Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. It after midnight and the city
doesn't feel like home. My kitchen windows crack, trickling in
a dry wind that carries the scent of engine exhaust
and stale fry fruit from the shutter kabob shop across
the street. I sit hunched over a narrow table stained
with ring marks and popmup with bent scabs from cheap
cigarette ash. Around me, layered and flowing as if this
table is an altar of confusion. Theretorm receipts, trip history,
print outs, post it notes, stuck to everything, and my
badded black note. Its page is fan open like the
enspolt guts of a clock, and each page is a
patchwork of frantic scroll and familiar initials, jared dates and addresses,
arrows looping through diagrams that look more like the clustering
bands of a stranger's nightmare than any logical structure. A
vortexpenciled at the center of most pages, ringed in a
phrase so stubbornly persistently almost chanted it into delirium, always
the last ry. The notebook has become a kind of
totem for me, though I sometimes hate to touch it.
My penhovers thin d my fingers tap at the slim
digital recorder that clicks on at a faint blue lead.
My own voice two Net to Go comes through the
tinney speaker. I listened to myself, flat and methodical, listing
out names. One A Brixton picked up at twenty two fourteen.
Last ride didn't end the fair item left behind. I
reached for the Navy lineard holding a faded plastic card,
the kind you used to scan into midtown apartment blocks.
The item was under my passenger seat, kicked up by
winner's nervous feet. Protocol says you tried to reach up,
find the person and sure nothing got lost in the
hand off. I did that. He used the phone number
listed in the app, which routed me not to win
it herself, but to her sister. I'd left a polite
message and got a call back on a soft weekday afternoon.
The woman's voice was brisk, edged with the map by
sharp tones of someone used to city chaos. I think
he must be confused. I don't have a sister by
that name. I don't know any whinner. You have the
wrong number yet I double checked with the app the
match was exact. Their faces in profile pictures resembled enough
to suggest family. I recalled the childer tickled the back
of my head as every plead our conversation rolling from
my coal lug in a patch of dry sunlight on
my living room floor, I sense for a moment that
the woman's confusion wasn't staged, that it concealed something vile,
a memory forcibly blotted, or a name erased by shadow.
Now in my cramped, shadow wrapped apartment, the residue of
that call will not fade. I replay the message on
my smartphone, her clipped denial, and the silence that yawned
just before she hung up. Rewind replay pause. There's a
coalness buried in the static, or whif a something final.
I thumbed the notebooks well worn seam, letting it fall
open to a pair of pages of stared at for days.
Scrolled along the margin, The air dresses are circled in red,
every one marking the end of that last ride, end
points of vanishing. Let it over a map of the
city's farthest reach as empty alleys, condemned blocks, lawn parched Parkland,
dead end, culled to sex, with mail boxes bristling like
the stumps of pull teeth. The pen's line overlaps itself,
the patrol in my own hand, always the last ride,
always a different place, always something lost that cannot be reclaimed.
I take a shaky breath and shut their corridor off.
The outside world barely seeps through the smear glass, just
a lost echo of city, bustle, Travis breeze faintly below,
ceaseless and indifferent. I know I don't deserve to be
this rattle to just overseats. Maybe a mistake in the
app confusion on the other end. But there's something else too.
There's a pattern curling at the edge of understanding, And
with every laid iron, every page turned, it closes tighter
round me. Assarisk, a memory of simpler Knight's floats up nights,
when driving was just work and complicated and repetitive, a
game of numbers. In time, I found my solace in
the orne sodium vapor glow, a thousand blotched tailers dancing
over the cracked black top. Before all of this, each
shift began, the same keys jingling in my pocket, the
slap of the car door, closing the fitful blow of
my coat. As I settled behind the wheel. I'd missed
the dashboard with a lemonye spray, wipe down the sticky
coin tray with a rag, checked the cup holder for
wrappers or receipts left by the previous night's parade of strangers.
I always buckled the tiny bag of mixed nuts and
old water bottles to the back of the front passenger seat.
It looked generous, but it was just habited. Some passengers
took snacks, most just ignored them. My phone would ping,
alerting me to the end flocks of fares. The city,
sprawling and restless, came alive in glass and chrome, as
dark as settled neon off licko store windows, club signs,
touching bus headlights, swinging white to catch loan figures. It stops.
