It is not a light show. It is information, dense and scrolling, written in a language I do not recognise but somehow begin to parse. Shapes and symbols and sequences, unfolding like a flower made of mathematics. I feel something inside me shift, a quiet rearrangement, like furniture being moved in a dark room. My thoughts, which had been racing, slow to a steady, measured pace. The fear does not vanish. It is simply set aside, placed on a shelf, noted and categorised and filed away.

The white light floods the pod, and for a moment, there is nothing but brightness and the deep, resonant hum. Then, as quickly as it began, it fades. The hum drops to a whisper. The blue light dims to a soft, ambient glow. The door clicks again, and a thin line of light reappears along the seam. The air inside the pod is still, the ozone smell fading, replaced by something clean and neutral, like laundered linen. I can move my arms again. I can think. But the thoughts are different, smoother, arranged in neat rows. I look down at my hands. They are the same. I am the same. And yet, something has been edited, a footnote added, a paragraph rewritten while I wasn't looking.

The door swings open, and the receptionist stands there, her smile no longer vacant but warm, welcoming, familiar.

"There we are," she says, her voice carrying a new, gentle cadence. "How do you feel?" I step out of the pod, my legs steady, the hum of the console fading behind me. The salon is quiet. The music is still playing. The coconut smell is still there. Everything is exactly as it was, except for the small, precise alteration at the center of me, a space that has been cleared and is waiting to be filled.