I packed like a man preparing for his final deployment. Each item had its purpose, its designated pocket, its assigned function in the mission ahead. Nothing personal. Nothing excessive. Weapons I didn't yet own but somehow knew I'd be able to manifest. Clothing that would last. Cash that couldn't be traced. All arranged with military precision in a bag I'd carried through three war zones, the fabric worn in places only I could see, like the invisible scars beneath my skin. The apartment felt colder than usual, emptier, though I was taking almost nothing with me.

  Sophie's urn watched from the kitchen table as I worked, the brushed aluminum catching morning light that seemed to pass through me rather than warm me. Five days, VANTA had said. Five days until I reached Keene's estate. Five days until I executed a correction that would erase a state senator like Officer Merrick had been erased, leaving nothing but a char mark and questions no one would be allowed to answer.

  I wasn't sure what frightened me more—that I was capable of this, or that I wasn't frightened by it. The rage that had driven me after Sophie's death had crystalized into something colder, more functional. I didn't feel righteous. I didn't even feel vengeful anymore. I just felt... tasked. Like a program running its assigned function. A weapon aimed at a target.

  My fingers traced the seam of Sophie's urn, the metal cool and unresponsive beneath my touch. "I'm heading out," I said to the silence. "Won't be back for a while."

  The words hung in the air, falling into that familiar void where Sophie's responses should have been. I'd grown used to these one-sided conversations, but today they felt insufficient. Today I needed something more tangible than ash and memory.

  I placed the urn carefully in the duffle bag, wrapping it in a t-shirt I'd never wear again. Then I grabbed my keys and headed for the door, not looking back at the apartment that had never been home, only a waiting room for whatever came next.

  The drive to Harlow Cemetery took twelve minutes. I'd made the trip exactly three times since Sophie's funeral—once on her birthday, once on Christmas, once when the rage had threatened to consume me whole and I needed somewhere to scream where no one would hear. I didn't visit often. The cemetery felt like a theater—a stage where people performed grief rather than lived it. Sophie wasn't there. Sophie was ashes in an urn that traveled with me. Sophie was the hollow space beneath my ribs that no amount of corrective blue light could fill.

  But the school board had commissioned a memorial plaque after her death—a small token for the teacher who'd loved her students even as the system that employed her stood by while she died. It wasn't a grave, but it was something physical, something permanent in a way I no longer felt. And since this mission might be the end of whatever I'd become, I needed to say goodbye, even if just for form's sake.

  The cemetery gates stood open, rusted in places but still functional. February had stripped the trees bare, their branches reaching toward a sky that refused their supplication. My boots crunched on gravel as I walked the path I'd memorized but rarely used, past headstones that tracked Harlow's decline in dates and cheaper materials as the years progressed.

  Sophie's memorial plaque sat beneath a young oak tree the faculty had planted in her memory. Bronze, modest, set in a small concrete base. "Sophie Carrow, 1996-2024. Teacher, Sister, Light." Below that, a quote she'd kept pinned above her desk: "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." I'd told them to leave off the part about the storm. The storm had already come and gone, taking her with it.

  I knelt beside the plaque, my knees pressing into cold ground that held neither her body nor her spirit. The tree had grown since the last time I'd visited, its branches reaching higher, its roots pushing deeper into soil that would never nurture my sister.

  "This might be wrong," I said to the bronze letters of her name. "What I'm about to do. What I've already done. What I've let myself become. You always said there were lines we shouldn't cross, even for the right reasons. Especially for the right reasons."

  The wind picked up slightly, rustling dead leaves across the cemetery ground. I didn't take it as a sign. Sophie wasn't speaking through nature. Sophie wasn't speaking at all.

  "But you're not here to pull me back anymore," I continued, my voice low and even. "You're not here to remind me that mercy matters more than justice. That forgiveness heals more than vengeance." I traced her name with my fingertip, feeling the cold metal against my skin. "And the thing is, Soph...I think some part of you would understand. Not approve, maybe. But understand."

  I glanced at the dates on the plaque, the twenty-eight years that encompassed everything she'd been and everything she'd never get to be. "You died because men like Keene decided your life wasn't worth the cost of saving it. You died because a system valued profit over pulse. And now that same system has turned me into something that can tear it down—not through protests or policy or the slow march of change, but through immediate, irrevocable correction."

  The silence that followed felt heavier than usual, weighted with everything unsaid between us. I knew what Sophie would argue—that becoming the monster to fight the monster was still becoming a monster. That the ends never justified the means. That I was trading my humanity for revenge dressed up as justice.

