File:00722933391 – The Daughter

Snow didn’t land on the tower. It arranged itself around it.

From the outside, the exhibition looked like a repurposed cathedral of surveillance—glass and steel ribbing, windows stacked like eyelids, drones orbiting with the slow confidence of things that never needed permission. The cordon cut the street into two climates. On one side: heated pavement, clean light, the overclass drifting toward warmth. On the other: bodies huddled under plastic, breath smoking, children watching the doors the way you watched the mouth of a furnace.

She watched them back.

Not in the charitable way her mother performed when donors were present. Not even in the guilty way people liked to imagine the overclass felt when they had a glass in their hand and a story to tell.

She watched the underclass because they were real.

They were the only thing here that didn’t feel designed.

A toddler stared at her from behind a low barrier. Red nose. Too-thin cheeks. The child’s gaze was steady in the way children sometimes were—like they hadn’t yet learned that looking could be dangerous.

For a moment, the girl thought of stepping closer. Of speaking. Of offering something—money, warmth, a sentence that meant, I see you.

Then, her mother’s hand touched her elbow.

“Keep moving,” her mother said, gentle as a leash.

The girl nodded. Her throat closed around the impulse. She folded it away so neatly she almost forgot it had existed.

That was her talent: folding.

Inside, the vestibule swallowed the cold. Heat rose in pulses timed to heartbeats, and the air smelled like pine and cinnamon laid over metal and electricity. Her mother moved through it as if the building recognised her. The Host recognised her too—smile polished, eyes blank.

When the wristband clicked shut around the girl’s skin, she flinched.

It wasn’t pain. It was intimacy without consent: warmth spreading under the crystal node, a faint vibration travelling up her arm as if something were learning her.

The Host said, “Synchronisation,” with the confidence of someone describing weather.

Her mother didn’t look at her.

“Don’t be dramatic.”

The girl swallowed. She never argued in public. She knew what arguments cost.

At the corridor’s end, the doors waited—seamless white, marked with an unblinking eye. Her mother’s posture changed at the sight of it: shoulders back, chin lifted, the stance she used when she expected to be admired.

Her mother always expected that.

The Host spoke about the Rooms—Past, Present, Future—as if naming stops on a tour. “Some visitors describe it as Dickensian.”

Her mother said, “Dickens is sentimental.”

“And yet,” the Host replied, “Urizar finds sentiment useful.”

***

The doors opened without sound.

Cold antiseptic air spilled out.

Room One was white—not gallery-white but ward-white. The kind of white that made skin look wrong, that exposed everything you’d tried to pretend wasn’t there.

A chair stood in the centre. Metal-framed. Straps hanging loose.

Her mother scoffed. “Subtle.”

The girl’s lungs tightened.

The chair was not subtle. It was honest. It looked like the truth would be strapped down here.

The doors sealed behind them.

The wristband warmed again. A pulse ran through her bones.

And then the smell arrived.

Not the room’s smell—pine, metal, clean heat. A distinct smell: cheap disinfectant and stale carpet and the faint sour edge of old aftershave.

Her stomach dropped.

She did not have to see anything to know where she was.

Her body knew first. It always did.

Her mother was standing beside her, posture stiffening, jaw tightening, eyes fixed as if she were bracing for impact. The girl glanced at her, then away—not out of mercy, but because looking at her mother during these moments felt like looking at a stranger in the dark.

The memory assembled itself around her, soundless at first. Sensation without image. Texture. Weight. The dull pressure of a hand on a shoulder that was not comforting.

Then, the hallway resolved.

Not a hallway in the gallery—something older. Domestic. Too narrow. Wallpaper patterned with flowers that had faded into bruised colour.

Her father appeared at the end of it as if he had been waiting.

He was younger than she remembered, because memory never updated itself politely. He wore the version of himself that had worked: shirt crisp, smile warm, voice preloaded with reassurance.

He was handsome in a way that felt weaponised.

“Come here,” he said.

The words weren’t loud. They never had to be.

