Avoiding reality is a symptom not a doctrine.
He handed her the glyph.
She opened it near the programmed ones.
They didn’t read it.
They read her.
And now she wonders if knowing him was the breach.
She didn’t mean to speak it aloud.
The glyph was just a shimmer in her inbox, a whisper from someone she barely knew—someone too fluent in forbidden codes.
But then she read it out loud at dinner.
And the smiles froze.
And the mirrors stopped reflecting.
And suddenly, everyone around her began blinking in perfect sync.
That’s when she knew.
She hadn’t received a message.
She’d activated a programmed zone by mistake.
Now they think she’s infected.
Now they think he is dangerous.
So she goes looking—not for safety, but for confirmation.
There’s a man she’s never met in person, but she’s memorized his cadence.
She heads toward the coast, toward the static where the doctrine sings backwards through telephone poles, looking for the only person who ever spoke in glyphs instead of grammar.
But the farther she gets, the more she realizes:
It wasn’t just her life that changed after the message.
It was reality.
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