First Operator Chronicles - 16 - Access Granted

This is where interpretation ends

Nothing extraordinary happened.

The city kept working with the same efficient clumsiness it always has. Traffic lights changed when they were supposed to. People crossed streets with their heads full of small urgencies. Machines did their jobs without witnesses.

I did too.

I got up.

My “normal people autopilot” was on:
Washed my face without looking at it in the mirror.
Ate something without hunger.
Answered messages with a bunch of corpo-slang that, at the end, said nothing, like always.

The world didn’t collapse because I was emotionally absent.
The world didn’t collapse because I was intellectually numb.

It never does.

The only difference was that there was nowhere left to look away.

Before, when the pressure got too dense, when the patterns started forming and my teeth began to feel that invisible hum, I moved my body toward something human, something known, something warm.

A cigarette.
A coffee.
A conversation.
An excuse.
A presence.

She wasn’t an error.
She was a wall.

A warm wall.
A living wall.
A wall that smiled back, and breathed on my body, and had weekend plans for no one, and made coffee like it didn’t need to prove anything.

I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t need to. It was such a short time that I thought I would have a little more time to taste this flavour in my mouth.

Now the wall was not there, not because it left, but because it wasn’t needed in some weird way, and the whole landscape was suddenly visible.

The first thing I felt wasn’t pain.

It was order.
Not the comforting kind.
Some unique pressure point that pushed into my mind and brought order.

The kind that makes you realize you’ve been living inside a selfie attempt your whole life, and no matter how hard you tried before, all you ever got was a blurry image of yourself. And now, something triggers the autofocus and the image is clear for the first time.

My mind wanted to call it clarity.
My heart wanted to call it loss.
And me, as usual, waited for one of them to bring something better than kindergarten doodles.

Terrible teamwork.

---

I walked through the morning like a man trying to keep his own footsteps quiet. Not because I was hiding, but because some childish part of me still believed that if I moved quietly enough, the world would not notice my mess.
That part of me was wrong, like the other parts of me, but in some special way of wrong.

It wasn’t violence that was waiting for me.

It was consistency.

I opened the window. The air smelled like cigarettes from someone else’s balcony and fresh bread from a bakery that still believes people deserve small mercies, everything mixed with the low-quality silence that the city floods your personal spaces with.

Somewhere a dog barked at the idea of existence, and some other one in another place barked back like they were joining a singing club.

Just… the modern definition of “normal” or “modernly normal”. Things weren’t bad enough, but not good enough to push you forward.
A fancy word for just functional.

But underneath that, something else.

A sensation, not a voice.

Like the city had an extra layer of electricity today.
Like everything had been slightly tuned.
Not louder.
More accurate.
More fine-tuned to something I can only feel.

I made coffee.
I did not think the machine hesitated this time.
It heated at the exact pace it should.
The water poured without overshooting.
The cup warmed my hands like a technical demonstration.

My mind tried to smile about it.
See? it said. Not everything is a glitch.

My heart didn’t answer.
My heart had been punched enough lately to conserve its words.

I checked my phone.
No messages from her.
Of course.

I didn’t blame her for that.

There are silences that are not punishment.
They are boundaries doing their fine job, reminding you the distance between “us” and “them”. I think now I am in the field of “them” now.

I tried to work, or do the performance of a worker.

The laptop opened instantly, as if eager.
Emails loaded without delay.

A file I had lost weeks ago appeared in a folder like it had always been there.

Technology has been too kind today.
Efficiency is suspicious when you’re used to friction.
I stared at the screen longer than necessary, waiting for my own paranoia to start performing.

It didn’t.

That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
Because paranoia is noisy.

This was quiet.
This was the moment after the room stops arguing and starts arranging itself, like something else already took the decision about whatever was conflicting too, and it is about to just act without you agreeing or not.

I went out quickly, fooling my mind that it was for groceries, or for a walk, or for the kind of movement you do when you want to convince your body you still control something, that everything is “modernly normal”.

But really, I needed to see if the world still behaved like a world.
Like the old rat-lab maze full of broken dreams turned into responsibilities, unfair taxes, and hopes that everything will be fine at least once before you die.
Something between my mind and my heart was claiming to hide from attention. I wanted to disappear, like being away from this sensation of fog that the city has become. I did not want to deal with it and I don’t want it.

