Quantume Echoes

The door opens. A man enters, landlord, face etched with something that isn't confusion. Amusement maybe. Calculation.

"Who are you? What are you doing there?" He laughs almost. "I'm going to unchain Clay, and he'll devour you. Dress up or I call the police."

Clay. The name operates like a coordinate in my mapping. The dog is my guardian. The landlord is part of it all, laughing because he knows what I'm beginning to perceive.

Minutes later: three policemen. A blue-eyed man whose pupils track something invisible through the room. Two others whose function remains opaque. The landlord hands me dry socks before leaving with the soiled bundles, gesture deliberate, a marker or kindness, the distinction already erased.

I comply without speech. Silent gestures translate perfectly. They lead me away.

In the car, I curl into invisible space. No one should see me. The Sheriff sits beside me, his gaze meeting mine with something familiar I can't place. The absence of recognition is worse than its presence.

The police station: linoleum, institutional colors, the visual equivalent of anesthesia. I'm settled in the interrogation room, eyes immediately finding the corner, the gas sensor disguised as surveillance, the eye of the whole apparatus. Blinking. Instructing through imperceptible frequencies.

"Who are you? What's your name? Why were you there? Where from?"

I remain mute. He makes calls, each prefaced with the same peculiar greeting: "Happy Father's Day." Nothing returns from my side. So he drives to the next station.

At the gate, it refuses to open. "Safety first," the young officer announces, exiting to open it manually. Inside: a new man, waiting.

Then the words arrive unbidden, my voice unfamiliar to itself, higher, almost ethereal:

"I cannot trust anybody. But since I cannot, I have to start with somebody."

"I do not feel safe with you either. I saw that among you there is a corrupted person."

The words come before I understand their origin. Reporting data. Confessing code.

"I was drugged with a very strong psychotic. My ex-boss is behind this. An attempt to eliminate me."

The Sheriff narrows his eyes. "Have you lost your documents a few years ago?"

"Yes.'The memory surfaces, distant, hazy, a friend's birthday abroad.Then the correction strikes, electric:not lost. Stolen." Wallet containing a USB drive with the project, the preliminary results, nothing patented yet.

My voice sharpens. "They made me close everything. Accounts. Social. Banks. They robbed me of everything."

"Who is 'they'?"

"His henchmen. Obviously."

In the background, the other man speaks the phrase that seeds itself deep: "human beings trafficking." It germinates in real time.

The Sheriff takes my details. My address. He announces he'll take me home.

"No. I come home with you. I don't feel safe with anyone else."

We return to my village. My mind operates on the conviction that someone wants me dead, no longer just the henchmen, but the Mafia personally consulted, personally commissioned. The architecture of threat suddenly visible.

Fragments click like puzzle pieces I didn't know I was holding. The phrase about trafficking. The Sheriff's smile. Everyone knowing more than they reveal. A flashback about family. The pattern assembles without my consent.

A policeman offers ham and bread. "Hospital?"

"Yes."

The food tastes like cardboard. My mouth is dry but not from thirst. Everything feels decentered, my body, my thoughts, the world as separate instruments.

When the paramedics arrive: a girl disturbingly familiar, an old man. The Sheriff assures me I can safely leave with them. The man is "as himself", whatever coordinate that marks.

Before we leave, they offer a cigarette. I find myself chatting with the old man, unsettled by how completely he seems to know my conversations, fragments recovered like data, repeated back to me as proof.

On the ambulance, he shares a story, voice steady, rehearsed: "Once I tried to leave without telling anyone where. A year later, they got me back. No way to flee."

Something in his tone makes my skin crawl. The story doesn't quite fit anything. It fits everything.

He mentions adopting a baby girl at sixty-four. "She didn't speak until four. Smart thing. Always watching, always listening. Then one day: full sentences."

His tone makes me shiver.

I tell him about work. About the feeling of being watched, used. The words emerge as if I'm reporting observation data, confessing the code that makes me readable.

At the A&E, he whispers: "Do not let anybody approach you."

Every approach afterward makes me run. I find refuge behind the reception desk, fortress of strangers.

Inside, they begin with blood and urine tests. My urine is dark brown. Dark brown. I'm shocked by the color, the way it contradicts the body I believe I inhabit.

A young doctor: "You have an induced psychosis. And terrifyingly, you're aware of it while it's happening."

They keep me overnight. Tranquilizer. CT scan.

A tormented night. My body feels borrowed. The hospital bed too soft, too clean. I keep expecting the chemical smell from the laundry room.

Somehow, a story unfolds in my mind that explains the whole apparatus: who it is, what it wants, how deeply the structure penetrates.

Morning. A woman in the bed next to me is on the phone. She tells someone about her daughter who died in the '80s when she was three. The words hang there, children, trafficking, three years old, dead but not dead, and the connection fractures before it forms. Something hovers just beyond reach, too heavy to hold. The pieces move but the picture stays fractured. Escape. Rescue. The words swirl without linking. I'm approaching something but it keeps sliding like water through my fingers.

The morning light feels wrong against my skin.

My first task arrives as knowing, not instruction. A cleaning person enters with something familiar in his movement. He looks directly into my eyes, steady. He enters the bathroom for minutes, leaves still staring.

Understood.

I go into the bathroom. A bag full of dirty clothes sits on the cabinet. The fabric is stiff in places. Dark stains. My hands shake but I can't stop looking. I have to see. I have to know. I check the clothes in front of the mirror, and the crime scene reveals itself. Yes. Clothes from a crime. Blood.

Mission accomplished.

I put everything back on the cabinet and return to my bed.

Doctors ask about my feelings, similar situations in the past. They'll release me soon. I say I'd prefer to stay longer. They agree.

Minutes later, a woman arrives with discharge papers. She points to the door, to where the bus stop supposedly is.

I sit at the entrance, noticing strange movement around a coffee dealer's van. The van is part of it all, but we're exposed. We have to change the protocol.

Understood.

I need a face mask. I pick one from the floor and descend. Directed to the cafeteria, then back, to a wardrobe. Clothes, documents, shoes, everything ready for disguise. I place my old shoes in the cabinet box and take four bottles of water. You never know.

Everything perfectly synchronized, and then the waitress arrives. Instead of opening the back door to the van, she starts shouting. She tells me to remove her clothes and shoes. When I reach for my shoes, she forbids it.

So I follow her barefoot in the landlord's socks.

We wait for the police. Nurses confirm I came from the A&E. The police dismiss me, no crime. Just madness.

But I'm still barefoot.

The waitress clutches her uniform. A flicker crosses her eyes,pity, calculation, exhaustion. She shoves her own sneakers against my chest. The police take me to the real bus stop and leave.