It started with a small notice on the building's bulletin board: "Residents are advised that extraordinary maintenance work on the window frames will be carried out on Wednesday. Please do not open your windows between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., to avoid calibration errors."
I got home late that Tuesday and forgot all about it. Wednesday morning, around nine, I woke up with a strange feeling of warmth. I got up and, without thinking, went to the living room window to let some air in.
I grabbed the handle, turned it, and pulled.
The window didn't resist, but I didn't hear the usual sound of glass against the gasket. I heard something like tape being peeled off a surface. And what I saw behind the frame almost made me pass out.
There was no street. No sky. No trees from the park.
There was a gray, opaque, flat surface, like Styrofoam or raw plastic. But the worst part was that the "scene" of the outside world, the view I'd had for years, was stuck to the back of my window glass like a cheap film, and it was peeling away.
A piece of blue sky curled up and fell onto my floor. I picked it up: it was light, thin as tissue paper, and on the back it had a serial code printed on it: ENV_STREET_044_LOW_RES.
I looked past the gray plastic. A few meters away, in the absolute void of that endless gray, I saw a figure. It wore a white suit, like a beekeeper's, and held a long roller. It was "painting" the building across the street onto an invisible surface.
It stopped when it saw me. Under the visor there was no face, only a pulsing light.
"Subject 774 has breached the integrity of the set," said a voice that didn't come from outside but from my kitchen intercom. "Immediate patch requested."
I tried to close the window, but the edge of the frame had started to melt, going soft as wax. The floor beneath my feet turned transparent, revealing that under my tiles there was no concrete, only a tangled network of fiber-optic cables and metal scaffolding vanishing into nothing.
"Please remain still," the intercom continued. "Reloading the texture will take only a few seconds. You may experience a slight taste of copper and the loss of your last ten years of memories. We apologize for the inconvenience."
I shut my eyes and started screaming, but my voice turned into a distorted sound, an electronic glitch.
When I opened my eyes, I was in bed. It was nine on Wednesday morning. I felt rested, but there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth. I went to the window to open it, then stopped.
In the hallway, the maintenance notice was gone from the bulletin board. In its place was a blank sheet of paper with a single handwritten sentence:
"DO NOT LOOK BEHIND THE FILM."
Now, every time I look outside, I wonder whether that barking dog or that passing cloud is real, or whether the man with the roller is just waiting for me to blink so he can give my world another coat of paint.
Have you ever noticed how, sometimes, the horizon looks a little too sharp to be real? As if it were just a high-resolution image placed there for you?