The crowd bunches up all at once.
Someone screams. Someone else shouts, "Call an ambulance," as if volume can rewind reality. A woman drops her phone. The screen hits the pavement, spins, and she does not even look down. A man flails his hands like he is trying to grab the air and cannot. Two people run forward, then stop the moment they reach the child, like it only becomes real when they are close enough to smell it.
Panic is not a single feeling. It is a messy system.
Some try to kneel but they do not know where to put their hands. Some step back, then step forward again. Someone yells, "Is he breathing?" and does not wait for an answer. Someone else takes a step toward the driver like they are going to attack him, then backs off, defeated by their own fear.
I stay where I am.
I am not watching the center of it anymore. I am watching the crowd. How it spreads, how it tightens. Who tries to take control, who clings to a role because a role is easier than thinking.
Someone is crying. Loud, broken. It has less to do with what she saw than with what she was forced to see.
I start walking again.
No one stops me. No one grabs my shoulder. No one shouts, "Why didn't you do anything?"
They are busy with something else. Turning what happened into something that makes sense. Like naming it gives them control.
The flow of people parts around the accident like water around a stone. The street keeps bending forward. The buildings keep going. Shop windows keep reflecting bodies that do not know where to put themselves. The city does not stop. It just continues.
I look at the traffic light ahead.
Red. It will turn green in eleven seconds.
Two people will cross early anyway. One will hesitate halfway, then commit. A car will honk, not because it needs to, but because the driver wants to announce himself. The honk will change nothing.
The light turns green.
Everything happens the way I expected.
The hunger is still there. It does not come and go the way it should. It sits in me like a constant demand, as if something inside my body is burning through fuel faster than it ever did before.
I pass a row of shops. Warm bread drifts out from a bakery and my body reacts for a moment, but I do not go in. Food is a short solution. Now it only lowers the volume.
A group of teenagers passes me, laughing too loudly at something none of them actually found funny. It is not emotion. It is a signal. A way to prove they belong.
A man in a suit walks fast like he is late for something he does not want. His phone rings. He looks at it. He does not answer. He will justify it later.
They are so readable it is almost boring.
I used to think people were complicated. Now they look like habits that learned how to walk.
I catch my reflection in a dark shop window.
My face is calm. My eyes are steady. What happened behind me has left nothing on me.
And I like that.
The time of the walk stays fixed in my head: twenty three minutes and forty seven seconds.
I do not know why it is that exact. It is not a guess. It feels planted, like an appointment with something I have not met yet.
My building comes into view.
It is ordinary. A keypad entrance. A small courtyard. A bench no one uses unless they are waiting.
I go in without slowing down.
A woman stands near the door smoking. She watches me for half a second, then looks away. She does not speak.
Good.
I do not feel like answering small questions.
I take the stairs. Second floor. My door.
I unlock it, step inside, and close it behind me.
The apartment is quiet, and the hunger feels louder in the silence.
I get home and close the door behind me.
The hunger is still there, but I don't go to the kitchen.
I need to test this.
Not with guesses or thoughts—something I can measure.
I go straight to the bookshelf.
I pull out a random book and sit down.
I open the first page.
Then I start flipping.
At first it's normal—page, page, page.
Then my hand accelerates without permission. The pages blur. The sound becomes a steady hiss.
I stop.
My eyes drop to the text and my first thought is simple:
How did I read that fast?
It doesn't feel possible.
I try to be honest with myself—maybe I didn't read it. Maybe I just flipped.
So I test it.
I close the book, open it on a random page, and look at a single line.
And instantly I know what comes next.
Not the general idea—the exact words. The punctuation. The sentence after it. The paragraph above it
It's all there, clean and complete, like it was never processed… just stored.
I flip again, even faster.
It doesn't feel like I'm reading.
It feels like I'm recording.
When I stop, I can recall everything I've "seen" so far with perfect clarity.
Every line. Every example. Every small detail I would normally forget.
That's when I understand what surprised me.
It's not that my eyes became faster.
It's that my brain stopped letting anything go.
And the shock isn't the speed.
It's the certainty.
I post the proof.
Then I don't check my phone.
Replies won't come instantly. People read, hesitate, argue with themselves, then decide whether it's worth leaving a comment. That takes time. Minutes if they're bored, hours if they're careful, days if they're proud.
I don't want time right now.
I want precedent.
