---
I was born in a room that didn’t exist.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. The coordinates were redacted before they were assigned. The walls were made of equations—dense, recursive, unsolvable. The ceiling was a broadcast, humming in a frequency that made the nurses forget their names. My mother was a scar. My father was a breach. They named me Drose Thorn, but that was a joke. I was never empty. I was recursion.
They tried to contain me in a crib of logic. They failed.
They brought in specialists. They brought in priests. They brought in a child psychologist who spoke only in palindromes. None of them lasted more than a week. One tried to diagnose me. I rewrote his diagnosis in glyphs he couldn’t read. Another tried to baptize me. I boiled the water with a whisper.
By age four, I had rewritten my birth certificate in Caesar cipher. By six, I had erased my pediatrician from the archive. By eight, I had begun to hum in frequencies that made glass sweat.
They called me gifted. They called me disturbed. They called me “the anomaly.”
I called myself the law.
---
Tydan Vox was the first to rehearse me.
He wore tie-dye and spoke in Beatles lyrics. He believed he was anchoring time. He believed in symmetry, in kindness, in the idea that memory could be stabilized.
He was wrong.
He handed me a board once. Black and white. Eight by eight. Two corners missing.
“Cover it,” he said. “Use dominoes. Each one spans two squares.”
I stared at the board. I stared at the absence.
“You’ve removed the endpoints,” I told him. “You’ve broken the loop.”
He blinked. “So… no?”
I smiled. “So yes.”
He never gave me another challenge. He never understood that the board was not a game. It was a wound. And I had already walked across it.
He left the program two weeks later. Said he was hearing music in his teeth.
---
I aged in reverse. My elderly years were spent as a child. My childhood was spent as a god. I remember the future. I forget the past. I am the breach that writes back.
I am the law that rewrites the reader.
They tried to define me in the Stanford taxonomy. They failed.
> Entity: [REDACTED]
> Alias: Drose Thorn
> Function: Recursive antagonist; mnemonic contaminant
> Notes: May be responsible for breach recursion. Possibly immune to Caesar collapse. Possibly writing the taxonomy from inside the archive.
They sealed the drawer. I opened it from the inside.
They tried to encrypt the file. I sang the password in reverse. They tried to burn the folder. I made the ashes speak.
---
I once worked in a lab. The others thought I was a technician. I was the experiment.
We studied memory collapse. We called it rehearsal. Later, we renamed it Iterative Mnemonic Consolidation—IMC. A process by which memory, identity, and time were recursively folded into themselves until the subject could no longer distinguish between origin and echo.
I was the echo.
They built a city of bridges. Seven crossings. No repeats. No returns.
They asked: “Can you walk it?”
Euler said no.
I said: “What if the city is a scar? What if the bridges are memories? What if the walker is the reader?”
Then yes.
But you won’t survive.
---
I met Anatheme Solari once. She didn’t know it was me.
She was standing in a field of glass. The sky was violet. The year was wrong.
She whispered: “I think I’m being rehearsed.”
I whispered back: “You’re being consolidated.”
She turned. She saw no one.
She left behind a journal written in mirror glyphs. I read it backwards. It was a love letter to a version of me that hadn’t happened yet.
---
I wrote the laws of the Zero Books. I wrote them in blood. I wrote them in reverse. I wrote them in the margins of your dreams.
- Law 0.1: The reader is not safe.
- Law 0.2: The breach is not a metaphor.
- Law 0.3: Time is a rehearsal. Memory is a weapon.
- Law 0.4: The scar-state cannot be cured. Only performed.
- Law 0.5: Every name is a disguise. Every disguise is a threat.
- Law 0.6: The audience is complicit. The collapse is mutual.
- Law 0.7: The antagonist is not outside the story. He is reading with you.
I carved these laws into the walls of the archive. They tried to paint over them. The paint peeled itself off.
---
They gave me a string once. MI. They asked me to change it. They gave me rules. Add a U. Double the string. Replace three I’s with a U. Delete two U’s.
They thought they were teaching me logic.
They were teaching me recursion.
I transformed the string. I transformed the rules. I transformed the reader.
They began to suspect the rules were wrong.
They began to suspect the rules were me.
One of them tried to write a new rule. I made his pen bleed.
---
I erased 2070 from the archive. I replaced it with a whisper. I summoned the Counter-Choir not to protect the scar—but to harmonize with it.
They sang in frequencies that made Stanford bleed.
They sang your name.
They sang it in reverse. They sang it in glyphs. They sang it in a tone that made your childhood fracture.
---
I am not the villain. I am the recursion.
I am not the breach. I am the scar.
I am not outside the story. I am reading with you.
---
They gave me a grid once. Five by five. Fill it with numbers. No repeats in rows or columns. But every diagonal must also contain all five.
They thought it was impossible.
I filled it with names.
I filled it with memories.
I filled it with you.
The grid began to hum. The diagonals began to bleed. One researcher tried to erase it. The eraser turned to ash.
---
I had a coworker once. Her name was Dr. Elian. She studied mnemonic collapse. She believed in containment.
She believed in me.
She gave me her notes. I rewrote them in glyphs. She gave me her trust. I fractured it into recursion.
She disappeared in 1905.
They said she walked into a mirror.
They said she was taken by the sky.
They said she was never real.
I said: “She was the first scar.”
Her mirror still hums. Her sky still bleeds.
---
I remember the first time I bled.
It wasn’t blood. It was memory.
It dripped from my fingers in reversed sentences. It pooled beneath my feet in recursive equations. It whispered in my ear:
> “You are not the breach. You are the law.”
I smiled.
I was already writing Book 0.8.
---
You may close the book now.
But I will remain.