The reports appeared gradually.
Ari encountered them the way he encountered everything now—incidentally, without seeking them out. A headline glimpsed over a shoulder on the train. A muted television in a shop window. A radio murmuring in the background of a late shift.
The language was consistent.
"Authorities are investigating—"
"Details remain unclear—"
"Residents urged to remain vigilant—"
Ari did not stop to listen.
He did not need to.
The cadence told him enough.
He noticed how the stories framed events without substance, filling uncertainty with speculation. Faces blurred. Details remained vague. The narrative leaned on fear rather than facts.
Media noise, he realized, functioned like static—loud enough to obscure, not precise enough to inform.
That was useful.
Still, Ari adjusted.
He avoided places where screens dominated the environment. He changed routes to bypass areas where conversations lingered on the topic. He limited exposure not out of anxiety, but optimization. Too much attention—even indirect—created interference.
He preferred clean inputs.
One evening, during a break, a coworker mentioned something casually. "Did you hear about that thing downtown?"
Ari shook his head once. "No."
The coworker shrugged and changed the subject. The exchange ended there.
Ari returned to his work without disruption.
Later, alone, he assessed his own response to the coverage. There was no spike in pressure, no stirring of impulse. The noise inside him remained level.
The stories did not excite him. They did not unsettle him either. They were simply information—ambient and imprecise.
Still, he understood the risk inherent in attention. Patterns formed not only through action, but through discourse. The more people talked, the more they searched for shape and meaning.
Ari had already learned to avoid patterning himself.
Now, he extended that principle outward.
He altered his schedule subtly. He avoided geographic clustering. He ensured no single location connected too many variables at once.
Avoidance was not retreat.
It was discipline.
The silence inside him remained intact, untroubled by the external noise. He found that the less he engaged with the narrative others built, the easier it was to maintain internal order.
That night, as he lay in bed listening to the city settle, Ari allowed the distant hum of sirens to pass through him without reaction. He did not imagine scenes. He did not rehearse.
He slept.
In the morning, the world continued unchanged. Work proceeded. Access remained. No one watched him differently.
Media noise rose and fell like weather—loud, unfocused, temporary.
Ari moved beneath it unnoticed.
That, he understood, was the goal.
As long as attention remained diffuse, as long as curiosity scattered rather than converged, nothing would interrupt the system he had refined.
He did not fear discovery. He avoided attention.
And avoidance, practiced consistently, felt almost effortless.
Safe. For now.