The first law of reality: everything has a price. The second law: I'm terrible at math.
I discovered this while staring at a cup of coffee that was slowly unpouring itself.
Steam reversed into the mug. Brown liquid defied gravity, flowing upward from the stain on my desk in perfect droplets. My brain stuttered, trying to process the impossible. Then I saw it—the text hovering in the air, faint and glitching like a bad hologram:
ANOMALY_DETECTED: Causality_Reversal
TIME_STAMP: 08:14:33
ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
I blinked. The text remained. I reached out, and my fingers passed through the shimmering letters. A cold static crawled up my arm.
Great. Either I'd finally lost it after three all-nighters, or reality had a user interface. And it was buggy.
My name is Kael. I'm a freelance code-monkey and professional insomniac. I fix broken systems for a living. Or I did, until the systems started fixing themselves… and then breaking in new, impossible ways.
The mug finished unpouring. The coffee stain vanished. The cup sat pristine, full, and steaming hot again. The glitching text flickered and changed:
CAUSALITY_RESTORED
COST_ASSESSED… CALCULATING
A sharp pain stabbed behind my left eye. It was a bright, clean pain—not like a headache, but like someone had deleted a memory with a scalpel. I gasped, gripping the edge of my desk.
What did I forget?
I searched my mind. My apartment keycode? Still there. My mother's birthday? Remembered it. The name of my first pet? A golden retriever named… something. The memory was a blurry photograph with the face scratched out.
The text updated:
MEMORY_ERASED: "Goldie" – First_Pet (Age 7)
REASON: Minor_Causality_Correction
I stared. The letters burned into my retinas.
No. No, no, no.
This wasn't happening. This was sleep-deprivation hallucination. I needed air.
I stumbled to the window of my cramped studio apartment, throwing it open. The city of Neovalis stretched below, a jungle of chrome and neon. Flying cars whispered between skyscrapers. Holographic advertisements flickered, selling virtual vacations and synthetic happiness.
And above it all, I saw the text.
Not on a screen. In the air. Tagging everything.
The sleek skycar zipping past:
The flickering ad for Nexus-Cola:
Even the old man on the rooftop across the way, feeding pigeons:
I gripped the windowsill. The cool metal felt real. The distant hum of the city was real. This wasn't a hallucination.
Reality had… metadata.
And I could read it.
A new line of text scrolled into my vision, urgent and red:
ANOMALY_DETECTED: PROXIMITY_HIGH
LOCATION: Street_Level – 22_Meters_SouthEast
NATURE: Lethal_Causality_Breach
I followed the virtual arrow in my vision, looking down. A crosswalk. A woman in a grey business suit stepping off the curb, eyes on her palm-display. A delivery truck rounding the corner too fast, its driver distracted by a flashing dashboard warning.
The calculations appeared before me, cold and certain:
ENTITY_A: Human_Female (Designation: Lena_Arroy)
ENTITY_B: Vehicle_DeliveryTruck (Mass: 4.2_Tons)
COLLISION_PROBABILITY: 97.3%
OUTCOME: LETHAL (Entity_A)
TIME_TO_IMPACT: 4.2_SECONDS
My heart hammered against my ribs. Four seconds.
The woman—Lena—hadn't looked up.
Three seconds.
The truck's brakes weren't engaging.
Two.
I was twenty-two meters up. Useless.
One.
No.
The denial wasn't a thought. It was a command. A refusal to accept the text, the projection, the inevitable outcome written in glowing letters.
My vision tunneled. The world dissolved into layers of shimmering code. The truck wasn't a vehicle—it was a complex bundle of
And the event… the collision… it was a line of logic. A simple, terrible equation:
IF (TRUCK.PATH) INTERSECTS (LENA.LOCATION) THEN (APPLY DAMAGE)
It was just code. And code… can be changed.
I didn't know how. I just reached. Not with my hands, but with that new, horrifying part of my mind that could see the strings. I grabbed the variable TRUCK.PATH and pulled.
The code resisted. A massive, invisible weight pushed back—the weight of cause and effect, of a universe that had already accepted this moment. Alerts screamed in my mind:
UNAUTHORIZED_CAUSALITY_EDIT!
REALITY_INTEGRITY_THREATENED!
I gritted my teeth, veins bulging in my temples. With a mental scream, I didn't change the truck's path.
I changed the street's friction.
