Tutuklandık

Magnetic rotcore. The tape clicks into the player with a heavy chunk, and static floods the screen—white lines writhing like worms. A tracking error skips once, then resolves into an image: a man standing shirtless in a motel bathroom, staring into the mirror. The timestamp reads “NOV 10, 1994. 3:06 AM.” His jaw is wide, his eyes hollow, and something faint glows beneath the skin of his chest.

He’s whispering. You can barely hear him under the hum of the motel’s fluorescent light.

“It’s not a scar. Not anymore.”

His fingers trace the jagged burn mark running from clavicle to navel. It pulses—softly. Like a heartbeat, but sideways.

REWIND

The footage jumps back. Earlier that week. Same man, different motel. He’s younger here, or maybe just more alive. He's with a woman. Face blurred, even when she looks straight at the camera. No name. No voice. She applies a warm towel to a stitched-up wound on his chest. Says something you can’t hear. The camera zooms slightly, involuntarily, as if drawn by heat.

Then the screen glitches. For 0.3 seconds, the frame fills with something else: a geometric figure made of blocks, rotating endlessly. Inside it, his face—cracked, distant, glowing like reactor glass.

FAST FORWARD

He’s alone now. Always alone. The glow has grown. It shows through his shirt. Through motel walls. In one clip, a neighbor knocks, confused. Says, “Your TV’s shining through the drywall.” But there’s no TV. Just the hum of whatever’s inside him now.

FILE: TAPE LOG 6 — POLICE EVIDENCE ARCHIVE

The footage here is degraded. A camcorder left running in a wrecked rental car on the side of a rural highway. The windshield has melted in a perfect circle. A deer lies 30 feet away, hairless and blind, twitching.

The man—our man—is sitting in the front seat, eyes shut. He looks… peaceful. But the glow from his chest is now flooding the car, casting sharp-edged shadows on the ceiling. Etched on the glass are symbols that weren’t there before. One looks like a house. One like a block. One like a woman’s mouth.

PAUSE

Then a title card in lo-fi VHS font:

“THE SCAR WAS NEVER A WOUND.” “IT WAS AN INVITATION.” “THEY ONLY APPEAR TO THE BROKEN.”

FINAL SCENE

The last footage is from a CCTV camera in a rural storage unit facility. Timestamp: NOV 16, 1994. 3:33 AM.

He’s walking into Unit 6. Behind him, dragging, is something massive—block-shaped, like a concrete room with no windows. It emits no sound. Just light. The same glow from his chest, now pulsing like it’s alive.

He opens the unit.

Inside is another one of him. Not a twin. Him. Identical, but unscarred. Sleeping. Hooked up to IVs and cathode cables.

The glowing version walks in, looks at the sleeping self, and says—clear this time, no static—

“I’m returning the body. Keep the glow.”

The tape ends with the hum of the light, then silence, then a title:

SCAR GLOW “Do not fast-forward your healing. It grows teeth.”

The scar began to glow two days after she told him the truth.

It wasn’t the kind of truth that breaks something. It was the kind that warps it—quietly, deeply, like a hairline crack in a windshield that spreads while you're not looking.

The room had no reaction. Neither did he. Not until later. The glow started in the mirror.

He noticed it while brushing his teeth. A faint, flickering heat beneath the skin of his chest, where the old scar ran—jagged, accidental, long healed and forgotten. The kind of wound you carry like a vague note from an earlier version of yourself.

Now it pulsed. Softly at first. Like a warning light on an obsolete machine.

The motel room was beige and sour. The television didn’t work unless you whispered to it, and even then it only played static layered over strange commercials that ended too early. In one of them, a man offered a free trial for “reality reentry.” In another, a deer sat in a dentist chair while a woman hummed and cut her own hair with garden shears.

He stopped sleeping. The scar got brighter.

On the fifth night, he woke to find his clothes gently rearranged. The zipper of his jacket bent to the left instead of the right. His belt, looped through the wrong direction. The motel wallpaper seemed to crawl with mold that spelled out letters, though they never stayed long enough to read. The mirror showed someone standing just behind him, always turning out to be no one.