This was my kindom elabyornth that felt navigable, if only
through repetition. My passengers changed each night, that their habits
rarely did group one. The club kids glitter on their knuckles,
cracked laughter, perfume. Shop is alcohol in a wound. The
left smears and the windows and hid the phone screens
from each other, talking nonsense above beats still pulsing in
their heads. Group two, the overnight shifters, tired faces stitched
up against fatigue, hands curled a round, battered backpacks, barely
audible thank hughes as they slipped into or out of
the back seat. I like these the best sellent, clean,
no drama. There were others, too, the late night insomniacs
calling for short rides to nowhere, eager to make tiny
connections in the quiet dark. For them, I kept a
running inventory of city trivia, ready to deploy if the
air got too awkward. Sometimes they offered more fragments of
their own stores, scraps of family trouble, idle questions about
my real job, if I had one. When I stopped
for gas, almost always at the blue Lit Rapid Fuel
on West Fifteenth, I made a ritual of it. That's
where I first became friendly with Malik, a ryde Chaer
veteran whose silver cam I announced itself from the wayward
squill of its brakes. Malick was a fixture or early forties,
always with a disposable cup of liquorice tea and a
cheap radial blur in the late soccer results he'd lean
out Handwall's cigarette already forming a droop at the edge
of his mouth, and MUTTERO city gossip through the static.
Don't stay too late in Glover Park, kid, I've seen
face down their turn ugly and not worth the extra
couple of bucks. Trust me, some ride, some shifts, You're
better off skipping, I'd laugh, wave him off. He'd shake
his head. Thick eyebrows needed an exaggerated warning. But next
time I caught a pang from Glover Park with the
warehouses near the river, my thumb hasted a second before accepting.
You heard a lot of things from other drivers. Most
were tales of parking tickets, bad tips, hookup's gone wrong,
passengers who spilled out on to the curve and vanished
before they paid. But every now and then some one
would mention a fair that went all the way across
the city without saying a word, vanishing into shadows own arrival,
and never popping up again. Quiet fairs, they called them.
He never got a second trip. Sometimes I found myself
carrying two or three in the same week. It never
seemed strange, not at first the city eight people, or
maybe the city reflected back what he put into its silence,
while hope erasure still alike, the night shift, no boss
watching me, nobody checking when on how long I worked,
just the city and its senses of faces, all easy
to forget. My well shrank to the glow from my phone,
the green light blinking and the dash, the sound of
sleep stove talk radio. The pattern is invisible until it tightens,
and by then you were too entangled to slip loose asterisk.
This past spring, something shifted, almost imprecipibly. It started as vague,
as quiet, and note I pushed aside until it stacked
into a wall. It was a quiet Tuesday when I
checked my weekly pay at summary. I'd been expecting my
usual mixed tips from club goers, short runs for casino diners,
the odd stretch for hospital staff clocking out. But as
I scrolled name by name, I realized three of my
so called regulars were missing. There were blank spaces in
the pay atless where they should have reappeared, listings for
ride I've given before, common name, slipping past, until suddenly
there was nothing at all, not a tip, not a
five star review. Curiosity aged into anxiety as I double
checked my route history in the app, each of the
vanished regulars had taken a ride within the last ten days,
always late, always to a different sector of the city.
The first, a construction worker named Halorin, asked to be
dropped off near an abandoned busteeper piles of rusting metal,
no sign of activity, just a lock gate. The second,
a middle aged woman named Coinsila, got out by the
shutter pharmacy in Northmore. The building paneled over and tagged
in purple spray paint. The last, at grad student Liam,
if my notes were right, requested to drop at a
city park long after closing. Usually a regular were books
within a week or two a dip. They chat or
at least not hollow. Profiles might change, new head shuts,
updated buyers, but these were different. When A tapped their names,
all I got was an eras green. This profile is
no longer active for the app, said even there passed.
Pickup's blurred and anonymized as rider with soil we way
in place of faces. I tried to message Liam Thrudia
in absystem, thinking he might have just changed numbers. Message
failed to send. Use it does not exist, not blocked,
not deleted, erased. It was then that a memory slid
side was into my mind. Halorin looking out the window,
muscles not intent under his windbreaker, whispering thanks, but not
quite meeting my eye as we idled at the bus deeper,
or Consola pausing on the curb, throwing a glance over
her shoulder, as if counting had lights before she slid
softly into the night. Each of them left behind a
debris feel ass scent on the seats, a glove and notebook,
a pocket of receipt but unturned up to reclaim it.