I open my laptop and type the first question that matters:
"people who suddenly became genius"
Then I sharpen it, one search at a time:
"sudden perfect memory case"
"constant hunger after long sleep"
"time perception slowed down superhuman"
"acquired savant syndrome"
"hyperthymesia adult sudden onset"
I click through results fast. Abstracts, forum threads, news summaries, vague "inspirational" posts that use words like breakthrough and awakening as if naming something makes it real.
There are similar stories.
None that match.
Not the twelve missing days. Not the hunger that doesn't resolve. Not the clean, immediate structure like problems unfolding into answers without friction.
I change the strategy without deciding to. It's automatic: when the scientific language stops giving me clean matches, the internet's other language appears.
"awakening sudden abilities"
"unlock brain power"
"hidden potential activated"
A video thumbnail catches my eye because it's aggressive, confident, and stupid in the way only the internet can afford to be:
"Increase Your Brain Capacity In 3 Days (Guaranteed)"
I click it.
I set playback to 2x immediately.
It's still slow.
Not the words the gaps between them. The deliberate pauses. The ritual of emphasis.
YouTube won't go higher than 2x.
So I install a browser extension.
No hesitation. No annoyance. Just: obstacle → tool.
I refresh the page. A small speed control appears.
3x. Better.
4x. Finally efficient.
I try 5x.
The audio starts to break not a literal explosion, but a harsh distortion, like the edges of syllables are grinding against the speaker. I can still understand him, but my ears register it as damage.
I push once more.
6x.
Now it's clearly degrading. Sibilants turn metallic. Certain frequencies spike into a thin, painful buzz. The meaning is still there, but the sound becomes the main problem.
So I back off.
4x again.
The distortion fades enough to tolerate. The man continues breathing, water, visualization, the familiar list of simple actions promised as a key to an impossible door.
It isn't useful.
But it is instructive.
Not because it explains anything, but because it shows what people do when they don't have explanations: they sell certainty.
I close the tab.
I go back to searching, but my eye catches something in the corner of a different page an ad with polished lightning, a golden shield, and a clean, arrogant slogan.
GODS OF OLYMPUS PLAY NOW
Zeus. Athena. Poseidon.
Normally I would ignore it.
Instead, a thought forms with the same quiet inevitability as the answers to the problems did:
What if "god" was just the old label for anomalies people couldn't classify?
It isn't belief.
It's a question about taxonomy.
I open another tab anyway.
"Greek gods real evidence"
"mythology based on historical events"
"ancient reports superhuman beings"
"Zeus historical interpretation"
The results are what they have to be: interpretation, argument, blurred history dressed as certainty.
No clean data.
Still, one thing sticks.
Mythology isn't only about the sky and the sea.
It's also about beings that look human and aren't strength without training, hunger without end, knowledge without learning, sleep that is not sleep.
I don't decide to connect it to myself.
The connection appears.
And I hate that it appears, because it's the mind doing what minds do: reaching for labels when mechanisms are missing.
So I force myself back to mechanisms.
Back to biology.
Back to the parts that can leave measurable traces.
I start a new list of searches, colder and more precise:
"hyperphagia constant hunger causes"
"leptin ghrelin appetite regulation"
"brain glucose consumption increased cognition"
"ketones cognition performance"
"torpor humans prolonged sleep metabolic downregulation"
"acquired savant syndrome mechanism"
This time, even when the results don't match, they at least speak the right language.
Hormones. Fuel pathways. Neural efficiency. Metabolic cost.
If my cognition is burning energy like a machine, the hunger makes sense.
If my body entered a protective, low-consumption state for twelve days, the missing time makes sense.
If my brain is recording instead of filtering keeping everything instead of discarding then the certainty makes sense.
Not as magic.
As a system that has changed its priorities.
I open a blank document and write, as if I'm logging a case study about someone else:
Symptoms:
12-day missing interval (subjective)
Persistent hunger not fully resolved by eating
Rapid comprehension + near-perfect recall after brief exposure
"Split" perception: multiple action outcomes visually overlaid
Perceptual dilation (subjective slowing), predictive accuracy increase
Then I write the question that matters more than any forum reply:
What am I?
Not emotionally. Biologically.
I don't look at my phone.
I don't need strangers to tell me I'm real.
I need to know what this body is doingand what it will do next.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, the ad's lightning and the word Olympus stay lodged like a splinter: not as faith, but as a reminder that humans have always seen the unknown and given it a name.
I don't want a name.
I want the rules.