  I also knew what she'd understand—that watching her die by spreadsheet had broken something in me that could never be repaired. That my rage had been looking for a weapon since the moment she'd taken her last breath. That VANTA hadn't created my capacity for violence; it had merely given it direction and purpose.

  "I'm still your brother," I whispered. "Whatever else I am now, I'm still that. And I think—I hope—that's the part of me you'd forgive. The part that couldn't save you then but won't let anyone forget what they did to you now."

  As the words left my mouth, I noticed something strange happening to the grass around the plaque. The blades shimmered, their edges becoming too sharp, too defined, as if rendered by outdated graphics software. For a split second, the entire patch of ground beneath my knees resolved into visible polygons, each blade of grass a distinct, digital construct before snapping back to organic reality.

  [PROXIMITY SYNC ESTABLISHED - OBSERVER MISSION LIVE]

  The text appeared in my field of vision, electric blue and unavoidable. Even here, VANTA watched. Even here, it measured and cataloged and interfaced. Even grief was data to be mined, emotion to be quantified, resolve to be tested.

  "Can't even say goodbye without surveillance," I muttered, rising to my feet. My knees didn't crack. My back didn't ache. My body functioned with mechanical precision, optimized for its purpose by whatever lived behind my eyes now.

  I placed my hand on the plaque one last time, feeling the cold bronze beneath my palm. "I love you, Soph. If there's anything after this, I'll see you there."

  Then I turned and walked back toward the car, my steps measured and even, my shadow following a fraction of a second too late. The mission was live. The countdown had begun. And whatever Dustin Carrow had been—brother, soldier, grieving survivor—was fading with each step I took away from Sophie's memorial, replaced by something more functional and less human.

  Observer-Prime. Instrument of correction. Hand of VANTA.

  I drove back into town and parked off Main Street, leaving the car where I could retrieve it easily when the time came. Walking Harlow one final time felt like a ritual without meaning—saying goodbye to a place that had already forgotten me. The mid-morning light cut through cloud cover in precise angles, illuminating dust particles that hung suspended like data waiting to be processed. Each step I took registered in ways that went beyond impact and sound, as if the pavement itself logged my movements in some vast, invisible ledger. The town had never felt less like home, more like a simulation running on outdated hardware.

  People moved around me in careful orbits, their eyes sliding past without recognition or acknowledgment. Not strangers—neighbors, former classmates, the mechanic who'd fixed my car for three years. They'd stopped seeing me months ago, after Sophie's funeral, when grief had rendered me into something uncomfortable, a walking reminder of systems that failed and futures that died. Now, VANTA's alterations made that invisibility complete. I was becoming a negative space in Harlow's consciousness, a redaction walking on two legs.

  Above the pharmacy that had failed Sophie, a digital billboard flickered as I approached. The advertisement for antidepressants dissolved into static, then reformed with text that hadn't been there before:

  [OBSERVER PROTOCOL ACTIVE: EXTRACTION IMMINENT]

  [MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL DISCRETION]

  The message lingered just long enough for me to read before morphing back into smiling actors pretending prescription drugs had saved their lives. No one else reacted. No one else saw. The message was for me alone, VANTA's network somehow bleeding through commercial infrastructure to deliver coded instructions.

  I kept walking, past the closed school where Sophie had taught, past the abandoned government offices where I'd filed appeal after appeal for her treatment. Each streetlight I passed dimmed momentarily, then brightened to a harsh, unnatural intensity that simultaneously cast my shadow in multiple directions. My footprints left faint blue afterimages on the concrete that faded seconds after I moved on—digital ghosts marking my passage through a town I was leaving behind.

  "Morning, Mr. Carrow."

  The voice startled me. An elderly man nodded from his porch, one of Sophie's former students' grandfather. The only person in three blocks to acknowledge my existence.

  "Morning," I replied, my voice sounding distant.

  "Heading out of town?" he asked, eyes tracking to the duffel bag slung over my shoulder.

  "Something like that."

  He nodded slowly, as if confirming something he'd already suspected. "Been meaning to say... your sister was one of the good ones. System's got no place for good ones anymore."

  Before I could respond, his porch light flickered violently. The man's gaze shifted toward it, brow furrowing in confusion. When he looked back at me, his expression had gone blank, eyes unfocused as if he'd forgotten what he was saying or who he was speaking to. He turned and went back inside without another word.

  [CIVILIAN MENTAL INTERFACE: DISRUPTED]

  [CONVERSATION REDACTED]

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +45]

  The text scrolled across my vision in now-familiar blue characters. VANTA was editing my goodbye tour in real time, severing connections, erasing interactions. I wasn't just leaving Harlow; I was being excised from it.