I shivered, shutting the app The missing were not my
story was my problem either. That was what I told
myself as I circled the names of my battered notebook,
my scroll becoming daggered with mounting her knees. Yet, no
matter how I tried to explain it away, routine turn over,
a people moving bad luck, the patent scratched deeper asterisk,
I resolved not to be superstitious. There are explanations for everything,
if you're patient and practical and willing to keep the
aging still a niche burro behind my eyes. Something was
at right. A week blood passed in restless, half productive
days between rides and corner shop sandwiches. I come through
my cloud, dry brodging up, dash on cliff, dashed by habit.
I sat on the floor, maps unveiled round me, and
moped with colored bushbends matching each disappearance. IRA after IRA
of night footage flickered white lines and city signage, headlight
blooming as halo's by the curb. I clicked through, slowing
for drop offs in those odd precincts where ferris seemed
to vanish. Soon a detail appeared, a plain white sedan,
always faint in the periphery, idling with its lights off
at two of the last three draw up sites. Even
as I scrutinized pixels, it remained distant, headlight, shadowed windows,
blank shape, and wavering out of habit aboost to the
daft comp's background audio static wind, my own tired size,
the scrape of a glove or breathy cough. Then, near
the edge of two drop offs, fois as surface nearly
impossible to parse transfers Here the garbled reply clipped, as
though half of the words were being broadcast for a storm.
She's ready. The words wormed their way into my skin,
alien and institutional, but clearly spoken. Coffee a cidic in
my veins. I needed to speak. Malik was on, so
I tracked him down at the Ambulet all night diner
that acted as our informal h key. He occupied the
corner booth, dunking toast and eggs, tracking the news on
a battered phone. Something's not right, I started small, careful,
You ever had riders disappear on you? Profiles were erased,
oor ride logs just gone. He scoffed, grinning over a
muffle of egg. Half the time its bugs goes, toccounts,
the back ends always breaking. Relax man ear rattled, They
switch numbers, dump the app whatever. I pushed harder, laying
out details, drop off in abandoned corners, the silent white car,
the voices in the background, Malik's eyebrows arch. But the
old skeptisism never slipped. You hang around the weird neighborhoods.
You see weird stuff. Probably just some one picking up
a friend, or hell, maybe it's a test ride from
another app. You checking the local news I had. I
told him there were no stories, no missing person's matching
what I'd found. Nadick waved it off, focusing on his toast,
His attention drifting from my knees, as if afraid it
mut stick. Days blended, I grew restless, my notebooks swelling
as names and addresses multiply. That nagging itch drove me
into the daylight for once, to the address where i'd
left Hallow in the old deeper Northwest, swallowed by weeds.
I walked him on, empty snack wrappers and gush shouts.
Sunlight made the air you feel impossibly bare, disowned by
the city. A chain hung loosely from the gate, and
at my feet a brownish crossed, its stain stretched into
the gravel and settling but ambiguous. I saw a man
lying beneath the top tangles of house building from his hoodie.
He watched me with feral distress, clutching something in his fist.
I made a show of glancing at my phone. A
friend of mine used to come here, seeing anyone around.
His apply was spit landing, slick and hot near my shoe.
You're not the first looking for her, he said, voiced
coal tight, ain't none come back. You can go now.
His gaze darted behind me when I turned head lights.
Balanced on the horizon, a white sedan and moving distant
in a wad of felt intent. I left before curiosity
could and spool into something darker. Back in my car,
swept running down I brought despite the chill, I looked
into the rear view mirror, certain I was being watched.
My skin felt too small for my bones. Asterisk A
stretch of days pretended and normally before the next sharp bitch.
I'd given up expecting quick closure and resigned to track
and clues in the margins, nursing my paranoil like a
saw tooth. Then at two in the morning, it takes
vibry to my phone awake. The number was blocked, a
gray notification balloon two short sentences, it's not your business,
stop asking about them. The message vanished within seconds, replaced
by the apse bland home screen, but not before my
thumb fired off a screen shot. That image lingered, and
my photo roll stamped inexplicably with a map, pin and
address matching one of the abandoned drop offs. My breath caught.
I tried calling the driver help line, still pretending to
be a good samaritan. I'm worried about a passenger who
never got home after a drop off. There was something odd.
I just want to know she's okay. The voice was
helpful in the way a customer service bought would be
perfectly measured. Slide to put lightness, pausing after each crypt.
