The Man Who Wouldn’t Sync
A lost tale of resistance from a future that already happened.
Title: The Man Who Wouldn’t Sync
Author: J.C. Wren (1974)
Editor’s Note
From the Archivist, Concordia University, 2025
In April of this year, during the digitization of microfiche archives from the now-defunct Vortex: Speculative Realities series (1971–1977), we discovered an unlisted entry tucked between the pages of Vol. 11, Issue 3—an issue long believed incomplete due to a printing error.
What first appeared to be a typesetting mistake or editorial oversight soon revealed itself to be something else entirely: a work of uncanny foresight.
Written in 1974, this story prefigures the rise of all-seeing networks, behavioral modeling, and the quiet exile of those who resist compliance. We present it here as found, with only minimal formatting adjustments, and leave questions of its origin and truth to the reader.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Sync
Part I: The Document Without a Past
July 8, 2025
They found it on a Tuesday.
Of course they did. Tuesdays are when the seams split.
It was just sitting there, on the bench.
Like it belonged. Like it had always been there.
Two vending cups to the left.
A sugar packet, crumpled like a confession, to the right.
No trace code. No scan thread. No provenance.
Just paper. Honest-to-god paper, spine-stitched, jaundiced at the edges, reeking of old toner and basement mildew.
A ghost that printed itself.
Davies-K picked it up.
He shouldn’t have.
But curiosity is a flaw the Oracle hasn’t debugged. Not yet.
The title stared back at him in half-dead serif, like a bruised eye in a faded photograph:
“The World That Watched Itself.”
Not quite centered. Not quite aligned.
Like it had been typed by a man with one good eye and a shaking hand.
No imprint. No table of contents. No file markers.
Just sixty brittle pages of something.
Something that didn’t want to be read. But had to be.
And then--margin scrawl. Ballpoint. Blue. Barely there:
April 2012 - River’s Bend
He stopped breathing for a second.
River’s Bend. His hometown. The one the Registry turned inside out. The last town to bow its head. Not out of defiance. Not really.Just something quieter. Slower. Harder to read.Its porch lights still flipped on by switch. Its kitchens hummed with gas burners and transistor radios.
He remembered the breach.
The Registry sent its queries. The Cyclops turned its gaze.
Names were sorted. Houses mapped.
Shadows classified by rhythm and heat.
His mother, barefoot on the porch, crying into her hands,
while the Watcherwings circled overhead, silent as shame.
They didn’t land. They didn’t have to.
The Cyclops had seen enough.
And yet, River’s Bend never quite surfaced.
Its patterns never fully coalesced.
As if the town had whispered its way out of visibility.
And the Oracle...
just moved on.
He should’ve reported the booklet and walked away.
But he fed it to the Reader.
And that’s when the machine hiccupped.
===========================================================
SYNC ALERT
UNMODELABLE SIGNAL DETECTED
ESCALATE TO PROTOCOL CHARON
===========================================================
Not corrupted.
Not malicious.
Worse.
Incomprehensible.
It didn’t read as language.
Didn’t register as form.
The Oracle couldn’t make sense of it.
Couldn’t follow its lines.
It didn’t behave like text. It was more like a manual for something you weren’t supposed to know existed.
They told him to break it down. Catalog it. Sanitize it. Strip it clean for the archives.
His training at the Central Registry had been exhaustive.
Not just the methods, but the operational thinking.
He’d learned how to isolate anomaly from noise.
To classify disruption.
To pin down chaos like a butterfly in a display case.
But this…
This wasn’t an anomaly.
It was defiance.
There, on the final page, like an afterthought or a curse:
Typed and Distributed by W. Harker
All Rights Reserved by None.
No record. No registry hit.
A ghost name.
Or worse. A real one.
The directive came through five minutes later.
Transcribe. Analyze. Flag subversive patterns.
Standard procedure…
The Neural Prediction Engine, buried somewhere in the Oracle’s core, spun to life, searching for patterns. Always patterns.
No empathy. No hesitation.
Just cold anticipatory logic.
But the air shifted when he turned the first page again.
He felt it. Like static, or breath drawn in.
Like something had noticed.
He sat at his console, dials glowing softly beneath the flicker of a single fluorescent tube. The room was scarcely larger than a broom closet.
