Closed System

Dark Memoirs - Index

Despite his achievements, his prowess in the field he chose to pursue a career in, you’re unlikely to have heard of him. He is nothing more than a phantom—a ghost, a shadow who was there. Once.

Perhaps.

The moment you know of his existence and understand who he is, it is your last.

With no room for error, his patterns, his process, and his procedure are clean and clear. Free from anything that contradicts his methods, both exacting and clinical.

In his formative years, there were few to no clues as to his identity. In any case where errors or perceived mistakes were discovered, the details were scarce, and given his propensity for methodical change, there was never a clear connective tissue between one less-than-perfect execution and another.

Lessons were learned quickly. Machine-like in his approach, he interwove failsafes and backup into his plans as part of their structural integrity, not as alternatives for error. His calculations and planning were precise and beyond reproach.

His system thrives on the total erosion of human basal emotions.

Even the language used is results-driven, devoid of feeling.

Acceptable loss is attributed to variables that cannot be easily contained or neutralised, while tolerable deviations occur when the strategic planning framework is altered to achieve the end goal.

Only by examining his patterns—wild and varied as they are over the course of decades, not years—can any minute thread connecting the diverse targets he successfully executed be found, and tenuous that thread is at best. It is as if he were never here, and the space he momentarily occupied was a liminal pocket of time and place, invited for precisely the required duration before he vanished.

Analysis alone fails. Observers—those who dissect details at a cellular level—mistake correlation for meaning, leading them to inevitable investigative dead ends.

His closed-system approach to his business ensures that scrutiny is absorbed as mere noise and dealt with accordingly. It is not about completely redirecting observers; he wants them to believe they are close. As analysts find patterns and construct narratives, those narratives impose order on his work—an order that is itself a false signal.

Never the same victimology twice.

Never the same method twice.

Geographical constraints were like brushstrokes on a canvas to him. They worked in his favour rather than against him.

Never anyone prominent enough to raise alarm bells, but never anyone classified as an unsafe victim group.

It is believed that if mistakes were ever made—if emotion was allowed to dictate even a modicum of his steps—they were identified as anomalies and decontaminated.

The calm before the storm meant he never revealed himself. Never introduced himself. There was no escalation in emotionally charged activity, no pointers or progressions that could be mapped out as evolution.

He favoured the quiet, the slight, and the restrained.

When the chosen hunting ground is humanity, variability is inevitable. He had already accounted for and made allowances for those potential variables. What might read to some as system stress was compartmentalised and hypothesised. Despite his inability to fully neutralise inevitable noise and deviation, secondary protocols were enacted. Programs and formulas were used as a corrective fluid over ink-blot errors.

Entropy is always implicated when atrophy disrupts the gentle, methodical glow of his approach to his work. On the few occasions correction was necessary, the procedure and structural framework—the foundations he had built upon—were altered, not ruined.

The misinformed and uninitiated would view time as an asset. While patience is virtuous, time itself is a detrimental friction, actively working against progress. Repetition can be useful, but it is also contaminating, wearing down frameworks. Although his achievements could largely be attributed to his successful implementation of adaptation, this was not truly a triumph, and the costs always need to be accounted for further down the line.

Degradation is often viewed as systemic failure: a negative, an aberration. In reality, it is not. Just as trees bend with the wind to absorb force and learn from it, so too did his pinprick-precise, systematic approach to extermination. Where correction was required, degradation became essential. The results were never regarded as loss, only as strict adherence to cause and effect—repair and evolution rather than detrimental devolution.

Specific variables were categorised as unsustainable. Where risk could not be successfully mitigated through minor adjustment, it was removed entirely. This was not escalation, but controlled pre-emptive stabilisation. Within a closed system, there can be no uncontrolled inheritance of error.