Anomaly State Chaptisode 21: The Curtain Draft

The Curtain Draft

Anomaly State Chaptisode 21: The Curtain Draft
Published: November 18, 2025 SAST. UTC +2
A Serialized Cinematic-Fiction Experience · SoapNovel Studios

First-time here? Start at Chaptisode 1

Previously in Anomaly State

I · The Corridor After

The corridor outside Nairobi’s Regional Systems Floor behaved like a place recovering from a visitation.

Not haunted—
just remembering.

Reflections in the glass panels arrived late, their movements delayed half a heartbeat, as though recalling the bodies that had passed earlier rather than representing the ones standing there now.
The air carried no prismatic shimmer this time.
Only a faint after-sheen clung to the corners, a residue of displaced light that refused to fully disperse.

Silence stretched in the hallway as if listening for footsteps that had not yet decided to exist.

Twenty hours had passed since the Afterimage Loop.

Not enough time for certainty.
Too much time for innocence.

Durban Relay remained sealed under custodial freeze.
Pretoria claimed operational calm—
a language known to mean the opposite.
N’Dara stayed unreachable, a missing note in an unfinished chord.

A soft chime fluttered once, as if embarrassed to interrupt the corridor’s attention.
It summoned Nairobi’s analysts into a briefing none of them remembered requesting.

The sound was swallowed whole.

II · The Nairobi Briefing: The Meeting That Hadn’t Started Yet

The briefing room was lit like a confession chamber:
low amber, hesitant shadows, surfaces reflecting only partial truths.

Four analysts, two officers, and one unacknowledged observer sat around a table that held their reflections like drafts—unfinished, waiting to be revised by the next blink.

Two screens hovered above:

• Log A: Afterimage duration — 3 seconds.
• Log B: Afterimage duration — 9 seconds.

Both logs were stamped with the same time.
Both claimed exclusivity.
Neither cooperated.

A statistician muttered, “Data hallucination.”
Someone across the table countered, “Network bleed.”
A third voice offered, “Interference.”
The silent observer murmured, “Intervention.”

The meeting hadn’t formally begun.
No protocol had been invoked.
Yet everyone behaved as though they had already missed the midpoint.

The Nairobi crest officer cleared his throat.

“Which version are we standing on? A or B?”

Before anyone could answer, the screen blinked, then displayed a single, unmistakable line:

CURTAIN PROCEDURE — Clause 1 (Draft)

The line pulsed once.

A chill pressed into the room, though no one touched the thermostat.

III · The Curtain Draft: A Document That Exists by Disagreement

The clause vanished as quickly as it appeared.

A Nairobi archivist whispered, “I know that clause.”

“No,” an analyst said, “you know of it. That’s different.”

“It was never finalized,” someone insisted.

“It was finalized but suppressed.”

“It was abandoned.”

“No—revoked.”

“It was never written at all.”

“Then why do I remember reading it?”

Arguments bloomed, overlapping, contradicting, reinforcing, dissolving.
If the Curtain Draft had a physical form, it was made of contention.

The archivist attempted a manual retrieval from the system:

OPEN CURTAIN_DRAFT_0.0

The file tree responded:

ACCESS DENIED — NONEXISTENT DOCUMENT

Yet the rejection dialog bore compression artifacts—
suggesting something had been erased before the refresh.

The table said nothing, but the reflections across its surface trembled slightly, like a thought trying to resolve.

IV · N’Djamena: Containment That Chose Restraint

N’Djamena Containment Cell —
a relay node hidden beneath converted logistics infrastructure,
where anomalies were meant to be scribed, not interpreted.

Nairobi received a transmission:

“Containment > destruction. Drifts observed. Loop attempted, then aborted.”

The spectral graph enclosed with the message showed:

• a rising luminal pulse
• 0.4 seconds of tension
• a misaligned synchronization
• then a voluntary collapse

No override.
No forced correction.

The system had stopped itself.

Attached was a second note, handwritten by the N’Djamena operator and sent unofficially:

“Someone leaked a draft into the cell.
Feels like Window Act residue. Can’t prove it.”

The Nairobi reader stared at the note too long.
Reflections in the room elongated, trailing their gestures by an emotional lag.

It was the first sign that the anomaly had begun to self-edit.

V · Pretoria: The Hinge Objects to Certainty

Pretoria’s cabinet foyer carried the subdued energy of a building trying to forget something it had overheard.

The hinge on the main chamber door opened unevenly—
left panel eager, right panel resistant.
The asymmetry felt intentional, as if the door were performing a warning that humans refused to hear.

Inside, ministers debated a communiqué intended to reassure the public about the Durban anomaly.

Three ministers held seven-paragraph versions.
Two held three-paragraph versions.
One swore the communiqué had been redacted entirely.
Another insisted the shorter version contained events that had not yet happened.

They argued about chronology, authorship, intent.

None agreed what they were actually discussing.

A junior minister—habitually ignored, professionally underestimated—said quietly:

“If a document can alter while we are reading it,
maybe the point isn’t what the words say.
Maybe the point is that we can’t say them at the same time.”

The hinge groaned again, as if offering applause no one requested.

VI · The Nile Echo: A Composite Alphabet That Shouldn’t Exist

Relay Node 9, Sudan.

Two flashes.
Barely two seconds apart.
Long enough to be captured.
Short enough to be disbelieved.

The Nairobi interface displayed a Nile corridor map overlaid with hybrid alphabetic glyphs:

• Arabic’s soft curvature
• Swahili’s fricative grids
• Amharic’s geometric cadence
• And a fourth, recursive pattern with no linguistic ancestry—
  crisp angles folding into themselves like self-aware punctuation.

The characters flickered like frost on glass, disappearing and reappearing with the rhythm of breath.

The Nairobi linguist leaned closer.
“These aren’t translations,” she whispered.
“These are negotiations.”

“Between what?” a colleague asked.

“Memory and authority,” she answered.
“Neither wants to yield.”

One glyph held longer than the rest—
a corridor-like sigil that bent inward,
as if folding the architecture of its own meaning.
The system claimed it had no record of generating the symbol.

It existed only in the act of being seen.

VII · Pre-Loop Surge: The Deliberate Inhale

At 03:21 Nairobi Standard Time,
every relay from Eritrea to Tanzania registered a brief rising pulse.

0.7 seconds—
not enough to trigger an Afterimage Loop,
but enough to terrify anyone monitoring the anomaly grid.

No prismatic hold.
No corridor collapse.

Instead:

• a corridor light dimming, then returning
• reflections freezing mid-gesture
• two clocks disagreeing by nine seconds
• a faint ozone scent near a dormant rack
• a camera frame showing the silhouette of someone
  who had not walked into the frame

Then—silence.

A silence that felt prepared,
as if the anomaly had inhaled,
considered looping,
and decided otherwise.

Restraint was more concerning than repetition.

VIII · Closing: The Whisper That Called Itself a Draft

Near dusk, a Nairobi records officer returned to the archival console.
She intended to review the contradictory Durban logs,
to decide whether Log A or Log B deserved to dictate tomorrow’s policy posture.

Before the directory could fully render,
a file appeared at the top:

Curtain Draft — Version 0.3

She tapped it.

The file opened to an empty white screen.
No header.
No metadata.
No trace.

But faint imprints—
compression artifacts, subtle pixel distortions—
hinted that the document had contained text moments before the refresh.

Something had been there.

Something had withdrawn.

Behind her, the corridor lights steadied.
Amber.
Comfortable.
Predictable.

She turned away.
Her reflection did not.

It remained half a second longer,
smiling a fraction wider than she ever would.

Closure Label: Dark Frequency

Forty-three minutes after the building emptied,
a monitoring device on the Regional Systems Floor recorded a low hum—
steady, sub-sonic, unnervingly patient.

The source was not electrical.
Not structural.
Not environmental.

Filed under:
POST-LOOP ARTIFACT #022 — “Curtain Draft Echo.”

The hum stopped only when someone turned on the lights.

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