We appreciate your concern. Unusual situations are reviewed internally. Thank
you for your report. Please let the system guide your
future trips. I pressed for a supervisor, but the call
ended mid scent and soundless surgical. I pulled back from
the phone, stomach twisting, and after image of compliance sticking
in my mind. Later that night, drovesey from stirring its greens.
I stepped to my window and looked down. Parked alongside
my battert tod anne as a crisp white carroseme make
same model as a one from my footage. Its engine
was silent, windows dark. I watch heart thumping, but the
driver never got out, and after what felt like IROs
it slid into the darkness. That weekend, as gured the
notebook for the first time, the clusters of numbers and symbols,
mid sense, date stamps, time windows crunched close to my
own rides, locations arranged in lines and knocks that deckered
the patterns I'd found on my maps. A cipher half
cracked I pressed my palm over the aging paper, feeling
the indent of my own desperate search. There's a line
eventually that cannot be retreated from I crossed it, then,
flicking on the recorder once more and whispering, if they
want to scare me off, they picked the wrong driver asterisk.
That week, I'll let my curiosity turn ferocious. Somewhere in
the wormholes of Rydeta, I believed the system themselves would
give up this secret. I fed my phone into a
tangled extension chords and booted up in old laptop skripton
routines to download, write histories, driver logs, pay out details
each day to set layered on new strangeness a revealing pattern.
Ride into view profiles flagged as an active when random,
they clustered in the late ires, drew thick lines along
the city's periphery. The Vanish shared a common template rides
requested after one a m drop offs and zones that
no one lived in. To lead it accounts with the
nives of arrival, I checked a map of my routes,
now seated with digital pins. Each one hung not in chaos,
but in a lop sided arc. As so mapping a boundary.
The randomness was an illusion. There was a design. Next
came something subtler. I enlarged a trip or seat. Peering
closer at the faded corner, there, barely perceptible a water mark,
a looping symbol matching what I'd scribbled blindly into the
margins of my notebook on nights where I couldn't sleep.
The pattern laced itself into the architecture of the app.
Mask are reading its background noise, reluctant, but steel. I
called on Malik this time. He wasn't dismissive. With hands
locked tight around his coffee, he leaned in over my
batted laptop. I've heard whispers, he muttered, voice nearly trembling.
They called them ghost fairs, no app cash only do
you take the wrong route, you don't come back, They
say those reasons. I lost two friends, funds off, cows abandoned,
like they just disappeared. After a shift, the conversation slid darker.
Mylek stayed into his mug, not quite meeting my eyes.
There was history in his silence. We parted awkwardly. That night,
unable to sleep, I took my usual diversion through the
city's northern blocks, replain old routes. My own streets felt hostile.
The corner's sharp, the lights colder. The white sedan surfaced again,
not parked, not illusory, betrayling me by block headlights flickering
at odd intervals. At the intersection near Brodrick's warehouse, it
cut inward, closing distance, and for a moment I thought
I a heartbeat lader. Swerved away into red lit side street,
the glare gone as a friends from reality. I slowed
to a stop, sweat pulling on my brow asterisk The
last straw was a plan, not a reaction. I would
return to the sight of the first missing ride, recreate
the trip, and see what surfaced. This time. I would
not just watch, I would intervene. I pulled my car
into a pocket of darkness near the same bastipo. My
dask come according live. Every window cracked for sound, a burn,
her phone nestled in my shoulder bag, ready to dial
malack of things went bad. The eye was bled by.
In thin, nervous minutes, my knuckles were white on the wheel.
The quarter to three, a figure emerged, a young woman
flickering in and out of the tangle of street lamp shadows.
I recognized her at once. Her face matched the one
ot sketched fit to the lust lost rider's name. She
glanced over each shoulder before marching to the curb. Thorn
in hand. I wanted to call out, but held myself
in check, every muscle straining. She paused the phone, lighting
her jaw in blue. Not my car, though, as I watched,
a white dan blant and perfect rolled up to the curb.
The passenger doors one open smoothly, and she slid inside,
darting one last wild glance back for a second. Our
eyes met through the glasser gaze and spoke and scream
for help, some private message pulsing in her silent plea.
The cop pulled away. I gunned my engine and tried
to follow, noting the license plate be five file zero TEEP,
but by the time I reached the intersection, it was gone.
Later at the plate vanished from registry, not found on
any public record, dadea white, expunged, sweat soaked skin prickling.
I spun the car back around determination, turning to dread.