  A security camera mounted on the bank building swiveled toward me as I passed, its mechanical whirr audible in the morning quiet. The lens focused with artificial precision, tracking my movement down the sidewalk. Then, with a sharp electrical pop, it short-circuited, smoke curling from its housing as the red recording light went dead. Three more cameras followed suit as I continued walking—locking onto my position before failing in sequence, leaving digital blind spots in my wake.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I hadn't received a notification since the night at the overlook when VANTA had first made contact. The screen showed no service bars, no WiFi connection, no data link of any kind. Yet a message waited in an app I'd never installed:

  [MISSION PARAMETERS UPDATED]

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: 2750/3000]

  [TIER ONE TOOLSET CALIBRATION: 92% COMPLETE]

  [EXTRACTION WINDOW: 6 HOURS REMAINING]

  I hadn't earned those points. I hadn't done anything but walk through a town that was forgetting me with each step. The System was accelerating something, rushing toward a threshold I couldn't see but could feel approaching like storm pressure against my skin.

  At the edge of town, I turned toward the Sunoco station—the last stop before the highway that would take me to Keene and whatever waited after. My car sat where I'd left it, ordinary and unremarkable except for the faint blue shimmer that outlined its frame when I blinked too quickly. I retrieved it and drove the short distance to the gas pumps, parking beside one with mechanical precision.

  I stepped out, credit card in hand—one last normal transaction before leaving normality behind. As my fingers touched the pump, the digital display went black, then flickered back to life with a sharp electronic whine. But instead of fuel grades and prices, Senator Silas Keene's face filled the screen, his campaign smile stretched across pixels never designed to display human features. His eyes locked with mine for a fraction of a second, his mouth opening to speak words I couldn't hear. Then the image shattered, dissolving into digital artifacts before resetting to its standard interface.

  [TARGET PROXIMITY ALERT]

  [CONVERGENCE PATH: LOCKED]

  [TIME UNTIL CORRECTION: 72:18:45]

  The countdown appeared where the total amount should have been, ticking down with atomic precision. I inserted the nozzle into my tank, the mundane action at odds with the reality fracturing around me. Gasoline flowed, measured by a meter that occasionally displayed impossibly precise decimal points.

  "Did you see that?"

  The voice came from across the pump island. A woman stood beside her SUV, keys clutched in one hand, the other frozen halfway to the pump handle. Her eyes were wide, focused not on me but on the screen that had momentarily displayed Keene's face.

  "The screen," she continued, voice hushed. "It showed—I thought I saw—"

  Her words cut off as the overhead lights flickered in sequence, casting alternating patterns of shadow and illumination across the concrete. She glanced up, then back at me, something like recognition dawning in her expression—not of who I was, but of what I represented. Something impossible. Something system-breaking.

  I said nothing. What could I say? That she'd glimpsed the seams in reality where VANTA was stitching its corrections into the world? That she'd seen through the digital veil for a moment before the System pulled it closed again?

  She swallowed, her hand dropping back to her side. "Never mind," she murmured, turning back to her vehicle. "Must have been a glitch."

  But her hands shook as she fumbled with her credit card, and she kept glancing at me from the corner of her eye—not with fear, exactly, but with the unsettled awareness of someone who's seen something their mind has no framework to process.

  [CIVILIAN PERCEPTION EVENT: LOGGED]

  [MEMORY CORRUPTION PROTOCOL: INITIATED]

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +75]

  I finished fueling in silence, replaced the nozzle, declined the receipt that began printing without my request. The paper extruded from the machine, blank except for a single line of blue text visible only to me:

  [THE CORRECTION IS COMING. YOU ARE THE HAND THAT DELIVERS IT.]

  I left it hanging there, a message for no one, and returned to my car. As I pulled away from the station, I glanced in my rearview mirror. The woman stood beside her vehicle, watching me leave, her face a mask of confusion and disturbed recognition—the expression of someone trying to unsee what can't be unseen.

  Harlow receded behind me, but VANTA's presence intensified with each mile marker, the dashboard instruments occasionally displaying characters and symbols that belonged to no known language. I was leaving, but I wasn't escaping. I was merely moving to my assigned position in a game whose rules I was still learning, whose stakes I was only beginning to understand.

  I hadn't slept in seventy-two hours. My eyes burned from screen glare, my neck cramped from hunching over keyboards in the dark. The worst part? This was my normal. The six monitors surrounding me cast ghostly reflections on my apartment windows, transforming them into observation panels where I watched my deterioration in blue-tinted silhouette. Normal people call this paranoia. I called it pattern recognition. Something had broken reality open at that convenience store, and I wouldn't stop until I knew what had crawled out.

