The dormitory hallway was almost silent, save for the persistent hum of the overhead fluorescents. The air smelled faintly of instant noodles and dry paper, the scent of half-finished homework and too many midnight snacks. Mia stood outside her room for a moment, clutching her planner in both hands, before pushing the door open.
Inside, the desk lamp cast a pale circle of light across her textbooks. Notes lay scattered in uneven stacks. Her laptop's screen blinked softly, the cursor waiting in a half-finished sentence. But Mia didn't sit down right away.
She closed the door behind her, letting it click softly into place, then stared at the desk. The planner trembled slightly in her grip. Something felt wrong.
She flipped it open. Pages fluttered like dry leaves. Blank.
Not just today.
The whole week.
No entries. No notes. No reminders.
No memory.
Mia's chest tightened. Her breath caught somewhere between inhale and panic. She turned to the last page she was sure she'd written on.
Monday. A grocery list. A meeting reminder. A half-sketched diagram of Sarah's class schedule.
Then nothing.
She sank into the chair. Her knees hit the underside of the desk with a thud, but she barely noticed.
Her pen was where it always was, nestled against the edge of the lamp base. She picked it up and turned the planner sideways, finding the narrow white margin of the page. She scrawled quickly.
TimeRipple suspected – monitor memory decay.
The words came from instinct, not certainty.
She stared at the ink until it bled slightly at the edge.
Then, slower, she added:
"When thought collapses inward."
She didn't know where the phrase came from.
But the moment she wrote it, her heart skipped.
A sound—just the soft crackle of a page shifting, maybe. Or something more.
The shadows in the corners of her room seemed to breathe.
She pulled her chair closer to the desk and began turning pages again, not for writing, but for clues. Any indentation, any torn edge, any stray hairline of graphite.
Nothing.
The absence was surgical.
Fluorescent lights buzzed harder overhead. Her eyes ached.
She pressed her forehead to the edge of the planner and whispered, "What did I lose?"
There was no answer. Only the clock ticking in stubborn rhythm.
Mia straightened, forced her breath steady.
She began reconstructing. Monday's meeting. Tuesday's notes. Wednesday—
Blank.
Her pen moved again.
Anchor sequence: Sarah. Council. Library steps. Yellow form.
If memory frayed, she would stake down what she knew.
From outside her window, wind pressed against the pane. Tree branches scratched lightly. But Mia stayed where she was, surrounded by the hum of study and the sharp quiet of unraveling.
She opened a new page. Marked it with a date.
Underlined it twice.
She would remember this night—even if she didn't remember what came before it.
She stood up, crossed to her closet, and pulled down an old shoebox from the top shelf. Inside were receipts, museum stubs, folded flyers, and other fragments she'd saved—anchors to things too easily forgotten. She flipped through them now, hunting not for facts, but for familiarity.
One flyer, folded twice, had a name she didn't recognize—but her own handwriting circled a date on it. A Wednesday.
Her fingers tightened.
She returned to the desk, added it to the page.
Unverified imprint: 12 Oct. - 'Elara workshop'?
She closed her eyes. Waited.
Nothing came.
No image. No sound. Just static.
But sometimes static meant signal. Hidden.
She scribbled again.
Double-check planner version backup. External scans?
A faint headache pressed behind her right eye. She blinked hard, trying to shake it loose.
She rose, crossed to the mirror, and stared at herself. Her face looked the same. Same tired eyes. Same pinched expression.
But something about the way the shadows pooled around her felt off.
She reached out and touched the mirror's surface.
Cold.
Then warm.
For a fraction of a second, she saw a flicker—her reflection stepping back a moment before she did.
She gasped and stumbled, catching herself on the dresser.
Then silence again.
She gripped the edge of the mirror with both hands and forced herself still.
"No panic," she said aloud. "Just record."
She went back to the desk and added one more line.
Visual inconsistency. Fragment. Catalogued.
The planner no longer looked empty.
Now, it looked like a crime scene.
She breathed once. Twice. Sat back. Then reached for the tea mug she hadn't touched in hours and took a long sip—lukewarm, bitter.
But grounding.
She opened her laptop and began copying entries. If the ink vanished, the backups would hold.
She didn't know what had been taken.
But she knew something had.
And she wasn't going to wait for it to happen again.
The cursor blinked as she opened a blank document titled: MEMORY STABILIZATION LOG.
Line one:
Night anomaly registered. Cognitive void detected.
She paused. Then typed:
Possible containment breach. Watch for signal bleed.
Then, in the margin of her physical planner, she wrote a single sentence in all caps:
DO NOT TRUST THE GAPS.
And circled it. Twice.
She looked around her room again. Her desk, her bed, her bookshelves—everything where it should be. And yet, none of it felt real unless she could trace its place in time.
She flipped her phone over and checked the calendar app. Notifications had been cleared. No history.
She reached for her backup drive and plugged it into the laptop. Old snapshots loaded—screen captures of homework, scanned forms, even images of Sarah from days she couldn't consciously recall.
She created a folder labeled: "Anchor Fragments."
Then saved every trace she could find.
Just in case.
The last thing she wrote, before powering down, was simple:
"If I forget again, this is proof I existed."
She closed the planner gently and slid it beneath her pillow.
Then lay in bed, eyes open in the dark, listening.
For memory.
For breach.
For silence.
She did not sleep.
But she did not forget again.
Her fingers curled around the spine of the planner beneath her, as if holding it close could hold her intact. She did not move. The shadows stayed still.
But she watched them, just in case.
Somewhere in the hall, a door clicked softly—another student returning, or leaving again. The familiar sound grounded her briefly.
She whispered one last note aloud into the dark, voice barely audible:
"I am here."
The words were not a reassurance.
They were a warning.