The World Feels... WrongI wake up to a flickering sky.The streetlights above me pulse in and out like a dying heartbeat, casting shifting shadows over the cracked pavement. A neon sign blinks too fast, its letters scrambling into nonsense before snapping back into place. A man in a brown coat walks past—then stops, stutters backward in a loop, and repeats the motion like a corrupted video file.What the hell?My breath catches. My limbs feel sluggish as I push myself up from the ground. I don’t remember collapsing. The last thing I recall is... pain. A sharp, electric kind of agony surged through my skull, leaving nothing but static in its wake. Now I’m here, with the world around me glitching like a broken simulation.“Hey! Are you okay?”I turn too fast, my balance shifting strangely as if gravity itself is recalibrating. A woman stands a few feet away, her expression uncertain. Her voice sounds off—like an echo arriving before the words do. Her eyes flicker for half a second, iri

First Signs of TroubleThe moment I reach for the glass, time bends.I see it falling, slow as a raindrop suspended in midair. My arm moves without thought, faster than it ever should. My fingers close around the glass just before it shatters against the counter. My heart pounds in my chest as I set it down carefully, staring at my own hand like it belonged to someone else.A deep breath. A slow exhale. It’s fine. Just another side effect.Then the lights flicker.For a moment, my apartment isn’t my apartment. The walls stretch, shift—becoming something sterile, metallic. The air feels thinner. I swear I see another version of myself in the mirror, his expression twisted in alarm. And then, just as suddenly, reality snaps back into place.I take a step back, my breath shallow. "No, no, no…"The words are barely a whisper.A sharp chime rings in my ears. My vision warps, lines of red text burning into my sight.[Overseer Alert: Tracking Initiated]A cold weight settles in my gut. The s

Breaking LimitsI take a deep breath, my muscles coiled like springs. The sensation of raw energy hums beneath my skin, an itch I can’t scratch. My body is no longer bound by the same rules. I feel it—every fiber of my being screaming for release, for motion, for something more. I need to push. I need to see how far I can go.The first test is speed. I lunge forward, the wind slicing past me as the world blurs. One moment, I’m at the end of my street. The next, I’m standing on the other side of town, my chest rising and falling in rapid bursts. My heart should be pounding from exertion, but it’s not. The rush of movement fills me with a heady kind of exhilaration.But then, the world twitches.The streetlights overhead flicker, their glow stuttering in odd, rhythmic pulses. The same couple I passed on the sidewalk a second ago reappears in front of me, walking the same path, holding the same conversation, their words eerily identical.I step back, a cold knot forming in my stomach. “W

Ghost in the SystemI stared at my screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, my pulse pounding in my ears. Darren had to be here—somewhere. Somewhere in the vast, sprawling veins of the government’s digital infrastructure, his name had to exist.I ran the search again, breathing shallowly and scrolling through the results.No matches were found.The words burned into my vision. My stomach twisted into a tight knot. Impossible. Nobody just vanished, especially not from a system that tracked everything—bank records, medical files, social security numbers, employment history. And yet, Darren was a ghost. A glitch. A name wiped clean from existence.My fists clenched, and before I knew it, I slammed them against the desk. "No. No way."I pulled up my secondary hacking interface, digging deeper. Bypassing firewalls. Scraping encrypted archives. Pulling fragments of forgotten data like a desperate archaeologist clawing through ruins.Nothing.I checked birth records, school transcripts, a

The AttackThe first bullet zips past my ear, so close that I swear I feel the heat of its friction as it slices through the air. My breath catches. My pulse spikes. And then—everything slows.The world stretches into unbearable clarity as my enhanced reflexes take over, a gift I never asked for and a curse I can never escape. The system inside me does what it always does: it calculates. Within the span of a blink, a dozen potential escape routes manifest before my eyes. But before I can even act on them, something fractures in my vision—two versions of the same moment unfolding in tandem.One reality: I move too slow. The bullet finds its mark, ripping through my skull.The other: I roll left, just in time, just barely scraping by with my life intact.I don’t get to choose.The system does.I feel my body react before my mind even processes the decision. The muscles in my torso tighten, and I throw myself to the left, hitting the ground with a force that rattles my bones. The impact