Complex Apparatus

The nutritionist’s office is a sanctuary of sterile precision, a temple to quantified lives. Charts line the walls like public confessions, before-and-after photographs, calorie equations, the complex poetry of transformation reduced to simple arithmetic. I sit in the chair that has cradled a thousand bodies seeking correction, watching his pen trace numbers across my file with the solemnity of an auditor.

“Three kilograms,” he announces, his voice devoid of inflection. “An increase since our last session.”

I stare at the digital readout, its red numerals blinking a quiet accusation. Two kilograms. Yet my clothes drape more loosely, fabric collapsing where it once strained. My morning reflection shows new angles, hollows carved deeper beneath my cheekbones. The body that feels lighter stands in stark contradiction to the scale that claims otherwise, a dissonance that opens a chasm of questions.

“But my clothes”

“Bodies are complex systems,” he interjects with practiced patience. “Water retention, muscle density, cellular flux. The scale measures mass, not metamorphosis.”

“With Christmas approaching, I’d hoped to streamline myself before the festive indulgence.” My gaze drifts to a brochure on his desk, glossy and clinical. “Perhaps I could replace one meal with a protein supplement. Something to anchor the metabolism without disrupting my routine.”

The suggestion feels less like nutrition and more like recalibration, another variable to control in an equation I no longer comprehend. He recommends a specific brand, available only at the local pharmacy. His specificity appears deliberate, as if this particular powder, from this particular location, serves a purpose beyond mere satiety.

I take the brochure, my fingers hesitating at its edge. Every intervention now carries the weight of a hidden protocol.

At 14’s delicatessen, the familiar ritual unfolds: wine selected with quiet consultation, cheese arranged like miniature architecture, conversation meandering through philosophy and village news. But today, the comfortable rhythm shatters when he enters.

The man fills the doorway with calculated presence, large, white-haired, his beard a sweep of accumulated snow, glasses that catch the light and deflect scrutiny. He moves with the unhurried assurance of someone for whom space naturally rearranges itself.

My body responds before my mind can process: skin constricting, breath catching, the primal alarm that recognizes a predator before intellect can name it. He approaches the counter, each footfall a statement of territorial claim.

“Black Pudding,” he orders, his voice heavy with ritual. “The usual selection.”

Blood sausages. Always blood sausages. No variation, no deviation, a man whose appetites have solidified into compulsion.

14 serves him with professional neutrality, but I detect the micro-tremors: the slight tightening around his eyes, the hurried efficiency of his hands.

The man pays and leaves, carrying his purchases like trophies. The shop settles back into its rhythm, but the atmosphere is irrevocably altered. The air tastes different now, metallic, charged with the residue of his presence.

“A regular customer?” I ask, my voice sounding distant in my own ears.

“Very regular,” 14 replies, his tone layered with unspoken meaning. “Some appetites become… predictable.”

The algorithm has evolved, its curriculum expanding beyond trauma psychology into the archaeology of historical truth. The historian from my book on graffiti now appears in a series of videos, dismantling official narratives with the methodical precision of an academic surgeon.

His lectures reconstruct the causes of world wars through a lens my formal education never provided. Not grand ideologies or inevitable clashes, but a simpler, more damning truth: incompetence, willful ignorance, the arrogance of power. Leaders who chose personal pride over millions of lives, transforming diplomatic failure into genocidal mathematics.

“History,” he tells his invisible audience, “is written by the survivors, not the witnesses. The survivors have agendas. The witnesses are dead.”

Each video adds another stratum to my understanding of power’s pathology, how systems preserve themselves through the careful curation of memory. I watch with the obsessive focus of someone memorizing the blueprints of a prison she must one day escape.

The pattern clarifies: official truth is an architecture, designed to support specific structures while concealing faulty foundations. But foundations can be excavated. Truth leaves traces in the sediment for those who know how to look.

Between these revelations, I maintain my gaming ritual, an hour each evening with digital puzzles that demand strategic thought without emotional entanglement. The screen’s clean geometry soothes my reorganizing mind, providing a stable framework while deeper processes churn below.

Tonight, I play a civilization-building game, placing cities and managing resources with the same methodical focus I once applied to laboratory protocols. Yet even here, patterns emerge: how systems fail when growth outstrips sustainability, how cooperation curdles into competition under scarcity, how the powerful consume the vulnerable with algorithmic inevitability.

The game’s artificial intelligence operates with a predictable logic I can anticipate and counter. If only human systems were so transparent.

As I build digital empires and watch them rise and fall according to clean, mathematical rules, my mind processes the day’s accumulated data: the nutritionist’s contradictory numbers, the white-haired man’s ritualistic hunger, the historian’s exposés on the blindness of power.

Each fragment finds its place in the expanding architecture of my understanding. Not answers yet, but coordinates. Not a solution, but a map of the territory I must navigate.

I catalog the pieces of this deepening puzzle. The game’s soundtrack plays softly as virtual civilizations rise and collapse under rules I can see and manipulate. Outside my window, the village sleeps beneath stars that have witnessed the endless, repeating rise and fall of empires built on principles I am only just beginning to decipher.