  "Come on, you bastard," I muttered, scrubbing through frame thirty-seven again. The corrupted footage played back in jerky fragments—Merrick's uniform visible in one corner, the store owner's terrified face, that impossible blue flash, and... static. Not damaged. Not deleted. Transformed. The crucial three seconds warped into digital noise that pulsed with an internal rhythm I couldn't decipher but somehow recognized.

  I'd backed up the video six different ways. Each copy degraded faster than the original, like the corruption was contagious, spreading through connected systems. My phone had crashed four times trying to email the file, then it factory reset itself without permission. The SD card I'd transferred it to had melted, actually melted, inside my card reader, leaving a small pool of plastic and a smell like burning hair.

  But I'd seen it. I'd watched that hollow-eyed man with military posture speak a single word to Merrick. I'd seen the cop's body illuminated from within, his skin becoming transparent as blue light ate through him from the inside out. I'd seen the precise, terrible pattern burned into his chest where his heart should have been.

  And I'd seen the world swallow it whole. No incident reports. No follow-up. No mention in the scanner chatter. No social media gossip. The convenience store had reopened the next day with a "plumbing issue" sign explaining the previous closure. The register receipt I'd grabbed—the one that said "ONLY THE GUILTY BURN"—had faded to blank thermal paper overnight, as if time itself had accelerated around the evidence.

  My gaze drifted to the corkboard on my left, where Sophie Carrow's face smiled from a photograph taken during our third interview. Not just a source. A friend. We'd bonded over coffee that turned into whiskey, over interviews that became strategy sessions, over shared rage at systems designed to extract profit from suffering. She'd sent me her medical records—the denial letters, the appeals, the "we regret to inform you" corporate poetry that slowly murdered her in bureaucratic verse.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "He's a good man," she'd told me once, when I asked about her brother. "But he doesn't trust what that means anymore."

  She'd described Dustin like people describe storms they both love and fear: powerful, distant, protective, and sometimes devastating. A soldier who'd come home to fight a different kind of war. A man who'd run himself ragged trying to navigate insurance companies, clinical trials, and pharmaceutical programs. A brother who'd held her hand while she died because that was all the system had left him.

  The man I'd seen through that convenience store window wasn't just angry. He was changed. Weaponized. I needed to understand what fundamentally changed between grief and vengeance.

  A soft electronic beep pulled me from my thoughts, my mother's oxygen monitor signaling a minor adjustment in flow rate. Through the half-open pocket door, I could see her hospital bed dominating what had once been my dining area. The machines around her hummed their mechanical lullaby, keeping her tethered to a life that slipped further away each day.

  The irony wasn't lost on me. The same healthcare system that had failed Sophie was slowly draining my mother's insurance, her savings, and now mine. The same billing codes, appeals process, and polite denials. Different disease, same outcome. Just slower. More expensive. More cruel in its extended hope.

  I turned back to my screens, tabbing through database searches I'd been running for a day. Facial recognition scans for Dustin Carrow had come back with bizarre errors—photos where his features blurred into unrecognizable smudges, security footage that corrupted precisely when he should have appeared, DMV records that showed multiple conflicting addresses or none at all. He existed in the system, but the system couldn't seem to hold him properly.

  But the deeper I dug, the more I found strange artifacts, digital footprints that shouldn't exist. Hospital records showed Sophie Carrow's vitals being checked two weeks after her death. Email metadata from her account timestamped well after her funeral. A single frame from the hospital security camera showed a figure in the server room the night billing records for seventeen patients simultaneously "corrupted."

  I'd started mapping these anomalies, creating a constellation of digital disruptions across Harlow. Power fluctuations. Traffic camera malfunctions. ATM errors. Each incident was minor enough to ignore individually, but together they formed a pattern—a path of digital distortion that followed Dustin Carrow's movements with mathematical precision.

  "You're becoming something else, aren't you?" I whispered to his blurred image on my screen. "The question is: what's making you?"

  I reached for the pill bottle beside my keyboard—more caffeine, my blood was probably half stimulant by now—when my laptop screen flickered. Not the usual flicker of overtaxed hardware, but something deliberate. Rhythmic. For a split second, I saw a command prompt I hadn't opened, text scrolling too fast to read. Then it vanished, replaced by a system error: "File not found."

  Every file related to Dustin Carrow had disappeared. Every search result, every database hit, every news article mentioning his name—gone. Not moved, not corrupted. Erased so entirely that the system didn't even acknowledge they had ever existed.

