He awoke to the rattle of cheap plastic against linoleum and the scream of fluorescence above.
Eyes open, and already the world was too bright—a blank box of a room, windowless, forty chairs arranged for maximum discomfort. The ceiling hummed like it was trying to bore through his skull.
No memory, just a spike of nausea and a heaviness in his arms and legs. He flexed his fingers: ten of them, long and pale, nails painted black. His knees were bent at a sharp angle, tight against the mold of the chair.
Even with the sense of having just been born—or worse, rebooted—his posture was perfect. He hated that he noticed.
On his lap: a manila folder, slick from the sweat of his hands. A label affixed, industrial black font: "ROLE – THE JOKER." Underneath, a line scribbled in unfamiliar handwriting: Not a copy. The original.
He didn't know what to make of the word Joker. It floated in his mind with no anchor, more sound than meaning. Still, a kind of vertigo opened in his chest as he stared at it. Something was missing. Everything was missing.
He glanced up, scanned the room. Thirty-nine other chairs, some empty, some filled with bodies—men and women of indeterminate age, all trying too hard or not at all. Every face seemed both familiar and wrong, like someone had gone wild with a composite filter and then dialed it back to uncanny.
He tried to speak—just to clear his throat—but all that came out was a dry rattle. No one looked his way.
He opened the folder, hands steady despite the pulse in his ears. The cover page was clinical, one line: Welcome. Underneath: Marcus Vale.
He blinked at the name. The name blinked back.
A stack of typewritten pages followed. The first was covered in words that circled themselves, repeating phrases like infection or hypnosis: LAUGHTER IS THE ENEMY OF FEAR. PAIN IS A TRUTH-SERUM. THE ONLY JOKE THAT MATTERS IS THE ONE NO ONE GETS.
There was no context, just fragments, as if the person assembling the file had suffered a concussion halfway through.
Page two was blank except for a stain. Red-brown, nearly black. He touched it and came away clean, but it left a phantom tackiness on his finger.
He read on, scanning for anything that might explain why his skull felt packed with cotton and why the word Joker made his spine buzz. Instead, he found a line of dialogue:
"Do you want to know how I got these scars?"
He mouthed the words. His lips tingled. He could feel a smile trying to break through, even though nothing was funny.
He closed the folder. The name on the cover burned hotter now. Marcus Vale. Not an echo. The original.
He scanned the room again, this time searching for evidence. There were others like him—no, not like him, but trying to be. A woman in a blue silk suit recited lines to her reflection in a handheld mirror, smearing lipstick with each syllable.
Two men in matching checked blazers traded insults in a language he didn't know but somehow understood. Down the line, a teenage boy bounced his knee so fast the motion blurred, muttering to himself, "Nolan's gone off the rails with this one. Nolan's gone off the rails—"
He recognized the word Nolan. It carried weight, a kind of gravitational pull. He didn't know why.
A clock on the wall read 9:02. He checked the time against his own pulse. Irrelevant. Time didn't feel real here.
The walls were lined with movie posters. Some he recognized: Memento, Inception, The Prestige. Others were blank, just a frame and a shape where the art should be. He looked at the faces in the real posters, waiting for one to light a fire in his brain. Nothing. Just glassy stares, haunted by memory he didn't own.
He noticed the scent: sharp and medical, astringent, underneath which lay a rot of old sweat and burnt coffee. The hum of the lights was joined by a distant, arrhythmic thumping—footsteps, or maybe something trapped and desperate behind the walls.
He became aware of his own breathing: too shallow, his lungs not keeping up, but his body stayed perfectly still. He wondered if the others felt it too, the sense that their bodies were being driven by remote control.
He studied them, and the more he watched, the more he realized that none of the other actors actually moved. They only rehearsed movement, little spasms of energy, then immediate return to pose. Only the boy with the bouncing knee seemed alive.
He looked back at the folder. He forced himself to read deeper, peeling away page after page of increasingly unhinged philosophy and manic block capitals:
TO REVEAL THE MASK IS TO KILL THE JOKE.
NO ONE IS BORN LAUGHING.
IF YOU SMILE LONG ENOUGH, YOU FORGET WHERE THE TEETH END AND THE LIPS BEGIN.
A part of him wanted to throw the folder away, to deny the pull of the words. Instead, he dug in, using the sharp of his nail to scratch at the label on the cover. A new word flickered underneath—VALE, in faded graphite. His chest tightened. It felt like an inside joke he'd never been told.
