Tutuklandık

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.