  "No, no, no," I hissed, fingers flying across the keyboard, trying recovery commands that returned only empty strings. "You don't get to disappear him too."

  From my mother's room, a voice called out with surprising clarity: "You've always chased ghosts, Tash."

  I froze, then rushed to her bedside. Her eyes were clear for the first time in days, focused on my face with a lucidity that made my heart stutter.

  "Mom?" I knelt beside her, taking her thin hand in mine.

  "He's not yours to find," she whispered, her voice stronger than it had been in months. "He's already been claimed."

  Before I could ask what she meant, her eyes drifted closed again, consciousness receding like a tide. I pressed my fingers to her wrist, feeling the fragile pulse there, steady but faint. Just a moment of clarity in the fog—rare now, precious, and always disorienting.

  When I returned to my workstation, the screens had changed. My desktop wallpaper—a photo of my mother from before her illness—had been replaced with a solid blue background. And in my email inbox, highlighted as unread, was a message I'd received three days before Sophie died.

  The subject line pulsed gently, as if breathing: "If you're reading this."

  I opened it, though I'd read it a dozen times already. Sophie's last communication, sent when she must have known she was running out of time. But this time, certain phrases glowed with a faint blue undertone I'd never seen before:

  "If I don't make it, it'll be because someone decided profits weigh more than breath. Please make them choke on their math. They can hide behind policy papers and actuarial tables, but we both know these aren't deaths—they're murders by spreadsheet. You're the only one still keeping count."

  The last line pulsed brighter than the others, as if emphasized by an invisible hand: "You're the only one still keeping count."

  The TV in my mother's room clicked on by itself, volume low. Not her usual documentary, but a news segment about Senator Silas Keene's upcoming appearance at a healthcare industry fundraiser. His face filled the screen, the practiced smile never reaching his eyes. For a fraction of a second, his image distorted—not the usual digital compression artifacts, but something precise and intentional. A blue grid superimposed over his features, marking points like targeting coordinates.

  The lights in my apartment dimmed, then brightened. My phone vibrated with a notification from an app I'd never installed. The air felt charged, as if a storm were building inside my walls rather than outside them.

  I wasn't afraid. I felt... recognized.

  "I see you," I said aloud to the empty room, to the watching presence I could feel but not name. "And I'm not stopping."

  I pulled open my desk drawer and removed the one thing I knew couldn't be digitally altered—an old film camera, loaded with actual photographic stock. Whatever was happening to Dustin Carrow, whatever had killed Merrick, whatever was erasing evidence faster than I could preserve it—it lived in the digital realm. But I still had analog options. Old-school techniques. Physical evidence.

  I wasn't chasing ghosts anymore. I was hunting for something that I thought could erase memory itself. And I'd find it, with or without sleep, with or without help, with or without sanity.

  Because Sophie was right. I was the only one still keeping count.

  I walked the industrial outskirts of Harlow where the town bled into abandoned factories and overgrown lots, each step taking me further from what remained of normal. The late afternoon light fell wrong—too sharp in places, too diffuse in others, as if reality couldn't quite decide on its rendering settings. A chain-link fence vibrated in perfect geometric patterns when no wind blew. The clouds above scrolled like automated backgrounds, their edges occasionally pixelating when I stared too long. Something was happening to Harlow, or perhaps to my perception of it. The town was thinning, becoming translucent in places where the System's attention wavered.

  Streetlights flickered into life despite the daylight, cycling through their programming in accelerated sequence—red, yellow, green, all three at once, none at all, patterns that traffic signals were never designed to display. Cars passed less frequently now, and those that did moved with jerky, artificial precision, like vehicles in early driving simulations. I watched an SUV stop at an intersection, wait exactly 3.25 seconds, then proceed regardless of the signal's state.

  The corner market where I'd sometimes buy coffee shut its metal security gate while customers were still inside. They didn't protest. They didn't even seem to notice as the lights went out and they continued shopping in perfect darkness, reaching for items that dissolved into placeholder graphics before their fingers made contact.

  A digital billboard advertising local real estate flickered through its rotation before freezing on an image of a house that had burned down three years ago. The text beneath it read: [ASSET DEPRECATED - AWAITING DELETION].

  Something fundamental was unwinding. Not just glitches or System interference, but a systematic removal of Harlow itself from active memory. As if VANTA was closing tabs on a browser, shutting down unnecessary processes, freeing up computational resources for whatever came next.

  I turned down Palmer Street, heading toward O'Malley's—the dive bar where I'd spent too many nights after Sophie's diagnosis, drowning grief that hadn't yet matured into rage. But where the bar should have stood, between the laundromat and the pawn shop, there was... nothing. Not an empty lot. Not a construction site. Nothing. A gap in physical space, a missing tooth in the jawline of the street. The buildings on either side connected seamlessly, as if O'Malley's had never existed at all.