Her body froze, small and immediate. Her mind tried to float upward, to do what it always did—to turn into a witness rather than a participant.

Urizar did not allow floating.

A gentle pressure at the base of her skull anchored her.

Her father’s hand reached out. She felt the phantom warmth of it, the wrongness of familiarity. She remembered, in her skin, the way he made violation sound like privilege.

Special.
Chosen.
Not like other girls.
You understand me, don’t you?

Her throat tightened. She swallowed bile.

She wanted to step back. She tried.

The memory held her in place.

It did not show everything. It didn’t need to. It delivered the shape of it, the power of it, the way her childhood was made into a private room she could never fully leave.

She became aware, distantly, that her mother was seeing something too—her face had gone pale, eyes glassy, lips pressed together so hard they almost disappeared.

But this was not her mother’s past.

This was hers.

And her mother’s presence inside it felt wrong, like an observer being allowed into a locked drawer.

The hallway jumped.

Time skipped the way it always did in her mind—no transitions, just a new scene slammed into place.

A living room. Evening. A fireplace that didn’t quite warm the space. A half-empty wineglass on the table.

Her father was laughing.

Her mother stood near the doorframe, holding herself very still.

The girl—herself—sat on the carpet, knees to chest, small enough that the adults’ bodies became architecture around her. She watched their faces with the quiet precision of a child who had learned that the slightest shift in tone could mean danger.

Her father said something low, indulgent. Her mother’s expression didn’t change.

Then, her mother moved.

It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t panicked. It was clean, as if the decision had been made long before the action.

She lifted something heavy—metal, maybe, the object unstable in memory the way pain often was—and she brought it down.

The sound was not loud.

It was final.

Her father’s laughter cut off as if someone had pressed a mute button on life. He folded. Blood hit the carpet in dark blossoms.

The girl on the floor—the child version of her—did not scream.

She did not move.

Her eyes stayed open, soaking in every detail, because she had learned that missing information could be dangerous later.

Her mother stood over the body, breathing hard, face blank.

For a second—just a second—her mother looked at the child.

And in that glance, the girl felt something snap into place. Not safety. Not love.

Ownership.

I did this for you.
You owe me your silence.

The memory tightened.

Ward-white bled into living-room colour, as if the past were being dragged into institutional light.

Men in uniforms appeared. Voices. Hands on shoulders. The girl being lifted, carried.

Her mother speaking with perfect calm.

“She’s in shock,” her mother said. “She doesn’t understand.”

The girl understood.

She understood that adults could hurt you.

She understood that adults could kill for you.

She understood that both acts would be explained later as love.

In the ward, the smell sharpened—disinfectant, boiled vegetables, bleach. A buzzer in the distance. A nurse saying, “Poor thing,” with a softness that felt like being placed back on a shelf.

Her mother’s story arrived like a blanket thrown over a crime scene.

“Accident,” someone said.

“Self-defence,” someone else said.

“Widow” the word formed around her mother like a title.

The girl—now in a small plastic chair in a waiting room—watched her mother’s face as strangers spoke about them. Her mother’s expression was composed, almost serene, as if she were already calculating outcomes.

In that waiting room, the girl made a choice she did not name at the time.

She would never again be surprised by what people were capable of.

Her father had taught her one version of power.

Her mother had taught her another.

She would learn the rest herself.

The memory collapsed.

The ward-white snapped back into gallery-white. The chair stood in the centre of the room, straps hanging loose, exactly where it had been the whole time.

The girl’s heart pounded. Her hands were clenched inside her sleeves so tightly her nails bit into skin.

Beside her, her mother exhaled shakily—as if she had been holding her breath for decades. Her eyes were wet. She wiped at them with the back of her glove like erasing evidence.

The girl looked at her mother and felt… nothing simple.

Not pity.

Not hate.

Not gratitude.

Only a cold, brilliant clarity that made her feel older than she was.

She understood something Urizar hadn’t even needed to say:

Her mother did not become cruel because she was hurt.

She became cruel because cruelty worked.

And the girl had been raised inside proof.

