Forty Pages to Fracture

The ward cycles like broken code: two out, one in. Change is coming. I can feel it in the air recycling, in the way shadows move.

The new arrival in Bed 4 is a stark, unsettling paradox. Death lives in her smile, every tooth charred black as burnt offerings, yet she radiates frenzied, chemical joy. Joy. I name her that. I cannot reconcile her condition, a recent suicide attempt, with her almost delirious happiness. The irony burns. How do you try to die and wake up this happy? What breaks in a person that I cannot see? She has tried to erase herself just days ago. And there they are: the very pills, rattling loose in her unzipped bag beside a cheap plastic lighter.

"Nurse!" My voice cracks the sterile air. "She tried to die swallowing these. And you left them with her? With a lighter?"

Her arrival triggers an impossible awakening. The Catatonic Woman, silent for two years, speaks. Her words, disjointed but clear, reveal a past connection with Joy, a shared history veiled in fractured memory.

One day, words spill from the Catatonic Woman: "Fire. My boy. Three years old. They said I couldn't... couldn't keep him safe." Then silence. Back to the void of catatonia. Fire. Joy. Two broken women in the same place. Coincidence feels impossible.

For a couple of days, Joy becomes my temporary anchor. She is consumed by an improbable love, infatuated with a guy less than half her age, her conversation a ghost-lover haunting her derailed mind.

"He sees me," she whispers, ash trembling on her lip. "Really sees me."

We share music from her phone, and the illicit comfort of her cigarettes.

Nearby, a slouched teen, a self-declared 'professional dropout', watches us. He preaches about the purity of transactional love, his words slick and rehearsed. When I ask for a cigarette, he smirks. "Nah. Give you one, you'll just want another." His friend silently passes me a smoke. The unexpected kindness from a stranger hits harder than the calculated cruelty of someone who knows me.

This is the real revelation: that kindness can arrive from randomness, that mercy does not require understanding. The dropout performs cynicism while his friend performs compassion. Both are performances. Yet one sustains, and one corrodes.

White coats swarm. "You're stable. Ready for discharge."

Cold dread pools in my gut. The village. "They'll use me again," I plead. Blank stares. Clinical indifference.

Think. Adapt. "I need to see a friend. Lend me fare, bus, train. I'll post it back."

The doctor's pen freezes. "No release without pickup. New policy."

3. I have to find 3. But his number… gone. I borrow Joy's phone, her social media account a lifeline. A message, brief and urgent, to 3's profile: It's me. Send digits. Come get me. A leap of faith. His reply flashes: Stay put. I'm coming.

Relief bleeds into unease. This place, this cold, fluorescent cage, has become my sanctuary. How fucked is my life that a psych ward feels safe?

And here is the final recognition: the hospital is not asylum but transition. Not safety but suspension. The ward is the space between states, where I exist in quantum superposition, neither committed nor released, neither healed nor deteriorating, neither here nor there. The indefiniteness is what allows survival. The moment they decide my state collapses it all.

The nurses… some watch me with knowing eyes. Guardians. One presses a book into my hands that night: "Read the first forty pages," she urges, her thumb brushing the cover The Hive Protocols.

I devour it. The pages feel different under my fingers. Urgent. Like they have been waiting for me. Page 40 burns with revelation:

We move at night.

We repair broken systems.

We are the Children.

Nurse 11 lingers, casual as death: "Oh, by the way, virus hit Geneva last night. Containment failed." He says it like weather.

The words detonate in my chest, Geneva, virus, containment failed. My blood. My work. My ignorant hands building their weapon.

I have become what I feared most: not a victim, but an instrument. Not exploited, but weaponized. The difference, I now understand, is grammatical. The passive voice obscures the active damage. "My blood was extracted" versus "I gave them my blood." "The virus was released" versus "I built it." Language is how we survive the knowledge of our own complicity.

What have I done?

The words don't scatter. They crystallize.

And in that crystallization, everything reorganizes. The Hive Protocols. The Whole. The Children. The surveillance. The helicopter. The kindness and the cruelty operating in superposition. It was never random. It was never broken code.

It was protocol all along.

And I have just realized, on page forty, in a hospital bed, with Nurse 11 standing in the doorway describing the collapse of containment, that I have been reading the instruction manual for my own construction.

Not my own rescue.

My own manufacture.