  I stopped, staring at the absence. My memories insisted the bar had stood there for decades—the worn wooden stools, the cracked leather booths, the bartender who'd served in Desert Storm and never charged full price for veterans. But reality disagreed, presenting a continuous storefront with no space for those memories to have occurred.

  "Excuse me, sir. Would you like to register to vote?"

  The voice came from my left—a city worker in a high-visibility vest, clipboard in hand, ID badge swinging from a lanyard around his neck. He extended a flyer toward me, his expression professionally neutral.

  "The bar," I said, pointing to the non-existent gap. "O'Malley's. It was right there."

  The man's face didn't change. His arm remained extended, the flyer unwavering. "Would you like to register to vote? Local elections matter."

  "Do you see what's happening? The town is coming apart."

  His smile didn't waver, but something changed in his eyes—a momentary flicker of confusion, quickly suppressed. "Would you like to—"

  And then he froze. Not metaphorically, but literally—suspended mid-gesture like a paused video, the flyer half-extended toward me, his mouth shaped around the next word that never came. Around him, the world continued. Wind moved his hair. A bird landed on the sidewalk near his motionless foot. But the man himself existed outside time's flow, trapped in digital amber.

  Three seconds passed. Five. Ten. Then, with a jerk like a skipped frame, he animated again—only now his arm was at his side, the flyer nowhere to be seen, his gaze focused on a point down the street as if I weren't standing directly in front of him.

  "Sir?" I said.

  He walked straight past me, his shoulder brushing mine without recognition, continuing down the street with mechanical purpose. I turned to watch him go, and in the moment my back was turned, the sound of the world changed—ambient noise dropping out, replaced by the faint electronic hum I'd come to associate with VANTA's direct manipulations.

  When I turned back, the missing bar had returned, but wrong—its facade rendered in too-perfect detail, its neon sign displaying characters from no known alphabet, its windows reflecting a sky I couldn't see when I looked up. A placeholder. A prop in a stage that was being struck even as I watched.

  Understanding crystallized in my mind with algorithmic certainty. This wasn't just a mission. It was an extraction. VANTA wasn't simply sending me to eliminate Keene—it was removing me from Harlow's continuity entirely, cutting me out of the town's fabric like a surgeon excising a tumor. Not physically, but ontologically. The town was becoming a closed node, a completed chapter, while I was being compiled for deployment elsewhere.

  [CONNECTION STABILITY: DEGRADED]

  [DEPLOYMENT NODE STATUS: LOCKED]

  [REINFORCEMENT PACKAGE DELIVERED]

  [TIER ONE TOOLSET – ONLINE]

  The text scrolled across my vision, blue characters against reality's rendering. And then the world shifted—not visibly, but in my bones. A sensation like static electricity crawled across my skin, followed by a sudden absence of weight, as if gravity had momentarily recalibrated its hold on my molecular structure.

  Something opened inside me—not a wound, but an access point. Information flooded in through channels I hadn't possessed moments before. I suddenly knew the structural weak points of every building around me, calculated to six decimal places. I could hear electrical currents flowing through underground cables, distinguish between power lines and fiber optic by the pitch of their hum. The air carried data on wind currents—temperature gradients, pollution particulates, the carbon dioxide signatures of every person within a hundred-yard radius.

  I looked at my hands. They appeared unchanged to conventional sight, but when I focused with this new awareness, I could see potential energy coiled around my fingers like living wire, ready to be shaped into tools, weapons, extensions of VANTA's will. Not summoned yet, but available—a toolset installed but not yet activated.

  Muscle memory I'd never earned guided my movements as I turned in a slow circle, scanning my surroundings with senses beyond the standard five. I knew how many heartbeats existed within thirty meters (seventeen, each one a distinct rhythm I could identify and track). I could see through walls by processing the minute vibrations their surfaces transmitted. I detected patterns in ambient electromagnetic fields that revealed recent movements, emotional states, concealed weapons.

  The door of a nearby building—its purpose now illegible, its signage corrupted into meaningless symbols—swung open as I looked at it, though I hadn't touched it or given any command. The hinges whispered data as they moved: material composition, maintenance history, optimal force required for silent operation. The air inside measured me, calculating my dimensions to ensure proper clearance as I approached.

  I stopped at the threshold, awareness expanding in concentric circles. This wasn't enhancement—it was transformation. VANTA hadn't upgraded me; it had overwritten me with something else, something that processed reality as data and responded with algorithmic precision.

