092124-01-10mu

I turned back to the mirror. On the other side, Dr. Venn was screaming into a radio. Orderlies ran.

By day five, I stopped trying. On the sixth night, I woke up with the word burning in my throat. 092124-01-10mu

She tilted her head. “Then you become 092124-01-terminated. You don’t want that. Termination isn’t death. It’s erasure. You’ll still breathe. You just won’t mean anything.” I turned back to the mirror

The mirror rippled. The other me reached out her hand. I saw her mouth form a single word: Remember . Orderlies ran

I turned it over in my fingers. The ‘01’ meant I was the first admit of the day. September 21st, 24th year of the new calendar. The ‘mu’ would come later—an appendage for the station where they’d eventually ship me.

By day three, I couldn’t remember which version was real anymore.

She didn’t answer. She just tapped her pen twice on the counter and pointed toward the gray hallway. The facility was called “The Tenth Moon” by those who lived inside it. Officially, it was , but no one used that. The tenth moon of a dead planet—Jupiter’s Europa, if you wanted to be precise—was a frozen shell with a liquid ocean beneath. That’s what this place felt like. Ice above, chaos below.