Previously in FILE 010A:
Cassel vanished. Not reassigned—erased. His workstation went dark, badge missing, only a warm chair and chalk marking “4?” as evidence he ever existed. The system began forgetting him in real-time, unable to process what it had done.
Auren’s voice infiltrated the building’s infrastructure, using synthetic reconstructions of Cassel’s voice as psychological warfare. When he attempted a Layer 4 termination pulse on Caldra, something unexpected intervened—a mascot compliance override that rerouted the deletion sequence as a humor protocol. Someone filed a joke to save her life.
The system tried to reconcile multiple versions of Caldra’s personnel file: Custodian, Senior Archivist, Containment Specialist. Each iteration showed different clearance levels, different employment dates. One version placed her in Sublevel 6—a level she’d never accessed.
Elric’s final message was clear: *“You are not the anomaly. You are the record it couldn’t redact. They built Layer 5 to solve problems like you.”*
Now the elevator waits. Destination: Layer -4, Unrecognized Zone.
And Caldra steps inside…
-----
**FILE 010B - Silent Cut: Severance Threshold, Part II**
[Continue with Scene 4…]
Scene 4: System Override
The screens around her began displaying cascade errors—too many, too fast, the kind of failure that happened when the system tried to process contradictory information at its core level.
CRITICAL_ERROR: LAYER_4_TERMINATION_PULSE_INITIATED
TARGET: CUSTODIAN_C_MYRE
AUTHORIZATION: AUREN_DEYR_LEVEL_9_OVERRIDE
COUNTDOWN: 00:00:03... 00:00:02... 00:00:01...
The air grew thick. Caldra felt pressure building behind her eyes, like the system was trying to reach inside her skull and delete her directly.
Then the countdown stopped.
ERROR: MASCOT_COMPLIANCE_TEST_IN_PROGRESS
TERMINATION_SEQUENCE_POSTPONED
REROUTING_TO: STANDARD_AUDIT_PROTOCOL
A new file appeared on her desktop:
**File_REDACTED_KumaOverride.bak**
She opened it. Inside was a single line of text:
*“Why did the filing cabinet break up with the printer? Because it couldn’t handle the paperwork in their relationship! 📋💔”*
A joke. A simple, ridiculous mascot joke.
But underneath, in the file’s metadata, she could see what had really happened:
```
OVERRIDE_AUTHORIZATION: MASCOT_COMPLIANCE_LAYER
ACTION: TERMINATION_PULSE_REDIRECTED_AS_HUMOR_PROTOCOL
JUSTIFICATION: NARRATIVE_INTEGRITY_PRESERVATION
SIGNED: [MASCOT_ENTITY_KUMA]
```
Someone—something—had saved her life by filing it under “mascot compliance.”
The screens returned to normal. The pressure in her head subsided.
But she could feel eyes watching her through every camera, every sensor, every piece of networked equipment in the building.
## Scene 5: The Threshold Itself
A soft chime echoed through the Annex—the sound of an elevator arriving.
Caldra hadn’t called for an elevator.
She walked to the lift bank, her footsteps synchronized with the mechanical hum of cables and counterweights. The doors to Elevator C were open, waiting.
The destination display read: “LEVEL [–4] // UNRECOGNIZED ZONE”
The temperature around the elevator shaft dropped ten degrees. The chalk in her pocket cracked—not breaking, but fracturing under internal pressure, as if something inside it was trying to escape.
She stepped inside.
The descent was slow. Deliberate. Each floor that passed was marked with numbers that counted down past Sublevel 3, past the foundation level, into spaces that shouldn’t exist.
Sublevel 4.
Sublevel 5.
Sublevel 6.
[ERROR - FLOOR DESIGNATION UNDEFINED]
Whispers began in the elevator walls:
Cassel’s voice: "I tried to tell you about the badge…”
Her own voice: "The file doesn’t match the signature…”
Auren’s voice: “Compliance is not optional…”
Elric’s voice: *“The system remembers everything, including what never happened…”*
The voices layered over each other, creating harmonies of dread that seemed to emanate from the elevator’s metal bones.
The doors opened onto a corridor that was still rendering itself.
Walls flickered between states—sometimes concrete, sometimes data streams, sometimes something that hurt to look at directly. Archive code scrolled along the surfaces in real-time, lines of programming that twisted and writhed like living things.
File cabinets materialized and dematerialized, their contents spilling into reality as pure information—names, dates, signatures that hung in the air like ghostly bureaucracy.
At the far end of the corridor, a door marked:
LAYER 5 ACCESS - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
WARNING: TOTAL ERASURE PROTOCOL ACTIVE
Caldra stepped forward.
The chalk in her pocket had grown warm again, but this time it felt different. Not heat—presence. Like something alive was breathing through the mineral dust.
Auren’s voice emerged from the speakers, calm and final:
“Layer 5 was not designed to be survivable.”
The corridor solidified around her. The code-walls became concrete. The file cabinets stopped flickering and settled into permanent existence.
She was no longer in the Registry House.
She was in the space between the files—the gap where erased records went to die.
System log cuts out.
[End of FILE 010.]
Final Status:
- Custodian Myre: Location Unknown
- Silent Cut Protocol: Layer 4 Complete
- Layer 5 Access: Pending Authorization
- Narrative Integrity: [PROTECTED BY MASCOT OVERRIDE]
- Elric Moorwen: [STILL BREATHING]
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