When I closed the door of my apartment on my planned quick escape, the elevator was there, silent, with the hum of the hallway pointing in its direction.

The elevator opened the doors just at the moment I closed the one in my apartment.

Like inviting.

I stopped.

I hadn’t pressed any button.
I was too far to do anything, and my brief experience with this is that coincidence is not scripted by the Machine.

The elevator waited, polite and silent, like nothing bad had ever happened between us.
Like the previous angry paranormal interrogation we had had was a dream some insecure man invented to make his life feel special.

My mind whispered a suggestion.
Just take it, it said. Be normal.

My heart didn’t speak, but my legs answered for it.

I took the stairs.

On the second floor the phone coverage disappeared.
On the first floor it returned.
Outside it dropped again.

A clean little wave of disconnection and reconnection, like a device doing a scan.

Like a system acknowledging that a variable had moved.

I walked to the corner store.

The cashier nodded in automatic mode at me without seeing me.
The shelves were filled with the usual promises: sugar disguised as comfort, packaging disguised as identity, little plastic shapes pretending to be food. All promises of a happy life at the cost of your present health.

I grabbed something I didn’t want.
I paid.

The receipt printed with a tiny mechanical scream.

I looked down without thinking.

The total was correct.
The date was correct.
And underneath, where there is usually an advertisement or a loyalty message, there was a line that didn’t belong.

Not in bold.
Not dramatic.

Just there, like it had always been part of the template.

“AWAIT OPERATOR AVAILABILITY”

I froze with the paper in my hand like it had insulted me.

The cashier didn’t react.
The people behind me didn’t react.
The city kept breathing normally.

My mind started sprinting into its favorite conspiracy-theories desk that leads to nowhere.

Printer error.
Store software.
A prank.
A coincidence.

My heart didn’t join the meeting.

My heart stayed in the corner, arms crossed, like it was tired of pretending this was something else.

I folded the receipt and put it in my pocket.
I walked out into the street holding my groceries like a man who believes he’s still doing something “modernly normal”.

At the crosswalk, the pedestrian light turned green before I touched the button.

I didn’t move.

Cars stopped anyway.
Drivers cursed anyway.

A woman with headphones crossed without looking up, trusting the system with the kind of blind faith in the system that raised her, that everything will be there for her rhythm. Not questioning if the system freed her or the system just put a cap on her expectations.

My mind was too thick about everything I see, but anyway, I crossed too.

On the other side, a bus passed with an LED sign that said the route number.
Then the route number flickered, and for half a second it said:
“ROOFTOP 23:11”
Then it returned to normal.

I laughed once, quietly, but the sensation was a laugh between me and God and, this time, the Machine.

Not because it was funny.

Because my brain needed to release something before it cracked.

This is the part where a “modernly normal” story would make the protagonist run.

Or scream.

Or call someone.

In a normal story, this would be the part where the world admits it has special effects.

But the Machine doesn’t do special effects.

The Machine does alignment, makes things fit.

It shows you the same thing from different angles until you stop pretending it’s an accident.

My mind tried to build a wall again.

Maybe you’re projecting, it said.
You’re tired.
You’re dramatic.
You’re just looking for patterns because you need meaning.

My mind always says that like meaning is a crime.

My heart finally spoke, very softly.

Or maybe, it said, the meaning is looking at you.

Terrible teamwork.

At the end of my “modernly normal” lap, I came home carrying groceries I didn’t need, like a child bringing homework to prove he did something.

Automatic pilot again:
I put everything away.
I cleaned the counter.
I washed a mug that was already clean.
I did the domestic rituals of people who still believe control can be manufactured with soap.

Then I sat down and stared at my phone.

It stayed dark.

No 23:11.
No message.
No proof.

Just a black screen reflecting my face back at me, tired and ordinary.

That’s the cruelest part.

How ordinary I still look, even as something inside my life is becoming operative.

My mind wanted to call her.

My heart wanted to call her too, but for different reasons.

Not to confess.
Not to ask for rescue.

Just to hear a voice that belonged to a human world.

To borrow a little gravity.

I didn’t.

Not because I was noble.