The Registry never ventilated the secure rooms. The heat clung to everything.
He cracked his knuckles. Cleared his throat.
Sweat prickled under his collar.
The mic arm groaned as he pulled it close.
The Oracle waited. Listening. Always listening.
His thumb left a faint sweat-oval on the page.
The sort of detail the Oracle wouldn’t log.
He cleared his throat again.
And began to read aloud.
PART II: The World That Watched Itself
Typed and Distributed by W. Harker - April, 2025
“They stopped watching us when we started watching ourselves.”
That was the first line.
No preamble. No salutation.
Just that, typed in uppercase, then struck through and redone in lowercase.
The NPE flagged it. Clicked in protest.
===========================================================
AMBIGUITY ALERT. NO CLEAR SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATION
===========================================================
Davies-K snorted.
The machine didn’t know who “they” were.
He did.
“The Electric Oracle eats patterns but shits certainty.”
The transcript output:
===========================================================
“THE [REDACTED] CONSUMES [REDACTED] BUT EXCRETES [REDACTED].”
===========================================================
He watched the glitch bloom across the screen like a bruise.
The Neural Prediction Engine didn’t like the word “shit.”
But it hated metaphor even more.
“The grid leases your shadow. I burned my receipt.”
The NPE groaned.
Not flagged. Not approved..
For a breathless second--an empty log entry.
Null response. No category. No idea what the hell it had just read.
“The Cyclops sees all. Its central eye never blinks, glass-smooth and silent. Its Watcherwings buzz in the sky, restless, tracing signal trails like bloodhounds.”
He paused. That one felt… personal.
The Reader hesitated. Just a blink of latency, barely a second.
But the system never blinked.
“Eyes at every crossroads. Every overpass. Every stairwell.”
He glanced up at the lens mounted above his desk.
Always watching. Always listening.
Soft and patient. Like a trap with no teeth--because it never needed them.
It simply remembered.
“The city’s veins pulse with data. Every heartbeat logged. Every silence, time-stamped.”
Davies-K rubbed his temple.
It wasn’t fiction.
It was diagnosis.
This wasn’t a warning about the future.
It was a refusal to lie about the present.
“Electric oracles with their prediction engines dream in patterns, like a mainframe gone mad.”
Davies-K blinked.
It rattled him. Something in that phrasing--a kind of lucid delirium--gnawed at the edge of his thoughts.
It felt less like a metaphor, and more like a confession.
Surveillance nodes don’t dream, Davies-K thought.
“They call it a Prediction Engine, but it’s just a meat grinder for human spontaneity.”
Something deep in the NPE’s bowels began to whir.
The Oracle’s response:
===========================================================
LANGUAGE FLAGGED: VIOLENT ANALOGY DETECTED.
RECLASSIFY: HISTORICAL ALLEGORY? Y/N.
===========================================================
He typed N.
It wasn’t allegory.
It was the cold truth.
“Sync or sink. That was the slogan. Smile for the Predictive Eyes. Keep your registry clean. Keep your tone pleasant. If you weren’t flagged, you were fine. If you were fine, you weren’t real.”
He read it calm, clear, same as the rest.
But this time, the machine twitched.
===========================================================
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT ERROR: “SMILE FOR THE PREDICTIVE LIES.”
CORRECTION?
===========================================================
He reread the line. No, he'd said it clean.
He didn’t type anything.
And then he saw it.
Middle of a paragraph, buried between two lines about unmapped heat signatures in civilian zones:
“…even River’s Bend couldn’t hide forever…”
His spine stiffened.
River’s Bend hadn’t resisted.
They’d submitted--late, but utterly.
No protests. No incident. Just quiet compliance that deepened into silence.
By the time the Cyclops turned its gaze their way, there was nothing left to see.
It wasn’t a rebellion that marked the breach. It was absence mistaken for obedience. A stillness mistaken for peace.
So how the hell did W. Harker know?
The NPE twitched once.
Then twice.
Then, an angry clattering inside its memory banks.
It vomited up an error code so malformed it didn’t even make the registry:
===========================================================
ERROR 91X.CORRUPT.CONTEXT/NOSYNC
SOURCE REFUSED SYNCHRONIZATION.
MANUAL OVERRIDE RECOMMENDED.
