"The System does not kill. It corrects."
It began with a sound that shouldn't have existed.
Not a siren. Not a scream.
Just… silence.
But too silent.
The kind that felt curated, like someone had erased all noise in a room just before pressing "record." The kind of silence that made Orin's skin crawl.
It followed him all morning.
In the aisles, there were no carts creaking. No packaging crinkling. No humming from the freezers. Not even the flicker of lights buzzing overhead. It was as if the store were holding its breath.
And then came the customers.
They arrived one by one, as they always did—smiling, nodding, mumbling greetings like polite echoes of themselves.
But something about them was wrong.
The old woman who always bought protein cubes in bulk came in, pushing her battered trolley. She always smiled at Orin, gave him a short wave, and muttered something about her cat, Mella. Or at least she had—every single time for the last year.
Today, she walked right past him.
No nod. No words.
Orin blinked and stepped into her path gently.
"Morning, Miss Allen."
She stopped. Looked at him. Her face blank. Eyes glazed.
"I'm sorry, do I know you?"
The words hit like a gut punch. Not because she said them—but because of how she said them.
Not confused. Not annoyed.
Flat.
Like a line of code that no longer had access to a variable it once referenced.
"...You come in every day," he said carefully, his voice a whisper. "You talk about your cat. Mella?"
Her eyes remained blank.
"I don't have a cat."
And then she pushed her trolley forward, moving past him without another word.
Orin stared after her, rooted to the floor.
Something had changed. Not just with her. But with reality.
He moved toward the security desk, switching on the small, outdated console screen. The feed showed the aisles in grainy monochrome.
But in aisle four, Miss Allen flickered.
Just for a frame.
Her face fractured—literally—for a heartbeat. Her form shimmered like it was being scrubbed clean. The cat food she always bought was no longer on the shelf. The product line itself had been removed.
He opened the store inventory.
There was no record of "MellaBites Feline Protein Mix."
He searched Miss Allen's previous purchases—her entire history was blank.
Orin felt his heartbeat spike.
Not fear. Not yet.
Just disorientation. Like waking up and realizing someone had shifted your entire room by three inches. Enough to trip you. Enough to break your sense of space.
He glanced at the corner of the monitor.
System Overlay: ACTIVE
Sync Level: 92.7%
Anomaly Proximity: MED-HIGH
A small circular icon pulsed in the corner of the screen: an eye, open, blinking slowly.
Watching.
His hand moved on instinct. He unplugged the monitor.
For a moment, the silence was absolute again.
Then the lights buzzed—loudly.
And the speaker system, long dormant, let out a faint burst of static.
"Protocol 1-0-7-B engaged.
Behavioural anomalies detected.
Initiating soft-correction sequence."
The words weren't audible to the rest of the store. Just to him.
He looked up. The security camera above the exit door rotated. Slowly. Precisely. Until it pointed directly at him.
The rest of his shift blurred.
No other customers spoke to him.
Even his manager—Mr. Jant, a nervous, talkative man who always greeted Orin with forced enthusiasm—walked right past him on the floor without acknowledging his existence.
At one point, Orin stood directly in front of him, blocking his path.
Jant stopped. Blinked.
Then… walked through him.
Orin stumbled backward with a gasp.
No impact. But he had felt the pressure. Like passing through jelly. Like being filtered through something liquid and cold.
He dropped to his knees behind the frozen goods aisle, clutching his chest.
Something was happening.
He hadn't changed.
But the world had.
And it had left him behind.
He left the store that evening through the back exit—something he never did. But the front scanner had refused to register him. The door stayed locked even after three swipes of his employee badge.
He walked home under a sky that looked… too still.
The stars didn't twinkle. They held their positions like pinned insects.
And the clouds?
They repeated the same shape every few blocks.
The same swirl. The same stretch.
He took a detour past the apartment complex where Miss Allen lived. It wasn't far.
Her name wasn't on the door list anymore.
In fact, the room she had once occupied had a new plaque:
K-042
SYSTEM-INTEGRATED HOUSING
RESIDENT: NULL
He stood there for a long time.
Not knocking.
Just remembering.
Trying to convince himself she had existed.
That the memory of her bent old frame, the way she whispered Mella's name like it was a secret charm—that all of that was real.
And failing.
Because the System didn't just erase people.
It erased context.
It sealed the cracks after it swept the truth away.
That night, Orin couldn't sleep.
His room felt foreign.
His things were there—but they didn't feel like his.
The photos on the shelf were wrong.
The frames contained people who should be familiar—faces that resembled family, but with just enough distortion to feel uncanny. Like AI-generated ghosts.
He pulled open the drawer beside his bed.
His notebook was still there.
He flipped to the first page.
Words in his own handwriting stared back at him.
"If you are reading this, then the rewrite failed."
"You remember something you shouldn't."
"That makes you Diver-Class. They will come."
He hadn't written this.
And yet, the pen marks were familiar. The slant of the letters. The spacing.
The corner of the page had a burned imprint of a symbol.
A circle, with an open eye and five small lines radiating outward.
He had seen it before.
In the dream. In the whispering.
On the stone.
And below the words, scrawled in shaky script:
"Find the girl who sketches."
"She remembers in lines."
"Before they correct her too."
His hand trembled.
He didn't sleep that night.
He just sat in the dark, waiting for morning.
Waiting to decide if he wanted to remember.
Or let the System erase him too.
What happens when memory becomes resistance—and forgetting becomes safety?
Who is the girl who sketches, and how does she remember?
© 2025 Ofelia B Webb. All rights reserved.
This is an original work published on WebNovel.