Sleepwalking

Cora had always believed that people would resist. That they would see the truth when it was right in front of them, that at some point, the absurdity of it all would reach a breaking point. But the problem wasn’t that people had been forced into submission. The problem was that they had accepted it. They had welcomed it. The system had been designed not to shock or terrify, but to wear them down. To lull them into complacency with a slow, creeping erosion of everything that had once mattered.

She remembered discussions with Alex in those early days, his voice low but urgent as he pointed out the warning signs. “It’s not the obvious power grabs we need to worry about,” he’d told her once. “It’s the small concessions that seem reasonable in isolation.” She had nodded without fully understanding, still believing that surely people would draw a line somewhere. Alex, with his historical knowledge and analytical mind, had seen the pattern forming long before she had. He’d recognized the deliberate strategy at work—the gradual normalization of the unacceptable. Now, watching it unfold exactly as he had predicted, she felt the weight of his absence even more acutely.

It hadn’t happened overnight. There were no grand announcements, no dramatic moments where people took to the streets to fight for their freedoms. The human mind didn’t work that way. Instead, it was incremental. A ban here, a restriction there. An inconvenience. A requirement. Then another. Then another. It had started with social media accounts disappearing, financial transactions being flagged, job applications quietly rejected. Then came the curfews, the loyalty pledges, the mandatory community service for the “less productive.” The notifications on their phones reminded them daily, a gentle nudge that compliance was for their own good.

Cora herself had complied with each new demand, telling herself it was temporary, manageable, necessary. She had signed the loyalty pledge without hesitation, eager to prove she was a model citizen with nothing to hide. Alex had been more reluctant, questioning the necessity, pointing out the historical precedents. Their first serious argument had been over his refusal to download the mandatory tracking app. “When you grant them this power,” he’d warned, “they never give it back.” She had accused him of paranoia then. Now, she wondered if even he had underestimated how quickly rights would dissolve.

And people just… adapted.

They grew accustomed to the nonsense, to the blatant lies, to the policies that didn’t make sense but were easier to accept than to question. The slogans changed weekly. The official history of the nation rewrote itself in real-time. The enemies of the state rotated like a carousel—one month, it was illegal immigrants, the next, it was free thinkers, the next, it was the ones who regretted their vote. The population adjusted their outrage accordingly, turning their hatred where they were told to, never stopping to ask why. It was easier to obey.

She had watched her coworkers embrace each new narrative without question, their conversations shifting seamlessly from denouncing one group to vilifying another. When she’d occasionally pointed out the contradictions—”Weren’t we supporting these people last year?”—she’d been met with blank stares or nervous laughter. After Alex disappeared, she stopped asking entirely. Self-preservation became her priority, adapting to survive in a world where memory itself seemed dangerous.

There was no war. There was no grand purge. It was just… boredom. The system had figured out that people didn’t need to be controlled by fear alone. They could be controlled by apathy. By exhaustion. By an endless stream of distractions that numbed them to their own servitude. People had become too comfortable with the absurd. Too desensitized to care. The government could announce a new tax on breathing, and half the country would just shrug and say, “Well, what can you do?”

Cora remembered a time when outrage had still seemed possible, when scandals had consequences, when truth still mattered in some objective way. Now those memories felt distant, almost fictional—stories from another lifetime rather than her own past. Sometimes she caught herself doubting whether things had ever been different. The Circle’s greatest success wasn’t controlling information; it was making people question whether accurate information had ever existed.

Cora had seen the signs years ago. The first time a government agency had openly admitted to using propaganda on its own people and no one batted an eye. The first time a corporation had rolled out a mandatory app that monitored daily activities, and everyone simply accepted it because it was “convenient.” The first time a political scandal broke that should have ended a career, and instead, it boosted poll numbers. People had stopped expecting anything to make sense.

She and Alex had watched these developments together, their responses growing increasingly divergent. While she had chosen silence and accommodation, he had become more outspoken, more determined to understand the mechanics of manipulation. “When cynicism becomes the default,” he’d observed one night, “resistance becomes almost impossible.” She had kissed him to stop his talking, afraid that even their private conversations weren’t truly private anymore. Her fear had been justified, but her method of coping had been the wrong one. Silence hadn’t protected either of them.

And when nothing makes sense, nothing matters.

That was the trick. The Chairman didn’t rule by brute force. He ruled by making the truth feel irrelevant. By making people so exhausted by the sheer weight of it all that they simply stopped caring.

Even the suffering had become entertainment.

The PR arm of the Circle had turned executions into spectacle. A viral trend on Vail’s X-Comm platform had emerged under the guise of ASMR, featuring the distant moans of prisoners, the rattle of their chains, the soft murmur of guards discussing their fate. It was a sick joke, a parody of the real horrors unfolding, but no one cared. No one reacted. The comment sections were filled with laughing emojis, mindless engagement, arguments over whether the screams were AI-generated or real.

Cora felt ill imagining Alex somewhere in one of those facilities, his voice perhaps one of those recorded for others’ amusement. Had he maintained his dignity? Had he broken under whatever methods they used? She would never know. She both desperately wanted to hear his voice again and was terrified of recognizing it in one of those horrific recordings. Each night, she dreamed of him calling out to her, his voice distorted through layers of electronic processing, begging her to wake up, to remember, to act.

The videos never stayed up for long. They didn’t have to. They spread like wildfire in the moments before they were scrubbed, their existence undeniable, but their consequences nonexistent.

Cora had seen one. She had clicked on it without thinking, expecting some absurd prank or satirical post, but the moment the sound hit her ears, a chill ran down her spine. It was real. The subtle tremor in the voice of the man begging, the sharp intake of breath before the impact of a baton. It was real.

Her finger had hovered over the report button, the action so deeply ingrained it was almost automatic. That’s what good citizens did—they reported violations, maintained the system, kept things clean. But something had stopped her. Not bravery, certainly not a sudden conversion to resistance. Just exhaustion with her own complicity. She had closed the app instead, neither reporting nor sharing, taking the coward’s middle path as always.

And yet, people kept scrolling.

She had wanted to scream. To shake the people around her and force them to see what was happening. But she knew how they would respond. A chuckle. A shrug. A dismissive, “It’s just propaganda.”

In her darkest moments, when sleep evaded her and the memory of Alex’s conviction haunted her, Cora wondered if she was any better than those who laughed at the videos. Her awareness without action, her horror without resistance—did it matter that she still had the capacity to be disturbed if she did nothing about it? Alex would have said no. Alex would have called her moral outrage without action the most useless emotion of all.

People weren’t afraid.

They were asleep.

And by the time they even thought about waking up, it would be too late.

And easier to just close their eyes again.

Cora stared out her window at the city below, where citizens moved through their daily routines with perfect compliance. She was one of them—going to work, returning home, following the rules, surviving. But since finding Alex’s memory card, something had shifted inside her. Not courage, exactly. Not rebellion. Just the uncomfortable awareness that there was a choice being made every day, every hour. To see or not to see. To remember or forget. To act or remain motionless.

She had spent years mastering the art of not seeing, of carefully looking away. It had kept her safe while Alex ventured into dangerous territory. But safety, she was beginning to understand, was its own kind of prison. And her cell door, unlike those in the Circle’s detention centers, was locked only from the inside.