===========================================================
The file locked.
The voice interface cut to static.
The console lights dimmed, one by one, like something was holding its breath.
PART III: Non-Modelable
“What do you mean it wouldn’t sync?”
The voice on the other end came down the line crisp, official, and just a little too rehearsed--like a man who’d practiced sounding unafraid.
Davies-K pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I mean it rejected the source. Wouldn’t parse. Spat up a context error we don’t even have a code for. I logged it as a 91X. Manually.”
A pause.
“That’s not a recognized--”
“I know it’s not recognized. Nothing about this is recognized. The pamphlet refused synchronization.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then: “Is the Reader still stable?”
“It’s quiet. But it locked the file and dropped the session.”
A soft click. Someone else joining the line.
“Send a packet to Cyclops Division. Institute a trace. Get profiling underway. And Davies-K… don’t read any more until we’ve run a risk map. Understood?”
He didn’t answer right away.
The Reader sat still. Lights dimmed. Not dead. Just... waiting.
He ended the call.
And reopened the file anyway.
A minute later, the NPE sputtered back to life, barely.
A hesitant boot in low-risk mode, running logic sweeps with the caution usually reserved for radioactive artifacts.
===========================================================
SYSTEM NOTICE:
PREDICTIVE CORE IN DEGRADED STATE.
LANGUAGE MODELING RESTRICTED.
AUTHOR PROFILING INITIALIZED.
===========================================================
Davies-K leaned forward.
“Begin with W. Harker. Known works, registry traces, publication logs. Run a style match.”
===========================================================
REQUEST RETURNED: 0 DIRECT MATCHES.
NEAREST LINGUISTIC CORRELATES: [NULL]
AUTHORIAL SIGNATURE: INDETERMINATE.
STYLE PROFILE: NON-NATIVE / NON-STANDARD / LOW PREDICTABILITY / EXCESSIVE RHETORICAL CONTRADICTION
CLASSIFICATION: NON-MODELABLE AGENT
===========================================================
He blinked.
“Non-modelable?”
That label was reserved for psych cases.
Feral cognition. Cult leaders. Poets.
He pushed the mic aside and rubbed his temple.
Outside the glass, the corridor pulsed with soft light.
Monitors blinked like fireflies in a jar, soft, pulsing, half-alive.
It was always quiet here.
Too quiet.
He slid another page into the Reader.
The Oracle spun up. Grudging. Uncertain.
Looped through options like a madman flipping switches, landing nowhere.
===========================================================
PROFILE ERROR: AUTHOR NONCONFORMANT
SIGNAL TRAITS: NONSEQUENTIAL. CONTRADICTORY. NON-SYNCED.
CAUSE UNKNOWN. MALICE POSSIBLE.
===========================================================
Davies-K leaned back, eyes narrowing.
The man wasn’t invisible.
He was incomprehensible.
Like trying to catch fog in a sieve.
“The flaw in the machine,” he muttered, “isn’t resistance.”
He tapped the screen, watched the Reader blink in quiet confusion.
“It’s refusal.”
The Oracle resumed, slow and suspicious.
===========================================================
RISK REPORT INCOMPLETE.
FURTHER ANALYSIS REQUIRED.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: FULL-SCALE AUTHOR TRACE.
APPROVAL REQUIRED.
===========================================================
Davies-K hovered over the authorization key.
He thought of River’s Bend.
The porch. His mother’s hands.
The silence after the surrender--heavy and deliberate, like someone had signed away the air in memory itself.
He pressed Authorize.
Part IV: Signal Path
He took the train home.
Past the inner ring, where towers breathed signal like lungs. Past the periphery hubs, where the sync nodes grew quieter, but never silent. He sat by the window, coat zipped high, eyes following the blur of the city as it bled into the outer districts.
Across from him, a woman smiled down at her TalkTo. Her eyes were glazed, half-lit, mindlessly absorbing the feed. Her thumb moved in practiced arcs. She wasn’t happy. Just occupied. She was never alone. The feed kept her company.
Further down the aisle, a boy played something silent. A game, maybe. The ad columns beside him adjusted hue every few seconds, recalibrating to his gaze--feeding the Oracle high-yield signal spikes, like saccharine for machines.
