The ambulance screeched off, wheels churning in the barely light day. Ethan stiffened in the sidewalk, his shaking hands still shaking from what he had just done. He should be proud of himself. He had just saved a man's life. Fear, pure fear, took over from within him.
The mobile in his pocket had once again vibrated. He pulled it out unwillingly.
"Reward integrated.
Status updated: [Perception I activated].
Progression unlocked.
Next Directive: Pending."
Ethan's face stared back at him from the black screen, distorted by the words floating over it. Dry mouth.
"Pending? What is that, anyway?" he grumbled to himself.
Neither did the app speak. It never responded.
The rest of the day arrived in pieces. Ethan leaned over his office computer, typing on autopilot, but his thoughts didn't dwell on spreadsheets and emails. They lingered on the Veil. The manner in which the world had been altered and felt different.
He could hear the tick-tock of the wall clock more than before very distinctly, each second striking his ear with a brutally vicious force. The typing, the writing pens, even the air conditioner in the distance, all atrociously loud, piercing, as if someone had flipped a switch in his head and cranked the world up to eleven.
It was too much noise by lunchtime.
Ethan walked off, lost in the city in a daze. His eye kept getting fixated on smallest details that he wouldn't have noticed at all otherwise: the barest crack in a pane of glass, the smallest limp in a person's step, the shaking hands of a street vendor as he fumbled with change.
Too much. Useful, perhaps.
He sat at a café, slouching over a mug of coffee that he hardly drank from.
That is when it occurred.
The woman across from him, the long auburn locks, eyes sharp but tired, was scrolling through her phone. For a split second, just a fraction of a breath, Ethan saw her face glitch.
Not change. Not shift. Glitch
Like pixels tearing on a faulty monitor.
Her jaw lines flickered. Her hand shook in mid-air and then stabilized.
Ethan froze.
It all stayed the same around him, voices, clinking spoons, hissing espresso machine, but the woman looked wrong. Wrong in a manner his head could never possibly comprehend.
She looked up, as though aware that his eyes were upon her. Eyes met.
And something pressed down upon him that instant. Like gravity, it seemed chosen for him alone, operating on his chest and tugging down at his lungs.
Her eyes narrowed. By the thinnest gap. Then, after a flash, she smiled again, reached for her phone, as if nothing had happened at all.
Ethan's phone vibrated instantly
"Observation registered.
Perception anomaly detected.
Warning: Do not interfere.
Await directive."
His stomach sank.
She was not ordinary. She was a part of them. Whatever the Veil consisted of.
Ethan quickly exited the café, the coffee still intact. His long strides reverberated down the street, every step resonating in his mind.
"Do not get interfere," the message warned. But he knew, deep down, that he already did. And the system looked on.