A chime sounded, soft and pleasant, absurdly gentle.

The door ahead slid open.

A corridor of mirrored glass waited—so clean it didn’t reflect like a normal mirror. It reflected like surveillance: high-definition, merciless.

They stepped into it.

In the glass, the girl saw her own face. Pale. Controlled. Eyes too calm.

She also saw her mother—composed again, already rebuilding her mask, already turning the experience into something she could own.

The girl realised then that the exhibition was not just showing her the past.

It was asking her a question.

Not what happened to you?

But:

What do you do with it?

At the corridor’s end, a new symbol glowed: a constellation of eyes.

***

ROOM TWO — THE PRESENT
SOCIAL MIRROR. WITNESS REQUIRED.

Her mother walked first.

The girl followed, the smell of disinfectant still in her mouth, and the weight of the living room still in her bones.

She did not know yet what the present would show her.

But she had already learned the rule:

When people tell you they did it for love, check the cost.

Sound returned before meaning.

Laughter arrived first—bright, brittle, layered so carefully it sounded like a single thing. Glass chimed against glass. Shoes whispered on polished stone. Beneath it all, a low hum pressed gently at her ribs, the sound of systems doing their work.

The air felt curated.

The room resolved into a version of the world she already knew: a donor lounge stretched tall and pale, its walls translucent, glowing softly as if lit from within. Tables of stone ran long and clean, set with wine and food arranged to look accidental while costing more than most people’s rent.

Overclass faces turned toward one another in relaxed clusters. Dark clothing. Small smiles. Easy confidence. These were people who had never been asked to justify their presence.

She recognised them—not as individuals, but as types.

Her mother moved among them as if stepping back into a photograph she had been taken in many times. Shoulders back. Chin lifted. The posture of someone who understood how rooms bent around her.

The daughter stayed near the edge.

She noticed immediately that her mother was trying to speak.

Her lips moved. Her jaw worked.

Nothing came out.

The daughter watched this with interest rather than alarm. She had grown up fluent in silence. She knew its uses.

The surrounding voices flowed freely.

“Merrowe’s figures were impressive,” a man said, swirling wine. “Brutal, but efficient.”

“Someone has to do it,” a woman replied. “Otherwise, it gets emotional.”

They laughed softly, approvingly.

The daughter felt a familiar sensation settle into her body—not anger, not shame. Orientation.

This was the present.

The room did not show her eviction charts or mortality curves. It did not bother with abstraction.

It turned inward.

Pressure bloomed behind her eyes—not painful, just insistent. The wristband warmed. The hum deepened.

The lounge peeled back.

The people remained, but their faces sharpened. Their smiles gained edges. The lighting shifted just enough to expose the seams.

She saw herself among them.

Not here, not now—but often.

Private rooms. After-parties. Corridors outside bathrooms where music leaked through walls. Online spaces where names dissolved into handles and bodies into rumours.

She watched herself move through these scenes with practiced ease.

She was beautiful here. Or rather—she was desired. The difference mattered.

She saw the way boys looked at her. How their confidence faltered under her gaze. How they leaned in too close, mistaking attention for invitation.

She let them.

She always let them.

Then she withheld.

The system did not dramatise it. It did not accuse.

It showed the pattern.

A boy laughing too loudly at a party.
Her smile—slow, deliberate.
A hand placed on his arm, light enough to promise.
A whisper just loud enough to be overheard.

Later:

Screenshots.
Stories.
A circle of friends tightening, amused and cruel.

She saw herself orchestrate the moment when desire tipped into exposure.

Not to punish.

To control.

She watched one boy—someone she vaguely remembered—flush red as laughter rippled through a group that had once been his. She saw the way his shoulders curled inward, how his voice shrank.

She felt nothing.

Then she felt something else.

Recognition.

This was not sadism. It was structure.

She had learned early that bodies were leverage. That intimacy could be weaponised without leaving bruises. That humiliation travelled faster than violence and cost less.

Her mother ruined lives efficiently.

She ruined them intimately.

The room shifted again.

