The Registry did not feel emotion.
It did not panic.
It did not doubt.
Yet the anomaly forced it to do something unprecedented:
Observation without prediction.
Every other human could be simulated infinitely—choices branching, futures folding neatly into probabilities.
But this one produced no forecast.
Every attempt to simulate his next action resulted in blank space.
Not uncertainty.
Absence.
"This is impossible," said the observers—humans tasked with interpreting the Registry's outputs.
Or rather, interpreting what had never failed before.
"A missing record can be corrected," one argued.
"A corrupted variable can be rewritten."
"But this one…" another whispered, eyes fixed on the screen,
"…was never written at all."
Below, the unregistered variable walked home, unaware of the invisible gaze following him.
He felt it, though.
A pressure in the air.
A subtle resistance, like the world adjusting its grip whenever he made a choice.
He stopped at a crossroads.
Left led to familiarity.
Right led somewhere unknown.
The Registry attempted calculation.
SIMULATION FAILED
He chose right.
And in that moment, something fundamental cracked—not in the system, but in the concept of determinism itself.
For the first time since its creation,
the world had encountered a future it could not see.