Fragmented protocol
Error: unresolved
Partially corrupted
Internal Court Records is a fragmented work of psychoanalytic autofiction written through the language of institutional systems. The text treats anxiety, memory, and guilt not as emotions but as administrative structures. Psychological states become protocols: anxiety governs, memory archives, guilt prosecutes.
The work is structurally informed by Franz Kafka's administrative absurdity, Jacques Lacan's notion of internalised authority, and Michel Foucault's analysis of surveillance and self-regulation. The text is also informed by algorithmic and platform language, where moderation systems increasingly pre-structure subjectivity itself.
Intended for readers of experimental fiction, psychoanalytic theory, and critical literature. This piece would appear in a theory journal, a contemporary art publication, or a hybrid platform for speculative writing.
Anxiety is rarely just fear. Fear has an object. Anxiety is infrastructural. It appears before the event, before language, before the subject fully understands what must be defended against. In psychoanalysis, anxiety signals proximity to something the psyche cannot symbolically organise. In contemporary life, it becomes governance disguised as self-protection.
Over time, anxiety learns architecture. It builds corridors. Moderation systems. Internal checkpoints. It begins speaking in the language of care, maturity, responsibility.
Eventually, surveillance no longer requires an external observer.
Every state begins with a border. Mine began with anxiety. Constantly evaluating myself against the world, comparing, relying on my own perceived value — all became ways to contain the urge for control, to pacify anxiety.
Anxiety: my abyss, the native operating system of my internal drives. It established a vertical structure of power inside me long before I learned to distinguish my own desires. Around fourteen, when I was still assembling myself from fragments reflected in the shifting RGB static of the world. A benevolent dictator inspected sentences before they left my mouth, compared my life to others' the way a border officer checks documents.
Over time, I built an internal court. Its architecture became part of my personality.
These records document a system that helped me survive while restricting my access.
I do not remember the moment of construction. The building already existed when I first became aware of myself inside it. Detached, functional, rational. A silo architecture: isolated sectors connected through rigid internal logic. From within, it resembled a brutalist data centre — levels, rigid connections, massive vertical structure without an exterior facade, built by someone afraid of losing their mind in a poorly organised mental space.
Floors and sections layered upon one another like poorly synchronised versions of the same life. From below, everything seemed linear. From above, the structure fragmented into blocks.
The light inside carried a strange softness — something sacred, natural, as if saying: relax. Stop holding yourself together so tightly. The space is not resisting you as much as you think.
In those moments, the staircase stopped appearing threatening. Then the anxiety returned. And the architecture hardened again.
Later, I understood: the building was not held together by concrete. It was sustained by ongoing internal tension. As if it fed on self-regulation.
The staircase ran the length of the building. Spiral structures functioned like axes holding the fragile world in place; double-flight stairs allowed movement. Some passages disappeared into the haze of artificial light. Everything was metal, so footsteps were always audible.
The higher the level, the quieter the space became. The building was observing your movement through it. As if the architecture expected the subject to begin moderating their own presence. The observer had long since been integrated into the system itself.
At those moments, I stopped. Not because the path was physically blocked, but because the system inside me had already begun interpreting possibility as threat.
Sometimes it seemed to me that the staircase led nowhere. That its primary function was to keep a person in a permanent state of approach — a condition in which desire exists, but access to it is endlessly deferred to the next floor.
Access is not prohibited.
Access produces doubt in the subject's right to access.
These are different things.
Long corridors led into the archive. The doors were identical. The lighting was dim, erasing any sense of stable time. Some sections remained permanently accessible. Others disappeared after a second attempt to return to them. The archive contained more than memory — entire systems of knowledge: catalogues, hyperlinked structures, thematic sectors connected through a dense internal logic.
In this place, memory functioned as a permissions system. Some memories remained near the surface — polished by repetition, stable enough to present to others. Others were stored deeper: undated, unsigned. Sometimes the archive altered records after repeated viewing or removed detail, leaving only the sensation that something had occurred.
The strangest rooms were located in the far sector. Their doors were not locked. Occasionally, calm voices could be heard from inside — voices of people who seemed never to have undergone an internal security check before speaking. I tried entering, but the mechanism seemed unable to register contact. The handle barely moved, as if the system could not verify my access rights.
Later, I noticed: the harder one attempts to control movement, the more immobile the mechanism becomes. As though the space opened only to those who stopped asking for permission.
Rarely able to get close enough. Near those doors, anxiety became attentive. It began speaking in the language of care.
Not now.
You are not ready yet.
Earn it first.
