Ira noticed it because she was trained to notice things that didn't add up.
The article was still there.
The date was still correct.
The byline still had her name.
But the paragraph she remembered writing… wasn't.
She read it again, slowly.
Authorities confirmed the incident was resolved without casualties. No unusual activity was detected.
Ira frowned.
That wasn't what she'd written.
She remembered choosing her words carefully.
Remembered refusing to use incident.
Remembered typing a man died and letting the sentence sit there, heavy and unavoidable.
Her fingers hovered over the trackpad.
"Arav," she said. "Did anyone contact you today?"
He looked up immediately. "No. Why?"
"They edited my piece," she said. "Not the whole thing. Just the spine."
Tiku leaned over her shoulder. "Wow. They didn't even credit the rewrite. Rude."
"This isn't censorship," Ira said slowly. "This is… correction."
Arav's chest tightened.
She pulled up her draft folder.
The original file was there.
Unchanged.
The sentence still read:
A man died after exhibiting signs of sudden emotionaldetachment.
But the published version didn't.
"That's not how edits work," Ira whispered. "They don't rewrite memory."
She stopped.
Her breath hitched.
"…Do they?"
The realization didn't come all at once.
It came in fragments.
A conversation she couldn't fully replay.
A source who no longer answered her calls.
A quote she remembered hearing but couldn't find recorded anywhere.
Ira pressed her fingers to her temple.
"I know something was taken," she said. "I just don't know when."
Arav felt cold spread behind his eyes.
This wasn't suppression.
This was revision.
They went back to the stairwell where the man had jumped.
The candles were gone.
The flowers, too.
Only a faint outline on the concrete marked where people had stood.
Ira swallowed. "People don't erase grief this fast."
Arav closed his eyes.
The pressure here wasn't fear.
It was absence reinforced.
As if the city had been encouraged to forget.
Inside him, the system did not respond.
That silence told him everything.
"I'm not misremembering," Ira said suddenly. "I know that."
Arav met her gaze. "I believe you."
That mattered more than he'd expected.
"But if they can edit what people remember," she continued, voice shaking, "then nothing we document is real unless they allow it."
"Yes," Arav said quietly.
"And if they can do that," she said, "then how do we fight them?"
Arav didn't answer.
Because this wasn't a fight yet.
It was an infiltration.
That night, Ira dreamed of typing.
Sentence after sentence.
Each one disappearing as soon as she finished.
She woke with her heart pounding, fingers numb.
On her phone, a notification blinked.
Not from the system.
Not from an authority.
Just a single word, appearing and vanishing between blinks:
Remember.
Ira sat up, breath shallow.
For the first time since the fractures began, she felt it clearly —
Someone was standing inside the gap between what happened
and what was allowed to be remembered.
And they weren't on the system's side.
Somewhere beyond oversight, a presence tilted its head.
Not to interfere.
Not yet.
But to observe the moment when awareness finally broke through compliance.