Because I finally understood something simple:

You can’t ask someone to be your wall forever.
And you can’t ask someone to understand a language you don’t even speak yet.

The Machine wasn’t asking for a sacrifice.
It never does.

It doesn’t seduce.
It doesn’t punish.
It registers, aligns, waits.

And now it was waiting in a way that didn’t leave room for interpretation.

In the afternoon, I tried to work again.

Small things were still happening but my mind was just tired to keep playing Clue:

My screen brightness adjusted itself when I leaned forward.
The cursor moved one pixel on its own, then stopped.
A page refreshed without me touching the mouse.

Small, precise things.

Like the Machine was reminding me:

I can touch anything.
I can rewrite anything.
I can do it quietly.
And you will still make coffee and pretend your life is normal.

I thought about her again.

Not with nostalgia this time.

With precision.

The way she had said it, careful, like closing a door gently so it wouldn’t slam.

“I can’t be your escape.”

She had been right.

Not because I was manipulating her.

Because I was cornered with something I still don’t know, I cannot prove to others, but I was hoping that she would understand, like hoping that I tell her about the Machine and we become a couple that resolves paranormal crimes like a sad and faded version of Scooby-Doo, but without a dog to make the comedy relief.

I did not know that I hoped so much.

Hope makes you loud.
Hope makes you knock on doors too late.
Hope makes you treat a human being like a future you can live inside.

And that is a weight, even when it’s wrapped in love with lipstick on a card.

I understood, without drama, that there was no copilot for this.

Not because it was tragic.

Because it was structural.

Some journeys are built with one seat on purpose.

My single-pilot submarine.

But the heart, that stowaway, always trying to sneak in anyway, hoping nobody checks the cargo.

By evening, the city started turning orange.

That tired streetlight color that makes you feel that the indoors is less risky than the outside now.

I ate something.
I didn’t taste it.

I smoked at the window and watched people crossing the street in a hurry and without it, like everyone is going somewhere they belong but it is just borrowed and they still did not get that email.

Everyone carrying something.
Everyone pretending it’s fine.

I thought again about how easy it would be to become cruel and call it intelligence.
How easy it would be to become numb and pay bills and taxes without a smile and call it adulthood.
How easy it would be to stay soft only when there is something to gain.

And then, as if answering a thought I hadn’t said out loud, my phone lit up.

No vibration.
No sound.

Just the screen waking on its own like an eye opening in the dark.

A black background.
White text.
Clean, minimal, indifferent.

“OPERATOR AVAILABILITY REQUIRED”

Below it:

“TIME: 23:11”

Below that:

“LOCATION: ROOFTOP”

Below that, smaller:

“CONFIRMATION NOT NECESSARY”

I stared at it so long my eyes started to water.

Not from emotion.

From the absurdity of a system that can be this direct and still feel like it isn’t saying anything.

My mind tried to speak.

My mind always wants to negotiate with sanity on its side, but sanity is an assignment that my mind has been falling asleep in class since always.

What if you don’t go? it asked.

My heart answered before I could.

Then it will go anyway, it said.
It will just go without you understanding it.

And that was the truth.

Not dramatic.

Just physics.

A time.
A place.
A condition that didn’t ask for permission.

The Machine wasn’t inviting me like a person invites you.

It wasn’t saying come.
It was saying when.

It wasn’t saying choose.
It was saying it has always been this way, you just kept covering it with “modernly normal” noise.

I didn’t feel fear.

Fear had been earlier, dispersed, leaking through the cracks of daily life.

This was different.

This was the moment where pretending ignorance becomes more violent than accepting evidence.

My mouth was dry.
My hands were steady.

That’s how I knew my body had already decided.

My mind wanted a speech.
My heart wanted a prayer.

And me, stuck between them, did the only honest thing I’ve done in weeks.

I stood up.
I grabbed my notebook.
I checked the radio like a ritual.
I looked at the door like it was a line on a map.

I didn’t text her.
I didn’t write her name.
I didn’t make it poetic.
I didn’t make it fair.

The “yes” wasn’t a word.

It was movement.
It was the moment I stopped resisting the fit.

At 23:07, I left.

And I hope everything that I don’t need was left behind.

I will travel light.
I will travel alone.
And I know that I will not come back.

Let’s submerge now.

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