Subject Zero: Faceless

I am—

I don’t know who I am.

It has been too long since I had a name to lose. I know I had one, once. I know it the way you know you once knew how to breathe underwater — not as a memory. As an ache shaped like one, with nothing left inside it.

I was summoned to this world.

To be a hero, maybe. To save it. That is how the stories are supposed to go — chosen, needed, handed a purpose the moment you arrive.

I don’t remember being told anything.

I remember being dragged.

I remember a room with no windows, and hands that were not gentle. I remember understanding, somewhere underneath the panic, that wherever I had landed —

it was a lab.

And I was the raw material.

*

How long has it been? I don’t remember. Days, maybe. Months. Years. Time stopped meaning anything once I understood it was not going to end, and when time went, it took the rest of me with it.

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Every day was a horror.

Every day, a new kind of pain, measured, logged, and improved upon the day after, until even the pain faded, and I stopped flinching before I stopped hurting.

I do not remember most of what they did to me. I think that is a mercy, though I did not think so at the time. What I remember is the shape of it — the same room, the same restraints, the same voices speaking about me instead of to me, as though I had already stopped being a person somewhere on the way in.

They took my name first. Then the years. Then, somewhere in all of it, they took my face — smooth now, blank, nothing left of it to hold an expression. When, how — I couldn’t tell you either. A man with no face has very little left to lose.

Except one thing.

*

In all the memory I lost, one fragment stayed clear.

A face. Smiling at me, like it already knew something good was coming. Keeping me going, on the days going felt like the harder thing to do.

Keeping me away from the escape death would have offered, if I had ever let myself reach for it.

I don’t know her name. I don’t know if I ever knew it. I only know that on the nights I could not remember what my own hands were for, that face was still there — patient, unbothered, the one thing that never once looked away from me.

*

And then, one day — silence.

Not quiet. I had already learned quiet. This was different.

The footsteps stopped coming. The voices stopped. The hum behind the walls, the one I had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own pulse, went out, all at once, like something enormous had finally been made to stop.

I did not ask what happened. Where there had always been horror, there was suddenly nothing.

I sat with the nothing for what might have been hours. Might have been longer.

I no longer have days.

I only have before, and whatever this is now.