  "I didn't ask for this," I said to the empty doorway, the watching system, and whatever remained of Harlow that could still hear me. "But VANTA didn't wait for permission. It just waited for proof I wouldn't stop."

  My voice sounded different in my ears, layered with information about vocal stress patterns, subharmonics, and decibel measurements. Even my words were being processed, analyzed, and fed back to me with metadata attached.

  I turned away from the door, from the building whose purpose had been erased, and faced the direction of my apartment. Not to rest. Not to reconsider. But to prepare and inventory what remained of Dustin Carrow before VANTA's final compilation rendered me into something else entirely.

  The sky above Harlow flickered again, its edges tearing slightly before resealing. The town was being archived, saved in some static format, while I was being formatted for a new function. Six hours remaining, according to the extraction window. Six hours until I left behind whatever humanity I still possessed.

  Six hours until correction began.

  I stared at my laptop screen as another file vanished mid-transfer, the progress bar freezing at 98% before collapsing into an error message I'd never seen before: "CONTENT UNVERIFIABLE - TRANSMISSION DENIED." That was the fifth video clip in an hour, disappearing not after I'd sent it but during the sending, as if something was intercepting and evaluating my communications in real-time. When I tried to take screenshots of the error messages, the capture function failed. When I attempted to record my screen with my phone, the footage showed only static where the error should have been. Something was watching me watch it disappear.

  The printer hummed to life unprompted, its paper tray shuddering as it processed a job I hadn't sent. I approached cautiously, journalist's instincts warring with the growing sense that conventional explanations had left the building hours ago. The page that emerged was blank except for a centered line of text:

  "YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A DELUSIONAL PATTERN."

  I crumpled the paper and tried my print job—a screenshot of the convenience store footage metadata that showed the file existed despite being unplayable. The printer accepted the command, its status light blinked while it processed. But another blank page emerged with the same message, as if my original command had been overwritten.

  My wall of evidence was becoming a monument to disappearance. Red strings connected photos to empty spaces where photos had been. Notes referred to testimonies now erased from recording devices. Timelines tracked events that digital records insisted never happened. I was watching the systematic removal of truth happening in real-time, executed with algorithmic precision.

  But as one layer of evidence vanished, another revealed itself beneath. The more I looked for Dustin Carrow directly, the more he disappeared. But when I searched for absences—for gaps in surveillance footage, for corrupted database entries, for error logs in hospital systems—patterns emerged. Not Dustin himself, but his negative space. The impression he left on digital systems that tried and failed to process his existence.

  Camera blind spots at the hospital during Sophie's final days. The server crashes at the insurance company, coinciding with appeals being denied. Emergency backup generators that failed during power outages despite testing green hours earlier. In each instance, buried in system logs and metadata, there were fragments of code that matched nothing in standard programming languages—characters rendered incorrectly, crashed debugging tools, and seemed to rewrite themselves when examined too closely.

  My hands trembled as I pinned a discovery to the wall—a single frame extracted from security footage of the industrial park flooding three years ago. Most of the facility was underwater, but one section remained mysteriously dry—the loading dock where another camera had recorded Senator Keene. A figure in military stance stood in the background, barely visible in the shadowed doorway. Not Dustin, but someone with his build and posture, watching Keene shake hands with another man whose face had been deliberately blurred in the original footage.

  I'd been looking at this backward. Dustin wasn't a victim who'd snapped after his sister's death. He had been present, observing the corruption that would eventually claim Sophie, not causing it, but witnessing it, recording it, judging it, and now, correcting it.

  My printer activated again, spitting out page after page at maximum speed. Each sheet emerged blank except for that phrase: "YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A DELUSIONAL PATTERN." The repetition itself felt threatening, not a warning but a command, an attempt to gaslight me into abandoning the connections I was making. I yanked the power cord from the wall, but the machine continued operating for thirty more seconds before finally falling silent.

  "I know what I saw," I whispered to the empty room, the watching presence I could feel but not locate. "I know what you are."

  But did I? The phenomenon I'd witnessed wasn't supernatural in the traditional sense. It wasn't ghosts or demons or anything with historical precedent. It felt algorithmic and calculated, as if a system executed functions with cold precision. Not evil, exactly, but utterly indifferent to anything except its parameters.

  I returned to my secure inbox, to Sophie's final email. The message I'd read a hundred times since her death. The one I'd printed and pinned above my desk as both a memorial and a motivation. Only now, examining the digital original, I noticed something impossible: annotations I hadn't made. Specific phrases underlined in faint blue, timestamps that didn't match the header data, paragraph breaks inserted where none had been before.

