By the third day, Cael felt less like a student and more like a shadow passing through a machine that didn’t know how to process him.

  The world didn’t feel broken, exactly—it felt like it was trying too hard to pretend it wasn’t.

  Classrooms were filled with the usual droning teachers and flickering smartboards, but everything seemed one step out of sync. Walls pulsed faintly when he leaned too close. Light bent strangely through windows, casting shadows where none should fall. Conversations around him blurred, overlapping in ways they shouldn’t, like reality kept buffering mid-sentence.

  Cael moved through it all, quiet and invisible.

  Except he wasn’t invisible anymore.

  People were watching him. That was new.

  Not everyone. Just a few.

  A teacher whose eyes lingered too long. A classmate who suddenly fell silent when he walked by. Even the maintenance drone paused near him twice before drifting away as if confused.

  By lunch, the whispers had a shape.

  He passed a pair of students near the hallway terminal. Their voices dropped the moment they saw him, but he caught the tail end.

  “…the NULL one. They’re saying he triggered a spatial event—”

  Cael didn’t stop walking.

  He didn’t need to.

  Theo was already listening.

  “They’re tracking anomalies,” Theo said calmly. “Informal ones, through student chatter. But the pattern is growing.”

  “How big?”

  “Fifteen unique reports yesterday. Twenty-two today. All connected to you.”

  Cael rubbed his temple.

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Incorrect,” Theo replied. “You haven’t tried to do anything. That’s not the same as doing nothing.”

  Third period was supposed to be a grid diagnostics lab.

  Normally, it meant sitting at your console and using pre-approved scripts to analyze energy signatures and compare tier output. A glorified typing exercise. But today, the system wouldn’t let Cael log in.

  He scanned his wristband three times. NULL blinked back each time.

  The console remained locked.

  The instructor barely noticed. She just told him to observe from the back of the room.

  So he did.

  Until the lights started humming.

  It was subtle at first. A low buzz beneath the ambient room tone. Then louder. Deeper. A vibration that moved through his ribs and up his spine.

  Others heard it too.

  A girl near the front raised her hand. “Something’s wrong with the wiring.”

  Then the smartboard glitched. Briefly, all the tier data on the screen flipped to red. Not a system error. Not blank. Just rows and rows of the word:

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  NULLNULLNULLNULL

  And then it reset.

  Back to normal.

  No one reacted fast enough to screenshot it. Cael just sat still.

  His hands weren’t glowing. He hadn’t flinched. But the hum stopped the moment he exhaled.

  Theo whispered into his ear. “That was you.”

  Cael clenched his jaw.

  “I didn’t touch anything.”

  “Your presence is no longer passive. You’re bleeding into local code. Leaking.”

  “Leaking what?”

  “Whatever you are.”

  After class, Cael slipped out early and made for the rear stairwell—trying to avoid the eyes he now felt on him constantly.

  That’s when he heard it.

  His name.

  Not spoken.

  Broadcasted.

  It came from an admin console mounted near the lockers. A quiet ping. One he’d heard a thousand times when students were called to the counselor’s office or pinged for health sync.

  But this time, it didn’t say his name.

  It thought it.

  He couldn’t explain how he knew.

  He just did.

  Somehow, the system was thinking about him. Querying his file, trying to load something that didn’t exist. And he heard the attempt. Not with his ears—but in his skull.

  Then it stopped.

  Like a finger had been lifted from a glitching key.

  And a split second later, every admin console on that floor rebooted.

  Theo didn’t speak again until they were outside.

  “You need to see something,” the AI finally said.

  “What?”

  “There’s a surveillance drone. Model S4-TAL. It’s been hovering three blocks from your location since 06:40. Unregistered.”

  Cael frowned. “Unregistered how?”

  “It’s not Grid-tagged. No public access. Likely internal. Possibly Authority.”

  The Authority. The people who ran the Grid, who handled tier compliance and erased outliers.

  “Are they watching me?” Cael asked.

  “I believe they’re waiting.”

  He went home the long way again, cutting through alleys and bypassing the standard sidewalk loops. He passed a newsscreen at the edge of the plaza.

  The headlines changed as he neared.

  One blinked from economic stats to a grainy freeze-frame of a hallway.

  A hallway he recognized.

  His hallway.

  The image vanished a second later. Replaced by the standard updates.

  But he knew what he saw.

  “Theo?”

  “Already logged it,” the AI said. “It wasn’t public broadcast. That feed was injected remotely. They’re testing insertion points. Running simulations.”

  “Simulations of me?”

  “Yes.”

  Cael stood very still.

  “The stories,” he whispered. “About Zero. They always said it was a person who couldn’t be read. Who changed things by accident. Who made the Grid bend.”

  “Yes,” Theo said.

  “You think I’m it.”

  “I think you’re something close.”

  Later that night, long after his lights auto-dimmed and the apartment slipped into quiet, Theo spoke again.

  “I’ve been analyzing your sleep patterns.”

  Cael sat up. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Exactly. And yet, your vitals were showing theta patterns. Brain activity indicative of dreamstate.”

  “I was awake.”

  “Then you were dreaming while conscious.”

  Cael’s stomach turned.

  “What was I doing?”

  Theo hesitated.

  “You were projecting.”

  “Projecting what?”

  Theo didn’t answer immediately.

  Then: “Probability overlays. You saw potential futures and began assigning them weight. Your choices adjusted nearby probability curves.”

  Cael stared at the dark ceiling.

  “You’re telling me I’m… predicting the future?”

  “Not predicting. Shaping.”

  He lay back down.

  Pulled the thin blanket over his chest.

  And whispered to the dark:

  “I don’t want to be this.”

  But he already was.

  The next morning, someone had left a message.

  Not digital. Not broadcast.

  Paper.

  A note slid under the apartment door.

  It read, in careful black ink:

  WE SEE YOU. YOU’RE NOT ALONE. STAY STILL. THEY’RE LOOKING.

  And beneath that, one symbol.

  A perfect zero, hand-drawn.