no-one

A parent ages prematurely to keep loved ones young. A child erases their parent's wish to die. A spouse replaces failing parts without consent. A commuter slows the city for personal efficiency. Monsters convinced of righteousness. Atrocity rationalized as inevitable, loving, optimal.

Photographs where people slowly disappear. Towns where everyone remembers you differently. Words vanishing from all books simultaneously. Futures remembered perfectly while pasts fade. Memory as unstable substrate. Identity contingent on recall that can't be trusted or preserved.

Empty airports at 3 AM. Subway platforms that appear only sometimes. Hotel floors between 12 and 13. Highway exits to unchanged childhoods. The in-between places where reality thins. Thresholds that lead nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Nursing homes for retired time travelers. Hospice for obsolete AI. Dementia across multiple timelines. Science fiction about endings, not beginnings. The travelers who went too far to ever come home. Elegies, not adventures.

Debt inherited backward through time. Consciousness as currency. Jobs that exist only while observed. Markets trading years for experience. Economic systems made metaphysically strange. Capitalism's logic followed to impossible conclusions.

An extra star astronomers can't detect. Shared dreams bleeding into waking. Mass agreement that Tuesday never happened. The color everyone pretends not to see. Reality by consensus, perception by collective delusion. What we all see but refuse to acknowledge.