They stopped watching us when we started watching ourselves.
The line returned, uninvited. Lodged behind his eyes.
He didn’t open his TalkTo. Didn’t sync. It buzzed twice, then went quiet--sulking.
The train car was lined with eyes. Not the obvious kind. They blinked behind smoked glass, tucked into seams. Surveillance nodes, keyed to motion. Every pole, every lamp, every seat. Wired and whispering.
And not just here.
Every shop window. Every front door. Every lamppost in the city fed back to the Oracle.
The Cyclops never slept.
Its eyes had been bought, boxed, and installed. Voluntarily.
A silent watcher for your porch. An extra set of eyes for your car. A lens in your child’s room.
All synced. All sold as protection.
They said it made people safer.
What it really made you was observable.
Its gaze moved through copper and concrete alike. Relentless, tireless, embedded in everything.
The train clicked past an intersection. Half a dozen bodies queued at the curb, eyes down, screens up--each TalkTo pulsing out location and habit like sonar.
The Oracle logged it all.
Every blink, every shuffle, every twitch cataloged.
Even the shadows left a trail.
Privacy was a phase, he thought.
Like steam engines.
Like rain.
People didn’t resist. They opted in.
The system didn’t need to chase them. It offered coupons.
Connection was comfort. Syncing meant you had friends. Meant your home preheated, your refrigerator refilled itself, your streetlight flicked on just for you. Every little luxury, one button press away.
And every press, one more confession.
He leaned back and closed his eyes.
Somewhere behind the cabin walls, a pattern recognizer updated its estimate on his mood.
He thought about the strange pamphlet for a moment.
Then his mind turned to what was already in motion. What the Registry had likely set into play the moment he flagged the file.
Cyclops Division, one of the Oracle’s embodied limbs, would’ve launched the trace within minutes. Surveillance nodes scraping footage, flagging anomalies, building behavioral shadows from mirrored glass, ambient reflections, and machine-sense residue.
The data would funnel inward, from the Cyclops, through the NPE, and upward to the Oracle itself. It would ingest the footage, the drop, the motion. Then backtrack every step like a dog sniffing its own dream.
They’d find the bench. They’d find the hands. They’d find him. Or the scent of him. Too quiet. Too careful. An absence with posture. But absence wasn’t enough.
He had studied this.
Taught others how to read between the signals.
He knew how they’d stitch his pattern together: gait analysis, thermal bleed, transaction ghosts, facial prediction nets run in negative.
And he had given them as little as possible.
No syncs.
No pings.
No pattern.
Harker hadn’t disappeared.
He’d become unreadable.
The train hummed beneath him, a gentle mechanical lullaby. Across the aisle, a woman with blue hair whispered into her TalkTo, eyes unfocused, brain tethered to a latticework of commerce and conversation. Davies-K watched her lips move, her expression blank. Synced. Always synced.
They all were.
Children blinked at glowing panes, their fingers tapping to rhythms no one else could hear.
A man scrolled through bar graphs and smiling faces, none of them his.
A teenager laughed at something looping endlessly. A joke with no author, just an echo.
No one looked up.
No one looked at each other.
A train full of ghosts, each tethered to their own private signal.
All the while, the Oracle watched. Not with menace, but with appetite.
He leaned back in the molded plastic seat and closed his eyes.
Thought of his last trip to River’s Bend.
It hadn’t changed much.
The perimeter lamp outside his mother’s house had long since dimmed.
No one left to maintain it. Its cold blue eye, once always watching, had blinked out. Like a ghost that forgot what it was haunting.
He could still picture himself on the porch, elbows on the rail, the wood gone soft with age.
Thought of the breach.
It wasn’t theft.
It wasn’t violence.
It was surrender. Quiet. Total.
They gave the machine everything. Names, habits, moods. Traded it freely for convenience, for comfort, for the glow of predictive ease.
And yet… River’s Bend never fully surfaced.
The breach wasn’t recorded. It dissolved.
The Cyclops had watched. The Watcherwings had circled.
But nothing took root. No pattern, no flag.
As if the town had whispered its way out of visibility.
Suspicion bled into silence.
His mother stopped singing.
The neighbors stopped waving.
And still, he had never stopped remembering.
