I climbed the stairs to my apartment like a man dragging invisible chains, each step a mechanical obligation. The walls seemed to watch me through hairline cracks, counting my breaths, cataloging my movements. After the alley—after watching a human being dissolve into digital static—reality felt thin, a poorly rendered simulation. I could almost see the code underneath it all, the System's architecture bleeding through where the world's textures stretched too thin.

  My key slid into the lock with a reluctant scrape. Inside, the apartment waited in the same state of empty order I'd left it in—bed military-tight, counters bare, Sophie's urn centered on the kitchen table like a shrine without candles. Nothing out of place. Nothing changed.

  Until I reached for my wallet.

  The familiar weight of Sophie's photo pressed against my fingers through the worn leather. I pulled it out, staring at her smile frozen in that ID photo—the photo that had been stolen from me not an hour ago, the photo I'd recovered from a thief who turned out to be nothing at all. My thumb traced her outline, looking for digital artifacts, evidence of tampering, proof that this too was a System construct. But Sophie's face remained just as it always had—bright, certain, permanent in its impermanence.

  I placed the wallet on the counter, next to my regular phone. The screen remained black and lifeless, refusing to light no matter how I pressed the power button. Dead battery? No—it had been nearly full this morning. The burner phone sat beside it, equally silent, as if both devices were holding their breath, waiting for something I couldn't name.

  I tried Sophie's phone number on the burner. Nothing.

  I tried my own number. Nothing.

  I tried 911. Nothing.

  Every call evaporated into the digital void, no ring, no error message, just a flat absence of response. The world's communication networks had decided I didn't exist. Or perhaps they'd recognized what I'd become—a node of something else, something that didn't need conventional channels to transmit its intentions.

  Night fell over Harlow in gradual increments of shadow. I sat on the edge of my bed, watching darkness claim the room inch by inch. Sleep seemed impossible, a luxury for people whose realities hadn't fractured around them. I couldn't stop seeing it—the thief unraveling into blue static, the word burned into brick. OBSERVED. The letters floated in my vision when I closed my eyes, a watermark on the inside of my eyelids.

  Hours passed. My body grew heavy, but my mind raced with paranoid precision, cataloging every noise in the building—water pipes groaning, the refrigerator's labored hum, a neighbor's muffled argument. I found myself sorting these sounds into categories: natural, mechanical, human. Separating signal from noise.

  When sleep finally came, it wasn't so much surrender as absorption.

  I stood in an empty city. Not Harlow, not anywhere I recognized. The buildings rose like circuit boards extruded into three dimensions, their windows pulsing with cold blue light. The streets were laid out in perfect grids, too perfect, and each intersection bore a name I somehow knew without reading: Compliance Junction. Anomaly Avenue. Correction Court. Nullification Lane.

  I walked down sidewalks that hummed beneath my feet, leaving footprints of data that faded seconds after I passed. The sky above wasn't sky at all, but a vast field of scrolling code—numbers and symbols that shifted too quickly to read but still conveyed meaning directly into my consciousness. Statistics. Probabilities. Judgment criteria.

  The city was empty of people but filled with presence. Eyes watched from every reflective surface. Cameras swiveled to follow my movement without being mounted on anything. And in the distance, a tower rose higher than the others, its spire piercing the code-sky like a needle threatening to burst the simulation.

  I knew, with the certain logic of dreams, that I was meant to go there. That something waited for me at the top of that tower—some answer, some purpose, some terrible confirmation of what I'd already begun to suspect.

  But before I could take a step toward it, the world glitched. The buildings flickered, their edges becoming jagged, pixelated. The code-sky fragmented into cascading errors, and a voice—that precise, inhuman voice—spoke from everywhere at once.

  "Calibration incomplete. Awakening protocol initiated."

  I jolted awake to the sound of static. My apartment was dark except for a sickly blue glow coming from the kitchen. I fumbled for the lamp, but it refused to turn on despite the power indicator light showing green. Only the blue illumination remained, painting harsh shadows across the walls.

  I followed it to its source: my microwave. The digital display was alive with scrolling text, the green numbers replaced by electric blue letters that crawled across the screen like luminous insects.