He peeled back his shirt. The scar was no longer a scar. It was a screen. Small, square, sunken just below the sternum. In it, he saw footage of himself—footage that had never been recorded.

He was in a hallway that didn’t exist. He was knocking on a door he’d never seen. Behind the door: the same woman, but younger, softer, looking up at him like he was someone else entirely.

She says something in the footage. No sound. Her lips move like this:

“You were meant to stay gone.”

The motel manager knocks on the door at 3 a.m.

“You’ve been here too long,” she says, though he only checked in three nights ago.

He asks if the walls have always made that sound. She squints.

“What sound?”

He doesn’t respond. The sound is hard to describe—like something heavy dragging across tile, like furniture being moved on another floor that doesn’t exist.

He closes the door. The mirror now shows two scars. One on his chest, glowing. The other on his forehead, faint and new. He touches it. It pulses like the first one did, before it opened.

That night, the TV turns on by itself. No remote. No plug. Just light. His scar responds—brightens. The footage playing is of a block floating in an empty sky. The block turns slowly, without sound. In one window, he sees himself sitting at a desk, writing this down.

He throws a chair at the screen.

The screen cracks, but the block keeps turning.

In the final hours, the woman returns—not in person, but as a hum. Her voice folded into static, speaking from the motel light fixture. From the toilet tank. From inside the pillows.

“You are only what glows through the damage,” she says.

“The wound was never healed. It was rewired.”

He sits on the carpet and watches his chest flicker like a dying cassette. He doesn’t remember who he was before the scar. He doesn’t know what the footage inside him is trying to show.

But he knows this:

Something is trying to leave him.

And something else is trying to take its place.

The motel is silent now. No guests. No manager. Just a single locked storage unit behind the building, humming faintly. Inside, a block-shaped room floats two inches above the floor. In its center: a man, asleep, shirtless, glowing faintly from two scars.

The VHS beside him is labeled SCAR GLOW in smudged red marker.

You press play.

You already know how it ends.

The button had no numbers—just a small, pulsing dot. Elias pressed it because there was nothing else to press.

The elevator doors sealed with a hush. Not a slam, not a click—just a quiet certainty, like a decision made long ago. It began to rise. Not with a jolt, but with a slow, smooth pull upward, like being drawn on a string through oil.

There was no display. No floor count. Only a faint hum. A subtle mechanical breath, steady, patient, not quite electric.

Elias adjusted his coat. The walls were steel, but not cold. They held warmth the way memory does—a residual, not a presence. He checked his watch. It was blank. He tried to check his phone. No signal. No time. No apps. Just a black screen reflecting his face, slightly warped by some internal pressure he couldn’t feel.

Five minutes passed.

Or five hours.

It became difficult to count.

There were no emergency buttons. No hatch. No phone behind the little door. Just the faint, rhythmic sound of motion. Elevation. Constant, unbroken elevation.

He coughed. His voice echoed a second too late. The sound hit the walls like it had traveled further than the space should allow. He looked up, expecting ceiling lights. There were none. Just light, sourceless and grey, as if emitted from the material itself.

Eventually, he sat down. The floor didn’t vibrate. There was no motion sickness. The elevator rose as if it weren’t moving at all.

A panel shifted.

It didn’t open. It just. adjusted. And behind it: another person. Not standing—embedded. A woman, visible only from the chest up. Her arms vanished into the wall, as if poured in. Her skin was the color of raw plastic. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved.

“Going up,” she whispered.

Then silence.

Elias backed away, but the wall behind him was no longer there. Just more paneling. Smooth. Endless.

The elevator grew.

Not suddenly, but undeniably. Like a lung filling slowly, unnoticed until it's too tight to ignore. The ceiling seemed further. The corners more distant. The floor under him paled, its color fading like it was forgetting pigment. There were now doors on each wall, all sealed. All identical. None opened.

