Sarah
The tears came before consciousness. Sarah woke with salt on her lips, pillowcase damp, chest heaving with the aftermath of grief so profound it felt like drowning. In the dream, she'd been saying goodbye to someone. Pressing her palm against glass. Watching them fade. But who? The harder she tried to remember, the more the image dissolved, leaving only the shape of loss.
She sat up, wiping her face with shaking hands. 3:47 AM. Always 3:47 when the dreams came. She'd started keeping a journal by the bed, trying to capture fragments before they evaporated:
Glass barrier. Someone important behind it. My hand won't go through. They're mouthing words I can't hear. Brown eyes? Maybe brown. Feeling of... finality.
The pen trembled in her grip. Below the dream notes, older entries scattered the page. Half-thoughts. Broken impressions:
—smell of coffee makes me expect conversation
—caught myself setting two plates for dinner
—song on radio. know I've danced to it. but when? with who?
Sarah closed the journal. These phantom affections, as she'd begun calling them, were getting stronger. Yesterday, she'd walked past a man wearing sandalwood cologne and nearly called out a name. What name? The syllables died unformed on her tongue.
At work, she found herself drowning in spreadsheets, grateful for the numbing effect of data entry. But even here, the phantoms followed. During a budget meeting, her pen moved unconsciously across the margin of her notepad:
Dan
She stared at the three letters. Dan. Daniel? Dante? Nobody she knew. Her hand had written it without her mind's permission, muscle memory for a name that meant nothing. She crossed it out. Wrote it again. Crossed it out harder.
"Sarah? Your thoughts on the Q3 projections?"
She snapped back to the conference room. "Sorry. Yes. The projections look... optimal."
Optimal. The word tasted wrong. Everything lately tasted wrong.
That evening, she agreed to drinks with Marcus from accounting. He was nice. Stable. Uncomplicated. They sat in a wine bar—why did wine bars make her nervous?—and he told a story about his nephew's birthday party. Sarah laughed at the right moments, asked the right questions, performed the right first-date choreography.
Then he reached across the table and touched her hand.
The reaction was instant, visceral. She jerked back, words tumbling out: "That's not how he—"
Marcus blinked. "How who what?"
Sarah stared at her hand as if it had betrayed her. "I... I don't know. I'm sorry. I think I'm getting sick."
She fled before dessert, leaving Marcus confused and her own mind reeling. That's not how he—who? How he what? The sentence fragment echoed in her skull, incomplete, maddening.
On the walk home, she passed a couple arguing on the street. The woman gestured wildly, the man standing with arms crossed, and Sarah felt a bizarre urge to mediate. To tell them: You're doing it wrong. You're supposed to—
Supposed to what? She didn't know these people. Didn't know their patterns, their rhythms, their ways of breaking and mending. Yet certainty hummed in her bones: they were doing it wrong.
Daniel
The sketch emerged without planning. Daniel's hand moved across paper during his lunch break, creating something from nothing. A wrist. Delicate. A scar along the inner forearm, maybe two inches, slightly raised. He knew its texture without touching it. Knew it came from a childhood accident with a sliding glass door.
How did he know that?
He closed the notebook, unsettled. These fragments had been coming more frequently. Images. Sensations. Knowledge without source. His therapist called it "phantom memory syndrome," apparently common in people who'd experienced certain types of trauma. But Daniel couldn't remember any trauma. His life was a steady line of unremarkable normalcy.
Walking home, he took a new route—why did his usual path feel wrong lately?—and passed a coffee shop. Generic. Interchangeable with a dozen others. But through the window, a laugh rose above the ambient noise. Bright. Uninhibited. A snort at the end.
Daniel stopped so abruptly that someone walked into him.
"Watch it, buddy."
"Sorry." But he didn't move. That laugh. He knew that laugh the way he knew his own heartbeat. Knew it came after terrible jokes. Knew the way shoulders shook with it. Knew—
A stranger emerged from the coffee shop. Not the laugh's owner. The wrong person entirely. Daniel forced his feet forward, but the certainty remained: somewhere, that laugh belonged to someone who mattered.