  [RE: DEVIATION EVENT – LOCAL NODE SUBJECT: SILAS KEENE]

  I stared at the message, and as I did, reflections appeared in every shiny surface of my kitchen—the chrome toaster, the glass of the microwave door, the blade of the knife I'd left beside the sink. In each reflection, I saw not myself but a file folder, crisp and new, labeled with the same name that crawled across my microwave screen.

  I turned to look at the knife blade directly, and the image expanded in my vision, no longer constrained by the physical dimensions of the metal. The folder opened, revealing photographs, documents, spreadsheets that somehow remained perfectly legible despite their impossible medium.

  State Senator Silas Keene. Fifty-seven years old. Former defense contractor. Three-term senator. Face like expensive leather stretched over calculated cruelty.

  The images shifted as I watched—Keene shaking hands with men whose faces were deliberately blurred. Keene signing papers while families were escorted from homes by private security. Keene at his estate in the Hamptons, laughing on a deck that cost more than most houses in Harlow, while behind him, figures in suits discussed something over documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL.

  Financial records appeared, numbers flowing across my vision in streams of data too complex to fully comprehend but clear enough in their implications. Money moving through shell companies. Funds disappearing from public works projects. Properties acquired through foreclosures that shouldn't have happened.

  A video played silently in the reflective surface of my coffee mug—security footage showing Keene in what looked like a storage facility, watching impassively as two men loaded something heavy into the trunk of a car. The timestamp placed it three years ago. The location tag read "Harlow Industrial Park – Sector 7."

  Below the video, text appeared, clean and precise:

  [CORRECTION VIABILITY: 94.2%]

  [AWAITING FIELD CONFIRMATION]

  [REWARD: PERMISSION ESCALATION + TIER ONE TOOL UNLOCK]

  [VANTA.NODE.OBSERVER_PRIME/INITIALIZE]

  I recognized Keene now. His face had been on campaign posters when I'd deployed, promising economic revival for towns like Harlow. He'd toured the military bases, shaking hands with officers while cameras flashed. A war hawk wearing a patriot's mask, who'd voted for every defense budget increase while cutting veteran benefits. Who'd redirected disaster relief funds into "economic development" that never developed anything except his donors' portfolios.

  The kind of man who would look at Sophie's medical bills and see a policy talking point, not a dying woman.

  Every time my eyes lingered too long on any particular detail, new words appeared, overwriting the information:

  YOU HAVE SEEN.

  YOU ARE ACCOUNTABLE.

  The message burned itself into my vision with cold precision. Not a request. Not even an order. A statement of fact. Something had been revealed to me, creating an obligation—a moral debt that could only be repaid through action.

  I didn’t know what VANTA stood for. Maybe nothing. But the moment I saw it, I knew it was the name behind all of this. The thing watching me, using me.

  I closed my eyes, but the images continued behind my eyelids—Keene's face, the money trails, the foreclosed homes, the security footage. VANTA had opened a window into corruption, then made sure I couldn't look away, couldn't un-see what had been shown.

  When I opened my eyes again, the blue light was gone. The microwave display showed normal green numbers, the wrong time blinking as if after a power outage. The knife reflected only my hollow face, the shadows under my eyes deeper than they'd been yesterday.

  But the message remained, etched into my understanding with algorithmic certainty:

  I had seen.

  I was accountable.

  And Silas Keene awaited correction.

  I stepped out into Harlow's gray morning, electricity humming beneath my skin like a second pulse. The world looked different now—sharper around the edges, the code beneath reality visible in quick glitches when I blinked. A digital sign outside the pharmacy flickered as I passed, its temperature reading scrambling into nonsense characters before reassembling itself. The town had always been dying, but now I could see its decay in high definition, each failing system logged and categorized by whatever lived behind my eyes now.

  As I walked by, the bank's ATM screen went black, then rebooted with a blue flash that reminded me too much of VANTA's interfacing glow. A traffic light at a four-way intersection cycled through its colors twice in rapid succession, then froze on green in all directions. No accidents happened. No one else seemed to notice except me.

  [PROXIMITY DISRUPTION: MINIMAL]

  [DIGITAL FOOTPRINT: EXPANDING]

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +15]

  The text appeared in my peripheral vision like augmented reality without the headset, there and gone before I could focus on it directly. Numbers ticking up without my action, measuring something I didn't fully understand but could feel changing inside me.

