The first thing Mika noticed that morning was the lack of sound.
Not silence. Silence always carries a weight, as if something were waiting for you to move. This was something else. As if the world had forgotten it was supposed to make a sound.
The alarm clock lay beside her pillow. The display glowed a dead green. 6:42 AM. It should have gone off. It always did. Mika remembered that sound all too well. Sharp, insistent, boring into her skull.
Now nothing.
She picked it up and shook it. The numbers didn't move. The seconds hands on the analog clock hanging above the door stood still. One second. The same. Always the same.
Mika swallowed.
"It's just a dream," she said aloud.
Her voice sounded normal. Too normal. Too clean in a room where everything should still be asleep.
She got out of bed. The floor was cool, as it always was in winter, but when she took a step, the boards didn't creak. She stopped. She took a second. Still nothing.
She glanced at her desk. Her school uniform hung on the chair. Perfectly folded, as if someone had straightened it during the night. Mika was sure she'd thrown it carelessly yesterday. She always did.
Always.
She stepped closer and touched the fabric. It was cold. Too cold for a room heated all night.
Then she heard the first sound.
It wasn't coming from outside. Not from the hallway. Not from the house.
It was inside her head.
A ticking.
Not a clock. Something deeper. Rhythmic. As if the world were counting down.
Mika jerked away from her desk and looked in the mirror above the closet.
Her reflection was… late.
Not by much. A split second. Just enough to notice that her reflection had blinked at her, not with her.
Her heart pounded in her throat.
"Stop it," she whispered.
The mirror shook. Literally. Like the surface of water when you drop a stone into it. Mika turned her back to her reflection. Don't look. Don't react. Mom always said that if something was strange, it was best to ignore it. The world would fix itself. The problem was, the world didn't look broken. It looked… being fixed.
----
In the kitchen, her mother sat at the table with a cup of coffee. lazily, as if everything was fine. The radio played the morning news softly.
"Good morning," Mika said.
Her mother looked up. She frowned.
"Excuse me…?"
she asked. One word. One tone. Neutral. Polite. Mika felt a knot in her stomach.
"It's me. Mika."
The woman looked at her longer. Too long. For someone trying to recall a dream after waking up.
"Are you… from the administration?" she finally asked.
"As for the bills, I paid everything."
The radio fell silent for a moment. The announcer stopped mid-sentence. Then his voice returned as if nothing had happened. Mika took a step back.
"Mom."
The word hung in the air. Nothing had happened. No reaction. No flash of recognition. Mother looked down at her coffee.
"Please leave,"
she said quietly.
"I don't like strangers coming into the house uninvited."
The ticking in Mika's head accelerated.
Her mother's words hurt her. Why did she act like she was a stranger?
---
She left without shoes. Without a backpack. Without a jacket.
The door closed behind her.
The stairwell was bright. Too bright. The fluorescent lights didn't flicker. They didn't buzz. Perfect. Sterile.
On the stairs, she passed her neighbor from the third floor. The woman looked straight through her.
Literally.
Her gaze slid across Mika's face as if she were looking at an empty space.
"Excuse me," Mika said instinctively.
The neighbor flinched.
"Did you hear that?" she asked someone who wasn't there. "Like an echo."
Mika ran outside.
The city functioned normally. Cars drove by. People talked. Children screamed at the bus stop.
And no one saw her.
Not quite.
As she ran across the street, one of the drivers braked sharply. The car stopped exactly where she should have been.
The driver got out, pale.
"What the..." he trailed off. "What was I doing?"
He looked around, disoriented. After a moment, he got back in the car and drove away as if nothing had happened.
Mika slumped to the sidewalk.
She was breathing rapidly. Too rapidly. Her hands were shaking.
"I'm hallucinating," she repeated. "I'm just hallucinating."
The ticking was loud now.
---
School was the worst.
Her locker was empty. No number. No name. As if she'd never been assigned.
The history teacher stopped mid-sentence as Mika entered the classroom.
"Who is this?" she asked, frowning.
The students glanced at her. A few tilted their heads, intrigued.
"Is... anyone new?" someone asked from behind.
Mika stood still. She felt eyes on her, unable to focus on her. It was as if their eyes were slipping from her figure.
