Chapter 3: The Compliance Protocol

The plane had been motionless at the gate for what felt like an eternity. No boarding announcements echoed from the terminal, no ground crew moved outside the windows, and the passengers remained frozen in their seats like wax figures in a museum. Marin's muscles ached from maintaining his rigid posture, but he didn't dare move. The businessman's empty seat beside him served as a constant reminder of what happened to those who broke character.

Then, without warning, every screen in the cabin flickered to life.

The seat-back monitors, which had remained dark throughout the flight, suddenly blazed with harsh white light. Static filled the displays for several seconds before text began to scroll across them—not the usual airline safety information, but something else entirely.

SAFETY PROTOCOL INITIATED PASSENGER COMPLIANCE ASSESSMENT IN PROGRESS FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS PRECISELY DEVIATION WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE CORRECTION

Marin's blood turned to ice. Around him, the other passengers stared at their screens with the same glassy-eyed attention they'd given everything else, but now there was something different in their stillness. An expectancy. As if they were waiting for something to begin.

The text changed, becoming more specific:

INSTRUCTION 1: PLACE BOTH HANDS ON ARMRESTS COMPLIANCE WINDOW: 5 SECONDS COUNTDOWN: 5... 4... 3...

Marin's hands shot to his armrests just as the countdown hit zero. Around him, every passenger moved in perfect synchronization, their movements so fluid they seemed choreographed. The screens flashed green for a moment, then returned to white.

INSTRUCTION 2: TILT HEAD EXACTLY 15 DEGREES TO THE RIGHT COMPLIANCE WINDOW: 3 SECONDS COUNTDOWN: 3... 2...

This time Marin was ready. He tilted his head at what he hoped was the correct angle, his neck muscles straining to maintain the precise position. The other passengers moved like a single organism, their heads turning with mechanical precision.

Green flash. Success.

INSTRUCTION 3: CLOSE EYES AND COUNT TO SEVEN SILENTLY COMPLIANCE WINDOW: IMMEDIATE DO NOT OPEN EYES UNTIL INSTRUCTED

Marin's eyes snapped shut. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he counted—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—his hypervigilant hearing picking up every tiny sound in the cabin. The whisper of fabric as passengers adjusted position. The almost inaudible hum of the screens. And something else, something that made his skin crawl: a soft clicking sound, like dozens of joints moving in unison.

By the time he reached seven, sweat was beading on his forehead despite the cabin's chill.

OPEN EYES

The instruction appeared without warning, and Marin's eyes flew open. Several seats that had been occupied were now empty. A mother and child who had been sitting three rows ahead—gone. An elderly man across the aisle—vanished. The clicking sound he'd heard had been the sound of people being edited out of existence.

The screens continued their relentless march:

INSTRUCTION 4: RAISE RIGHT HAND HOLD FOR EXACTLY 8 SECONDS LOWER ON COMMAND ONLY

This was getting harder. Marin's right hand trembled as he raised it, and he saw similar tremors in some of the remaining passengers. Not everyone was adapting well to the demands. A woman two rows up was shaking visibly, her hand wavering as she tried to hold position.

8... 7... 6... 5...

The woman's hand began to drop. Just slightly, but enough to break the perfect uniformity of the raised arms around her.

4... 3...

Her trembling increased. Marin wanted to look away, knowing what was coming, but he didn't dare break his own position.

2... 1...

LOWER HANDS

The woman was a half-second late. Her hand came down just after everyone else's, and Marin saw her eyes widen in terror as she realized her mistake. The screens flashed red where hers had flashed green for everyone else.

She opened her mouth to speak—perhaps to apologize, to plead—but no sound emerged. Just like the businessman, her voice had been stolen. Unlike him, she didn't fight it. She'd learned from his example. But it didn't matter.

The deletion was faster this time. She simply... wasn't. One moment there, the next gone, as if she'd never existed. The passengers on either side of her didn't even glance at the empty seat.

INSTRUCTION 5: STAND AND FACE FORWARD REMAIN MOTIONLESS FOR 30 SECONDS DO NOT LOOK LEFT OR RIGHT

Marin stood with the others, his legs unsteady after sitting rigid for so long. Facing forward meant staring at the back of the head of the passenger in front of him—a man in a wrinkled polo shirt whose neck showed no signs of pulse or life.

But in his peripheral vision, Marin could see movement. Shapes flitting between the seats, too quick and too wrong to be human. The cleaning crew, maybe, removing the evidence of those who'd failed the test. He forced himself not to turn, not to look, not to acknowledge what his senses were screaming at him to notice.