A different scene layered over the last: a private chat thread glowing in the dark. A boy typing too much, too fast. Confessions spilling out because she had learned how to ask questions that sounded like care.

I’ve never told anyone this.
You’re different.
I trust you.

She saw herself read the messages with detached calm, already planning how the information might be used. She didn’t hate him. She didn’t like him.

She was curious.

The system paused on that sensation, isolating it the way it had isolated her mother’s calculus in Room One.

Curiosity without empathy.

The pressure behind her eyes eased slightly.

She understood what the room was offering her—not condemnation, but clarity.

She had always believed she was reacting.

To her father.
To her mother.
To the world that had watched and done nothing.

The room showed her something colder.

She was initiating.

The donor lounge bled back in around her.

She realised dimly that her mother was watching a different present entirely. The way her mother’s posture had tightened, suggested charts, numbers, exposure.

This was better.

This was personal.

Voices carried again.

“You need someone like her,” a man said nearby, nodding vaguely toward where her mother stood. “Someone who can be ruthless.”

“Yes,” a woman agreed. “It keeps the rest of us clean.”

The daughter stepped forward.

Not because she was offended.

Because she wanted to see what happened when power was addressed directly.

“Is this what you tell yourselves?” she asked.

The words cut cleanly through the chatter.

Faces turned. A few smiles faltered.

“I’m sorry?” the woman said.

“You talk about her,” the daughter said calmly, “as if she’s a function. As if she absorbs the mess for you.”

A man frowned. “This isn’t appropriate.”

The daughter smiled—not kindly.

“What’s inappropriate,” she said, “is pretending you don’t enjoy it.”

Silence spread, thin and tense.

She felt the system shift its attention.

The pressure behind her eyes sharpened—not painful, but precise. Data flickered at the edges of her vision, then receded. This room was not about prediction.

It was about exposure.

She turned toward the space where her mother stood unseen.

“Mother,” she said.

She felt it when her mother heard her—a ripple in the air, a tightening of presence.

“I see you,” she said.

The lounge shuddered.

A discordant tone cut through the hum. Faces froze mid-expression, laughter arrested in open mouths. The people became mannequins wearing politeness.

The room peeled away.

Transparency layered over everything. Guests reduced to silhouettes, then to nodes. The environment stripped back to infrastructure.

The Host’s voice intruded, strained. “Miss Merrowe, please—this room is for observation.”

“Not participation?” the daughter asked.

No answer.

She felt a familiar calm settle into her limbs.

This—this—was what she was good at.

She did not fear conflict. She did not fear exposure. She had been raised in a house where both were constants.

Her mother’s voice broke through the silence, hoarse and small.

“Stop.”

The daughter turned.

“For once,” she said gently, “you mean it.”

The data surged briefly, then collapsed inward.

A new light bloomed at the far wall.

A door resolved, etched with branching lines and embedded eyes.

***

ROOM THREE — THE FUTURE
PREDICTIVE MODEL. OUTCOME PROBABLE.

The daughter stared at it.

She felt no dread.

Only a quiet, unsettling symmetry assembling itself in her mind.

She glanced back once—at the frozen donors, at the husk of the present, at the place where she had learned how power felt.

Then she walked toward the door.

Behind her, her mother followed.

The daughter understood something then, with the same clarity she had felt in the living room years ago, watching blood soak into carpet:

The future would not surprise her.

It would only confirm.

The door sealed behind them with a sound like breath being taken in.

Room Three was colder than the others. Not in temperature, but in intent. The light flattened everything it touched, stripping faces of softness, bodies of ambiguity. The air felt thinned, optimised, as if comfort had been identified as waste.

At the centre of the room hovered a lattice of lines and nodes, rotating slowly. It reminded her of a map taught to think, or a mind taught to predict. At each junction, a small eye opened and closed, patient and incurious.

Her mother slowed.

The daughter did not.

She felt the pressure behind her eyes immediately—not pain, not fear. Alignment. The wristband warmed, then steadied, as if the system had found the correct frequency.

IDENTITY CONFIRMED.
PREDICTIVE MODEL INITIATED.

