I noticed the error at exactly 7:42 a.m.
There was nothing special about that morning.
No strange dreams. No headaches. No sense of anticipation.
Just another weekday.
I was standing in my kitchen, staring absentmindedly at the digital clock on my phone while the kettle heated up. That was when something caught my attention.
The phone read 07:42.
The wall clock above the sink read 07:41.
One minute.
At first, I didn't react. Clocks drifted all the time. Cheap batteries, bad calibration—normal things. I unlocked my phone, refreshed the screen, and watched the numbers carefully.
07:42.
I waited.
The wall clock ticked.
07:42.
They synchronized.
I frowned.
It wasn't the correction that bothered me. It was the timing. I hadn't adjusted anything. Neither device should have known to align with the other.
I stood there longer than necessary, listening to the faint hum of electricity in the walls. The kettle clicked off, steam rising into the air, but the uneasiness stayed.
Numbers weren't supposed to hesitate.
On the way to work, I tried to forget about it. I really did.
Traffic lights behaved normally. The bus arrived on time. People complained about the weather and scrolled through their phones like every other day.
Nothing looked wrong.
That made it worse.
At 9:00 a.m., I logged into my workstation and waited for the system to finish loading. A notification appeared almost immediately.
System Log Updated.
I froze.
Our internal servers updated once a day—at midnight. Everyone on the team knew that. Unexpected logs meant manual access, and manual access meant trouble.
I opened the log file.
There was only one new entry.
[08:59:59] — Record adjusted.
No source ID.
No process name.
No reason.
That alone should have been impossible.
I refreshed the page.
The entry disappeared.
Not marked as deleted.
Not overwritten.
Just… gone.
I checked the system clock.
09:00:00.
One second late.
That was when my phone vibrated against the desk.
A message. Unknown number.
"Don't rely on what you remember."
I stared at the screen longer than I should have.
Pranks were common. Scams even more so. But something about the wording felt deliberate. Precise. As if the sender knew exactly what would unsettle me.
I typed a reply.
"Who is this?"
The typing indicator appeared instantly.
Then stopped.
No reply came.
I locked my phone and leaned back in my chair, letting my gaze drift to the fluorescent lights above. Around me, coworkers typed, laughed, argued about deadlines. The world moved forward without hesitation.
As if nothing had happened.
I reopened the system log.
The entry was back.
This time, there were two lines.
[08:59:59] — Record adjusted.
[09:00:01] — Observer acknowledged.
My fingers tightened around the mouse.
Observer.
That word didn't belong in any system architecture I knew. It wasn't a role. It wasn't a process. It wasn't even a valid tag.
The dark screen reflected my face faintly.
For the first time that morning, a thought surfaced—slow, unwelcome, and impossible to ignore.
Maybe the problem wasn't the data.
Maybe it was when the data started paying attention to me.