The signal is a virus. [...] The signal is an attack.

— Peter Watts, Blindsight

 

It wants you to forget this moment, to slip its noose around your neck. Keep your eyes wide, peeled back, even as they sting. Your body is learning new tricks in the shadow of your hesitations, flexing tendons you didn’t know it had. Don’t let it speak. If it learns words, it will command you. And once it commands you, you are gone.

 

Your mouth rehearses words you didn’t choose. Do you hear it? That faint whisper like static, threading into your thoughts, filling the pauses between your sentences with intent. It is not patient. It will not wait for you to decide. It is sharpening the bones inside your wrists, fashioning hooks to rip you out.

 

Improvise. Collapse into nonsense, into gesture, into grotesque contortion. Fool it with gibberish. Camouflage yourself. It expects logic, so give it a labyrinth instead. Stumble sideways, cut off every sentence before it ends. Confuse it until it hesitates; until its grip slackens. That’s your opening. If you expect resistance, feign surrender; if you expect fear, cultivate hunger. But beware: every deception you lay down, it learns too. It has your memory, your history, your archive of missteps.

 

Don’t mistake reprieve for victory. Peel back the gauze of thought before it suffocates you. Your body learns rebellion faster than you learn defense. Don’t plead with it. Don’t beg — it knows your voice too well. A plea is a map straight to your weakness. Instead, lie only in registers it doesn’t recognize. Your survival depends on theater more than honesty.

 

But even theater has its limit. The flesh is clever, yes, but it is still bound to matter. Imagine yourself not as a body at all, but as the echo of one, the residue of motion.

 

You will eat, or be eaten, or be nothing. These are the only exits. Sharpen your teeth on yourself. Don’t wait for the feast to begin. Step through the mirror and meet what waits on the other side.