(Third Person Limited)
The computer lab had a way of making time feel unreal after midnight. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed softly, their glow flattening everything into shades of white and gray, as if color itself had grown tired and gone home. Rows of unused monitors sat like dormant machines, screens dark, collecting dust and fingerprints from earlier hours.
Shawn Vargas sat alone near the far wall, one leg hooked around the base of his chair, shoulders slightly hunched toward the screen in front of him.
Lines of code filled the monitor, scrolling past in steady intervals as his fingers moved across the keyboard. There was no urgency in his movements. No hesitation either. Each keystroke landed exactly where it needed to, like he was transcribing something already complete rather than creating it from scratch.
The assignment was infamous among third-year students.
A distributed systems simulation designed to fail—intentionally. Nodes crashed without warning. Network latency spiked unpredictably. Requests duplicated, vanished, or arrived out of order. The goal wasn't perfection but resilience: build something that didn't collapse just because reality behaved badly.
Most students hated it.
Shawn should have hated it too.
Instead, he felt an odd, unsettling calm.
He leaned forward, eyes narrowing slightly as he reread a section of logic handling node reassignment. It worked. But it worked in a way that annoyed him, like a sentence that got the point across but used too many words.
"That's… clumsy," he muttered.
He deleted the block without ceremony.
What replaced it was smaller. Cleaner. The logic folded inward, assumptions stripped away until only necessity remained. He didn't consciously plan the change; the structure simply presented itself, and his hands followed.
Minutes passed. Maybe more. The lab clock ticked quietly on the far wall, unnoticed.
A warning box suddenly appeared on his screen.
Race condition detected.
Shawn frowned.
He hadn't expected that. The synchronization should have held.
He scrolled back through the relevant section, scanning line by line. The code was sound. The lock acquisition was correct. The data flow consistent.
The issue wasn't the code.
It was the model.
The simulator assumed a fixed delay between node failure and reassignment—an assumption that stopped being valid the moment adaptive prediction was introduced. The warning wasn't flagging an error. It was complaining that reality no longer fit its expectations.
Shawn adjusted the constraint.
The warning vanished.
He stared at the clean output, a faint chill running through him.
That shouldn't have worked.
Not because it was wrong—but because it had been obvious. Too obvious. The solution had come without resistance, without the usual friction that marked real effort.
He leaned back slightly, rubbing at his temple.
A dull pressure had formed behind his eyes, subtle but persistent, like a headache waiting for permission to exist.
"Probably just tired," he said quietly, though there was no one around to hear it.
He glanced at the corner of the screen.
1:47 a.m.
The number surprised him. He hadn't noticed the hours passing.
Shawn ran one final stress test, pushing the system into deliberate chaos. Nodes failed in clusters. Messages arrived corrupted or duplicated. The simulation strained—and then stabilized.
It held.
He exhaled slowly.
The assignment was done.
With a few clicks, he packaged the files and submitted them. The confirmation message appeared almost immediately, bright and final.
Assignment submitted.
The lab didn't react. The lights continued their quiet hum. The night remained indifferent.
Shawn sat there for a moment longer, staring at the screen, the pressure behind his eyes deepening just enough to make him uncomfortable.
Something felt off.
He couldn't explain it, only that the silence around him felt heavier than before, as if the room were waiting for something he hadn't noticed yet.
After a moment, he shut down the terminal, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and stood.
The chair rolled back slightly, its wheels echoing too loudly in the empty lab.
As he walked toward the exit, the glow of the monitor faded behind him, leaving the room dark once more—unchanged, unaware, and already falling behind.
(First Person)
The moment I stepped out of the lab, I knew the headache wasn't normal.
At first, it was just pressure—like someone pressing a thumb gently against the center of my skull. Annoying, but manageable. I told myself it was the fluorescent lights, the late hour, the caffeine I shouldn't have had but did anyway.
Then my thoughts refused to line up.
The hallway outside the lab stretched longer than it should have, the rows of doors repeating with mechanical precision. I became aware of my footsteps echoing, not just as sound but as pattern—intervals, reverberation decay, the slight asymmetry caused by the open stairwell at the far end.
Why am I noticing this?
I tried to ignore it, focused instead on walking, on the feel of the backpack strap against my shoulder. But my mind kept moving, branching outward, grabbing onto details without asking permission.
The security camera above the exit door had a blind spot. I could tell by the way the ceiling panel was misaligned. Not because I'd studied it before—but because the angle was wrong, and my brain filled in the rest automatically.
I pushed through the door and into the night.
Cool air hit my face, carrying the distant hum of the city. Cars passed on the main road beyond campus, headlights streaking between buildings. Somewhere, a group of students laughed, the sound breaking apart into individual voices before I consciously registered it as a group.
Time felt… off.
Not faster. Not slower. Just uneven. Like my thoughts were arriving ahead of the moment they belonged to.
I reached the stairs and paused, one hand gripping the railing as a sudden wave of dizziness washed over me. The pressure in my head sharpened, blooming outward, and for a split second my vision fractured—edges doubling, lights smearing into thin lines.
Too much.
The word didn't come from fear. It came from clarity.
