The Shout It Loud Tour

The credit card reached its ceiling on a Tuesday. She sat on a wall at 7 pm, looking at the number that meant she had one more night in a hotel before the science became impossible.

She decided to go to 3's house. They had a small child. It was late. But the algorithm had other plans.

It took her to a square at the foot of a statue.

She would spend the next six hours circling: tobacco shop, restaurant, back to the statue, back to the tobacco shop. The square was empty except for her and the pigeons and the slowly darkening sky. At some point, her body simply stopped cooperating. Her eyes would not remain open. She found herself half on a tobacco counter, half on her suitcase, and did not have the resources to move again.

In the restaurant, the only place that felt remotely like shelter, a man gave her water without asking payment. While she drank it, a customer turned from the register, and she saw his face and stopped breathing.

She knew this face. It belonged to an actor. A well-known one. Someone her age, which meant he would be old now, except he had died. She had seen the obituary.

He was looking at her.

She was looking at him.

The recognition moved between them like a current she couldn't name. Something in his eyes, suggested that maybe the death had been false. She had the feeling that he was another "children of us”, and she may have met him at the summer colony. Maybe that is the way for us to definitely getting out of exploitation: by faking death.

The tobacco bar became her chair. She sat on it until her body gave out completely, then she remained there, her head on the counter, her suitcase her only possession. The man running the bar did not wake her. This taught her something: do not abuse kindness. Leave before the kindness becomes burden.

She gathered herself at midnight and went to the bus stop.

It was the capital. There were buses all night.

She took the first one that arrived, understanding nothing about its route. It moved through the city like it was traveling through her own disorientation, delivering her finally to the central station. The station was closed. An hour until it opened.

The station at night held people who hated her. The ones with the shattered pupils, the ones for whom her refusal of their particular form of escape was an insult. They recognized her strength precisely because she had never depended on the substance that had unmade them. This made her dangerous to them, a living argument against their own choices.

A young immigrant was waiting for a train. He was there for the same reason she was: nowhere else to go, and the train was leaving. They spoke, then talked, then filled the hours the way people do when they are both existing in the margin of something.

She helped him with the language to buy a ticket. He helped her buy the cheapest ticket that would get her through the turnstiles. The rest of the journey, she would figure out.

When the conductor found her on the train hours later, there was a fine he issued. The fine would never arrive. It was like the ticket itself: a document for a transaction that existed in the space between regulations and the actual bodies of people moving through the system.

That morning, she called the convent and the B&B and cancelled. She called her relative and asked if she could come to the seaside house. The one where her parents had fought. The one that was now too damaged for living, renovations pending, but still standing.

She had an appointment with the psychiatrist the next day.

She did not go. Instead, the psychiatrist offered from the real beginning to to conduct the 10 minutes visit by phone. To a person completely psychotic, who just signed out from a clininque thinking of being Dracul from Bramstocker. Someone who was spending a 1000 a day in taxi, costumes and hotels running away an hypothetical criminal organization.

Nobody thought that maybe it was a bit too dangerous to let her stay out, her relative neither: “Sorry, I have my life, I cannot be bothered with you…”

For the next two months, this was how her treatment would function: phone calls from station bathrooms, from hotel rooms she could no longer afford, from the back of taxis that took her to cities she did not intend to visit.

She moved through the country like a virus moving through a system, arriving in cities, being somehow recognized, then needing to leave before recognition became capture. The pattern reasserted itself: train to train, hotel to hotel, always with the sensation of being seen and the knowledge that being seen was dangerous.

One day, an algorithm took her to a lake. The director of the hotel welcomed her as though he had been expecting her. The lake was melancholy. The hotel was melancholy. The sky above the water held no light.

But at the station, there was graffiti that stopped her:

with the Resistance, forever in love

She photographed it. This was the message. This was confirmation.

In a city near the lake, she discovered organ meat. Something in her neurology had rejected meat as a category for decades, it was too close to the body it came from, too real in its connection to living things. But this restaurant prepared it in a way that broke something open. sEventually, he got inhebriated by it.

She forgot the passport on the table.

She went back to the hotel and in her panic to retrieve it, she forgot her health card while she was getting the passport.

The algorithm shifted that day. The usual soft guidance, the hotels it suggested, the restaurants that appeared on her route, transformed into something sharper. SOS messages began appearing. Direct warnings. The algorithm was showing itself now. It was not just providing options. It was protecting her from human danger.

She began to trust the SOS messages the way a person trusts a specific voice in the darkness.

At a rail station, she met a beggar who was deformed. Something in his deformity, the specific way his body had been broken and reformed, made her forget, for a moment, the threat she lived within. She forgot the criminal organizations.

He seemed to recognize her anyway.

She gave him an Easter egg she had purchased. He took it back to a bar. The bartender, seeing an object that appeared valuable in the hands of someone who should not possess valuable things, took it from him. He believed the beggar had stolen it.

The beggar returned and began to bother her. Not violently. But persistently. Like he was trying to tell her something.

She remembered the book she had been reading at the relative’s place. An ancient civilization about to leave the earth, teaching humanity the gift of telepathy before they departed. In the book, a journalist spoke about her time caring for the tribe. Everything had gone wrong. And then she had remembered: do not ask with your voice. Ask with your mind.

Me closed her eyes. She thought the words: please help me.