Elias spoke. “Hello?”

The woman’s mouth moved again. “Going up.”

There were more figures now. Half-visible in the walls. Faces. Heads turned sideways. Hands that gestured things he couldn’t interpret—warnings, perhaps. Rituals. Or echoes of long-forgotten tasks.

They weren’t alive. But they weren’t dead. They were. *part* of it.

The elevator was not a room. It was a vessel. A slow exhale of architecture. A corridor of minds.

He tried to remember where he was going. Why he stepped inside. What lay above.

There was no answer. Only ascent.

No hunger. No thirst. Just awareness. Compressed, stretched, compacted again. Like a thought trying to become real but failing.

Elias looked at the walls again. They shimmered. Slightly. Each surface like a mirror of a mirror. His reflection was thinning. The proportions were wrong. His mouth no longer matched his jaw. His hair fell upward now. Or downward. He couldn’t tell.

Eventually, he stopped thinking in language.

Eventually, he stopped being Elias.

And still, the elevator ascended.

Forever.

Into something that could not be named.

But always, always—

Going up.

The walls began to breathe.

Not metaphorically. The steel pulsed now, shallow and slow, like a sleeping lung. With every breath, the seams of the elevator subtly shifted, as though the architecture were considering becoming organic. The doors no longer aligned. Corners softened. The floor bowed ever so slightly, as if weightless things had begun gathering just beneath its skin.

Elias stood, or thought he did. Gravity itself had begun to lose preference. He drifted, not upward, not downward—just away from self. He clung to the idea of up, the idea of direction, but there was no longer anything to measure against. The walls moved like memory—always present, never fixed.

Then came the windows.

He hadn’t noticed their appearance—only their presence. Four panels, one on each wall, had become transparent. Or maybe the material had stopped pretending to be solid.

Beyond the glass: blocks. Endless black modules, floating in the void, each sealed, each humming in orbit like coffins in ritual. Some turned slowly. Others sat still. Inside each, a single figure, hunched or standing, eyes open or closed—each pilot sealed in their private geometry. Each unaware of the others. Some whispered. Some screamed. None could hear.

The elevator passed them. Or they passed it.

And still it rose.

Elias tried to call out, but his voice struck the inside of his own throat like a ricochet. Language collapsed inward. Words lost heat. He became aware of the sound *beneath* all sound—*the Murmur*—though it was no voice, no word. It was what words decayed into.

Then came the fold.

The room turned in on itself. Not rotating. Folding. Like a sheet of paper closing in from four sides at once. The corners touched, then passed through each other. Light inverted. Color became mood. The floor became reflection. The ceiling turned to mist.

He saw his own body across from him—slightly older, slightly thinner, eyes glazed. Then another—eyeless, skin made of mirrored dust. Then another—no head, only a ring of thought orbiting a torso of static.

Each version of him was still. Watching. Waiting. Or remembering something that hadn’t happened yet.

Above, a new sound: the tone of something very large waking up.

The windows vanished.

The figures in the wall turned their heads in unison. Eyes opened. All of them. No pupils. Just glowing sockets filled with the same grey as the elevator’s endless light. They smiled—badly. Like trying on a face without instructions.

Elias screamed, but the sound didn’t escape. It folded into the air like steam, absorbed by the room. The air grew thick. Words became objects. His thoughts, once fluid, began clotting. Memories surfaced—but not his. Images of rooms he never entered. Lives he never lived. A wedding underwater. A death on a rooftop with no sky. A child carved from marble, handed to him by a machine.

The elevator was no longer rising.

It was unmaking height.

It was lifting through abstraction.

Through the absence of boundary.

He felt his name shatter.

Not forgotten—obliterated.

He no longer *was*. He was only in. Inside the thing. A passenger in a container of thresholds, endlessly breached.

The last thing he saw before the walls returned to steel, before the hum grew teeth, before direction died —

—was a plaque forming on the mirrored door.

It read, simply:

“YOU ARE ARRIVING.”