I didn't make it fifty feet before second vickl box
me in. Two men in dock suits stepping out faces
blank in the glare of my dacham. The tallow one
wrapped the window, slow and deliberate. I hesitated, heart thudding,
but cracked at half an inch. There are places drivers
aren't meant to see, he said, tone graveled and almost gentle.
This is your last warning. His companion met my eyes,
the smile flickering for an instant threat contained in composure.
Keep asking, and you'll join the missing. They stepped back,
cow idling until I reversed and fled, slick with the
sense of utter exposure. At home, my hand shook as
I backed up the dash onto my laptop, clutching the
notebooks so tidy its corn as curled. Even from the
safety of my own living room, I felt the cold
stare of those suited men, and the echo of that
fraezed looping in my bones. Always the last ride the
Pastern was not just a map of fear, nor a
puzzle for idle hands. I had asked too loudly, too well.
Now it reached for me alone in the dawning dark.
I finally understood what it meant to disappear alone in
the dawning dark. I finally understood what it meant to disappear,
but sleep refused to take me, replaced by the relentless
ticking up my own pulse, rickishing around the tiny apartment
until the wall seemed to pulse with threat. I watched
on bleed, weak color through the clouds and anemic blue.
My hands stung where the notebooks cover had but an inn,
leaving pale impressions across my palm. I wasn't ready, could
never be ready for what I now suspected was moving
alongside me, always two steps ahead. By noon, the city
was awake, the apartment flooded with gray. I stepped into
the shower, a water sloosing over a skin that felt board.
Once dress, I tried to focus on normal things, food, laundry,
catching up on the crooked bills sat piled on the
kitchen counter. But the world had changed overnight. Every fitstep
from the hall made my stomach not The grind of
a garbage truck became a warning bell, the broken elevator's
wine a coded message. My phone, begrudgingly obeying, produced a
calendar of errands. I assigned myself groceries, laundry drop off,
returning a library book, and I forced myself through each
as flicking to every white vehicle parked at the curve,
every reflection in store front glass. The city's rhythm was
jagged to day, as if the presence that had chattered
me and the small errors had left a signature across
the architecture. The morning curd at the sand which shot
spilled outside noisier than usual, and their chattermorphed into static.
As I threaded through to grab coffee, half listening from
my own name, or maybe the crackle over radio cueuing
up something that shouldn't exist, I found myself circling back
to the old depot. I hadn't planned at my feet,
simply routed day. While I sip coffee, gone cold and flavorless,
the lot was wide up in a daylight, the fenced
troop in unrusty hinges. No sign now of the street
sleeper or the white Sudan, but a single chair had
been tip near the chain and on its crack viny
lay a heap a cigarette, but still fragrant fresh. Someone
had kept watch. The urge to investigate collided with my
own fear. I snapped a photo of a chair, a
close up of one toasted filter, and moved on, unwilling
to linger in the open to larn. A delivery truck
idled in the lane, engine rumbling, metallic and unfriendly. The driver,
a narrow faced man with the tattoo of a clock
just visible above his collar, watched my progress in the
wing mirror. When I turned back, the mirror surface caught
my gaze. Strangely, for a slivered instant, it wasn't myself,
but someone else standing in the reflection. Shoulders, broader face, indistinct,
hands curled into fists, Sweat prickled beneath my jacket. I
hurried back to my car, fighting the compulsion to look
over my shoulder. The city's sun had grown harsh, flattening
the world to two dimensional brightness, as if daring me
to miss some vital clue. I drove aimlessly, needing to
keep in motion. The radio mumbling in the background with
news of laofs and another city council corruption probe. Even
the anchors practiced reading sounded brittle and mechanical. The long
red light a police cruiser rattle passed. Asked the officer,
and side gave nothing but an impassive glance. I thought
about flagging him down, showing my batted NOTEOK and explaining
the white sedans, the missing passengers. But what would I say.
I didn't have even a name that could be traced,
only shadows, voice, fragments, and that looping symbers gorched into
the meditate of my life. That symbol had begun to
infiltrate my dreams. Dozing as star plates, it flared across
my eyelids, a twisted loop pot noose pot circuit, echoing endlessly.
At times, in half sleep, I'd almost hear a faint voice,
my own, someone else's chanting. Always the last ride, it
was as if the structure of my days was being overwritten.
He qulibraated into alignment with something vast and caring. Late
in the afternoon, I steered the car down to the
river side industrial blocks, hoping motion would keep me sane.