PART V: The Anomaly
Later that night, from his kitchen table, Davies-K thumbed on his TalkTo.
The unit chimed once. A friendly trill.
He opened the shell, dialed into his workstation through a private maintenance loop.
No audit trail. No uplink pings.
A ghost signal in the static.
He slotted the file into a dormant block, the kind meant for calibration noise and system junk.
Tagged it: Supplemental Analysis.
And just like that, he was back inside.
Off the books.
Just him and the pamphlet.
And whatever it was hiding.
The TalkTo crackled.
A dull carrier hum resolved into a voice, flat, synthetic, and unmistakably Oracle.
“PROFILE ANALYSIS -- SUBJECT: ‘W. HARKER’
Begin playback?”
Davies-K tapped the table. “Proceed.”
As expected, the agents in Cyclops Division had already run a full trace on the pamphleteer.
The Oracle had ingested the data, categorized it, and now presented it.
It began with the footage. It played the drop in reverse, frame by frame, lighting adjusted for cloud cover, shadow vectors inverted for time-of-day estimation. Behind the bench: a glint. A wristwatch. A sleeve. A gait signature.
The man was methodical, never looking up. But the Cyclops didn’t need eye contact. It needed angles. Pollen traces. Thermal ghosts on public railings. Partial reflections in vending glass.
It tracked him three blocks west, where a blind spot should’ve ended the trace. But the scent lingered: ink particulates, old adhesives, trace ozone.
That’s where they found the press.
Manual. Iron. No onboard logic.
The kind that clattered like history remembering itself.
The Oracle’s voice dropped half a register, almost a whisper.
“Subject previously active under the handle ‘DeadLetter’ across unregistered message nets, 2008–2019. High-frequency contributor. Noted for detailed critiques of early predictive architectures. Tone profile: technical, sarcastic, subversive. Flagged as incendiary.”
Logs flickered past on the TalkTo’s glowing screen: people dissecting state inference engines, stray captures of deleted replies, comment chains severed mid-thought. Abrupt timestamps. Ghosts of conversations that once burned hot and bright, snuffed out in silence.
“Trigger Incident: March 2020.
Three activists flagged in an Oracle-affiliated pilot program.
All disappeared within 72 hours of posting flagged content.
Final transmission by DeadLetter read: ‘It’s not paranoia if the machine watches everything.’”
Davies-K stared at the screen, that old phrase burning into his thoughts. He hadn’t heard it in years.
He whispered it aloud.
The mic didn’t flag him this time.
“Post-2020: Subject abandoned all known devices. Registry went dark. No digital presence since July 2021. Re-emerged in 2025 under analogue protocol: manual typeset, inked signatures, hand-distributed pamphlets. Alias adopted: W. Harker.”
A photograph bloomed on-screen:
A man in his fifties. Gaunt. Eyes sharp. Windbreaker, canvas trousers, a hard mouth.
Beside him: a battered pickup, late ’90s. No computer systems. No Oracle tether. No synchronization.
A bumper sticker peeling at the edges read: “THE FUTURE ATE MY NEIGHBORHOOD.”
"Philosophy: Compliance is convenience; rebellion is righteousness.
Mobility Pattern: No fixed location. Travels only at dawn.
Vehicle: Unregistered. No onboard computer. No uplinks.
Payment Method: Cash only.
Device Activity: None on record.
Communications: Physical. Shields TalkTo in foil while in transit. Signal damped.
Status: Anomalous. Tracking possible, but confidence remains low."
Davies-K scratched his jaw.
The Oracle continued:
“Subject not hiding. Subject refusing. Registers as noise. Unmodelable. Contradiction density exceeds model thresholds.
Conclude preliminary profile?”
Davies-K leaned forward.
“No,” he said softly. “Keep digging.”
The Oracle’s voice didn’t rise. If anything, it dipped lower, smooth as cold static.
“Query: When was your last confirmed synchronization, Operator Davies-K?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Repeat: Last confirmed sync event for Operator Davies-K. System requires timestamp validation.”
He stared at the TalkTo’s screen. For a moment, he didn’t answer.
Then, with deliberate slowness: “Four days ago. During maintenance rotation.”
“Noted. Discrepancy logged. Manual sync recommended.”
He frowned. That wasn’t protocol. The system didn’t log operator syncs unless flagged.