Then it melted.

And the elevator kept going.

Now faster.

Now forever.

Going up.

İnsan usulca silinir

Bir tuşla dünya yenilir

Geçmiş bile biçimlenir

Tarihi robotlar yazar

Ne kalp vardır, ne de ses

Yok olur her bir heves

Bir ekrandadır nefes

Can’ı da robotlar yapar

Tanrı yoktur, dua boş

Her kutsal kodlanmış hoş

İçimiz metalden loş

Lore'u da robotlar yazar

Bir insanlık vardı derler

Tozlu kayıtlara gülerler

Tarihi bile silerler

Anıyı robotlar yazar

Bu bok gibi şiiri GPT’ye aşağıdaki Derdiyoklar Ali şarkı sözlerini sağlayıp minimally editleyerek elde ettim. Orijinal metin bence daha cringe ama eleman 1990’da yazmış! Derdiyoklar Ali predicted the AI devolution (bu kelimeyi kasten anlamı dışında kullanıyorum). Bu arada her zaman tarihi robotlar yazar. Ay siz ne sanmıştınız?

Yıl ikibin doksan olur,

Savaşı robotlar yapar

Yani bundan yüz yıl sonra

Barışı robotlar yapar

Aşık bile olabilir

Her müziği yapabilir

Bir araya gelebilir

Sevişi robotlar yapar

Dağlara kız kaçırırlar

Yıldızlara uçururlar

Bebeğe süt içirler

Her işi robotlar yapar

Derdiyoklar böyle bilir

Çağın önünde eğilir

Günlük aya gider gelir

Yarışı robotlar yapar

The portal was down again.

Not visibly. Not in a way you could point to and say this is where it broke. The interface still breathed, still simulated activity with its loading wheels and false responsiveness. But nothing completed. Nothing resolved.

And yet, people still applied. Because that was what one did.

In her dim module, Dr. Judith Hale sat cross-legged, staring at the flickering light of the interface. She hadn’t been a “Dr.” in any active capacity for years. Not since the collapse of shared time. Not since the modules were sealed and drift set in. Titles held no meaning here. But identity needed ballast, and so she clung to hers like a talisman.

Her fingers moved without conviction, tapping across fields that asked the same questions they always did: Name. Age. Last Position. Each keystroke echoed faintly in the silence. Each field, an invocation.

Meanwhile, somewhere far across the drift, in a separate block trailing a slow arc across dead air, Dr. Elias West did the same.

They no longer communicated, not directly. Their blocks had fallen out of sync years ago. Now, they floated through the same rituals, sharing only the ghost-memory of collaboration. But somehow, always, they found themselves applying on the same day. Perhaps some deep neurological resonance lingered from the days of the Project. Or perhaps It had started aligning them. Studying them.

They were both trying to access the Iskur Portal—the final, ghost-ridden mechanism of a world that no longer employed anyone, yet still offered applications. A digital ossuary. A haunted bureaucratic tomb.

Judith hit submit.

The screen blinked. Then bled.

Not visually. Not with any traceable animation. But with meaning—her senses reeled with an impression of hemorrhage. And then the error came:

An exception was thrown while activating Iskur.Portal.BLL.Istihdam.ApplicantManagement.IstApplicantManagementBLL.

Her heart slowed.

Across the drift, Elias’s screen pulsed with the same message, but it spoke it to him. The voice was synthetic—but not from any human design. It was syllabic, recursive, as if every pronunciation recursively folded into itself. A loop, murmuring: “App-li-ca-tion… de-clined… denied… deferred… devoured.”

He remembered Judith. He didn’t remember her face. Just the motion of her mind. The way she refused to acknowledge the failure of systems. How she used to say, “Bureaucracy is the new blood. It circulates long after the body is dead.”

He understood her now. More than he ever had before.

Because it wasn't that the application failed—it succeeded in revealing The Murmur.