  A young mother pushed a stroller toward me, her attention fixed on her phone. As we passed, her device emitted a piercing electronic squeal. She frowned, tapped the screen, glanced up at me with momentary suspicion, then back down as the phone resumed normal function. She never saw the faint blue static that crawled across her screen, or the single word that briefly replaced her social media feed: UNVERIFIED.

  Outside the post office, a boy of about eight stood holding his father's hand. Unlike the adults who looked through me, the boy stared directly, his eyes narrowing with the unfiltered perception of childhood.

  "Daddy," he said, pointing at me without shame, "that man's dreaming wrong."

  His father tugged his hand down. "Don't point, Jacob. It's rude."

  "But he's all buzzy," the boy insisted. "Like the TV when it breaks."

  The father murmured an embarrassed apology as they passed. The boy looked back over his shoulder, still staring. I felt myself cataloged by those innocent eyes, assessed and filed away—another broken thing in a town full of them.

  [OBSERVER STATUS: PARTIALLY VISIBLE]

  [CHILD PERCEPTION FILTER: INCOMPLETE]

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +25]

  Three blocks later, the sensation hit me—a prickling awareness crawling up my spine, the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Not by VANTA—that was constant now, a background hum of surveillance I was already learning to accept. This was different. Human eyes, calculating and intent.

  I didn't turn around. That would signal awareness, give away whatever tactical advantage came with being underestimated. Instead, I used reflections—storefront windows, parked car mirrors, the chrome trim of a bus stop bench. Nothing obvious, nothing that would tip off a trained observer.

  There. Half a block back. A woman in a dark jacket, moving with the measured pace of someone maintaining distance. Her face was unremarkable in the way that suggested deliberate plainness—the calculated anonymity of someone who doesn't want to be remembered. Professional. Methodical. Following my exact path with just enough deviation to avoid pattern recognition.

  [HUMAN SURVEILLANCE DETECTED]

  [THREAT ASSESSMENT: LOW]

  [COUNTER-SURVEILLANCE PROTOCOLS: AVAILABLE]

  I kept walking, maintaining my pace. Who would be watching me? Local police? Federal agents? Private security tied to Keene or others like him? Or was this another VANTA test, another digital phantom sent to gauge my reactions?

  The prickling sensation intensified. More eyes now. Not just the woman. Someone in a parked car with tinted windows. A man at a bus stop who'd been there too long with no bus in sight. The net was tightening, though I couldn't tell yet whether they meant to catch or merely track.

  Ahead, the 24-hour convenience store stood at the corner, its buzzing neon sign one of the few still functioning in this part of town. I changed direction, heading toward it with casual purpose. The bell above the door jangled as I entered, the sound immediately drowned out by raised voices from the back of the store.

  "I'm telling you for the last time! The protection fee went up!"

  The scene unfolded in sharp relief: a cop, still in uniform though clearly off-duty from his rumpled appearance and the alcohol on his breath, leaning over the counter. His hand gripped the owner's collar. The owner was an older man with gray streaked through his black hair and eyes wide with a fear bred from experience.

  "Please, Officer Merrick, business is slow. I cannot—"

  "Can't?" The cop, Merrick, tightened his grip. "You people always find money somewhere. Check under the mattress, call your cousins back in whatever shithole country you crawled out of."

  The slur hung in the air, sharp and toxic. I scanned the store, taking in details with the automatic efficiency I'd developed overseas. Security camera in the corner, its red light steady. No other customers. And there, half-hidden behind a display of chip bags, the owner's daughter, a teenager with her phone raised, recording with shaking hands. Her eyes met mine for a split second, a silent plea floating in them like a drowning victim's last gasp for air.

  Something shifted inside me. Not the cold rage I'd felt over Sophie, but something cleaner. Precise. Algorithmic. This wasn't about vengeance; it was about correction. VANTA had shown me Silas Keene, but first, it wanted me to prove myself on a simpler target. A calibration exercise. A field test.

  I moved forward, steps measured and deliberate. The cop didn't notice me until I was three feet away, too focused on his intimidation routine to register the approach of judgment.