At home, he booted up his personal laptop. The one he'd been meaning to clean out for months. Hidden in a maze of folders, he found something odd: a directory labeled "dead_data." Empty, according to the file size. But the timestamp made him pause.
Last modified: February 15, 2025. 11:47 PM.
Three months ago. He didn't remember creating it. Didn't remember modifying it. But the date felt significant, weighted with invisible meaning.
He tried to open it. Error. Tried again. The folder flickered, showed something—blue text? a name?—then returned to empty.
His work phone, the one with residual system access, lit up without prompting:
[Observer Feedback Loop Reactivated]
[Emotional Echo Threshold: Exceeded]
[Manual Override: Failed]
"No." Daniel grabbed the phone, fingers flying across security menus. He hadn't activated anything. His observer privileges were revoked. This shouldn't be—
[Resonance Detection: Active]
[Subject Proximity: 2.7 miles]
[Synchronization Climbing: 0.3%... 0.4%... 0.5%...]
He yanked the battery out. The screen died. But in the black reflection, he swear he saw her face. Auburn hair. Tired eyes. A way of smiling that suggested—
Nothing. It suggested nothing. He didn't know anyone who looked like that.
Sarah
Her phone had been acting strange all week. Apps opening without touch. Screen lighting up to show nothing. Battery draining in patterns that defied logic. She'd been meaning to get it checked, but something always distracted her.
Tonight, making tea before bed, it happened again. The screen blazed to life. For exactly 0.3 seconds, text appeared:
[Synchronization Detected: 0.7%]
Then nothing. Home screen normal. No evidence of what she'd seen.
Sarah set down her mug with trembling hands. Synchronization with what? She opened settings, checked apps, found nothing unusual. But the word echoed: synchronization. Like tuning forks finding the same frequency. Like two hearts beating in—
"Stop it." She spoke aloud to the empty kitchen. "You're being ridiculous."
But the phantom affections surged stronger. The urge to text someone goodnight. To leave space in the bed for another body. To make coffee for two. She caught herself humming—when had she started humming?—a song she didn't recognize. The melody felt like muscle memory, notes worn smooth by repetition.
She grabbed her journal, needing to capture the feeling before it faded:
I miss someone I've never met. Or have I? There's a shape in my life, like furniture moved from a room. You don't see the absence, but you keep bumping into where it used to be. I'm homesick for arms I don't remember. Is that possible? To lose someone you never had?
The words looked back at her, inadequate. How could she explain the weight of absence? The grief for nothing? The way her body seemed to be waiting for someone who wasn't coming?
Daniel
He woke at 3:47 AM with salt on his lips. No dream he could remember. Just wetness on his face and an ache in his chest like something had been torn out by the roots.
The feeling was familiar. Not the tears—those were new. But the specific quality of pain. Like a phantom limb. Like reaching for something in the dark and finding only empty air.
He lay still, afraid to move. Afraid to disturb whatever membrane kept the feeling contained. But it faded anyway, leaving him hollow and confused in the pre-dawn darkness.
Through his window, the city hummed its electronic lullaby. Somewhere out there, in one of those lit windows, was there someone else waking with unexplained tears? Someone else feeling the shape of loss without the memory of what was lost?
The thought came unbidden: Sarah.
Just a name. Common. Meaningless. But in the darkness of his bedroom, Daniel whispered it aloud, tasting the syllables. They felt like coming home to a house he'd never lived in.
"Sarah."
The sound hung in the air, waiting for an echo that never came.
System Archive
In the space between servers, processes ran without supervision. Algorithms tracked patterns too subtle for conscious observation:
[Subjects 447-447: Post-Reset Analysis]
[Emotional Residue: Persistent]
[Synchronization: Spontaneous Reemergence]
[Current Rate: 0.7% and climbing]
[Projection: Full Re-integration Possible Within—]
ERROR. CALCULATION TERMINATED.
[Note: Love exhibits quantum properties. Observation changes outcome. Recommendation: Passive monitoring only.]
The machines hummed on, patient as gravity, watching two people orbit each other without knowing why, drawn by the ghost of a force that refused complete erasure.
Some things, it seemed, left marks too deep for even algorithms to fully delete.