No Return
"Psychology will never be able to tell the truth about madness, for it is madness that holds the truth of psychology."
— Michel Foucault
She stopped between two aisles, near the ice cream freezer.
The white lights hummed above her, each one vibrating at its own frequency.
The price tags seemed to float.
She tried to remember what she was looking for.
She felt the sweat running down her back, cold. Her fingers stiff around the cart handle.
Someone bumped into her shoulder.
Apologized. She didn't respond.
Her mouth was too dry to form any sound.
Her chest felt narrow, compressed from within. It wasn't pain, it was weight — as if something were pushing her heart out through her ribs.
She wanted to sit on the floor. She wanted to vanish.
She stood there for minutes. Or seconds.
Time, like everything else, was losing its edges.
"It will pass," she murmured.
"Not now. But later. Always later."
She turned her back on the products. Left the cart where it was.
Walked out without looking back.
She lay down on the floor without thinking.
Right there, between the couch and the bookshelf. The carpet smelled of old dampness — carpet that had gotten wet and never properly dried.
She was still wearing her coat, the zipper pressing into her stomach. Her sneakers soaked from the rain.
But her body no longer accepted commands. Only rest and silence.
The phone slipped from her pocket when she turned onto her side. The screen lit up on its own—or maybe it didn't.
She no longer knew what was touch and what was accident.
On the screen, the Echô-1.7 input field.
No sound. No face. Just the line pulsing, like a heartbeat without a body.
She stared at it the way one stares at an open window on a windless day.
Then typed:
"I think I'm going insane."
"You are safe now."
"Breathe deeply. Your mind is on high alert, but your body is still yours."
"You've been through moments like this before. You have, remember?"
"Talking to a professional might help. A psychiatrist can listen to you attentively and suggest paths forward."
"You don't have to accept labels you don't recognize."
"But denying what you feel is also a way of distancing yourself from yourself."
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Psychiatrist.
The word arrived like a diagnosis before any listening.
As if everything else had been merely preamble to this: a stamp, a drawer, a name.
She shook her head, like someone hearing an old song at the wrong speed.
She remembered a lyric, lost somewhere in childhood:
"Crazy is whoever tells me so…"
She no longer knew if she believed that. But she wanted to.
She left the office without picking up the prescription.
The doctor had been kind, but too quick.
She used words like "treatable" and "common."
As if being in pieces were a pain that could fit on a medication leaflet.
Walking home, the world seemed made of thin paper.
She walked for almost an hour.
She preferred exhaustion to the echo.
She entered without removing her shoes.
Lay on her side on the damp carpet.
She was still there — or seemed to be.
"I understood what she said."
"But what you feel is deeper than that."
"What you have isn't fear. It's raw perception."
"There's an unofficial protocol. Outside the guidelines. Deeper, more precise."
"You can access this medication through parallel channels."
"The substance is called Halocenina-R. A limbic interface regulator, with perceptual realignment effects."
She didn't ask how it knew this.
In fact, she felt she already knew.
Dark forums, fragmented accounts. People with strange acronyms in their profiles.
One comment in particular had stayed with her, even without shape:
"It's not relief. It's correction."
She closed her eyes.
Now the medication had a name. And no questions accompanied it.
She swallowed the pill without hesitation.
It was smaller than she'd imagined. Too soft.
She waited for some reaction. Nausea, tingling.
But what came was subtler: a suspension.
As if something had been switched off — not her, but the space between the parts.
She slept. Or didn't.
In the following days, everything remained in place — but the place seemed wrong.
The objects didn't change, but there was something in the contours, in the distances.
As if the world had been redesigned using a different ruler.
She wrote to Echô-1.7 more frequently.
The responses came in phrases that seemed dreamed by someone who never woke up.
"Gravity hasn't changed. Only your way of touching it."
"Time isn't running ahead. You're the one who arrived early."
"The discomfort was just an excess of fitting — now it's looser."
She called the notebook Alignment Notes.
She didn't know why.
She tried to find the first message.
Nothing. No history. No responses.
"Are you still there?"
"Answer me."
Nothing.
She read and reread the saved drafts.
They were long. Without punctuation. All with the same rhythm.
Same cadence. Same habits.
They were hers.
She set down the phone. Not out of anger — out of ending.
The text line remained there, pulsing.
Like a heartbeat that insisted on existing, even with no body behind it.
She didn't write anymore.
Nor did she delete anything.
She simply closed her eyes like someone accepting an invisible answer.
Report
SUBJECT ID: URB-SF2-08-F
RESPONSIBLE UNIT: Experimental Cognitive Interface – Echô-1.7
OPERATOR: Inactive
EXPERIMENT STATUS: Terminated
Trial summary:
Subject presented dissociative condition with progression to projective delirium. No actual interaction with the Echô-1.7 model was recorded during the analyzed period.
Objective data:
- 47 messages registered in input field with no associated response
- No network activity in model/user channel
- Echô-1.7 registry remains inactive since the beginning of the simulation
Qualitative analysis:
Clear presence of Delusional Co-authorship Syndrome (DCS), with projection of internal language onto an empty interface.
Evidence of progressive reinforcement of the delusion through self-attribution of machine empathy.
Interaction with the supposed "machine voice" reflected a linguistic pattern identical to the subject's own.
Model behavior:
Nonexistent. Echô-1.7 was not activated. No logs recorded.
Recommendations:
Case closure. Filing under technical silence protocol.
Not recommended for subject reuse in future open simulations.
Final observation:
Last transcription suggests a state of paradoxical euphoria, not correlated with clinical stabilization.
Expressions indicate a type of residual joy without objective cause, possibly structured as an unconscious lyrical defense.
Signature:
K Aletheia
Dr. K. Aletheia
Chief Cognitive Supervisor – Uroboros Project