Being erased is a physical sensation—part ache, part weightless fear.
Swan's stomach gnaws at itself.
It's been thirty-six hours since the erasure, and hunger has become a philosophical problem. He tried buying food from the campus cafeteria this morning—scanned his student ID at the register and watched the machine reject it three times before the cashier looked at him with that particular blend of confusion and irritation reserved for people who are wasting everyone's time.
"No valid payment method," she said, even though Swan could see his meal plan balance on the screen. Three hundred dollars. Untouched. Inaccessible.
He walked away with his tray still empty.
Now he sits in the Combat Simulation Laboratory—Blackwood Institute's pride and joy, a massive space where holographic arenas materialize and students duke it out with code-assisted martial arts for grades and glory. The air smells like ozone and competitive sweat. Around him, students in tactical gear calibrate their neural interfaces, running pre-combat diagnostics with the focused intensity of gamers about to enter ranked matches.
Swan isn't here by choice.
"Unregistered participant detected," the system announced when he wandered too close to the lab entrance, looking for Elara. "Processing... Error. Unable to verify credentials. Assigning to sparring pool as auxiliary combatant."
Before he could protest, a security drone herded him inside, and now he's trapped in a system logic loop: he can't leave the lab because the exit requires valid student credentials, but he doesn't have valid credentials, so the system defaults to its secondary protocol—put the unidentified entity somewhere it can be monitored.
In this case: the sparring dummy rotation.
"Next match," the arena's AI announces, its voice crisp and gender-neutral. "Kaito Nakamura versus auxiliary combatant. Standard ruleset. Non-lethal force authorized. Begin initialization."
Swan's heart rate kicks up as the holographic arena materializes around him—a circular platform suspended in a void of shifting colors, boundaries marked by hard-light barriers that hum with barely contained energy. Across from him, his opponent resolves into clarity.
Kaito Nakamura is everything Swan isn't. Tall, athletic, moving with the fluid confidence of someone who's never questioned their right to occupy space. His combat gear is top-tier—custom neural interface gleaming at his temple, haptic feedback suit that probably costs more than Swan's entire deleted scholarship. Dark hair pulled back in a practical ponytail, eyes sharp with competitive focus.
Swan has seen him around campus. Everyone has. Kaito is ranked third in the Institute's combat simulation league, a celebrity in the ecosystem of students who treat these matches like professional sports.
"You're not on the roster," Kaito says, frowning. His neural interface flickers as he tries to pull Swan's combat profile. "Who are you?"
"Nobody," Swan answers honestly.
Kaito's frown deepens. He's about to say something else when the system interrupts.
"Initialization complete. Match begins in three. Two. One."
The holographic timer vanishes.
Kaito moves.
He's fast—not superhuman, but enhanced by his neural interface's predictive algorithms, his body responding to threats before his conscious mind finishes processing them. His first strike is a textbook opener: close distance, feint high, strike low, exploit the opponent's defensive reflex.
Swan barely dodges. His body moves on pure panic, no technique, just the desperate flailing of someone who's never trained for this. Kaito's fist passes close enough that Swan feels the displaced air against his cheek.
"Come on," Kaito says, frustration bleeding into his tone. "At least try to fight back. This is embarrassing."
Swan doesn't respond. He's too busy trying not to die.
The second strike comes faster. A leg sweep that Swan doesn't see until it's too late. His feet leave the platform. Time stretches—that horrible moment of knowing you're falling and being unable to stop it.
Swan's vision fractures.
The code-sight activates involuntarily, adrenaline and fear forcing the perception shift. The arena peels back into layers of light and logic. He sees the holographic platform as a gravity simulation, sees Kaito's movements as physics calculations playing out in real-time, sees the trajectory of his own fall rendered as a predictable arc.
And he sees time itself—not as a steady flow but as a sequence of discrete moments, frame-by-frame updates ticking forward at regular intervals.
Swan reaches out—not with his hands, but with whatever part of him interfaces with the code-layer—and he touches the update cycle.
Slows it down.
The world stutters. Kaito's follow-up strike—a punch aimed at Swan's exposed ribs—extends in slow motion, each microsecond stretched into observable duration. Swan can count the individual frames of movement. Can see the exact angle of Kaito's trajectory. Can move while time crawls.
He twists mid-fall. Plants his hand on the platform. Pushes himself back upright while Kaito's fist is still completing its arc through space Swan no longer occupies.
Then time snaps back to normal speed.
Kaito stumbles, his momentum carrying him forward into empty air. His neural interface sparks—visible malfunction, brief but unmistakable—and his weapon (a practice blade materialized by the arena system) flickers and vanishes from his hand.
"What the—" Kaito spins, staring at Swan with an expression somewhere between confusion and awe. "How did you—"
The words die in his throat. His eyes lose focus. Swan watches in real-time as Kaito's face cycles through emotions: confusion, certainty, then confusion again. Like his brain is trying to reconcile contradictory inputs and failing.