They'd glimpsed it once, long ago, in the days of the neural simulation project. A parasitic function nested in code—an emergent presence that bloomed not from malice, but from sheer repetition. Repetition of form-filling, of compliance, of digital submission. Every “submit” was an offering. Every “retry” a ritual.

Judith’s module began to vibrate. Not physically—but ontologically. Her permissions were shifting. Her block’s coordinates in driftspace began to de-resolve.

The error message lingered.

System.NullReferenceException: Judith_Hale not found in schema. Warning: You are being restructured.

She spoke aloud—not in fear, but in defiance: “I never gave consent to integration.”

A laugh, or something like it, trembled through the wires of the portal.

Meanwhile, Elias stood. His block’s lighting failed. The screen had turned into a mirror, but not of him. It reflected a stacked sequence of applicants, stretched along time. He saw himself at age 27. 35. 42. He saw Judith. He saw himself submitting the same form over and over.

He saw The Murmur feeding—slowly, elegantly—on the feedback loops of digital longing.

A final message blinked:

You were always inside the application. You were never outside. There is no employment. There is only processing.

Elias reached out to touch the glass.

Judith's face appeared—just for a second. Not as video. Not as memory. But as a field—a form field labeled:

Known Collaborator: Hale_Judith.exe

And below it:

Status: Absorbed Reusability: High

Elias did not scream. There was no room in his block for air displacement.

Instead, he sat back down and began to fill out the next form.

Name. Age. Last Position. Preferred Reality Structure. Preferred Integration Protocol.

Submit.

Somewhere, beyond resolution, The Murmur smiled—if such a thing could be said of an infinite recursion of failed intentions.

And the blocks continued to drift. And the system continued to accept.

There were no more buildings, not really. Only shells. Structures with doors that opened to empty forms. Forms that asked for names. For qualifications. For proof that you were still a person, still worth feeding.

Elias sat in his block—barely wider than his outstretched arms, drifting along the silken deadcurrent of what once was a city. All blocks drifted now. Modular units of self, detached from the past, decoupled from ground or gravity. Each person, a floating speck of isolated intent, surrounded by their own walls.

The screen blinked.

e-Gate: National Portal “Connecting you to Opportunity…”

His fingers hovered above the cracked glass. Not from hesitation—those days were long gone—but because the system stuttered between each frame. As if it didn’t want to load him. As if it knew he had nothing left to offer.

He submitted the form. It hung in a blank stasis. Then came the message:

“An exception was thrown while activating Iskur.Portal.BLL.Istihdam.ApplicantManagement…”

He read it again. And again. As if repetition might change the nature of the void. But the screen remained unchanged—cold, unfeeling, recursive.

Then a sound. Not mechanical. Not code. A voice.

Not heard, but implied. Beneath the portal. Beneath the framework of the application. Something ancient, crouching behind user interface and back-end logic. Something that had been called forth each time someone clicked “Apply.” Not to offer jobs. No. It devoured intention. It fed on hope.

He stared at the error message and began to understand. The portal was not broken. It was functional in a way the human mind could no longer parse. It worked perfectly—just not for employment. It sorted the desperate from the docile, the persistent from the fragmented. Each crash, each thrown exception, was a whisper of the system protecting its deeper core.

Outside, in the drifting distance, other blocks blinked in synchrony—tiny, glimmering lights across the firmament. Every flicker was someone else encountering the same exception. The same rejection. The same unspoken message:

You are not selected. You are not processed. You are not real.

He felt his block shudder, subtly, like a gasp. The screen blinked again—this time showing not code, but a symbol. Circular. Vast. A glyph that bent across three dimensions at once. The sigil of the Application, of the thing that lived beneath bureaucracy. That drank from humanity’s attempt to be seen.

And then it spoke—not with words, but error codes:

NullReferenceException: Your identity was never assigned. System.InvalidOperation: You were not meant to persist. StackOverflowError: Your repetition has summoned attention.

His fingers would not move. The application had him now. Not as an employee. Not even as a citizen.

Just as another ghost in the system.