I woke to silence.
Not the usual way, like with the hum of the fridge, the twinkling streetlights outside, muffled of late-night television from her neighbor’s apartment. The world was utterly, impossibly still.
Everyday wake up with the first thing, I reached to my phone.
Dead...?
I sat up and tried the lamp. Nothing too.
A growing fear in my chest as I walked to the window, looking out at a city that had gone dark. There is none of lifeless, silence, and even the sky seemed eerily void of stars.
A blackout? Maybe.
I stepped outside and saw others noticed too—All the people came out from their apartments in confusion, whispering, checking their unresponsive devices.
A man across the street kept tapping at his smartwatch in frustration. A teenage girl closed and reopen her laptop as if it might on.
Then someone screamed.
"Ahhhhh!"
I turned around and noticed an old woman stood on her doorstep, staring at a newspaper with her trembling hands. She was not screaming in fear, but in frustration, panic even. The paper was blank. Not just missing headlines,
Completely, blank.
My pulse quickened. I ran back inside and open all the drawers, flipping books. Every page was empty.
Even the text, the images—gone. I grabbed a photo album, the one my mother had given to me before she passed away. It had been filled with memories,
Blank. Every single page.
The world had lost its record of itself.
————
The first day :
By midday, the chaos had escalated. Phones, computers, even televisions—all screens flickered on but displayed only a blank nothingness.
Conversations turned frantic as people realized they couldn’t recall certain facts. Passwords were forgotten. Even personal details—GMAIL or the names of lovely relatives, all had became fuzzy.
It wasn’t just the machines that had lost their memory. People were losing theirs too.
And me, a former software engineer, clung to my thoughts like lifelines, repeating my own name, age, and past. I grabbed a notebook, tried to write down what i could still remember, but nothing was came to my mind.
A man on the street claimed this was a blessing—a reset for humanity.
The world still functioned in a way as cars ran, water flowed, but the infrastructure that held civilization together—communication, digital records, even written language—was unraveling.
I wandered through the hollowed-out remains of a once-modern world. Without access to information, people had been relying on spoken word, trading knowledge like currency.
There started to form a group and took charge by strong leaders with strong memories or some skills But still, panic was all around, everyone still concerned about the future days.
There was the day, I went for grocery store to get supplement before everything "out of stock".
And guess what? That was a horrible journey i have met before.
I reached for a can of beans, and for a split second, the entire aisle flickered. All the shelves, the products, even the people around her just blink for second in a sudden. It was as if reality had stuttered. When the moment passed, everything looked the same, but my heart was racing and my fear was ballooning for that moment.
a boy came nearby, seems like no older than twelve, he was staring at me with wide-eyed.
"You saw that too?" he whispered.
I crouched beside him "You’ve seen it before?"
He nodded and said "It happens when you try to remember too much."
Whats the logic was? I couldn't think any of it as it not likely make sense of, “What do you mean?”
The boy then say it with a very determined look, “The world isn’t broken, its being rewritten.”
After all this, I began testing my memories focused on things i shouldn’t forget as well as my mother’s voice, the smell of rain. Each time when I concentrated hard enough, the world around started glitched, revealing fragments beneath the surface. A ghostly phenomenon.
i saw buildings flickered into different shapes, and the street signs with names that I didn’t recognize, also people who weren’t there before.
Someone was altering the world, in piece by piece.
That night, i found others who had seen the glitches. A small underground group, led by a woman named Wenny, had uncovered a terrifying truth:
The world wasn’t experiencing a technological collapse. It was a controlled reset.
"Something is erasing our history." Wenny explained.
"Not just from our minds, but from reality itself. Every time we forget something, it ceases to exist. And whoever is behind this is making sure we never notice.”
"But why?" I asked.
Wenny's expression darkened. “Because something is rewriting us into something else.”
Me and the group created a plan.
If memory can anchor reality, they need to create a glitch big enough to expose the source of the rewrite. They gathered together, where thousands of people once gathered to celebrate, but now it was empty.
One by one, they began speaking aloud the most vivid memories they had.
Descriptions of loved ones, lost cities, forgotten songs. As they did, the world trembled.
Buildings blinked and blinked,the sky flickered between day and night. And just for a second, I saw them, tall, faceless beings standing just beyond the edge of perception, watching, waiting.
They were the one of the reset.
And they had noticed me.
Now, the world was unstable, reality shifting like a corrupted file. I could feel they were preparing to erase their resistance.
And what I knew for the time.
The world wasn’t theirs to control. It was ours.
With all my strength, she clung to a undeniable truth—my mother's face. The love in her eyes, the way she hummed when she cooked, the warmth of her embrace.
I spoke the memory loudly, forcing it into the fabric of reality.
The ground cracked beneath me, the city crashed...
Light exploded.
The city was still, the sun shone bright, and people were waking up as if from a long dream.
The devices still didn’t work, the books were still empty, but something had changed. People remembered each other. They recalled names, places, emotions.
I knew they weren’t safe. Not yet.
The architects might return. But for now, humanity had won a battle they never even knew they were fighting.
And this time, they would not forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment