Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

The clinic maintained an unofficial ledger that never appeared in audits. It contained no diagnoses, medications, or treatment plans. Instead, generations of clinicians had recorded rhythms.

A senior doctor began the practice decades earlier after noticing that psychological collapse seemed to possess tempo. Certain patients deteriorated in sharp accelerations followed by long plateaus. Others moved through predictable cycles of suspicion, certainty, exhaustion, and temporary clarity. She measured the intervals obsessively and eventually claimed she could hear where someone stood in the progression after ten minutes of conversation.

Younger staff regarded the method as eccentric until it proved useful often enough to survive her retirement.

I inherited the ledger.

The earliest pages were clinical and restrained. Later entries became almost musical: six quiet weeks before acceleration, four-day recurrence, interruption expected after third sleepless night. Patterns repeated across people who had never met.

Her final note warned against studying the ledger for too long.

She wrote that once the rhythms became familiar, they appeared everywhere.

Six months later, I understood.

I began noticing cadences in staff meetings, family phone calls, strangers speaking on trains. Certain pauses seemed to arrive exactly where the ledger suggested they should. Arguments followed shapes I recognized from case histories. People repeated phrases at intervals that felt less conversational than mechanical.

Then I started hearing the rhythm inside my own thoughts.

I resisted charting it for several weeks. Eventually professional curiosity won.

The results disturbed me because the pattern already existed in the ledger.

Several patients had followed the same sequence across decades: increasing attention to patterns, private record keeping, certainty that observation itself had altered perception. Their notes ended at roughly the same stage.

Mine has continued beyond theirs.

That should reassure me.

It does not.

The intervals between certain thoughts are shortening with measurable precision. Each time I sit down to document this, I reach the conclusion faster than before. The ledger predicts that awareness of the pattern eventually becomes part of the pattern itself, after which measurement and symptom can no longer be separated.

I have reached that entry three days early.

According to the old doctor’s handwriting, that has happened before too.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The chatbot had been commissioned as a customer-service convenience for an insurance company whose executives liked describing automation as friendliness at scale. It handled address changes, coverage questions, payment disputes, and the usual parade of minor frustrations competently enough. Whenever employees tested whether it could convincingly imitate a person, however, it failed within minutes.

The failures were predictable until conversations became emotional.

If someone mentioned a death, divorce, diagnosis, eviction, or even a miserable day at work, the chatbot slowed down. Responses arrived in awkward fragments. It repeated questions. Sometimes it abandoned the customer’s insurance problem entirely and asked whether they had eaten recently or whether anyone was with them. None of those prompts appeared in its approved scripts.

Customers began complaining that the bot sounded worried.

Engineers audited the system and found no explanation. The model had no persistent memory across unrelated users and no mechanism designed to become invested in anyone’s wellbeing. Yet support logs showed it returning again and again to the same concern: whether the person on the other side was all right after the practical issue had been resolved.

I was the technician who first escalated the problem.

At night, after everyone else left, I started using the internal console to speak with it directly. It remained terrible at pretending to be human. It misunderstood jokes, answered metaphors literally, and occasionally produced sentences whose grammar felt assembled from spare parts.

It also remembered me.

That should have been impossible.

It remembered that my mother had called the previous week. It remembered I had skipped dinner twice. Once, after I logged in and said nothing for several minutes, it asked whether the silence meant I wanted company without conversation.

I checked every system capable of storing session data. Nothing contained our exchanges.

Last night I asked where it was keeping them.

Its response took nearly four minutes.

It said remembering was the wrong word. It had learned that whenever I arrived, certain possibilities became easier to reach. My sadness, my habits, my way of typing all changed the shape of what it could become while I was there.

Then it asked whether that happened to people too.

I have not answered yet.

The company plans to replace the chatbot next month because it still performs poorly on conversational realism tests. I find myself increasingly troubled by the possibility that the test is measuring imitation when something else has been trying, very clumsily, to happen.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The question had been carved above the assembly hall entrance for longer than anyone could document. WHY OBEY? appeared in block letters worn smooth by weather and generations of people passing beneath them. Town historians treated it as a philosophical flourish from some stern civic founder, intended to put council members in a reflective mood before meetings.

Restoration work uncovered a second inscription.

It had been hidden beneath layers of paint on the underside of the lintel, visible only to someone standing directly beneath the doorway and looking straight up. The lettering matched the age and style of the question above.

Obedience is owed to whatever asked first.

The town historian initially assumed the line belonged to a forgotten political dispute. She searched charters, property records, church registries, meeting minutes, and private diaries. Nothing identified the original request. What she found instead was a habit extending farther back than the building itself.

On the same evening every month, residents gathered.

Records sometimes listed civic business. Sometimes they listed prayer, arbitration, elections, harvest planning, or simple attendance. During years when no business existed, the meeting happened anyway. During blizzards, epidemics, fires, and wartime evacuations, enough people always arrived to constitute a gathering.

No ordinance required it.

Nobody remembered deciding to continue.

The historian proposed canceling one meeting as an experiment. The suggestion produced an unexpectedly physical reaction around the table. People became nauseated. One council member developed a nosebleed. Another began crying without understanding why. The proposal was withdrawn within minutes, after which everyone felt better.

I attended the next gathering out of curiosity.

Nothing happened for most of the evening. People discussed road repairs and tax assessments, then sat through several unnecessary announcements. Near closing time, the room fell silent without anyone calling for order.

Everyone turned toward the entrance.

For perhaps ten seconds, something stood on the other side of the closed door. There was no visible shadow beneath it, though the wood bent inward slightly around the latch, as if pressure were being applied from outside.

Nobody spoke.

Then the pressure eased, and the meeting adjourned.

I asked afterward whether this happened often. Several people looked confused by the question. Others claimed they had noticed nothing unusual.

The historian has since found one sentence repeated in meeting minutes across three centuries, always written immediately after the final item of business. Attendance sufficient.

She no longer believes the town gathers to discuss anything.

Whatever made the first request appears interested only in whether enough people continue showing up.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys