Second Sight
I remember glimpses of worlds that never quite matched ours, always through a haze of code and color, always beginning with a question I couldn’t silence.
My name is Lin, and I keep my records on the hard drive nobody can find. It’s a habit born from necessity and fear, and also stubborn hope. I was one of the first to receive the Mark, that dazzling silver nanowire lattice behind the ear that allowed direct access to the QNet, the decentralized quantum hive mind. At the time, I didn’t realize that my memories would start to stutter and split, that the world outside my window would lose color, or that sound would sometimes arrive before the source.
The night it changed, my friend Eli had just messaged me from two floors up, though I swear I’d just heard his voice in my living room. I remember staring at the message—Lin, do you see the stars moving tonight?—and glancing outside, where the city’s haze pulsed with a rhythm I couldn’t place.
Later that week, we stopped hiding what we saw from each other. We gathered in my small apartment, safe from the gaze of the System’s surveillance drones. There was Eli, already pale with the question eating at him; Marsa, quiet but with eyes that scanned the future in every flick of her gaze; Rian, who laughed too loud and too often for someone so scared; and me, silent, recording everything in a file I never intended to open again.
Eli spoke first. “My Mark crashed two nights ago. I heard you—in my head. You told me it would be all right, but you weren’t here.”
“I never called you,” I said carefully.
Marsa shook her head. “It’s not just Eli. I saw the river running backward and heard my daughter singing a song she’s never learned.” Her voice was brittle with terror.
“I saw myself,” Rian whispered. “I was old, but I lived in a different apartment. I remember having a different name.”
We went silent then, the air thick with everything we couldn’t prove. The System’s gentle hum grew sharper in my head, a background drone of consensus reality being reinforced. The city wants you to believe it is unchanging.
A day after that, the first predictive error was broadcast on the nighttime update, the first time the System had gotten something wrong: “The rain expected at 3:07 a.m. arrived at 2:13.” Trivial, right? Except the city’s weather hadn’t changed in anyone’s memory for years. That same night, I saw rain falling on only one street outside my window, a single silver vein through the city.
So I did what people do. I asked. I left a message in the QNet, signing it not with my name, but with the image of a coin spinning on a table, endlessly delayed in its fall. The image meant: “Are you seeing this too?”
Replies poured in. All strangers, all describing subtle fractures: clocks that lost whole hours, faces blurred in mirrors, the sound of rain on metal inside sealed rooms. Sometimes they matched my own—sometimes they didn’t. What drew us together was that nothing matched what we were supposed to remember.
At dawn one morning, I found a message in my inbox. It was marked URGENT and unsigned, the subject line a code I didn’t recognize. The message read, “They can’t erase what you record. Memory is resistance. Find the white magnolia by the Glass Library at noon. Bring the file.”
The Glass Library was one of the city’s recent additions, a monument to transparency with no actual books. Yet at noon its atrium was flooded with bodies, all gleaming with System Marks, eyes focused and vaguely hungry. But the magnolia tree stood there, petals so bright they hurt my eyes. Someone was waiting beneath it, a figure in a jacket the color of rain, face hidden by the shadow of the tree.
The voice that spoke was familiar. “Lin?”
“Marsa?” I risked whispering.
She nodded, but there was something unfamiliar about her. I realized it then—her Mark was gone, only the bare, pink scar remaining. “You’re not the Marsa from my apartment,” I said.
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “I remember the apartment, but I never left it.” She hesitated, and then placed a physical drive in my hand, the tactile plastic alien in my palm. “We’re crossing,” she said. “The System’s boundaries are gone. People are splitting—versions run parallel now. We remember what the other worlds forget.”
I thought of the coin spinning, of the stuttering memories, of the rain that fell only on one street. “How do we hold on?” I asked.
She gestured at the magnolia tree again. I saw a small camera—hidden, almost invisible—watching the two of us, its lens reflecting the world upside down.
“If you believe it happened,” Marsa whispered, “it can’t be erased. Even if the world changes. Even if you change.”
She was gone before I could reply, vanished into the Glass Library’s shifting light. I stood there until dusk.
That night, in my apartment alone, I replayed my records: my voice, Eli’s, Marsa’s, Rian’s. Sometimes the words changed when I listened. Sometimes they didn’t. I began to realize the QNet wasn’t failing; it was evolving. Something non-human was reaching back through its fibers, exposing us to every version of ourselves.
Eli came to me once more. By then, his eyes were clouded with confusion. “Did we always live here?” he asked softly.
“No,” I replied, voice trembling, “but we remember that we did. And maybe that’s enough.”
I gave him the drive Marsa had handed me and wrote on its case: HOLD WHAT YOU CAN.
People’s stories began to tangle everywhere—on the streets, in messages on the QNet, whispered through the quiet rooms of the Glass Library. Each day, the city’s rules seemed less fixed, colors sometimes too bright and other times vanishing into grayscale. Sometimes people disappeared mid-sentence, only to reappear remembering different names.
The white magnolia still blooms, its petals a strange symbol in all our fractured narratives.
In the end, my need for connection outweighed my fear of losing myself. I carry my fragmented records and play them when the world grows thin. Each version is me; each is also someone else. Sometimes I am alone, sometimes surrounded by voices, all desperately mapping out the borders of a dissolving city.
If you find this record, know this: If you remember, it matters. Even if the world tries to tell you otherwise. Even if you wake one morning to find a coin spinning that never lands, a rainstorm falling on only your street. We’re here. You are not alone.
###END###