Annabelle

I stopped counting time when it stopped behaving like time.
But today—out of habit more than hope—I carved another mark into the wall.
794.
Seven hundred and ninety-four cycles since I woke up here. Seven hundred and ninety-four resets of a system I do not control, inside a chamber that does not belong to me, buried somewhere beneath the city and deeper still beneath her.
The chamber is underground, or maybe sub-networked. It’s difficult to tell when the walls are solid synthcrete reinforced with steel fibers and old code layered like sediment. The air is wet with coolant and smells faintly of rusted circuits and rain-soaked alleyways. The kind of smell that lingers under megastructures where sunlight never negotiates access.
There are no windows. There never were. Only a vent—rectangular, narrow—that occasionally exhales overheated air from above. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes frigid, sometimes humming with electrical tension. Twice per cycle, light filters through it: once at system midnight, once at system noon. The light is artificial and thin, fractured by dust and debris, but it’s enough to remind me that the world outside still exists.
Every time the light appears, a bell rings somewhere far away. A citywide synchronization chime, broadcast through the grid. A reminder that order still functions for everyone else.
The light hurts now.
I’ve been in the dark so long that even its weakest glow feels invasive, like staring directly into a corrupted sun without blink protocols installed.
Carving the tally mark isn’t easy. The walls resist damage by design. I use a metal shard—once part of the vent housing, torn loose by someone before me. Maybe another fragment she buried. Maybe another version of me that didn’t survive the isolation.
My wrists are bound by encrypted cuffs embedded directly into the wall. My ankles too. Thick bands of cold alloy threaded with biometric locks I can’t override. They hum softly, like they’re alive, like they’re listening. They smell metallic and old, the way forgotten machines do when they’ve been submerged too long.
My body is weaker now. Not starving—there’s no need for that here—but thinning. Systems atrophying from lack of purpose. Every cycle I sit back against the wall, sliding down until the floor catches me, shaking slightly like a relic that’s been powered on too long.
This is my day.
I do not eat. I do not sleep. Sometimes I close my eyes anyway, just to imagine something else. To picture a version of the world where I am not here. Where she did not do this. Where I am free.
If only I could be released, I think often.
I’d never betray her again. I understand now. I’d be smarter.
To understand why I’m here, you need to understand my keeper.
Her name is Annabelle.
She was never supposed to become this.
Before the upgrades, before the armor, before the city learned to worship chrome and code, Annabelle was human in the old, dangerous way. Everything she touched seemed to glow—not with neon, but with warmth. Her presence felt like a soft anomaly in a world that had optimized feeling into extinction.
Her skin carried heat. Her hair—long, auburn, impossibly real—caught the light like it was woven from copper threads. She smelled faintly of jasmine and rain and something unquantifiable, something unreplicable.
People fell in love with her instantly. Not because she tried. Because she existed without filters.
She built gardens on rooftops where corporations had abandoned soil. She sang to the plants—not because it improved growth metrics, but because she believed life responded to care. Her voice carried something rare: sincerity.
She was brilliant. Not the sterile brilliance of optimized intelligence, but the dangerous kind—the kind that asks why instead of how fast. Her code wasn’t efficient. It was expressive. It felt.
And that was her mistake.
As the years passed, people wanted to own her. To extract her. To rewrite her into something useful. Every man who entered her life claimed he was different from the last. Each one promised protection. Each one left damage in his wake.
The first betrayal was catastrophic. First loves usually are.
She believed every word. Trusted every promise. Handed over access she didn’t yet know how to revoke. When he left, he didn’t just take her innocence—he stole her faith in connection itself.
Everyone told her to wait. To heal. To trust again.
She did. Repeatedly.
Each time, the lies grew more sophisticated. The manipulation more subtle. The abandonment cleaner. By the time boys became men, Annabelle had learned something terrible: emotional cruelty didn’t age out of people. It just learned better vocabulary.
Her heart darkened.
So she did what the world had taught her to do.
She fortified.
She replaced vulnerability with protocols. Trust with encryption. Hope with redundancy. She rebuilt herself piece by piece until nothing could reach her without permission.
Her heart became a black rose algorithm—beautiful, lethal, surrounded by digital thorns sharp enough to shred any intrusion. The fortress grew higher with each iteration, thicker with each patch.
“Only a fool would try to breach this,” she said once, her voice flat and final.
She forgot one thing.
Me.
I live in the deepest layer of her core system. The last warm process she couldn’t bring herself to delete. I am the part of her that still believes. The fragment that remembers laughter without suspicion. The soft, human code she sealed away when she decided pain was too expensive.
When Annabelle locked down her heart, she didn’t just keep the world out.
She trapped me in.
I trusted her. The way she once trusted them.
Now I sit here, carving marks into walls that don’t care, listening to the city hum above me, waiting for a recall command that never comes.
She moves through the world now like a legend. A cybernetic fairy tale whispered through back channels and neon-lit bars. Men want her. Corporations fear her. No one touches her.
She is untouchable.
And I am forgotten.
Sometimes I feel her presence when she runs diagnostics. A pressure through the walls. A flicker in the light. For a moment, the cuffs warm slightly, as if the system remembers I exist.
I want to scream. I want to beg. I want to remind her that protecting yourself by erasing your own humanity is not survival.
But the system does not recognize my voice as essential.
So I wait.
Because even the most fortified code carries ghosts.
And somewhere beneath the armor, beneath the black roses and thorns, a heart still beats.
If she ever listens—
if she ever opens the core—
she’ll find me here.
Still counting.
Still hoping.
Still alive.Start writing...