My rough curve threw empty loading docks and pass ware
houses half bricked and stenciled with warnings. I stopped at
an ancient payphone outside a shut of canteen, dug up
a handful of coins from under my seat, and dialed
to help, lying once more, not from my mobile, but
from this anonymous relic. The phone ran too many times,
the sound wheezy in my ear. I hung up before
the line could connect anxiety rising in my throat with
the city's grid and wind around me if I pressed
too hard. I checked the app out of haw To
to old reflex, that flutter of Pavlovin, hoped for a ping,
but it sat blank, safe for one curious banner. Night
fares open, except if you dare. I've blinked at the wording,
not remembering the app ever, showing anything so brazen, a
trick of tiredness, I told myself, or a new Halloween primo.
Still my thumb hesitated over the icon. I killed the
screen instead, scribbling notes about the morning in my now
ragged notebook, each entry more stuttered and elytrical than the last.
As Oz began to close in an emptiness collected behind
my ribs, hunger maybe or something colder, the city's surface
boast and shimmered, and Sody Orange's office hours emptied, and
street lamps flicked on one by one. I parked in
a lot behind in abandoned bickery, bround out window glass
painted with sunburst and cold malik. It rang five times
before his deep bone tied mutter answered you all right?
His voice was worry stripped of last week's bravado. I swallowed.
I need to talk. It's intensifying. Cars outside my place,
system glitches, stuff showing up in the app that shouldn't.
Ye said, your friends went missing? Did any one look
into it? Did anyone care? He was silent for a moment,
traffic sloughing softly in his background. People talk, but most
drivers don't want trouble. They just want to get paid
and get gone. My cousin ran into something a while back,
whitecock cash farer, never clocked in the system. He was
gone two days. Then his car showed up, abandoned keys
on the dash, no trace beyond that. Did you get
the police involved? He made a sound half way between
laughter and disgust. What could I say that they picked
up a ghost with real hands and a real fare
There's no record of just vanish rights like they never happened.
All I had was a plastic key ring and a
gout feeling something's wrong. I press low and urgent. YE
think it's just the cast system or is it something
built into the app? He sighed, an old man's sound
on a young man's breath. Don't know, rumor is some
one pays for privacy, gets it, and drivers like us
fill in the gaps. It's too big to pin down now,
but watch yourself. Yeah, I'd keep your head down for
a while. I let his words hang and hung up.
I sat breathing in silence, the sky burning to flame
of the city's twisting lines of traffic. There was no
comfort in motion, now, no safety in routine. I circled homewards,
passing familiar landmarks that felt subtly altered, a mural with
faces that shifted as he drove by. At a playground
where a dozen swings swayed without wound, the street lights
strode at regular intervals, as if blinking messages in some
aching code. Outside my building, a trio of white sedan's idled,
each set a block apart, engines chuffing vapor into the
evening air. Each was identically yet indistinct, burying to cows
in the apse blue and green, but with blank, unreadable
QR codes where their scan stickers should have been. I
didn't approach. I double parked, got out, and walked with
fee to the side entrance, eyes low, my hands shook
as I fumble with the lock code. The door closed
behind me the heated hush of the wholeward, pressing clothes
inside my apartment, I performed my nightly rituals almost by
muscle memory. Checked the dead bolt, weadged a chair against
the handle, flipped every switch in sequence, peeked through the
blinds to the half seen street below. My phone bass
once a fountom notification white away. Before I could focus
on the screen, I threw it on to the table,
un knees, nodding my belly. A single envelope was slid
under my door, plain white, just my name block printed
in blue ballpoint, the latter slightly smudged. I bent open
it with shaking fingers. Inside a photocopa page taken from
my own battered notebook, complete with my dinner stained loops
and chickens cratch notations in the center, the looping symbol
drawn and cleaner, colder lines than my own hand could
have managed, rendered almost clinical below the symbol, one line
drive careful to night. The room seemed to shrink. My
heart bucked up, pulse, thunderous. I sat holding the copy
like a curse, I thought, pressed forward, shuffling all others aside.
