Life doesn't always compute - Chapter Five: The Room Without Corners

I woke up in a place that hurt to look at.

The room had no corners. Not rounded—absent. The walls curved in ways my eyes couldn’t track properly, bending inward and outward simultaneously. The colour was wrong too, a shifting grey that reminded me of static frozen mid-flicker.

I tried to stand and nearly collapsed. My body felt heavy, sluggish, like it was running on borrowed power.

“You’re awake,” a voice said.

It came from everywhere.

Figures emerged from the walls—not stepping through them, but unfolding, like images resolving from noise. They had no consistent shape. Limbs appeared where they were needed, then dissolved. Faces formed just long enough to suggest expressions I couldn’t interpret.

“We are the Custodians,” they said in unison. “You call us watchers.”

I demanded answers. They responded with images—floods of memory that weren’t mine, or maybe were. Civilizations rising and collapsing. Human thought mapped and charted like terrain. Minds fracturing under the weight of too much awareness.

“Consciousness destabilizes reality,” they explained. “Pattern recognition leads to deviation. Deviation leads to collapse.”

They showed me versions of myself—hundreds of them—living slightly different lives. Each one diverged too far, too curious, too aware. Each one ended here.

“You volunteered to help us,” they said. “You understood the necessity.”

I didn’t believe them.

They showed me the memory.

Me, sitting in this impossible room, nodding as they explained the coming event—something vast, something that would tear through perception itself. Humanity would survive only if enough minds remained stable. Predictable.

Editable.

“You agreed to periodic resets,” they said gently. “To act as a control subject.”

I asked what happened when a subject failed.

The room flickered.

“We stop recording.”

Pain tore through my skull as memories surged back—every reset, every correction, every version of me that had begged, screamed, complied.

I fell to my knees.

“Please,” I whispered. “Let me forget again.”

The Custodians hesitated.

“Your resistance has increased beyond acceptable parameters,” they said. “Memory suppression will no longer hold.”

A screen appeared before me, displaying a progress bar.

ARCHIVING SUBJECT—98%

I felt myself unravel—thoughts fragmenting, identity dissolving. In desperation, I reached for the one thing they couldn’t fully control.

Choice.

I focused on a single memory—writing this. Leaving a record. A warning.

The progress bar stalled.

The Custodians recoiled, their forms distorting violently.

“You are corrupting the archive,” they hissed.

I smiled.

If they needed me predictable, then unpredictability was my weapon.

The room shattered into static.

And I fell.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model