Synthesis

Elias stood at the edge of what had once been a storefront, heat washing over his face as flames climbed the brick like living things. A sign above the entrance—OPEN—flickered on and off, stubbornly looping long after the power should have failed.

That was the detail that finally broke him.

Fire didn’t loop.

Fire consumed, spread, collapsed into ash. But this blaze repeated the same motions—same burst of sparks, same window collapsing inward, same curl of smoke drifting left, then resetting. Elias watched it happen three times before his breath caught.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered. Or worse—it’s real, but not original.

Around him, people ran, shouted, filmed. Some laughed. Some cried. None of them noticed the repetition. None of them noticed the seams. They were too busy performing the roles they’d been handed.

Elias backed away from the flames, heart hammering. His mind raced—not with panic, but with synthesis. Years of pattern recognition snapped into place all at once.

The media loops.
The synchronized outrage.
The drones hovering just long enough to be seen.
The way every escalation justified the next restriction.

It wasn’t chaos.

It was choreography.

He glanced down at his phone again. The message was still there.

DO YOU FEEL THE DESYNC TOO?

No sender. No metadata. No network path.

That alone told him everything.

Elias slid the phone into his pocket and scanned the street. The crowd surged past him again, the same chant repeating with the same cadence, as if the city were stuck on a corrupted track. Above, a drone dipped, corrected itself, then dipped again—identical movement, frame-perfect.

They’re watching for anomalies, he realized. For people who stop playing along.

He forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly, the way he used to during system failures—when the worst thing you could do was react too fast.

“I need to disappear,” he murmured.

Not flee.
Not fight.
Hide.

He turned down an alley choked with smoke and debris, moving with purpose now. Every instinct screamed at him to keep his head down, to blend in, to become noise again—but he knew that wouldn’t work anymore.

The system had flagged him.

He could feel it in the way the hum seemed to follow him now, adjusting pitch as he moved. In the way his reflection in a shattered window lagged just a fraction behind his motion.

Elias ducked into a burned-out apartment building, climbed a stairwell stripped of railings and light. Each step upward felt like moving against gravity that didn’t quite exist. At the third floor, he slipped into a unit with no door, just a blackened frame.

Inside, the air was still.

Too still.

He sat on the floor, back against the wall, flames flickering outside the window. His hands trembled—not from fear, but from the weight of the realization settling in.

If this is a simulation, he thought, then attention is the currency.

He powered off his phone.

The hum softened.

A test.

He smiled grimly. “Good to know.”

Elias didn’t know who was running the world. He didn’t know how many layers deep the lie went. But he knew this: survival no longer meant food or shelter.

It meant opacity.

As the city continued to burn—replaying its destruction for anyone still willing to watch—Elias Ward faded into the background, becoming just another dark window in a ruined building.

But unlike the others, he was no longer asleep.

And somewhere deep in the system, a quiet note was added to the logs:

ANOMALY: ELIAS WARD — STATUS: UNTRACKED

For now.