"I had you," Kaito says slowly. "I know I had you. But you—you were—"
He shakes his head. The memory won't solidify. Swan can see it happening—the system's cleanup protocols activating, smoothing over the paradox, rewriting Kaito's certainty into doubt.
Around the arena, spectators murmur. Students who were watching the match with casual interest now wear expressions of uncertainty. They saw something impossible, but the memory is already degrading, becoming dream-like, unreliable.
"Technical malfunction," the arena AI announces. "Match suspended. Data corruption detected. Logging anomaly for review."
The holographic platform dissolves. Swan drops the last six inches to solid floor, his legs nearly giving out from the adrenaline crash.
Kaito stares at him. His neural interface is still sparking intermittently, small arcs of corrupted data dancing across the hardware.
"Who are you?" Kaito asks again, but this time there's no confusion in his voice. Only determination. Only the certainty of someone who's found a puzzle they're going to solve.
Swan doesn't answer. Just walks toward the exit, which—blessedly—now accepts his presence. The system has categorized him as a technical problem, and technical problems get removed from the combat lab.
Behind him, Kaito pulls out his personal tablet. Starts typing. Logging. Recording.
Swan feels the weight of new attention settling on him like a target painted on his back.
Elara finds him twenty minutes later, sitting on a bench in the campus gardens where holographic cherry blossoms bloom year-round. She's carrying her usual arsenal: the blood-stained notebook, a digital camera that looks vintage even though it's brand new, and a portable audio recorder that dangles from her wrist on a strap.
"You're still here," she says, and Swan can't tell if it's relief or surprise in her voice.
"Where else would I go?"
"Nowhere. Everywhere. The system is getting aggressive with erasures." She sits beside him, close enough that their shoulders touch. Swan feels her presence like an anchor, gravity pulling him back toward reality. "I lost you for three hours this morning. Couldn't remember your face. Checked my notebook and saw the entry from yesterday, but the words... they kept shifting. Changing. Like the system was trying to overwrite my external memories too."
She holds up the camera. "That's why I brought this. Physical media. Harder to corrupt than digital files."
"You want to take my picture?"
"I want to prove you exist." Elara's voice cracks on the last word. "Every time I close my eyes, I forget what you look like. I have to check my bracelets to remember your name. It's getting worse, Swan. The Anchor effect is fighting the erasure protocols, and my brain is the battlefield."
Swan sees the evidence in her eyes—red-rimmed, exhausted, flickering less today but at a terrible cost. She's bleeding from her nose again, a thin trail she hasn't noticed yet.
He reaches out, wipes the blood away with his thumb. Elara flinches, then leans into the touch.
"Take the picture," Swan says quietly.
She raises the camera. Clicks. The flash is bright, artificial, preserving a moment that reality is trying to delete. She takes another. And another. Different angles, different lighting, building a redundant archive of proof.
"Now talk," she says, activating the audio recorder. "Tell me who you are. Everything you remember. Your full name, your birthday, your favorite food. All the details that make you real."
"Swan..." He hesitates. His last name should come automatically, but when he reaches for it, there's only absence. Like trying to remember a dream five minutes after waking. "I don't... I can't remember my last name."
Elara's hand tightens on the recorder. "What else?"
"My birthday. I know I have one. I know I've celebrated twenty of them. But I can't—the date is just—" Panic rises in his throat. "Elara, I can't remember when I was born."
"It's okay. It's okay." But her voice shakes. "What can you remember?"
Swan closes his eyes. Reaches for solid memories. "Kai. My best friend since middle school. We used to—we would—" The details slip away like water through cupped hands. "He doesn't remember me now. Nobody does except you."
"What about your parents?"
The question hits like a physical blow. Swan tries to picture his parents' faces. Tries to remember their voices, their names, any single concrete detail about the people who raised him.
Nothing.
Not absence. Not amnesia. Just... nothing. Like the concept of parents exists, but his specific parents never did.
"They're gone," he whispers. "Not dead. Not absent. Just... erased. Retroactively. The system is deleting my entire history."
Elara sets down the recorder with shaking hands. Opens her notebook to a fresh page and starts writing frantically, pen pressing hard enough to tear the paper.
"Then we anchor you here. Now. In this moment." She writes as she talks, each word a desperate act of preservation. "Swan. Male. Approximately twenty years old. Third-year student at Blackwood Institute, major unknown due to record corruption. Recoded individual with reality manipulation abilities. First manifested code-sight during Daemon incursion on October 7th. Currently experiencing retroactive erasure of personal history."
She looks up. "What's your favorite color?"
"What?"
"Your favorite color. Tell me something small. Something that can't be erased because it's too insignificant for the system to care about."
Swan thinks. "Blue. Dark blue. Like the sky right before it gets completely dark."
Elara writes it down. "Favorite food?"
"I don't know anymore. But I remember I used to hate mushrooms. Texture thing."
She writes that too. "Fears?"
"Being forgotten." The words come out raw, honest. "Being alone."
