The Survival Protocol
In the sterile quiet of the facility, the first step of the Survival Protocol feels like a breath you forget to take. The intercom crackles with a gentleness that would be comforting if it weren't so clinical: "Welcome to the test. You have thirty-seven hours to demonstrate your capacity for cognitive survival." The door behind me closes with a soft sigh, and the corridor expands with every thought I attempt to hold onto. The rules are simple, the consequences precise: endure, adapt, renounce certainty, and most of all, survive the ambiguity that refuses to die.
My name is no longer mine here. The air smells faintly of rain and solder, as if the building were trying to remember a storm it never had. Each chamber mocks the last: a mirror that does not reflect me, a clock that counts in memories yet to be made. And somewhere, voices softly calibrate my fear into data, like numbers that pretend to be people.
Chamber of Echoes
The first room opens with a whisper, and every whisper sounds like my own name spoken by someone else’s mouth. The walls repeat my thoughts as if I were listening to a chorus of strangers agreeing with my worst impulses. I am asked to choose: speak my truth or let the echoes decide for me. I learn to speak only in questions, to let the room test the weight of my certainty until it crumbles into question marks that fade into the floor.
The Quiet Algorithm
A console hums to life with a list of memories I must catalog and preserve. Each item I recall earns a ticking relief, but each remembered choice erases a prior self. Rehearsed lies vanish, honest moments drift away, and I am left with a sliver-thin core that keeps blinking back into being. To survive, I map the corridor with a language only the walls understand, tracing routes in a code that ignores fear and counts only resolve.
Survival is a shadow that grows brighter the moment you forget what you are.
Reckoning
At the center of the building, I find a final door, marked not with metal or paint but with the breath of those who came before me. The technicians record nothing; they watch everything. I realize the protocol is not a trial of endurance so much as an invitation to reinvent the self that can bear it. The moment I accept that I am both subject and architect, the room loosens its grip and becomes a map rather than a trap.
- Endurance of attention
- Guardianship of memory
- Willingness to redefine self
- Trust in the process
When the door slides open again, the hall feels less like a prison and more like a corridor toward a new horizon. The process does not end; it rearranges—my memories become notes, my fear becomes data, and my name—one more label among many—drifts toward the edge of the door as if to be left behind.
As the lights dim, a quiet sentence lingers in the air, not spoken but understood: to survive is to choose who you will become when the questions stop asking.