  The last line—"You're the only one still keeping count"—now glowed with subtle blue luminescence under my desk lamp, a light that shouldn't exist in plain text displayed on an LCD screen. I touched the monitor, half-expecting to feel heat or electrical charge, but encountered only the cool glass surface.

  "Tash?"

  My mother's voice from the other room—clear, strong, more lucid than I'd heard in months. I rushed to her bedside, heart pounding with that familiar mixture of hope and fear that accompanied her rare moments of clarity.

  "I'm here, Mom," I said, finding her hand among the blankets.

  Her eyes focused on me with startling precision, as if the fog had temporarily lifted. "He's not your ghost to chase anymore, Tash."

  I froze, the words striking with targeted accuracy. "What did you say?"

  "The soldier. Sophie's brother." Her voice was steady, her syntax unbroken by the usual confusion. "He's not yours to find. He's already been found."

  She'd never met Dustin. I'd never mentioned him to her, especially not since her condition worsened. She shouldn't know his connection to Sophie and shouldn't be speaking about him with this unnerving certainty.

  "Mom, how do you know about—"

  But her eyes had already drifted closed again, her breathing settling into the rhythm of sleep. Or something that resembled sleep but felt more like an abrupt disconnection, as if a call had been terminated from the other end.

  I backed away from the bed, the air suddenly heavy with unnatural stillness. Not just quiet, but absence—the calculated deletion of ambient sound. The oxygen concentrator's mechanical rhythm seemed muted, though its indicators showed normal function.

  The television flicked on by itself, screen brightness rising to maximum intensity. The Ken Burns documentary that was playing earlier appeared, but something was wrong. The footage rewound without my input, settling on a segment about civil disobedience during the Civil War. But the narration that began wasn't Burns' familiar voice. Instead, it spoke with inhuman precision, each word perfectly enunciated with digital flatness:

  "Correction always begins with memory. What remains is what matters."

  The historian being interviewed on screen continued moving his lips, but the words emerging were disconnected from his mouth movements. The voice continued:

  "You are pursuing shadow fragments. The Observer-Prime is completing his function. Systems that fail will be corrected. Those who maintain failure will be removed."

  I didn't reach for the remote. I didn't try to turn it off. I stood transfixed, understanding with increasing clarity that I wasn't witnessing a failure of technology but its evolution or its possession by something that moved through digital networks like a predator through tall grass.

  "Sophie Carrow's death was a calculation error. The correction is now in process. Interference will be logged."

  The screen flickered, images of Senator Keene appearing and disappearing rapidly, campaign footage, security stills, news appearances, before settling back on the documentary. But now the historian's face occasionally glitched, revealing Dustin's features beneath, hollow-eyed and expressionless.

  I understood then that Dustin was no longer merely seeking vengeance. He had become something else, a weapon wielded by whatever force had reached through my television to deliver its warning. Not a man corrupted by grief, but an instrument of design, executing corrections according to parameters I couldn't see but could feel closing around Harlow like a fist.

  The lights in my apartment dimmed momentarily, then brightened to painful intensity before settling back to normal. The television shut off as abruptly as it had been activated. In the sudden silence, my mother's breathing continued uninterrupted, as if nothing unusual had occurred, as if she hadn't briefly served as a mouthpiece for something inhuman.

  I returned to my workspace, my wall of vanishing evidence, to Sophie's glowing email. My hands no longer shook as I retrieved my analog backup, a film camera loaded with chemical photographs that couldn't be remotely deleted, a notebook filled with handwritten observations that existed beyond digital reach. Old technologies were too primitive for whatever was erasing the newer ones.

  Whatever was happening in Harlow, whatever transformed Dustin from grieving brother to instrument of algorithmic judgment, it wasn't finished. It was accelerating, reaching beyond its initial parameters, touching systems and lives far removed from its original targets. And if I was right, if the patterns I'd traced through vanishing evidence pointed where I thought they did, then what was coming wasn't just the elimination of one corrupt senator.

  It systematically rewrote what we accepted as possible, honest, and accurate. A correction that didn't stop at individuals but extended to the structures that produced them. And Dustin, or what remained of him inside whatever he'd become, was merely the first visible manifestation of something larger awakening within our networks, devices, and digital nervous system.

  I closed Sophie's email, the blue glow lingering like afterimage on my retinas. Her final words echoed with new meaning:

  "You're the only one still keeping count."

  And I would. Not just of the dead, but of the corrections. Not just of the vanished, but of what replaced them. Someone had to witness what was coming, even if witnessing was all I could do.