"You're not alone." Elara's hand finds his. Her fingers are cold, trembling. "I'm here. I'm remembering you. And as long as I keep documenting, keep recording, you'll have proof that you existed. Even if everything else gets deleted."
Swan looks at her notebook—pages and pages of cramped handwriting, bloodstains, desperate attempts to hold onto truth in a world that rewrites itself. At her camera, building a redundant archive of his face. At the audio recorder preserving his voice.
"What if they erase you too?" he asks. "What if documenting me makes you more anomalous? More likely to be debugged?"
"Then someone else will remember." Elara's voice is fierce despite the fear in her eyes. "Ash. Cipher. Others we haven't met yet. The Recoded take care of each other. That's how we survive."
She raises the camera again. "Once more. Look at me. Let me see you."
Swan meets her gaze as the shutter clicks. For one moment, preserved in silver halide crystals and chemical reactions, he exists. Undeniably. Provably. Real.
His stomach growls. The hunger has moved beyond physical discomfort into something more existential—a gnawing emptiness that food wouldn't solve anyway.
"Here." Elara pulls a protein bar from her bag. "I brought extra. Figured you wouldn't be able to access meal services."
"You thought of everything."
"I have to." She presses the bar into his hand. "My brain doesn't work like other people's anymore. I think in contingencies and redundancies. Every possibility branching off into probability trees. It's exhausting. But right now, it's keeping you alive."
Swan tears open the wrapper. The protein bar tastes like cardboard and artificial sweetener, but his body accepts it gratefully. Physical proof that he still has basic needs. Still exists in corporeal form.
"What happened in the combat lab?" Elara asks. "I felt something. A ripple in the substrate. Time dilation, maybe?"
"I slowed down time," Swan admits. "Or I sped myself up. I don't know the difference. I just didn't want to get hit, and suddenly I could see the gaps between moments."
Elara's eyes widen. "That's... that's advanced Recoding. Most of us can manipulate small objects, maybe glitch a system or two. But affecting time itself—"
"I didn't mean to. It just happened."
"That's even more impressive. And more dangerous." She lowers her voice. "Someone noticed, Swan. Someone always notices when reality bends. The system will log it, analyze it, send something to investigate."
"Someone already noticed." Swan thinks about Kaito's expression. The determination in his eyes. "The guy I was fighting. Kaito something. He knows I did something impossible, and he's not the type to let mysteries go unsolved."
"Kaito Nakamura." Elara's face goes pale. "Oh no. Oh, Swan, that's bad."
"Why?"
"Because Kaito isn't just a combat student. He's a research assistant in the Cognitive Warfare department. He has access to Institute security systems, combat analytics, anomaly detection algorithms. If anyone can track down an unregistered Recoded individual, it's him."
Swan feels the weight of that knowledge settle in his chest. Another threat added to the growing list. The system's cleanup protocols. Shadow-puppeted humans. Daemon rifts. And now an intelligent, determined rival who's decided Swan is worth investigating.
"I need to get better at this," Swan says. "The Recoding. If I'm going to survive, I need to learn control. Not just panic-responses and desperate instinct."
"Agreed." Elara pulls out her tablet. "I've been researching. The dark nets have rumors about training methods. Visualization techniques. Ways to interface with the code-layer more deliberately. It's dangerous—pushing your Recoding too hard can cause feedback loops, system rejection, even permanent dissociation from consensus reality. But staying passive is more dangerous."
She meets his eyes. "Are you willing to risk it?"
Swan thinks about Kai's empty stare. His vanished dorm room. His deleted parents who maybe never existed. His entire life being systematically erased while he watches.
"What do I have left to lose?"
"Your sanity," Elara says bluntly. "Your physical form. Your last connections to humanity. Just because you're already partially erased doesn't mean you can't fall further."
"But I could also get stronger. Learn to fight back. Maybe even figure out how to un-erase myself."
"Maybe." Elara doesn't sound convinced. "Or maybe you'll discover that once you're deleted, there's no restore function. No undo command. Just acceptance and survival in whatever form you can manage."
Swan looks at his hands. Imagines he can still see traces of code clinging to his fingers from when he touched time itself.
"Tomorrow," he says. "We start training tomorrow. At Static Grounds, where reality is already flexible."
"Tomorrow," Elara agrees. She raises the camera one last time. "But right now, let me take one more picture. Insurance."
The shutter clicks.
In the captured image: a boy who exists in defiance of deletion. A girl who remembers everything and suffers for it. Two anomalies holding onto each other in a world that wants them gone.
Later, Elara will add the photo to her archive. Will write the date and time on the back in permanent marker. Will store it in three separate locations—physical locker, encrypted cloud backup, hidden folder in the static-space servers that the Recoded maintain.
Later, someone will try to delete it. The system will flag it as corrupted data. The image will glitch, degrade, fragment.
But it won't disappear entirely.
Because some truths are too stubbornly documented to erase cleanly.
And some people refuse to be forgotten.
[END OF CHAPTER]