A low, conspiratorial whisper drew his attention two chairs over. The blue-suited woman was murmuring to the empty space next to her. He focused on her lips:
"Heard last year's guy couldn't finish. Said the room ate him up and spit him out. Auditioned twice, then disappeared. Poof." She tapped a nail to her temple. "Nolan wants blood, this time. The right kind."
Her gaze flicked to Marcus and away. He thought he saw a flash of recognition—or was it fear? She pressed the mirror to her mouth and whispered, "He's the one. Look at him. You can't fake that kind of empty."
He looked down. His hands were trembling, but his body was composed, locked in an elegance that felt borrowed. He didn't know how to be Marcus Vale, but apparently, everyone else thought he did.
He remembered nothing before the chair, the folder, the name. But as he sat there, under the buzzing lights, he began to suspect that he had always existed in this waiting room, that the world outside was a rumor. All that mattered was the next name called.
A bell chimed—loud, brassy, unearned. A door at the far end opened. A woman in a crisp black suit—her face so symmetrical it felt designed—stood in the gap and scanned the room. Her eyes found Marcus instantly.
"Number Seventeen? Marcus Vale?"
He didn't move. Not at first. Then something deep inside compelled him—a need not to respond, but to perform response. He raised a hand.
The woman smiled, perfectly white teeth, and gestured him forward. The others went silent. Even the knee-bouncing boy froze.
Marcus stood, folder pressed to his chest, and moved. His legs obeyed without hesitation, but the grace in the movement felt alien, like he was playing the role of a man on the way to his own execution. He walked to the door and looked back only once, catching the blue-suited woman's eyes in the mirror as she mouthed:
"Good luck, Joker."
He didn't smile, but something in him did.
He stepped through the door into the next bright unknown, and the world behind him reset to static.
....
He followed the woman into a tunnel of white and chrome, the door behind him shutting with a click that sounded, somehow, like it had ended a chapter of his life.
The assistant's heels led the way, each impact perfectly measured. He watched her walk, then himself. His own stride was a silent echo—no stumble, no drag, just unbroken glide. He wondered if he'd always moved like this, or if he'd learned it in the waiting room, or if it belonged to the other thing he was supposed to become.
The corridor stretched long and cold, every surface scrubbed to a hospital shine. The walls were lined with posters—framed one-sheets under plexi, arranged like a corridor of portraits for the dead. Each one had a pair of eyes that followed him as he passed.
Some belonged to characters, some to actors, some to abstract concepts that had once meant something to someone. Inception. Dunkirk. There was an old Memento poster, the art sun-bleached and frayed at the corners.
He stared at the reflection of himself in the glass. It was wrong, as if the image had been warped by a funhouse algorithm: sharp jaw, hollow cheeks, the greenest eyes he'd ever seen.
His hair was so black it looked blue under the lights, long enough to graze the collar of his coat. He looked like a ghost who had come back to audition for the role of a man.
The assistant kept glancing over her shoulder, not quite making eye contact. She spoke in a tone engineered for customer service.
"You okay? First time?"
He tried to smile, but it felt like an experiment.
"I think so," he said, the words shaped by lips he'd never gotten used to. His voice was lower than he expected—soft, but edged with something serrated. She seemed satisfied and picked up the pace, almost eager to be done with him.
They passed a glassed-in conference room, empty except for a potted ficus and a stack of color-coded binders. The air here smelled like lemon disinfectant, with an undertone of plastic. Somewhere far away, a phone rang, unanswered, then rang again.
He caught his hand in the reflection, clutching the Joker folder so tight his knuckles blanched. The tremor was there, but faint, like a wire buzzing with low current. Otherwise, his movements remained glacial, not a wasted gesture.
He wondered if this was how you walked to your own execution, if the body somehow knew and just carried you along for the ride.
The corridor ended at a featureless steel door. The assistant keyed in a code on the wall panel, and it gave way with a pneumatic hiss. The chill inside raised goosebumps on his forearms.
She turned to him, finally making real eye contact. "They're ready when you are. Just wait for the light to turn red." She pointed at a thin LED strip above the doorframe, currently dark.
He nodded. She left him there, alone. For a moment, he felt the weight of her gaze even after she was gone.
He set the folder down on a side table, smoothed his shirt, then looked again at his reflection in the nearest poster glass. He stared into his own eyes, searching for memory, for meaning. Nothing. Just the predatory calm of an animal waiting to see what the trap looked like from the inside.
He held there, at the threshold, and for a moment, he imagined that if he walked away now, the world behind him would vanish, and only this corridor, and this role, would remain.
He reached for the casting room door. His hand hovered, uncertain, but the rest of his body held perfect stillness. The tremble inside him grew louder. He watched the light. Waited for red.
It came, and he pressed forward, into the unknown.