“…Is that policy now?”
The Oracle didn’t reply.
Just a soft hum, like a capacitor winding itself too tight.
Somewhere deep in the machine, something was watching him back.
And somewhere in a cabin, in a canyon, beneath a canopy of unregistered stars.
W. Harker folded another pamphlet.
Ink still drying.
PART VI: Bullseye
It started with a map.
Not one drawn by hand, but stitched from patterns--the quiet churn of the Pattern-Eaters working the backend, cross-referencing distribution points, flyer density, residuals.
And one morning, there it was:
A grid.
Not clean. Not perfect. But unmistakable.
Davies-K stared at the screen, bile rising.
Every red pin was a drop site.
Every yellow ring, a time window.
Then he saw it.
Top left corner.
A dot. Too rural for a prediction node. Too quiet to matter.
River’s Bend.
The Oracle said nothing. Didn’t have to.
It was just another coordinate now.
They found the truck just outside Calico Hollow.
Dust-covered. Empty. Key still in the ignition.
No prints. No signal residue.
Except--
A folded pamphlet on the seat.
Crisp. Fresh.
Date-stamped: August 2025.
Davies-K stood beside the open door.
The wind moved through the empty truck’s cab like breath escaping.
Typed cleanly. Signed: W. Harker.
A single line circled in red:
“The future isn’t a grid--it’s a goddamn prison yard. And W. Harker just tunneled out.”
That night, he didn’t go home.
He slid into the driver’s seat. Let his hands rest on the wheel a moment.
It smelled like old vinyl and gasoline. The kind of machine his grandfather once taught him to drive, long before the world decided it wanted to watch itself. Before the Oracle, the NPE, or the Cyclops.
The TalkTo squelched:
“OPERATOR DAVIES-K: LAST SYNCHRONIZATION ATTEMPT FAILED.”
He opened the glovebox. Nestled between a cracked roadmap and a rusted penknife: a folded sheet of kitchen foil.
Without thinking, he wrapped the TalkTo and shoved it under the seat.
The silence was immediate. No more pings. No more Oracle. Just the road, the wheel, and the whine of wind through an old chassis.
The old truck’s suspension creaked as he drove out past Calico Hollow.
Past the last Mono-beam, where the signal lattice frayed into guesswork.
Until the roads turned to gravel.
And gravel turned to memory.
PART VII: The Vanishing
The porch was still there.
Splintered. Sagging. But intact.
He stepped onto it and sat, just like he had when he was a boy.
But the boy was gone.
And so, finally, was the watcher.
The night pulsed, analog and unobserved.
No lenses. No sync nodes. No signal glow.
Only the stars--fierce, unfiltered--and the hush of wild things that didn’t know they were being monitored.
He thought of his mother’s hands.
Folding laundry while the registry stole names.
Clutching silence like it was the only safe thing left.
He remembered the day the watcherwings came--hovering, humming, not landing.
Because they didn’t have to.
For the first time since the pamphlet, he didn’t feel watched.
And for the first time in his life, he realized what that meant.
He stood.
He hadn’t been out to the old shed in years.
It still smelled like rust and mouse droppings. The tools on the pegboard hadn’t moved since his father died. Except one. The far wall had been cleared. A table, clean. A chair, centered. And in the middle, like a gift from a ghost: the duplicator.
Manual feed. Hand-crank. Still oiled.
A ream of blank stock sat beside it, sealed in plastic. Someone had been here. Not recently, but not decades ago, either.
On the platen, there was already a stencil loaded.
He pulled the lever and out came the page:
“Don’t wait for the machine to fail. Become the failure it can’t model.”
--W. Harker
Then he fed the sheet into the duplicator.
Typed six words:
“They chose comfort. I chose memory.”
By dawn, the shed smelled like ink and revolution.
The duplicator hummed.
And somewhere between the cranks, Davies-K disappeared.
Only Harker remained.
===========================================================
LOG ENTRY: UNKNOWN NODE
SIGNAL ORIGIN: OUTSIDE OPERATIONAL GRID
MESSAGE PAYLOAD:
“THEY STOPPED WATCHING US WHEN WE STARTED WATCHING OURSELVES.”
