Report myself to headquarters

They called it the Moral Paradox Protocol; I was one of its field agents, a temporal observer tasked with excising anomalies before they ossified into catastrophe. This morning's anomaly was small and stubborn: a woman in 1958 whose protest pamphlet, if it circulated, would seed a surveillance regime decades later; the Protocol's default answer was quiet deletion, but I chose a different tack—improvisation and artifice instead of erasure. I swapped her pamphlet for a witty lyric I'd composed on a street-side typewriter, planted the song in jukeboxes and dance halls, and watched belief mutate into chorus as citizens traded manifestos for melodies. The unintended consequence arrived within a generation: the tune codified into rituals that disciplined dissent into efficient networks, and now I face the moral knot of whether to undo my own improvisation or accept that my improvised solution forged a new kind of order.

I move through the network like a quiet saboteur, plucking the melody from sheet, lacquer, and memory until what was once a hymn is only a rumor the century can no longer hum. At first the change is microscopic—dancers misstep where choruses used to center them, jukeboxes spit coins back, and a blank day blooms in the city's ritual calendar. Within a few years the surveillance architecture that had piggybacked on those rituals stutters and reconfigures; without a popular tune to naturalize control, power migrates into dry procedures and niche enforcement, while the pamphlet's ideas creep back through marginal zines and whispered manifestos. I watch those divergent small histories like a surgeon watching a scar close, knowing some comforts vanished with the song and that the Protocol is already tallying my improvisation as an offense I can never fully balance.

I begin slipping xeroxes into coat pockets at laundromats, tucking folded leaves into library books, and leaving a single copy beneath a cafe sugar jar—each quiet transaction a careful seed to reintroduce the original argument without igniting the Protocol's alarms. At night I watch small circles form around these paper relics: a busker who folds one into his guitar case, a student who copies a paragraph into a margin, an undertaker's assistant who reads it between shifts and passes a line along to a cousin. The pamphlet's ideas rethread themselves through rumor and half-remembered lines, resurfacing as stubborn objections at union meetings and in the footnotes of underground journals, and the Protocol's monitors register background noise but not the direct causality that would trigger an excision. For the first time since my improvisation began, I feel the moral ledger tilt—my offense score rises only a little, but the human consequences multiply with a slowness that comforts and terrifies me both.

I go back into the city with a different resolve, tracing the faint fingerprint of each copy I've let loose and unspooling their conduits until I find the people who carry them. At dawn I slip into a busker's practice, trade the pamphlet in his case for a blank chord chart, later I borrow the student's notebook and excise the margin line with careful scissors, and in the undertaker's room I fold the last leaf into the coat pocket of a garment already slated for disposal. I do not obliterate with fanfare; the removals are whisper-light—coffees doused to blur ink, pages slit and scattered into recycling, xeroxes fed through a shredder that hums like a small confession—and each disappearance leaves its peculiar ache. The Protocol's sensors, primed to flag creation rather than subtraction, register a curious silence and route their attention to bureaucratic audits instead, leaving a softer, lonelier sort of order in the city's bones for which I must answer to my own conscience.

At noon I walked into the Protocol's marble foyer and signed my name for an unscheduled review, palms slick, the registry's scanner humming like a small confession. I unfolded my ledger—song fragments, swapped pamphlets, the careful deletions—and said each choice aloud, not pleading but cataloguing cause and consequence for clerks whose faces gave nothing away. They logged offenses, stripped my field authorization, and assigned me to record-keeping and oversight rather than erasure, a punishment that felt like a reeducation but one that would allow me to point future agents toward discernment; they also amended a note in my file that discretion, once confessed, could be trained, not simply excised. I left without the old tune in my mouth or the pamphlet in my pocket, carrying instead a thin office badge and a quiet conviction that the Protocol might yet make room for human judgment if someone inside kept choosing to tell the truth.