Ira realized something was wrong when her recorder played a sentence she didn't remember asking.
She sat at her desk, headphones on, replaying the interview audio she'd collected that morning — routine questions, careful phrasing, nothing controversial.
Then a voice — her own — said:
"When did you first notice the gaps?"
Ira froze.
She scrubbed back.
The waveform was clean.
No distortion.
No glitch.
The interviewee's response followed immediately.
"I thought I was tired," the woman said. "But then I realized… everyone else forgot the same thing."
Ira's stomach dropped.
She did not remember asking that question.
She didn't go to Arav right away.
That scared her more than the anomaly itself.
Instead, she checked her drafts.
One article.
Then another.
Entire sentences were intact — grammatically correct, stylistically hers — but unfamiliar.
Not rewritten.
Inserted.
Carefully.
Respectfully.
As if someone knew exactly how far they could go without triggering resistance.
Ira closed the laptop slowly.
"Okay," she whispered to the empty room. "That's new."
Arav felt it before she told him.
A pressure — not heavy, not sharp — brushed the back of his awareness, like fingers hovering just behind his eyes without touching.
Not the system.
Something else.
"You feel it too, don't you?" Ira asked when she finally spoke.
"Yes," Arav said. "It's not hostile."
"That's not comforting."
"I know."
They met at the campus library steps — neutral ground, open space, too visible for overt manipulation.
Ira showed him the files.
Arav read them carefully.
"These aren't edits," he said. "They're alignments."
Ira stared at him. "Alignments to what?"
Arav didn't answer immediately.
Because the answer unsettled him.
"To awareness," he said finally.
The first remembered thing returned that night.
Not dramatically.
Not all at once.
Just a detail.
A woman Ira had interviewed weeks ago suddenly called back, confused.
"I don't know why I didn't say this before," she said. "But my brother was there. The night at the junction. He didn't just collapse — he looked at someone. Like he recognized them."
Ira's pulse quickened.
"Who?" she asked.
There was a pause.
"I don't remember his face," the woman said slowly. "But I remember thinking… someone wanted us to forget him."
The call ended.
Ira sat very still.
Inside Arav's head, the system remained silent.
No logs.
No warnings.
That silence was deliberate.
Whatever was happening didn't violate containment.
It circumvented it.
Later, alone in his room, Arav felt the presence more clearly.
Not watching.
Listening.
Not cold like suppression.
Not sharp like pressure.
Curious.
A thought surfaced in his mind — not forced, not foreign.
Just… offered.
You're mapping the wrong thing.
Arav inhaled sharply.
"Who are you?" he whispered.
The answer didn't come as words.
It came as recognition.
A sense of someone who lived between memory and attention.
Someone who didn't erase, didn't suppress — only nudged.
You don't fight control by resisting it, the presence seemed to say.
You fight it by remembering sideways.
Arav's hands trembled.
This wasn't an enemy.
And that terrified him.
Across the city, a report stalled mid-generation.
Not corrupted.
Paused.
For the first time, a containment process couldn't determine whether an influence existed — because it left no measurable trace.
Only aftereffects.
Rudra Dhawan felt it and frowned.
"That's not you," he muttered. "And it's not them."
He smiled faintly.
"Interesting."
Ira stared at her screen long after midnight.
One final line had appeared in her draft.
Not highlighted.
Not tagged.
Just there.
Memory doesn't disappear.
It learns where it's allowed to exist.
Ira closed the laptop.
Somewhere nearby, a presence leaned closer — not to intervene, not to protect.
Just to see what they would do next.