The first blind zone appeared at 09:13 a.m.
It was small enough to miss.
Ethan only noticed because he had trained himself to distrust smoothness.
He was standing in line at a convenience store, waiting to pay for a bottle of water he didn't need. The cashier scanned items with mechanical rhythm. A mother behind him distracted her child with a candy bar. The numbers above their heads floated calmly, as expected.
Except one.
A man near the entrance—late thirties, office clothes slightly rumpled—shifted his weight impatiently. His lifespan value was… incomplete.
Not zero.
Not hidden.
Incomplete.
The last two digits jittered, blurring for less than half a second before stabilizing again.
Ethan's hand tightened around the bottle.
That had never happened before.
The system had rules. Visibility was absolute. Even during recalculation, numbers adjusted cleanly—never uncertain.
He paid, nodded at the cashier, and walked out slowly, resisting the urge to turn around. The moment passed. The man exited in the opposite direction. The numbers above everyone else remained stable.
But Ethan had seen it.
A blind zone.
By noon, he found two more.
One on a crowded bus—an elderly woman whose lifespan briefly failed to update when she stumbled but didn't fall.
Another at a crosswalk—a teenager whose number lagged behind his physical movement, as if the system was a step late.
None of the events mattered.
No deaths avoided.
No years saved.
No costs imposed.
That was the point.
These were the exact kinds of moments Ethan had identified the night before: statistically insignificant, emotionally low-impact, drowned in noise.
The system had deprioritized them.
And in doing so, it had left gaps.
Ethan returned home and shut the door behind him, locking it out of habit rather than necessity. He sat at his desk, notebook open, pen poised.
Blind Zone Criteria (Observed): – Low projected impact
– No cascading consequence
– No moral leverage
– Human-scale randomness
He paused, then added a final line.
– Involves choice without outcome
The system optimized outcomes.
It didn't understand choice that led nowhere.
Ethan leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. His own lifespan number hovered faintly in his peripheral vision. It dipped by a negligible amount as he exhaled—stress adjustment, nothing more.
He smiled without humor.
"You don't see waste," he said softly. "So you don't see freedom."
The system reacted that evening.
Not directly.
Indirect pressure had always been its preferred method.
At 7:02 p.m., Ethan's phone buzzed with a notification from his bank: a flagged transaction, pending review. Minor inconvenience. He resolved it in minutes.
At 7:19 p.m., the elevator in his building stopped one floor early and reset. No alert. No cost.
At 7:43 p.m., his internet connection slowed just enough to be noticeable.
These weren't punishments.
They were nudges.
The system was testing whether inconvenience would alter his behavior.
Ethan didn't respond.
He made dinner, ate slowly, and washed the dishes by hand. He didn't intervene in anything. He didn't seek blind zones.
He waited.
At 9:11 p.m., the pressure escalated.
A system message appeared for the first time in days.
[Stability Threshold Approaching]
No color. No emphasis.
Just text.
Ethan read it twice, then closed his eyes.
"So you are watching," he said.
The message didn't change.
He opened his eyes and looked directly at his own number.
It flickered.
Not violently. Not erratically.
But out of sync.
For less than a second, it didn't match his heartbeat.
Ethan inhaled sharply.
That was dangerous.
The system had always prioritized self-consistency. A mismatch between physical state and lifespan calculation suggested either delayed input or… divided attention.
"You can't monitor everything at once anymore," Ethan whispered.
The message vanished.
The next day, Ethan pushed further.
He didn't interfere with events that mattered.
He interfered with patterns.
He stood in a queue and deliberately stepped out, then back in, creating a micro-delay with no downstream effect.
He held a door open too long, forcing people to adjust their pace by fractions of a second.
He asked unnecessary questions at a pharmacy, not to delay service but to introduce conversational noise.
Every action was harmless.
Every action was pointless.
And slowly—so slowly most would never notice—the numbers began to desynchronize.
Not everywhere.
Only around him.
A man brushed past Ethan on the sidewalk, their shoulders barely touching. The man's lifespan dipped… then corrected upward by an amount that didn't align with any recorded cost.
The system had overcompensated.
Ethan stopped walking.
For the first time, he felt something close to fear—not because of danger, but because of possibility.
The system was guessing.
That night, he dreamed.
It wasn't symbolic. The system didn't use metaphor.
He stood in a vast, empty space filled with numbers—billions of them—floating like stars. Lines connected some, forming constellations of cause and effect. Others drifted alone, unlinked, unimportant.
Ethan walked toward a cluster where the lines were thinning.
Each step caused no explosion, no alarm.
Just silence.
Behind him, the connections grew denser, as if the system were reallocating attention away from where he was going.
He woke with his heart racing and his number trembling faintly above him.
He sat up, breathing hard, and laughed quietly.
"You can't chase uncertainty," he said.
The system made its first mistake at 3:27 a.m.
A woman on the tenth floor of his building slipped in her bathroom. Nothing serious—bruised arm, shaken pride. In previous models, the system would have preemptively adjusted: a delayed step, a shifted grip, a marginal cost to prevent the fall entirely.
It didn't.
Ethan felt it before he heard it—the dull thud, the muted cry.
He was at her door in seconds, calling for help, making sure she was conscious. Paramedics arrived quickly. No lasting harm.
But when Ethan looked up, her lifespan number told the truth.
It had dropped.
Not by much.
But enough.
The system had failed to optimize.
Ethan stood in the hallway long after the paramedics left, staring at the empty space where the numbers should have aligned.
"You missed it," he said quietly.
There was no response.
Back in his apartment, a system message finally appeared—brighter than before.
[Resource Allocation Adjusting]
Ethan nodded slowly.
"So that's it," he murmured. "You're stretched."
He sat at his desk and opened the notebook again.
At the bottom of the page, he wrote a single sentence.
Control requires attention. Attention has limits.
He closed the notebook.
Outside, the city continued its flawless rhythm—almost flawless now. Tiny errors crept in at the edges, invisible to most.
But Ethan saw them.
And more importantly—
He knew how to make them grow.