Isaac learned quickly that invisibility was not the same as freedom.
The city remembered itself, but it did not remember him.
At first, the novelty of it felt almost peaceful. He could walk through crowded markets without being jostled, stand inches from strangers without triggering discomfort. Vendors spoke prices aloud, then faltered when they realized no one had responded. Security guards stared past him as if he were a smudge on glass.
But peace had edges.
Doors did not open for him anymore—not automatically, not manually. Elevators ignored his presence. Public transport screens refused to acknowledge his weight. When he stepped onto a bus, it lurched as if hit by wind, and passengers gasped, clutching seats, eyes wide with fear at a force they could not see.
Isaac stopped trying after that.
He learned the city's forgotten paths instead: stairwells, service tunnels, maintenance corridors that no one used unless something had gone wrong. He slept where the infrastructure thinned—between systems, beneath attention.
The notebook kept him tethered.
Every morning, he read the first three pages to remind himself who he was supposed to be. Every night, he added a few lines of his own, recording what the city would not. He wrote carefully, knowing that someday even the act of writing might feel unfamiliar.
On the seventeenth day after the restoration, Isaac noticed something strange.
Someone noticed him.
It happened in the underground concourse beneath the old transit hub, a place officially closed for renovations that never came. Isaac was sitting against a concrete pillar, rereading a passage about the Registry's early architecture, when a voice said:
"You're real."
Isaac looked up sharply.
A young man stood a few feet away, staring directly at him. Not past him. Not through him.
At him.
The man looked exhausted. Hollow-eyed. Clothes worn thin, as if he had been moving constantly without destination. Around his neck hung a cracked ID badge with the name scraped off.
"You can see me," Isaac said.
The man laughed—a short, incredulous sound. "I was hoping you'd say that."
Isaac stood slowly, every instinct warning him to retreat. "How?"
"Same way you exist," the man replied. "By slipping through the cracks."
They stared at each other for a long moment, two impossibilities sharing the same space.
"My name is Jonah," the man said finally. "At least, it used to be."
Isaac hesitated, then nodded. "Isaac. I think."
Jonah's eyes softened. "You're further gone than me."
"What do you mean?"
Jonah gestured vaguely at the air between them. "I flicker. Some people almost see me. Kids mostly. Animals." He smiled faintly. "You don't even do that."
Isaac felt a chill. "How many others?"
Jonah's smile faded. "Enough."
They walked together through the concourse, footsteps echoing unevenly. Jonah spoke quietly, as if afraid the walls themselves might be listening.
"When the Registry went down, it didn't bring everyone back," Jonah said. "Some of us came back wrong. Incomplete. The system didn't know where to put us."
Isaac thought of the woman. Of the way memory had rejected her as it reclaimed itself. "You were erased?"
Jonah nodded. "For seven months. Maybe more. Time's hard to track when no one remembers you exist."
"And now?"
"Now we're leftovers," Jonah said simply. "Not erased enough to disappear. Not remembered enough to live."
They reached a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Jonah pushed it open without resistance.
Inside, the space widened into something like a camp.
Dozens of people occupied the abandoned station—some sitting in small clusters, others pacing, some lying still with eyes open, as if afraid sleep might finish what the system had started. Lanterns powered by scavenged batteries cast uneven light across faces etched with the same quiet dislocation Isaac saw in Jonah.
Every head turned toward him.
A murmur rippled through the room.
"He's blank," someone whispered.
"Is he… gone?"
A woman approached Isaac slowly. She was older, her posture rigid with careful control. "You're not recorded," she said, not asking.
"No," Isaac replied.
Her shoulders sagged with something like relief. "Then you won't vanish when they find us."
"They?" Isaac asked.
She gave a bitter smile. "You didn't think they'd stop, did you?"
Hale's face surfaced in Isaac's mind—calm, measured, reasonable. "They shut down the Registry."
"They shut down the public one," the woman corrected. "There are backups. Mirrors. Shadows of systems that were never meant to be exposed."
Jonah watched Isaac closely. "You know how it works."
Isaac nodded slowly. "I helped build it."
The reaction was immediate. Anger flared. Voices rose. Someone threw a piece of concrete that passed harmlessly through the space where Isaac stood, clattering against the wall.
"You're the reason we're like this," a man shouted.
Isaac did not flinch. "Yes."
Silence fell—not because they forgave him, but because his certainty unsettled them.
"I can't fix what I did," Isaac continued. "But I can see what's still broken."
The older woman studied him. "And what do you see?"
Isaac closed his eyes briefly. In the dark behind them, the city's systems hummed—memory reorganizing itself, efficiency returning, control reasserting its quiet grip.
"I see a world that learned nothing," he said. "Just enough fear to hide its worst ideas better."
Above ground, in a secure office that did not officially exist, Director Hale watched a live feed stabilize.
"Begin Phase Two," he said calmly.
The erased had survived the collapse.
Now they would be corrected.