===========================================================
PART VIII: The Man Who Wouldn’t Sync
He dreamed in typewritten lines now.
Sentences clacked through his sleep. Looping phrases, ink-black on paper-white, margins narrowing until they pressed into his skull.
He stopped logging meals.
Started printing his thoughts instead.
===========================================================
NPE LOG: PATTERN DRIFT DETECTED.
OPERATOR: DAVIES-K.
BEHAVIORAL PROFILE VARIANCE: 2.1%.
CLEARANCE: SUSPENDED PENDING REVIEW.
RISK DESIGNATION: ORANGE.
===========================================================
He didn’t argue.
Just stood.
Badge quietly confiscated.
And walked out like a man shedding a skin.
On the way home he dropped his first pamphlets.
“Disobedience by osmosis,” one note read.
“You stare into noise long enough, and the signal changes you.”
He found the truck in a salvage lot outside the grid.
Late ‘90s. Manual everything. Dusty green with oxidized trim.
No uplinks. No computer system. No oracle.
It smelled like pine needles and gasoline and freedom.
He paid in cash.
The clerk didn’t ask questions. Just handed him the keys and said, “Don’t stall her cold.”
He didn’t. Not once.
That night, he drove it out past the grid.
Taped over the plates. Filed off the VIN.
And in the glovebox, where the registration used to be, he slipped a new card.
Name: W. Harker.
Address: Unknown.
Purpose: Refusal.
By morning, a new leaflet was making its rounds through the city:
“Don’t wait for the machine to fail. Become the failure it can’t model.”
--W. Harker
On a Tuesday, just before rush hour, he folded one copy extra-carefully and slipped it into the gap beneath a station bench--between gum wrappers and coffee stirrers. Then he vanished into the crowd.
===========================================================
NPE LOG: NEW SIGNAL DETECTED
SOURCE: UNKNOWN
ORIGIN: PHYSICAL LEAFLET
FLAG: UNMODELABLE
OPERATOR: UNKNOWN
ALIAS: W. HARKER (DUPLICATE KEY DETECTED)
===========================================================
EPILOGUE // CONTROL FILE ADDENDUM: YEAR 2050
===========================================================
SYSTEM ARCHIVE ACCESS: [REDACTED]
FILE: CASE-NULL / OPERATOR: “DAVIES-K”
STATUS: CLOSED -- INCONCLUSIVE
REQUESTING ENTITY: JUNIOR ANALYST #443-L (PROBATIONARY)
ACCESS GRANTED: READ-ONLY
===========================================================
CASE REVIEW COMMENTARY – ANALYST 443-L
“Recovered material appears to straddle myth and record. Pamphlets still circulate in physical trade. Mentions of ‘W. Harker’ persist in low-signal strata. No biological trace on file. No lineage.
System confidence in historical accuracy: 0.01%.
Recommending transfer to Folklore Archive.”
===========================================================
ATTACHED SCAN: HANDWRITTEN FRAGMENT – PROVENANCE UNKNOWN
PAPER DEGRADED. INK ANOMALOUS. LANGUAGE MATRIX UNABLE TO EXTRACT SYNTAX.
VISUAL ANALYSIS SUGGESTS CURSIVE ENGLISH SCRIPT.
RECONSTRUCTION ATTEMPT YIELDS PARTIAL PHRASE:
“THEY STOPPED WATCHING US WHEN WE STARTED WATCHING OURSELVES.”
TRANSLATION CONFIDENCE: <0.3%
INTERPRETATION: INCONCLUSIVE.
RECOMMENDATION: RECLASSIFY AS SYMBOLIC ARTIFACT.
===========================================================
===========================================================
SYSTEM EVENT: ORACLE CLASSIFICATION UPDATE
ENTITY: “W. HARKER”
STATUS: LEGEND
CLASS: FOLKLORE
REASON: PERSISTENT NON-MODELABILITY
PROTOCOL: ERASE ANOMALY / PRESERVE MYTH
FINAL ENTRY TIMESTAMPED
LOG SEALED
===========================================================
Somewhere, a duplicator rattles in an unmonitored zone.
And somewhere else...
A folded leaflet waits beneath a bench,
Ink drying in the dark.
Really enjoyed this, great stuff
Shared
https://x.com/naomibrockwell/status/1943790041773339057