FROM: 0.72
TO: 1.8
On the street, physics stuttered.
The truck's tires, designed for modern ultra-smooth roads, suddenly gripped the asphalt like it was superglue-covered sandpaper. The vehicle didn't just slow—it shuddered, jerked, and slewed sideways with a deafening screech. It missed Lena by a meter, slamming into a reinforced utility pole that bent but held.
Lena stumbled back, falling on the sidewalk, her palm-display clattering away. Alive. Unharmed.
Silence for a heartbeat. Then screams, shouts, the sound of running feet.
I sagged against my window, drenched in cold sweat. A wave of nausea rolled through me. But beneath it… a spark of something terrible. Awe. I just… edited reality.
The cost hit me like a sledgehammer.
The pain this time wasn't just behind my eye. It was everywhere. A deep, resonant ache in my bones. My vision swam with new, brutal text:
MAJOR_CAUSALITY_VIOLATION_LOGged
COST_ASSESSMENT: SEVERE
IMMEDIATE_PAYMENT_REQUIRED
It felt like hooks in my soul, tearing pieces away.
First: The memory of my seventh birthday vanished. The cake, the laughter, my father lifting me onto his shoulders—gone, replaced by a gaping, silent void.
Second: A constant, low-grade tone pierced my hearing in my right ear. A high-pitched whine that I knew, instinctively, would never leave. The world became subtly muffled, monaural.
Third: The smell of the rain coming through my window… disappeared. One moment it was the clean, petrichor scent of a city washed clean. The next, it was nothing. Just sterile air.
Fourth, Fifth, Sixth: Seventeen minor memories, gone in a flash. The feeling of sand between my toes. The taste of my grandmother's soup. The chords to a song I loved.
I collapsed to my knees, dry heaving. The world felt… less. Diminished. I was a painting with colors scrubbed out.
The system text finalized its transaction:
`DEBITS:
· 1x Core_Memory (Tier_2)
· 1x Sensory_Input (Auditory_Perfection)
· 1x Sensory_Input (Olfactory_Array_Subset)
· 17x Episodic_Memory_Fragments
BALANCE: REALITY_STABILITY +/- 0.0001%`
A balance. I'd saved a life. The universe had taken pieces of mine in exchange. A glitch tax.
Before I could process the horror, a new alert pulsed into view. This one wasn't white or red. It was a deep, void-like purple.
ANOMALOUS_ENTITY_DETECTED: SECTOR NEOVALIS-7
DESIGNATION: [REALITY_GLITCH – CLASS: PRIMORDIAL]
STATUS: **ACTIVE & AWARE**
THREAT_ASSESSMENT: CATASTROPHIC
DIRECTIVE: CONTAINMENT & AUDIT
ASSET_DISPATCHED: [PURIFIER] – ETA: 09:00:00
My blood ran cold.
Purifier.
Across the street, the reflection of my apartment in a dark office window shimmered. My own reflection didn't move. It stared back at me, its eyes not eyes but swirling vortexes of green code. It raised a hand—not in greeting, but in a slow, deliberate slicing motion across its throat.
Then it pixelated and vanished.
My apartment door hissed open on its own. No one was there. But on the floor, just inside the threshold, a single sheet of old, yellowed paper lay. It hadn't been there a minute ago.
I crawled to it, my body heavy with exhaustion and terror.
It wasn't paper. It was vellum. And on it, in precise, unfaded ink, was a message:
THE SYSTEM SEES ALL.
THE SYSTEM CORRECTS ALL.
YOU ARE AN ERROR.
YOU WILL BE CORRECTED.
– THE ADMINISTRATORS
Below the text, a simple line drawing: a clockface, its hands pointing to nine. And beneath that, a sequence that made my new, code-seeing vision itch:
[ROOT_ACCESS_PROTOCOL: OMEGA]
[USER: KAEL]
[STATUS: MARKED_FOR_DELETION]
The paper dissolved into ash in my hands, the ash then vanishing into motes of light.
I was left alone in the silent apartment. The hum of the city felt distant. The high-pitched whine in my ear was a constant reminder. The void where my memories had been ached.
I had saved a life. I had broken the rules of existence.
And in nine hours, something called a Purifier was coming to debug me.
I looked at my trembling, slightly numb hands. The tools of a god, paid for with the currency of a soul.
The first law of reality: everything has a price.
The third law: I'd just started a war with the cashier.