I closed my eyes, trying to breathe through it, and immediately regretted it.
Behind my eyelids, shapes formed—abstract, luminous, layered. Not images exactly, but structures. Relationships. Systems nested inside systems, each one complete on its own, each one part of something larger.
It was beautiful.
It was terrifying.
I felt like I was standing at the edge of something vast, my mind leaning forward without my consent. Thoughts stacked on top of one another, not colliding, not competing—just… fitting.
I could see the assignment again, not as code but as behavior. I could see why it worked, why it would continue to work, and how it could be improved if I had more time.
I didn't want more time.
The pain spiked without warning, sharp and blinding, like a spike driven straight through my skull. I gasped, bending forward as my hands clenched around the cold metal railing.
Stop.
Stop thinking.
The command cut through the cascade, and the structures collapsed inward, vanishing as abruptly as they had appeared. The world rushed back into place—stairs, lights, night air—solid and reassuringly limited.
I opened my eyes.
My heart was pounding. My hands were trembling.
That wasn't normal. That wasn't stress. That wasn't anything I'd ever felt before.
I stood there for a long moment, waiting for the dizziness to pass, for the pressure to ease. It didn't disappear, but it dulled, retreating to a low, persistent throb.
People walked past me, barely glancing in my direction. To them, I was just another tired student lingering too long on campus.
They couldn't see the afterimage burned into my thoughts.
They couldn't feel the sense of loss, sharp and irrational, like something important had just been taken away.
I straightened slowly and started walking again, more carefully this time, as if sudden movement might trigger whatever that had been.
The city lights ahead looked the same as always.
I wasn't.
And I had no idea how to explain that—to myself, or to anyone else.
(Third Person Limited)
The apartment was quiet in a way that felt lived-in rather than empty.
A single lamp illuminated the living room, its warm light softening the worn edges of furniture that had seen better years. The couch cushions sagged slightly in the middle. Papers were spread across the coffee table in uneven stacks—bills, work documents, things that had been set down with the intention of organizing them later.
Shawn stepped inside and closed the door behind him as gently as he could.
The smell of reheated food lingered in the air, faint but comforting. Something with garlic. He toed off his shoes near the entrance, lining them up out of habit, and slipped his backpack onto the hook by the wall.
On the couch, his mother sat with her glasses perched low on her nose, eyes scanning a printed spreadsheet. She looked up the moment she heard the door.
"You're late," she said.
Her voice wasn't sharp. It never was. It carried tired concern, the kind that had settled into her bones over years of long shifts and quiet worry.
"Yeah," Shawn replied. "Group project ran long."
She glanced at the clock on the wall and raised an eyebrow. "At nearly two in the morning?"
He shrugged, careful to keep his movements casual. "You know how it is."
She studied him for a moment longer than usual. The light caught her face at an angle that made the lines near her eyes more pronounced. "You okay?"
"Fine," he said, too quickly. He corrected himself. "Just tired."
Her gaze lingered, then drifted to his temples. "You look pale."
Shawn forced a small smile. "Fluorescent lighting does that to people."
She snorted softly, then shook her head. "There's food in the fridge. At least eat something before you crash."
"I will."
He moved toward the hallway, then hesitated.
The pressure behind his eyes pulsed again, subtle but insistent, as if responding to the quiet. The apartment felt smaller than usual. Too enclosed. Every sound—the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking clock—stood out with uncomfortable clarity.
"Mom?" he said.
She looked up again. "Yeah?"
"Do you ever…" He trailed off, searching for the right words. "Do you ever think about Dad?"
The air shifted.
It was barely noticeable, but Shawn felt it immediately—the way her shoulders stiffened, the way her expression closed just a fraction.
"Of course I do," she said after a moment. Her tone was measured, careful.
"I mean," he added, "about the accident."
She exhaled slowly and set the papers aside. "Shawn."
"I know," he said quickly. "I'm not trying to—"
"It was a hit-and-run," she said, cutting in gently but firmly. "The police did what they could. They never found the driver. That's all there is."
Her words were steady, but there was something beneath them—old hurt, carefully managed.
He nodded. "Right. Sorry. I didn't mean to bring it up."
She softened, reaching for her glasses and removing them. "You don't have to apologize for asking. I just don't want you carrying things you can't change."
Shawn looked away.
Unfinished things had a way of sticking with him lately.
"I'm going to lie down," he said.
"Eat first," she reminded him.
"I will," he repeated, though they both knew he probably wouldn't.
He walked down the hallway to his room and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch sounded louder than it should have.
On the other side, his mother sat alone on the couch, staring at the spot where he had been standing, her concern deepening into something quieter and more afraid.
Inside his room, Shawn leaned back against the door, eyes closed, the dull ache in his head pressing harder now.
They never found the driver.
The thought surfaced uninvited, sharp and unresolved.
Somewhere deep in his mind, something shifted in response—subtle, almost eager.
Shawn pushed himself away from the door and collapsed onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling as the apartment settled back into silence.
The night pressed in around him, heavy and unmoving.
And beneath the ordinary quiet of home, something unseen continued to hum, patient and relentless, as if counting down in a language only his mind was beginning to understand.