Chapter 6: The World Begins to Show Cracks That Can No Longer Be Ignored

The anomalies did not erupt all at once.

They appeared with restraint, as if testing how much I could endure.

The next morning, I noticed that my phone’s step counter had logged an extra twelve thousand steps.

Not a syncing error.
The timestamps were precise: 2:40 a.m. — 4:10 a.m.

During that time, I was certain I had been sitting at my desk until dawn.

I opened the health app. The heart rate graph during those two hours showed clear fluctuations—
fast walking, brief stops, then movement again.

As if another version of me had been moving through the city along a predetermined route.

When I stepped outside, the sky was an unnatural gray-white.

Not overcast—more like the contrast of the light had been dialed down. People on the street still walked and talked as usual, but their movements occasionally slipped out of sync.

Someone raised a hand half a beat too late.
Someone turned their head, but their shadow moved first.

The misalignment was fleeting, almost impossible to catch.
But once you noticed it, you could never unsee it.

At a crosswalk, I saw a man across the street.

He was looking down at his phone.

But before he lifted his head, I had already seen the change in his expression.

Reality was preloading.

Strange messages began appearing in the company group chat.

Someone insisted they had already attended a meeting that morning, but there was no record of it.
Someone else complained that the system contained files that were “duplicated but not identical.”

Chen from engineering pulled me aside and asked quietly:

“Have you noticed… that version control has been acting strange lately?”

I didn’t answer.

Because it suddenly occurred to me—
the word version was no longer a metaphor.

At noon, I went back to the corner restaurant.

I needed to confirm something.

When the owner saw me, her expression visibly changed.

“You’re… a little different today,” she said hesitantly.

“How so?”

“Yesterday when you came,” she lowered her voice, “you said you didn’t eat spicy food.”

I nodded. “I don’t.”

She shook her head slowly.

“No,” she said. “Yesterday you said—‘I can’t eat spicy food right now.’”

The difference was tiny, but my back went cold.

Right now implied a condition.
A temporary restriction.

I thought of the version of me in the surveillance footage, standing outside a stranger’s door.

Perhaps he hadn’t been waiting for a person.

But for a moment in time.

At three in the afternoon, the city experienced its first officially inexplicable incident.

A bus on the same route was simultaneously recorded as “arrived on time” and “never departed.”

Both records were real.
Passengers argued, each with their own version.

When I saw the news alert, a thought surfaced in my mind a moment before I finished reading:

It’s started.

I didn’t go back to the office. I went straight to Zhou Wan’s clinic.

She was already waiting for me.

This time, she didn’t pretend to be calm.

“You feel it too, don’t you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“The world isn’t lining up anymore.”

She took a deep breath, as if she had finally reached the point where hiding was no longer possible.

“Lin Shu,” she said, “you have to let me finish.”

She told me something crucial—

I wasn’t the only one experiencing version splitting.

I was just the first to become aware of it and try to record it.

When contradictions appear in other people, they are automatically corrected.
Their anomalies are rationalized, overwritten, smoothed out.

But not mine.

Because there is one problematic version of me that has always refused to be overwritten.

I knew who she meant.

“What does he want?” I asked.

Zhou Wan was silent for a long time before answering.

“He wants to end all of this.”

“How?”

She looked up at me, fear appearing in her eyes for the first time.

“With a complete merge.”

The word exploded in my mind.

If two versions merge, what does that mean?

Stacked memories?
Personality overwrite?
Or—one version deemed redundant?

I remembered the question I had written:

If only one can remain, why shouldn’t you disappear?

Zhou Wan said softly:

“If he succeeds, the world will stabilize.”
“But you may not remain whole.”

And suddenly I realized something even more cruel.

The survival of the world and the question of who I am had been placed on opposite sides of a scale.

And the version of me who had already seen the ending
had clearly made his choice.

As night fell, the city lights came on once more.

This time, I saw it clearly—
some of the lights turned on twice.

As if the system were repeatedly checking which version of night it should display.

Standing on the street, I finally understood.

The apocalypse isn’t destruction.

It’s this—

The world deciding who is real.