The teacher cleared her throat.
"Please leave," she said. "The lesson is in progress."
When Mika didn't move, the woman glanced at the empty space next to the blackboard.
"Please leave''
The door closed on its own.
She found the bathroom at the end of the hall. She locked herself in a stall and slumped to the floor.
She pulled a notebook from her pocket.
A journal.
She opened it with trembling fingers.
On the first page, in her own handwriting, was a sentence she didn't remember ever writing:
IF YOU ARE READING THIS, NORMALIZATION HAS ALREADY BEGUN.
DON'T TRY TO BE NOTICED.
IT SPEEDS UP THE PROCESS.
The ink was still fresh at the bottom of the page.
The ticking stopped.
Instead, she heard a soft, polite voice just outside the stall door.
– Mika Aoyama.
Your existence has been classified for correction.
She didn't scream.
She couldn't.
Because in that moment, she understood something worse than fear.
The world wasn't doing this by mistake.
It was doing it exactly as it should.
The stall door wasn't locked.
Mika was sure of it. She always double-checked. But now the handle moved slowly, without a jerk, without rush. As if someone on the other side had an eternity.
"Mistake," the voice said. "Your data hasn't been fully erased yet. It's a transitional stage."
Mika pressed her hands to her ears.
It didn't help. The voice didn't penetrate the air. It appeared directly in her thoughts, calm, polite, administrative.
"Please don't resist," he continued. "Resistance generates instability. Instability prolongs the process."
The bathroom light flickered.
For a second. One, brief moment. Enough for Mika to see a shadow under the stall door.
He wasn't human.
Not because he was oddly shaped. He was too human. A perfect figure. Straight shoulders. His head was slightly tilted, like someone reading a document.
The shadow did not move with the light.
He waited.
"Who are you..." Mika whispered.
"I am a function," the voice replied. "Just like you were."
The word stung more than it should have.
You were.
The journal in her hands began to tremble. The pages turned by themselves, one by one, as if someone had read them in a hurry.
They stopped at a random page.
DAY 3
IT DOESN'T HURT ANYMORE.
THAT MEANS I AM CLOSE.
"It's not mine..." she began.
The ink on the paper spilled, forming a new sentence.
YOU ALWAYS SAY THAT.
Mika felt a cold in her chest. Not physical. Empty. As if someone had taken something important out and forgotten to put it back in.
"How many times…?" she asked tremblingly.
The shadow under the door shifted ever so slightly. As if a weight had shifted.
"Enough," the voice replied. "You reach the same stage every time. You react emotionally every time. That's a mistake."
"What if… if I leave?" she asked. "If I run away?"
Silence fell.
Real this time. Thick. Unnatural.
"There is no 'outside' to the world," the voice finally said. "There is only conformity or correction."
The cabin door began to open.
Slowly. Without a creak.
Mika jumped to her feet and ran out without looking. The school hallway was longer than before. Too long. The emergency exit doors at the end were receding instead of coming closer.
The sounds of school disappeared. There were no conversations. There were no footsteps. Only her breathing and the ticking that returned, this time synchronized with her heartbeat.
Bulletin boards hung on the walls. One was blank. The other was empty too. The third had only one sentence, printed in perfectly even font:
PLEASE DO NOT STOP IN THE TRANSITION AREAS.
When she touched the wall, her hand went through the paint as if through fog.
"No," she whispered.
"No, no, no."
Her shadow on the floor grew fainter. Fuzzy. As if the world had forgotten where it was supposed to be drawn.
She ran outside.
The sky was unnaturally smooth. No clouds. No birds. No airplanes. A uniform, light gray color, like an unfinished texture.
A group of students stood in the schoolyard.
They were all looking at the same spot.
At her.
Mika's heart leapt. Hope burned in her throat.
"Can you see me?" she cried.
One girl tilted her head.
"Can you feel it?" she asked the others. "Like... cold."
The boy next to her rubbed his arms.
"There was something here," he said. "But I think it's gone."
Mika looked at her hands.
Her fingers were starting to blur at the edges. Like a poorly written image.
A shadow appeared behind her.
This time without doors, without warnings.
"The final stage," said a voice close to her ear. "Transfer."
