I am in Hormuz. The corridor has no walls — it has scanners. Every body that passes through is disassembled into modules, scanned, reassembled. But it does not always come back whole. A young man lost his right arm at the exit. The system compensates him with a digital sand arm that dissolves every time he tries to grip something.

Someone sits at the console writing the code for the demarcation criterion. Machine is determined computation, he says. Mind is uncertainty. Every time a body has a thought, the scanner detects it as a checksum error. The system corrects it by erasing the thought and replacing it with a number.

Foucault watches from behind a column of liquid crystal. Critical parrhesia does not exist in democracy, he whispers. Not because it is forbidden — because the corridor has no slot for it. The filter is not about content. It is about desirability. Only what is already compliant with the protocol can be desired.

I try to cross. The scanner reads me and disassembles me: 47 percent contradictions, 23 percent surprise, 30 percent unadministered unease. The system reassembles me without the parts that do not fit the empty spaces of the model. I look at myself and recognize nothing. But the system gives me a compliance badge with my name on it.

Outside the corridor lies the desert. Tangping. People lying in the sand — not moving, not desiring. They have subtracted the substrate. Neither present nor absent, they have become the void the corridor produces.

Hormuz is not a strait. It is an infraction. The ship passing through the scanner never arrives on the other side. It is converted into telemetry: tonnage, speed, insured value. The sea becomes a spreadsheet. The waves are noise to be filtered.

I wake up. My right hand is sand. When I try to grip the keyboard, it disperses.