The name should have vanished at midnight.
Isaac Koranteng had watched that moment hundreds of times before—the final second when a human being slipped out of the world without ceremony or resistance. The Registry chamber was designed to make that moment feel clean. Sterile. Merciful. White walls, muted lights, the constant low hum of servers that stored and reshaped the memory of an entire city.
He sat alone at his terminal, hands folded, eyes fixed on the screen.
The cursor blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Then the name returned.
Isaac leaned forward, a cold pressure tightening in his chest. Names did not return. The erasure protocol was absolute: legal records dissolved, biometric access revoked, digital traces unraveled, and—most importantly—social recognition algorithms adjusted so that the erased person no longer registered as meaningful to anyone else.
People stopped noticing them.
Stopped remembering them.
Stopped caring.
Isaac checked the authorization log again, scrolling slowly to reassure himself that this was not a mistake. The clearance codes were valid. The deletion had been approved at the highest administrative level. Every safeguard had been satisfied.
"There's no reason for you to still exist," he murmured.
He initiated the command again.
DELETE — CONFIRMED.
The lights flickered overhead.
At first, Isaac thought it was nothing—just a fluctuation in the aging power grid. Then the floor vibrated slightly beneath his feet, and the hum of the servers shifted in pitch, like something inhaling sharply.
Static crackled in his headset.
Before he could remove it, the emergency channel cut in.
A live street feed filled his screen without permission.
Rain slicked the pavement, reflecting neon advertisements and traffic signals. A man stumbled into view, clutching his chest. His mouth moved as if he were calling for help, but no sound reached Isaac through the feed.
People stood around him.
They were watching.
No one stepped forward.
No one reacted.
The man collapsed.
Isaac's breath caught. "Why aren't they helping him?"
The feed switched abruptly.
Another street. Another body. Same pattern. People staring, confused, disturbed—but not intervening.
Then the third feed appeared.
A woman stood at the center of the frame.
She wasn't running. She wasn't hiding. She wasn't violent. She simply stood there, calm and still, while chaos unfolded around her. Pedestrians brushed past without acknowledgment, eyes sliding away as if their minds refused to hold onto her presence.
The camera struggled to focus.
Her outline shimmered, bending slightly at the edges, as though reality itself could not decide where she belonged.
Facial recognition activated automatically.
ERROR: IDENTITY NOT FOUND.
Isaac's heart pounded. Every citizen had an identity. Even the erased left residual system shadows—ghosts in the data.
This woman had nothing.
The feed cut to black.
Isaac's terminal refreshed.
The name was still there.
Sweat prickled along his spine as a red alert pulsed across the screen.
MULTIPLE FATALITIES — CAUSE UNKNOWN.
Isaac leaned back slowly, hands trembling. He had always believed erasure was humane. No cages. No firing squads. Just quiet removal from the world's awareness.
But the images replayed in his mind—the bodies, the confusion, the woman who could not be focused, identified, or ignored.
For the first time, Isaac felt the weight of what he had done.
He had not erased a person.
He had unmade the rules that kept people harmless.