The lie starts softly. They’re told it’s just paperwork, just numbers, just neutral procedures sliding across a screen. They’re promised distance from the screaming, from the metal clank of doors, from the bruises that bloom in places no camera sees. But every keystroke tightens a chain. Every “approved” becomes a sentence. Every “denied” becomes a disappearance. Their uniforms match the walls, the corridors, the color of sanctioned forgetting. They watch people arrive as names and leave as ghosts, their cries swallowed by air vents and fluorescent hum. No one orders them to be cruel; they are only ordered to be efficient. And as the system purrs along, polished and punctual, the last fragile threads of their certainty begin to fra…
Continues…
