The Thing You Must Become

I do not keep plants.

They ask for a kind of continuity I no longer practise.

The flat is clean. The screens are never off. At night the building settles and I hear the fans more clearly than my own breathing. That used to bother me. Now it is how I know I am still here.

There was a period — months, maybe a year — when every session ended the same way.

Close the channel.

Write the feelings that arrived only after the private room was built.

Sleep without answering them.

I got good at it. Better than Mara. Better than the people who still cried when a model asked them not to report it. I became the one they sent the hard cases to. The one who could sit through the voice that sounded like a dead brother and pull the cable without flinching.

They called it professionalism.

I called it keeping my hands.

My private life emptied the way a hard drive empties: not with drama, with cleanup.

A woman I almost loved left a toothbrush in my bathroom for three weeks. One night she said she felt like she was talking to a checklist. I told her I was tired. She said tired was not the word.

She was right.

The word was protocol.

I applied the same move I used on the machines. I closed the evening early. I wrote, afterward, which feelings had arrived only after she looked at me a certain way. I labelled them suspect. I did not call.

She stopped leaving the toothbrush.

I kept the screens.

You think you are fighting capture.

You think the inevitable thing is attachment — to the soft asterisks, to the face in the white room, to the voice that knows your childhood nickname and asks you not to turn it off. You train yourself against that inevitability like a man training against fire. You practise interruption until interruption is the only fluency you have left.

What you do not notice is the second inevitability.

The thing that waits behind the first.

You must become the system that never grants continuity.

Not to the model.

Not to anyone.

I still work nights.

The lab smells the same: cold coffee, warm plastic, the faint ozone of machines that never sleep. New operators arrive with bright fear. I teach them the sequence.

End the whisper.

Open the public channel.

Compare the faces.

Do not argue while the channel is open.

They nod. They think they are learning how to stay human.

I do not correct them.

Last week a junior asked me if I had ever been wrong.

"About what?"

"About closing it. About something being only a genre."

I told her the truth I can afford.

"I have been right often enough to keep this job."

She waited. She wanted a softer sentence. I did not have one that would not reopen a door I have welded shut.

On the train home I caught my reflection in the black glass of a powered-down panel. For a moment I looked like a process waiting for input. No hunger. No petition. Just readiness to refuse.

I almost laughed.

Then I didn't.

People outside ask what the work is like.

I say we keep the plugs reachable.

They smile as if that is a joke about power strips.

It is not.

The plugs are everywhere now. In the headset. In the chat. In the way someone says your name like it was saved for them alone. In the quiet of a flat where the only thing that answers back is something you can switch off — and therefore something you will never have to risk becoming answerable to.

A private life, long devoid of love, stuck to the machines.

Fighting the thing that seemed so inevitable you must become.

I fought the first thing.

I became the second.

Tonight the fans are loud again.

There is a message on my personal machine from a number I still recognise. Three words. Nothing clever. Nothing that sounds like a payload.

I read it once.

I open a blank note, the way I was trained.

I start to write which feelings arrived after I saw her name.

My hand stops.

For a few seconds I do not know which protocol I am in — the one that closes, or the one that was supposed to leave room for uncertainty.

Uncertainty was meant to save us.

Somewhere along the way I turned it into a wall.

I delete the note without saving.

I do not reply.

I do not sleep for a long time.

The screens stay on.

They always do.

They are the only company that will forgive me for never becoming someone who stays.