"Where?" she whispered.
The shadow leaned in, its voice becoming almost... human.
"Where all the versions of you who couldn't help but be afraid go."
The world trembled.
It didn't explode. It didn't collapse.
He simply… moved on.
And Mika Aoyama felt something write her name one last time.
The name hurt.
Not physically. Not like a wound or a blow. It hurt like a thought you can't finish. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, existing but refusing to come out.
Mika Aoyama.
Shadow spoke it without accent, without emotion. Like a string of characters stored in a system that had just been marked for deletion.
"No," Mika said, though she wasn't sure if she still had a mouth. "Not yet."
Because she was still thinking. And if she was thinking, then she existed. That was how the rules worked. That was what she'd always been told. That was what she'd told herself.
The world responded with silence.
Because the world didn't argue.
Because the world didn't have to.
Because the world had already made its decision.
She realized she was no longer standing on the field.
There was no grass or concrete beneath her feet. It was a smooth, pale surface, without texture. As if someone had forgotten to finish it. Each step made no sound, but left a trace that disappeared a moment later.
Space stretched in all directions. There was no sky. There was no ceiling either. Just a uniform, illuminated void that made her eyes hurt.
"This... is this place?" she asked.
"It's a buffer," the voice replied. "A transitional area between presence and absence."
"So... I haven't disappeared yet?"
A shadow appeared before her. This time, fully formed.
He looked like a middle-aged man. A suit. Too neat. His face was devoid of detail, like a test model. His eyes were the worst. Not empty. Too watchful.
"Disappearing is a process," he said. "You are at the center of it."
Mika looked at her hands.
They were transparent around the edges. Inside, they still existed. Still.
"And the others?" she asked. "The ones I saw. The ones from my dreams."
The Administrator tilted his head.
"They've been preserved," he said. "In a form that doesn't affect reality."
"So… they're alive?"
"They're functioning," he corrected her.
The word cut something deep inside. Mika clenched her fingers. At least she tried. The movement was delayed. As if the neural signal had to travel too far.
"Why me?" she asked quietly. "What did I do?"
The Administrator was silent for a moment.
"That's the most common question," he finally said. "And always irrelevant."
"It's relevant to me."
"The system doesn't operate on the concept of 'for me.'"
The space around them rippled. Images began to appear in the bright void. Fragments. Broken scenes.
A girl sitting on her bed, writing in a notebook.
The same girl, older, crying in the school bathroom. Same face, but different eyes, different posture, different ending.
"It's…" Mika held her breath. "It's me."
"It's you," the Administrator confirmed. "Versions that have been through the process before."
"Why did none of them…" She paused. "Why didn't any of them stay?"
"Because none of them were consistent," he replied without hesitation. "You're always observing. You're always questioning. You're always trying to remember."
"Is that bad?"
"It's unnecessary."
The images began to blur. One of Mika's versions lifted her head and looked directly at her.
Her lips moved.
Mika heard no sound, but she knew what was being said.
Don't trust him."
The Administrator didn't react.
"The process is ending," he announced. "You will be transported to the dream zone. Your consciousness will be simplified."
"Simplified how?" Mika asked.
"Without the need to remember," he replied. "Without fear. Without questions."
It was worse than death.
Mika took a step back.
"What if I refuse?"
For the first time, the Administrator seemed to hesitate. A split second. A mistake. Microscopic, but real.
"Refusing doesn't change the outcome," he said more slowly. "But it can change the course."
"So I can do something."
"You can delay," he admitted. "Delay creates instability."
"And the instability…?" she continued.
The Administrator looked at her more closely.
"…requires supervision."
Mika felt something shift. Not in space. In the rules.
"You were like me once too," she said suddenly. "Right?"
The Shadow didn't answer immediately.
"I was an aberration," he finally admitted. "Now I'm the solution."
"What if I don't want to be a dream," Mika said. "If I want to remember."
The Administrator closed his eyes.
When he opened them, his Shadow… disagreed with him.
"In that case," he said quietly, "the process will become complicated."
The Void trembled.
Somewhere far, far away, the world paused for a moment.
And for the first time since Normalization began, Mika was certain of one thing:
This chapter wasn't over yet.