Tutuklandık

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.