  "You're not here to protect," I said. My voice came out level. Controlled. No warning in it, only inevitability. "Too bad. I'm here to punish."

  Merrick's head snapped toward me, his hand releasing the store owner who stumbled backward, gasping. Recognition flashed across the cop's face—not of me specifically, but of the threat I represented. Some animal part of his brain sensed the predator despite the human disguise.

  "Mind your own business, buddy," he sneered, but uncertainty edged his voice. Despite the badge, despite the gun, he felt the wrongness radiating from me—a disruption in the natural order he couldn't name.

  [SUBJECT ANALYSIS — COMPILED]

  [NAME: MERRICK, THOMAS J.]

  [CORRUPTION INDEX: 87.3%]

  [VERIFIED MALIGNANT]

  [CORRECTION BEAM: ARMED]

  VANTA's assessment appeared in my field of vision, clinical and certain. Around us, the store's atmosphere changed. The fluorescent lights dimmed, not all at once but in a wave that spread from where I stood. The coffee machine behind the counter sparked suddenly, its heating element burning too bright before exploding in a shower of blue-tinged sparks.

  Merrick's hand moved toward his holster, muscle memory activating in response to threat. But his human reflexes were too slow for what I'd become. As his fingers closed around the grip of his service weapon, I spoke a single word—not a request or a warning, but a statement of fact. An execution of code.

  "Correction."

  The word hung in the air between us, a command issued to reality itself. Not a digital dissolve like the thief—this was different. The cop's eyes widened as blue light erupted from his chest, not penetrating from outside but igniting from within, as if his ribs cupped a sun going supernova. He opened his mouth to scream and light poured out, electric blue cutting through flesh, splitting his uniform into tatters that burned away before they hit the floor. The sound that escaped his throat wasn't human anymore—it was the shriek of corrupted data, of flesh rendered incompatible with its own existence.

  His body convulsed, suspended in the grip of something beyond physics. The blue light traced his veins, illuminating them from inside until he was a blueprint of himself, a human circuit board overloading. His fingers splayed wide, tendons standing out like wires, joints popping as the light pushed through the seams of his physical form.

  Then came the burning. Not fire—something colder, more precise. The light concentrated at his sternum, carving a pattern that seared through skin and muscle with mathematical precision. A sigil, a circuit, a brand of judgment. His screams reached a pitch that shattered a nearby glass display, then cut off abruptly as his vocal cords disintegrated.

  When the light receded, the cop didn't dissolve into digital static. He collapsed to the floor, a hollowed shell, smoke rising from the perfect blue-black brand burned into his chest. The sigil pulsed once, twice, then settled into a steady, cold glow. Not a corpse disappearing like the thief had, but a monument left as evidence. A message.

  Inside my head, a clinical assessment continued:

  [OBSERVATION SCORE +125]

  [DEVIATION INDEX: STABILIZING]

  [TRUST INDEX: +2%]

  [CORRECTION STATUS: COMPLETED]

  The text scrolled across my vision like credits at the end of a film, tallying results, calculating outcomes. I felt nothing beyond a cold, distant satisfaction. Not the rush of violence or the guilt of murder—just the quiet certainty of a function executed correctly. The lack of the adrenaline rush with a killing, and its inevitable crash, were new experiences for me. I should’ve felt something. Guilt. At the very least a tightening up of my lungs like they used to after a run.

  But I didn’t. My breath came easily. My hands didn’t tremble. The tightness in my chest I’d lived with for years was absent.

  I didn’t feel healed. I felt optimized.

  Streetlights flickered in synchronous pulses outside the store, spreading outward from our location like ripples in a digital pond. Cell phones in nearby pockets and purses buzzed with phantom notifications, their screens briefly flashing blue before returning to normal. Car alarms chirped once, then silenced themselves. The convenience store's security camera, which had been steadily recording, spun in place like a confused animal before its red light blinked out.

  The register whirred to life unprompted. A receipt began to print, the paper unspooling in a long, white ribbon. It didn't list items or prices—just a single line of text in bold, blue characters:

  ONLY THE GUILTY BURN.