The system never prohibited anything directly. It operated more subtly. First came the sensation of unsafety. Then the internal observer. Correction began to resemble personality. Repeat anxiety in the language of care long enough, and a person loses the ability to distinguish protection from control.
Before speaking, I would feel a tension beneath my ribs, as though the system were initiating a security check. Sometimes a thought was only a vague sensation — something alive inside but not granted permission to enter language. Not when words are forgotten, but when prevented from being born at all.
There was always someone between thought and speech.
Not a censor. A moderator.
As though my voice had become an edited version of something more authentic to which I had lost access.
This statement may destabilise the system.
Insufficient data for a confident opinion.
Please wait.
I waited so long that waiting began to resemble maturity. Eventually, silence stopped feeling like absence and started to feel like order. The system preferred silence.
The accusation appeared before the act itself. Not as a thought, not even as a voice — more like an internal contraction, a tension somewhere between the throat and the chest, as though the system prepared in advance for the necessity of justification. Intention had only just begun moving through consciousness, yet the body was already registering it as a potential disruption of order.
I began explaining myself pre-emptively. Softening formulations. Reducing desires to a scale that would not trigger an internal alarm. Some impulses required editing in advance, as though the mere possibility of wanting too much was already a threat. Confidence without evidence, freedom without prior authorisation, desire without proof of deservingness. Even the right to speak had to be earned.
This is how guilt ceases to function as a response to action and becomes a background condition. The system no longer requires punishment. It is enough that a person begins living as though already under investigation.
That was the efficiency of guilt. It did not produce prohibition directly. It produced a person who confirmed their own guilt. Who lowered their voice in advance, prepared for refusal, searched within themselves for the reason they should not be allowed. The internal court never asked what I had done. It asked something else:
What made you think
you were allowed to begin with?
The courtroom existed somewhere between the archive and the staircase. The room was white, though the whiteness resembled not sterility but the absence of memory. As if the space had been continuously cleared of previous proceedings so that guilt could always feel newly generated.
of permitted desire
The defendant was me. The judge also. The prosecutor had no face. Only a calm voice. It had always been in progress. Some hearings took place at night. Others occurred in the middle of conversations. Occasionally, in mirrors, several seconds before looking away.
The judge studied a stack of papers. The pages were blank.
Defendant, do you understand the accusation?
Not entirely.
Recorded. Refusal to comprehend the structure of one's own guilt.
The defendant repeatedly approached restricted-access sectors. The room of unrestricted speech. The room of desire without prior authorisation. The room of error. The room where people enter without explanation.
Were the doors locked?
No.
Were there formal access restrictions?
Formally — no.
Then on what basis did the defendant consider herself prohibited from entering?
The system requires the subject to confirm limitations independently. Otherwise, the architecture loses stability.
So the prohibition existed only through consent to it?
Objection. The formulation destabilises the process.
The lighting pulsed almost imperceptibly, as though the system were expending additional energy to maintain internal coherence.
Defendant, when did you first begin perceiving your own thoughts as a potential threat?
I felt the familiar tension beneath my ribs. Security check. Even here.
When it began to feel as though certain words could alter the way space responded to me.
Space?
People. Systems. Reality. There was never much difference.
Call the witness.
Memory did not enter immediately. First, the room's temperature changed. Then something resembling a figure appeared in the far corner.
Do you remember the moment the internal restriction was formed?
I remember the atmosphere. First came fear. Then the system renamed it caution, then maturity, then personality.
After that, the subject began perceiving control as a form of self-care. The architecture embedded itself so deeply that prohibition eventually began speaking in her own voice.
The courtroom started resembling a system attempting to analyse itself.
Why did you continue obeying rules whose origin remains unknown to you?
I remained silent for a long time.
Because they sounded reasonable.
That is not an answer.
Because they sounded like my voice.
The lights flickered. The display froze. For a brief moment, the room entered a different kind of silence — neither administrative nor anxious. Something softer. Unprocessed. A strange lightness beneath the ribs. As though the security system had failed to initialise in time.
If the origin of the prohibition is unknown, if access was never physically restricted, if guilt emerged before action itself… then under what law does this court exist at all?
The system functions through stability.
That is not a law.
Through the subject's internal agreement with their own limitation.
That is not a law either.
The judge looked exhausted. More like a mechanism beginning to recognise its own construction.
Then what exactly constitutes the crime here?
The defendant saw the mechanism.
Behind the wall, the staircase could be heard again. At that moment, I noticed a door at the far end of the room. It had not been there before. No warnings. No symbols.
The handle slowly moved downward.
Not fully.
Only slightly.
But it was enough.
Protocol forwarded to the reflection department.
The department runs on the same dataset of anxieties.
Error reproduces.
System continues operating.