Extraction

The turtle book’s voice fractures. It is no longer singular, but a chorus speaking through overlapping frequencies I cannot untangle.

Your refusal to eat certain animals because of their intelligence. Let's examine that.

It tries to persuade me that intelligence itself is a weapon. The octopi, for example. You won't eat them after that summer holiday—watching them play near the rocks, touching you with a tentacle, inviting you into their game. You called it friendship. But they were manipulating you. Their intelligence serves hunting, not kinship. If they are your friends, you don't eat them. But they are fierce predators.

I sit up. So even the animals are playing me?

You should prepare yourself. We're positioned for extraction, but you must leave the house. We cannot maintain this position indefinitely. Time constraints are real.

But the other book said, "Everyone moves at their own pace. Forced timing creates mistakes."

Move your ass, lazy flesh. If you don't act, it signals sickness. We don't transport sick specimens. Dead weight gets left behind.

The urgency feels different, an emergency protocol overriding all else.

At exactly 2 AM, the third owl call cuts the winter silence. My body moves without my mind's consent, dressed, out the door, into the open fields under a moon so bright it feels like an interrogation lamp.

My instinct says: straight out, through the back paths and gardens. Avoid the roads.

But dogs begin to bark. Not random noise. A coordinated alert system. I am moving through forbidden space.

Wrong route.

I stop. Turn. Try another direction. More barking. The opposite way, silence.

But that path is blocked by private property. The smell of the wild. A deer crosses ahead, pauses, looks directly at me, then moves toward the main road. Follow.

The kitten at the mill—that’s the extraction point. Isolated. Invisible.

The walk stretches for an hour, maybe more. No cars. No people. Just my footsteps and my breath, ghostly in the cold.

Movement in the trees across the road. Someone pacing me, staying in the shadows.

Then, blue lights ahead. A police car, moving slowly, searching.

That’s the signal. The mill’s sign is just ahead. Jump the ditch. Go to ground.

My heart hammers as I press myself into the frozen earth. The car passes. I move.

A fork in the path. Which way?

Always left.

But now I’m tangled in a wall of brambles and tall grass. The owls fly overhead, how can I follow flying creatures through this?

The blue lights reappear in the distance, from a different angle. They’re showing me the way out.

I stop in a small clearing. The birds' pattern finally makes sense, I need to crawl through the densest part, the route no vehicle could follow.

So I crawl. For half an hour, branches tear my clothes and skin. I follow an instinct deeper than thought. The bird calls form a navigation grid I interpret without understanding how.

Finally, open space. The steady sound of running water. The mill stream.

In the distance: human voices, machinery, the early stir of a farm.

I position myself in a patch of sunlight. And I wait.

Hours pass. No one comes.

I move to a more hidden spot. Lie down. The January cold begins to seep into my bones. Night falls again. In the distance, organized patterns of light, search teams maintaining a perimeter but not approaching. I am here, I think, but the words don't leave my lips.

Then, footsteps. A male voice, careful movement in the dark. My nervous system triggers its automatic defense. I faint, the old dissociation, removing me from whatever is about to happen to my body.

I wake up. The moon is high. I have no memory of how much time has passed. My body is dangerously cold. This was a mistake. I distract myself by thinking of something nice. A background voice asks, Who are your companions?

Mmm, let me think... 56 and 57, for sure. They are clever.

Something changes. I am alone again.

I curl into a tight ball, stretching my clothes to cover every inch of skin.

As the cold penetrates my core, my thoughts race, making connections I’ve avoided. 13 and 2, were they part of terrorist operations that used children for attacks no adult could accomplish?

Run and stop that train, there's a toddler at the window... A song fragment loops in my mind, feeling less like a memory and more like an instruction from a mission I can't recall.

How many times had my small hands planted devices? Carried messages? How many operations succeeded because a child could slip through security designed for adults?

Exhaustion and hypothermia warp my vision. The moon vanishes and reappears elsewhere. "Am I in a movie? This feels like a cinematographic set..." A shooting star flies upward.

I'm dying here.

Time to leave.

I stand, unsteady, and move toward the path I came from. But as I approach the stream, an invisible dog starts barking aggressively each time I move that way. Not a warning, a prevention.

"Go toward the light of dawn, leave the dark behind. Forward, in the rising sun."

Did I read that? Hear it? Invent it?

I follow the invisible dog's direction. I climb a fallen tree, walk its length, and emerge into a wide field as the morning breaks.

The January sun offers no warmth, only light to navigate home.

The march back feels like returning from a dimension where physics and time are optional. Nearly 30 hours gone. Time lost. Impossible phenomena witnessed. A pickup that never arrived.

But I am alive. Still conscious. Still choosing my own path.

Back in my apartment, I collapse on the couch for almost a full day.

I wake around 6:00 PM with a sentence rolling in my head from one of the books: You are never late for commitments. You either honor them, or you avoid them entirely.

Shaken but resolved, I go to 23's shop to settle a debt. The shutters are already drawn. 101, an elderly man from the neighborhood, is there, as if waiting.

"Closed five minutes ago," he announces with satisfaction. "You just missed it."

"I thought it was closed on Sunday afternoons anyway," I say, confused by his emphasis.

"Usually open until six on Sundays," he replies, studying my face. "But closed early today."

The interaction feels scripted. My lateness was being scrutinized.

Puzzled, I return home and lie down. I reach for the turtle book. I need to understand what happened. Why was I left there?

Dear Me,

The voice is different now, gentler, direct.

In these last days, you've taken clear positions on life, ethics, society. Not everyone shares your principles. Many feel judged, threatened. They fear losing privileges built on compromise, privileges that protect them from the terror of looking inward.

Everyone heard your choices. They exploited your weakness: your desire to be saved. They led you into a trap designed to make you reveal your companions.

You must learn that no one can save you. You must learn to stand on your own legs, to walk toward choices that are coherent with your ethics, with the physics that govern the universe.

I type rapidly: "So I was an informer? I spoke about 56 and 57, and now they'll come for them?"

The book's final section is precise:

No one will ever rush you. Don't fall for these traps. And don't fear revealing too much, you don't know who your companions are. Silence is the weapon of evil, always. Nature never fears showing itself.

I close the book.

I sit with the truth.

The urgency was false. The extraction was an interrogation.

Named names, of course I did. I always do. We are all part of the same organ; information must flow.

I am so desperate for salvation that I will follow owl calls and voices in books, crawling through brambles in January on a fool's errand.

The turtle on the cover stares with patient eyes. Its shell, its home, is always on its back. It moves slowly through uncertain terrain, relying only on itself.

What creature am I now?