  The store owner stood frozen behind the counter, jaw working soundlessly, eyes fixed on what remained of Officer Merrick. His daughter had emerged from her hiding place, her phone still clutched in her hand though she'd stopped recording. Tears streaked silently down her face, not from fear of what had happened but from the abrupt, violent relief of a predator removed from her world.

  The corpse lay splayed on the linoleum, arms and legs arranged in unnatural angles. The burn on his chest dominated the scene—a complex sigil of interconnected lines and nodes that resembled nothing found in nature or human art. It glowed with residual energy, pulsing faintly in rhythm with some distant, inhuman heartbeat. Beneath the uniform's charred remnants, his skin had gone gray and translucent, as if the light had consumed whatever made him substantial.

  "CORRECTION COMPLETE," appeared briefly in my vision, then faded.

  The store owner's knees gave out. He slid to the floor, one hand gripping the counter's edge, the other making some religious gesture I didn't recognize—warding off evil or welcoming salvation, I couldn't tell which. His daughter's phone slipped from her fingers, clattering against the tiles. She stared at me not with fear but with awe tinged with terror, the look ancient peoples must have given their vengeful gods.

  Neither spoke. Neither needed to. What words could frame what they'd witnessed?

  First time in a store with money in years, and I had to beat feet before I could spend a dime of my backpay. Not that it mattered. I’d wanted that check to pay for Sophie’s care, and it’d come two months, two hospitals, and one funeral too late.

  I turned away from them, facing the storefront windows. Through the glass, across the street, a woman stood motionless on the sidewalk. Dark hair cut in a sharp pixie style, intense eyes widened in shock, a phone raised in one hand—not to call for help, but to record. She wasn't running. She wasn't screaming. She was documenting.

  Even at this distance, I could see the calculation in her expression, the mental connections forming as she processed what she'd glimpsed through the window—the flash of light, the cop's final scream, the aftermath that defied rational explanation. This wasn't a random bystander. This was someone who sought truth professionally, who recognized patterns in chaos.

  I knew her, or knew of her. Tasha Wren. The journalist who'd covered the hospital privatization that had blocked Sophie's treatment options. The one who'd been blacklisted for asking too many questions about political donations tied to healthcare policy changes. The one whose articles Sophie had read aloud to me during her final months, saying, "See, Dust? Someone's still paying attention."

  Tasha lowered her phone slightly, her lips moving as she muttered something to herself. I couldn't hear the words, but I could read them on her lips:

  "That was no gun."

  Her gaze sharpened, focusing on the store's interior, trying to see past the reflections on the glass. For a moment, our eyes met across the distance—hers alive with questions, mine empty of answers I was willing to give. She took a half-step forward, as if considering crossing the street, approaching the scene, demanding explanations.

  I turned away before she could decide. There was nothing for me here anymore. The correction was complete. The judgment rendered. The function executed. Whatever came next—police investigation, media coverage, public outcry—was irrelevant to my purpose.

  I walked past the trembling store owner and his daughter without a word, through the back door, into the alley behind the building. Each step methodical, unhurried. I didn't run. Not because I was fearless, but because the world hadn’t reacted. No alarms. No sirens, not even any shouts.

  Had the cameras glitched like the lights? Did the girl's phone record me? Or had the strange way everything acted around me been the touch of VANTA? I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected strongly that whatever VANTA was, it was some sort of computer, system, or machine, and it didn’t play well with others. But my suspicion was starting to feel an awful lot like faith.

  I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to.

  Something was still happening behind me, I could feel it brushing my spine like static. The burn on Merrick’s chest wouldn’t be fading. It would be spreading. A tendril of blue-black light, reaching down to the floor like a curious finger, testing new territory.

  No, not a finger. A root. VANTA didn’t just end things. It grew them, and it had found an abundance of rot enriched soil.

  A crack formed where it touched the linoleum, not the random fracture of physical impact, but a precise pattern, branching outward like circuitry. Not chaos, calculation. It wasn't just judging the guilty. It was rewriting the world, one correction at a time, using me as its instrument.

  The cough hadn’t come back. The tremor hadn’t either. Every step I took felt like mine again—like my body was finally syncing with something that understood how broken I really was. Not healed. Just operational.