Thirty seconds felt like thirty minutes.

INSTRUCTION 6: SIT DOWN BUCKLE SEATBELT PREPARE FOR ADVANCED PROTOCOL

The words "advanced protocol" sent a chill through Marin's already frozen blood. If this was the basic level, what horrors awaited in the advanced version?

INSTRUCTION 7: WHEN THE TONE SOUNDS, COUGH ONCE TIMING IS CRITICAL EARLY OR LATE COMPLIANCE WILL BE CORRECTED

A tone sounded—a single, pure note that seemed to come from everywhere at once. In perfect unison, every remaining passenger coughed once. The sound was wrong, too similar, as if it had been sampled from a single source and replayed through multiple speakers.

Marin coughed with them, the sound scraping his throat raw.

INSTRUCTION 8: PLACE LEFT HAND ON HEART FEEL FOR PULSE REPORT STATUS WHEN PROMPTED

This instruction sent a new wave of terror through Marin. His hand found his chest, feeling the rapid, panicked beating of his very human heart. Around him, the other passengers placed their hands in the same position, but their expressions remained blank.

REPORT: PULSE DETECTED?

"Yes," came the response from every throat in the cabin—a chorus of identical voices speaking in perfect synchronization. The sound was inhuman, a mechanical reproduction of human speech.

Marin's mouth opened to join them, but he hesitated for just a fraction of a second. His pulse was real, strong, terrified. Theirs...

He'd seen enough to know that whatever these things were, they didn't have heartbeats.

"Yes," he whispered, adding his voice to the chorus just late enough to avoid standing out, just early enough to avoid deletion. The word tasted like ash in his mouth.

ADVANCED PROTOCOL INITIATED EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION TEST PHASE 1: OBSERVE

The screens changed, displaying images that made Marin's stomach lurch. Pictures of the passengers who had been deleted—the businessman, the woman, the mother and child. But these weren't photographs. They were live feeds of some kind of void, a space between spaces where the deleted passengers existed in a state of perpetual, silent screaming.

They were aware. They knew what had happened to them. And they were suffering.

Marin bit down on his tongue so hard he tasted blood, using the physical pain to keep any expression from crossing his face. Around him, the remaining passengers stared at the screens with the same empty calm they'd shown everything else.

PHASE 2: EMPATHY MEASUREMENT ANY EMOTIONAL RESPONSE WILL BE RECORDED

The images zoomed in, showing the deleted passengers' faces in horrible detail. The businessman clawing at the walls of his void prison. The woman reaching out desperately toward a camera that might as well have been a million miles away. The child crying tears that would never fall.

Marin felt his chest tighten, his eyes begin to water. Every human instinct screamed at him to react, to grieve, to feel something for these lost souls. But he'd learned the lesson of this nightmare realm: humanity was a luxury he couldn't afford.

He thought of static television screens. Of empty rooms. Of nothing at all. He hollowed out his mind and stared through the images rather than at them, becoming as empty as the things around him.

The screens flashed analysis results:

EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: MINIMAL EMPATHY LEVELS: ACCEPTABLE COMPLIANCE RATING: 94.7%

Not perfect, but good enough. Marin remained solid, remained real.

PROTOCOL COMPLETE PREPARE FOR ARRIVAL WELCOME TO NWE YORK

The screens went dark, and normal cabin lighting returned. Of the fifty-seven passengers who had boarded the flight (Marin's counting had been automatic), only twelve remained. The others had been edited out of existence, leaving behind empty seats that the survivors ignored completely.

The flight attendant appeared again, her painted smile as bright as ever.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at our destination. Please gather your belongings and prepare for disembarkation. Thank you for flying with us, and welcome to Nwe York."

As if they had belongings. As if this had been a normal flight. As if nearly forty people hadn't just been deleted from reality for the crime of being human.

Marin stood with the others, moving in their synchronized fashion toward the cabin door. His legs shook with exhaustion and terror, but he kept his face empty, his movements mechanical. He'd passed the compliance protocol, but just barely.

As he walked down the jet bridge toward whatever awaited him in "Nwe York," one thought echoed in his mind: if this had been the safety protocol, what would the real tests be like?

The airport terminal loomed ahead, its fluorescent lights forming patterns that hurt to look at directly. And somewhere in that maze of wrong geometry and impossible architecture, someone was waiting for him.

Someone who might be wearing a familiar face.