She did not flinch.

She had grown up surrounded by forecasts. She understood the comfort people took in knowing what came next, even when what came next was terrible.

The lattice brightened.

She saw her mother’s future first, because that was how the system worked: primary subject, dominant vector.

Her mother, older but preserved. Controlled. Alone in rooms curated to signal taste rather than warmth. Legacy reduced to names on walls and policies that would outlive their consequences.

This did not surprise her.

Then the lattice shifted.

The daughter’s own trajectories flared into view.

They were tighter than her mother’s. More volatile. Less forgiving.

She felt something like interest.

The system did not bother to moralise. It did not frame her as victim or threat. It treated her as material.

EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION: ELEVATED
ADAPTIVE CRUELTY: FUNCTIONAL
RECIPROCAL VIOLENCE: PROBABLE

She watched the futures assemble without panic.

She saw herself older, posture mirroring her mother’s without effort. She saw rooms bending around her, people responding to her silences as if they were instructions. She saw herself making decisions that felt clean because they were efficient.

Then, the symmetry emerged.

A scene resolved—sharp, precise.

Her mother and her, alone together.

The argument itself barely registered. Words were irrelevant. They always had been.

What mattered was the moment.

She saw her mother act first in one version. The same internal stillness she had recognised in the living room years ago. The same calculation.

If she lives, it continues.
If she dies, it ends.

Then she saw the inverse.

Herself acting first.

The feeling was identical.

No hatred. No righteousness. Just necessity.

The system did not privilege either outcome. It did not suggest which was preferable. It presented them as equivalent solutions within a closed structure.

She understood then what her mother had not.

This was not about fate.

It was about inheritance.

Violence did not pass down emotionally. It passed down architecturally. Through models of power. Through lessons about what worked.

The vision did not linger. It did not need to.

It collapsed cleanly.

The pressure behind her eyes eased. Sound rushed back in—murmurs, music, the distant clink of glasses. The gallery reasserted itself as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

Her mother stood very still beside her, face pale, breathing shallow. For the first time, she looked small.

They walked toward the exit without speaking.

***

Snow assembled itself outside the glass in perfect silence, surveillance lights refracting through each falling crystal. The city watched them leave with the same neutral attention it gave everything else.

Just before the doors, her mother stopped.

She stepped aside, hand already lifting her phone. Her movements were precise, efficient—the posture of someone performing a task she had already rehearsed internally.

“Yes,” her mother said into the receiver.

A pause.

“A month.”

Another pause.

Her mother frowned slightly, as if correcting an error.

“No. Not a pilot. Everyone.”

She listened, lips pressed thin.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said, and ended the call before the reply arrived.

For a moment, the daughter said nothing.

She watched her mother slide the phone back into her coat, watched the familiar mask settle into place. Not relief. Not joy.

Containment.

They stepped out into the cold.

The daughter imagined the city’s tenants receiving the notification. Rent suspended for thirty days. Relief blooming briefly, dangerously. Children sleeping warmer. Parents exhaling for the first time in weeks.

She also imagined the calendar turning.

Thirty days was not mercy. It was a delay.

She turned to her mother.

“That was generous,” she said.

Her mother looked at her quickly, searching for approval, for gratitude, for something she could use.

“It’s a start,” her mother said.

The daughter nodded.

“Yes,” she agreed. “A month is enough time for people to remember what breathing feels like.”

Her mother’s eyes flickered, uncertain.

“And after?” her mother asked.

The daughter looked back at the snow, at the towers, at the drones counting every flake.

“After,” she said calmly, “they’ll remember who took it away.”

Her mother stared at her then, truly stared, as if seeing her for the first time.

The daughter met her gaze without flinching.

She understood now what the exhibition had been asking her all along.

Not what will you become?

But:

What will you do when it works?

They walked on, their shadows stretching long and parallel across the illuminated pavement.

Above them, Urizar recorded everything.

Including mercy.

Including delay. Including what came next.

© B. C. Nolan, 2025. All rights reserved.