WOODEN TIGER: Conscience Prison No. 9

We were promised flying cars. What came instead was the right to lock ourselves away. In a near-future world, a new law grants any citizen a strange freedom: to convict themselves in the court of their own conscience and serve the sentence. To everyone's surprise, people line up to use it. Conscience Prison No. 9 is run by a warden who goes by the name Wooden Tiger. When an observer — one of the rare few trained to read what cannot be said aloud— is assigned to find out why they locked themselves away, he begins pulling at threads that lead somewhere no one intended. Outside the walls, unseen players are pulling strings of their own. This is not a thriller. It is a slow psychological unraveling, built the way truth actually arrives in a life: out of sequence, in fragments and twists.