092124-01-10mu -

I pressed my ear to the vent. A voice came through, thin as wire: “You’re not crazy. The memories are real. Don’t let them take the tenth mu.”

The first session, I lasted twenty minutes. My mother’s voice came through the speakers, but she wasn’t saying what she’d really said. She was saying the approved version. “You were always a difficult child. The therapy is for your own good.”

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. 092124-01-10mu

I touched the glass.

She looked at the door, then back at me. “They take you to the basement. There’s a room. In the room, there’s a mirror. But it’s not a mirror. It’s a door.” I pressed my ear to the vent

I stepped.

By day three, I couldn’t remember which version was real anymore. Don’t let them take the tenth mu

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.”

Two orderlies came for me—the same two from the first day. They didn’t speak. They led me down a staircase I hadn’t seen before, past doors with no handles, past a sign that read TERMINAL MEMORY UNIT — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY .

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.