Chapter 3 – Reality Drift
1036 Words
His hands were cold all the way to the office.
Jasper shoved them into his coat pockets, trying to ignore the phantom heat of the ticket pressed against one palm. It was impossible not to feel its texture there the ridged emboss, the faint flex when he curled his fingers even though he wasn’t touching it now.
The streets behaved themselves. No folding, no strange curves in the sidewalk. Every sign and storefront anchored in place, facts holding steady like they ought to. By the time he reached the building’s revolving doors, part of him almost believed he’d imagined the whole thing.
Almost.
The lobby smelled faintly of lemon polish. The front desk guard nodded, same as every day. Jasper gave a quick wave and headed for the elevators.
Inside the mirrored car, he caught his own reflection again. This time, nothing moved out of sync… but as the doors slid shut, the reflected wall behind him shimmered briefly, showing what looked like tiled steps dropping into dimness before the smooth chrome returned.
His stomach dipped, like missing a stair. He blinked hard, muttered something about bad coffee, and tried to steady himself.
The data quality floor was busy phones ringing, the hum of servers leaking through the wall panels in steady white noise. Jasper set his coat over the back of his chair, shoved his bag under the desk, and opened his task queue.
Rhea was already at her station, two rows over. She noticed him, raised her eyebrows with that silent *you look rough* question, then returned to her monitor. He pretended not to see.
Routine was a tether here: verify batch integrity, log discrepancies, query anomalies in the client database. The one thing Jasper understood absolutely was *error that shouldn’t be there*.
But when he pulled up a client table to run his usual scan, three records produced a mild jolt of déjà vu. The addresses listed matched station names from the dream’s transit map stations with impossible titles like **Branswick Bastion** and **North–North Terminal**.
He sat back, pulse ticking up.
The rational explanation wrote itself again: placeholder data, imported from testing tables, automatically populated by names drawn from some city halfway across the world.
He checked the source metadata.
Creation timestamps: early this morning.
Source tables: internal.
Origin city: *[BLANK]*.
A flicker of movement caught his peripheral vision: On Rhea’s desk, her coffee mug rotated a fraction, revealing a logo that looked much too familiar. Sunburst, rail arc.
He closed the records, refusing to let the hook sink deeper. He needed all his mental edges sharp the company had already flagged him once for “pattern‑seeking commentary” in his reports.
Still, curiosity gripped harder than policy. During his lunch break, Jasper risked pulling the morning photo of the kiosk onto his screen. Most of it was still corrupted, grey static tearing through station lines… but now, strangely, the static had shifted to cover every name *except* Delsane Hub.
The lone station name sat clear and sharp, pulling his gaze like a centre of gravity.
A small pop sounded from somewhere above probably an HVAC adjustment but it startled him enough to look up. The ceiling panel over his desk was set slightly askew. A hairline gap traced its edge, clean and deliberate, reminding him too much of the curve he’d seen in the sidewalk earlier.
A faint vibration ran through the floor.
The building’s lights flickered just twice so quick the ambient chatter didn’t falter before settling.
In those two flickers, Jasper saw something impossible in the corner of his vision: the corridor beyond their department bent slightly, just enough to suggest that if he stepped into it now, he might find himself walking downhill into a street that belonged in last night’s dream.
By the time the lights stabilised, the corridor was normal again.
He swallowed, forcing his attention onto the bland safety of his sandwich. His body remained tense, tuned to that faint vibration like it was a warning drumbeat at the edge of hearing.
Something was shifting nearer, testing pressure against the seams between here and *there*. It was subtle but insistent, like a hand pushing through skin.
The vibration faded. His shoulders eased… but that was when he noticed the time on his monitor had advanced by thirty‑seven minutes without him registering a single tick.
Screens around the office all displayed the same jump. No one reacted. Colleagues typed, muttered to themselves, ran queries all with zero acknowledgement that anything unusual had happened.
Jasper stared at the clock readout, feeling a hollow click go off in his chest.
He didn’t need The Guest’s riddles intruding to know one thing absolutely:
Whatever was bleeding through from his dreams was no longer content to stay at night.
And it had just stolen half an hour from his day in front of everyone, without anyone but him noticing.
He reached for the subway ticket in his coat pocket.
It wasn’t there.
His fingertips swept the lining of his coat pockets twice.
Empty.
Jasper yanked the coat across his lap, checked every seam and fold as if the ticket might have migrated during the morning. Nothing. He even reached into the inner breast pocket he hadn’t touched in months. Still nothing.
The warmth it had carried that faint feverish weight was gone as if the object had never existed.
He glanced at the desktop clock again; the extra thirty‑seven minutes still sat there on the readout, stubborn in all their stolen certainty. His own life was being quietly edited, and he was the only one seeing the revisions.
“Lose something?”
Rhea’s voice startled him. She stood beside his desk, holding a stack of reports.
“Just… my train of thought,” Jasper said, forcing a smile.
She gave the kind of hum reserved for conversational dead ends and set her reports on the admin cart just beyond his chair. The top page bore a logo sharp black print, ringed by a pale watermark.
Sunburst. Rail arc.
Once, twice, in the same place on the page.
Jasper stared.
“Is that new branding?” he asked, careful to keep the words casual.
- Writer