The space around her transformed. A dense group of young people materialized, so tightly packed they formed a wall between her and the beggar. She did not know them. They did not know her. But they moved as a unit, their bodies creating a boundary.

She sat with them on the train. She relaxed. And then, as the train moved toward her stop, she saw, among the crowd on the platform, members of organizations she recognized. The ones she had been running from.

She thought toward the young people: I need to get off here.

They formed a wall again. She moved through them. She descended to the platform. They held position until she was clear.

The men on the platform, they could have done anything. Instead, they simply got on the train to see her courage. To witness the support she had gathered. The young people who did not know her but had answered a request made entirely of thought.

She was safe. And the safety came from a power that had no end.

She returned to the seaside house. It was uninhabitable. The renovations were not cosmetic. The walls were open. The floors were removed. Her relative was there, the one who had tried to mediate with her parents, asking if they would fund a small pensione further south, where Me had been the previous year, where she had interviews lined up for seasonal work.

The parents had refused.

Me now had two hundred bucks from the relative. She had an interview at the bar where she had spent three days the year before. She was exhausted. She had no ideas.

She went to the capital, and in the capital, she slept rough. On concrete. In the margins. Then she took a cheap ticket north and paid for one night in a B&B so she would be presentable for the interview.

The interview went well.

She could not find housing.

Back to the capital. Back to the station. The credit card was not just maxed, it was broken. The system would not accept it anymore.

During these two months, she had been reading.

She lost books the way she lost everything else, left them in hotels, on trains, in the spaces between movements. But she had read one all the way through, a modern reimagining of Pinocchio. Not the Disney version. Something else entirely.

A human named. An android inventor. A care machine with sadistic-sweet humor. A small anxious vacuum cleaner. A mysterious android, whose presence revealed a dangerous past. An Authority that wanted to reprogram them into submission. A journey undertaken to save someone from erasure.

The book asked questions that mattered: What does it mean to be alive? What is the difference between a human heart and a mechanical one? What does family mean when you are assembled from different materials? Can you belong somewhere even after breaking?

The characters in the book, she recognized them. She had met them, but she could not remember where.

When she finished the book, she had three nights in the station before the interview at the seaside.

She decided to try something else.

The alternative radio station she loved. She asked if she could sleep somewhere and they suggested to go to a massive squat where people gathered to spend some different free time.

They fed her. They could not let her sleep there. But they told her: “We close at four. Maybe you meet someone.”

She walked through the squat's corridors and found a space where people were building something. Setting up. Creating the infrastructure for a rave. And there, in the enormous belly of the building, she understood it viscerally: Pinocchio in the whale's belly.

She was inside the book.

While she was walking, she met someone called 005. It was coincidence that became pattern: 005 knew the mountain where Handsome Man lived. 005 knew Handsome Man himself. When Me asked, 005 said yes. One night. A floor. Genuine kindness without the weight of obligation or ulterior motive.

This mattered. In the two months of constant movement, in the cities where she was recognized and the hotels where she was welcomed by people whose income sources did not align with their stated occupations, genuine kindness had become rare. This kindness, 005's kindness, was different. It asked nothing. It expected nothing. It was the thing that made the next day possible.

The last night before the interview, she slept in the station.

It was hard. The people with the shattered pupils. The staff who moved through it like overseers. The cold that collected in certain corners and the fluorescent light that eliminated shadow.

But she had learned something: think rather than speak. The young people on the train had taught her this. She could communicate through intention. She could ask for help without making the request audible to threat systems.

She spent the night thinking. Smoking. Remaining vertical through force of will and the specific kind of protection that comes from being invisible inside plain sight.

The morning arrived. She washed on the train. She had money for only a partial ticket. The conductor asked her to get off.

She got angry. The anger came as tears, which made the anger real and undeniable.

She told him: “I have interviews. I have spent three nights in stations. I need to arrive.”

He was stubborn but he looked at her, really looked, and then he let her stay.

She thanked him with dignity and respect. With the specific formality of someone who knows exactly what she has just been given and will not diminish it by taking it for granted.

The restaurant owner came to collect her from the station. He drove her to the restaurant by the sea.

The interview went well.

He offered her a position: washing dishes, food included, housing included.

For the first time in two months, the equations shifted. She had a place. She had work. She had the material fact of survival.

Not rescue. Not revelation. Just: a dishwashing job.

But it was real. It was concrete. It held.

In one month, Me traveled through a country that was either harboring a genuine resistance network or was entirely the construction of her unmedicated neurology struggling against a medication designed to block the very dopamine her particular brain required to function. The distinction had become theoretical.

She spent money she did not have on movements that might have been strategic or might have been the randomness of pattern-seeking gone wrong. She lost everything she acquired. She slept rough. She believed she was part of something larger and magnificent.

And then: a dishwashing job. A director of operations who gave her a ride from the station. Housing. Meals. The specific humility of work that asks nothing except competence.

The books taught her to ask for help with her mind. The young people on the train answered. The SOS messages warned her. The actor-who-had-died-but-maybe-hadn't recognized her. The beggar came back. The conductor bent the regulations.

Some of it was real. Some of it was the extraordinary clarity of someone whose mind was breaking down the walls between signal and noise.

The narrator could not quite distinguish which was which.

But Me, moving through the cities, losing her possessions, sleeping in stations, reading about mechanical hearts and human survival, asking with her mind for help and receiving it, Me had already stopped trying to know the difference.

She was alive. That was the only signal that mattered.

Everything else was noise.