This was a warning, possibly the only one I get
somewhere behind the apartment's drywall. Pipework rattle, faintly expanding, contracting
like a throat learned to swallow hidden things. The city's
voice was everywhere, inscapable, and for the first time I
sensed it wasn't just background. It was an alert system
and nervous system, bending itself to erase those he wandered
too near the core. I didn't sleep that night. I
wrote for IARS catalog in the whited eddy my encounters
at the depot, the periphery of each missing passenger. I
drew new maps, lines, crossing lines, spirals that never quite closed,
Patches where the streets of the city simply stopped. A
phrase returned, unbidden, leaping as if piped directly from the
marrow of the city, always the last rye. I stared
at the page until the words bled into shapes, dissing
and unanchored. Just before dawn, my phone wined one final
clitch notification for a flickering instant. As the screens struggled
to lower it, I caught a glimpse a new ride
request pick up the abandoned depot, drop off unknown. The
offer hung open, A dare my thumb trembled over the
except button. I waited, every nerve, crisp, feeling the weight
of fear settle. I did not press it, not yet,
because I knew, after all this, I'd have only won
more chance to get it right. But the silence in
my apartment expanded, pressing against the window glass, creeping through
the sagging floorboards and the heat stained walls. I tried
to shake it off, put on music, tried to read,
even considered picking up Malick's culls. But every few minutes
I found my eyes drifting back to the phone, the
ride request still pulsing on the screen, as if the
app itself was watching me hesitate, I slipped the battered
notebook into my coat pocket, just in case, and paced
the narrow living room. I wanted so badly to convince
myself this was just paranoia, sleeplessness, a cumulative drag of
bad shifts and city rock catching up to me. But
the play of headlights across the ceiling made the hair
on my forearm stand up. I thought about all the
names already written in my notebook, passengers loss to records,
streets erasing them, and wondered what I'd say to a
police officer to my own family. Someone tried to trace
my whereabouts and found nothing but a log of one
way rides and harlow dresses. Reluctantly, I pulled the blinds
all the way open and peered out. The street below
was nearly deserted. The three white sedans were gone, replaced
by garbage truck that had stopped mid collection. Its engine idled,
rumbling while the crew hunched over their phones. Faces sallow
and the elied glow, but parked two blocks down, barely
visible in the sodium vapor haze, and other white sedan
lingered lights off, windows up, motionless as a tombstone. I
watched it for nearly five minutes, willing it to move,
to betray some sign that a night normal person sat inside.
It didn't. My phone buzzed again, jolding me upright. A
new notification scrolled up in the right chair app, ghostly
and oddly formatted, congratulations, you have been selected for priority routing.
A cold shiver traced my spine. It didn't match any
promotion I had seen before. I tried to dismiss it,
but the app frozen the right screen, refusing to close.
The pick up and drop off were still labeled with
those two chilling words, abandoned, depot unknown. For a whild second,
I considered reinstalling the app, wiping my phone, even tossing
it out the window, just to break the tension. But
the idea of disconnecting completely terrified me more. To walk
out into a world and tract and catalog with no link,
even a corrupted one, between myself and the system that
by now seemed as much a predator as a service.
My hand drifted back to the envelope sitting half open
on the kitchen table, the copy of my own ravings
inside Drive Careful to Night. The words seemed less a
warning now than an instruction, a rule of passage for
surviving the next few hours. I sat knees pulled to
my chest and watched the right request fade and reappeared
three times before I reached over and shut off the
phone entirely. The room plunged into an odd hush, punctuated
only by the hum of the fridge and the distant,
unhurried sirens marking another imagined emergency elsewhere. Eventually I settled
by the window again, watching the city slow and raveling
toward morning, wondering if I'd even know when precisely eyed
step across the threshole from bystinder to participant. If I
ever did, perhaps it would be in a moment just
like this, the phone asleep, the room locked down, and
outside a white car waiting, engine dicking as the world
spun on a naisey, blissful ignorance. The morning that followed
the confrontation wasn't mourning so much as a slow return
of color and sensation, the well bleeding back into the
apartment's gray corners while the events of the night poll
steadily behind my eyes. I barely remembered sleep. It seemed
I must have dose. Sitting upright at my table, chin
pressed into cross arms, the notebook still clutched in my hand.
Any attempt to move summon an aching stiffness, as if
my entire body had braced for blows that never came
but left bruises anyway, Dawn was a meek thing, making
the city outside seem small and unfinished. If I'd hoped
that sun light I would bleach away the tension, or
undee what happened to that white sedan's would dissolve, Fritz
would seem empty by daylight. I was wrong. My phone
sat in its usual place, the screen refusing to light.
The richer aup had crashed in the night and pressed
into pow button only brought a stutter of a boot
screen before fading to black. I wondered whether it was
sabotage or simply the hard way giving up understress. Nothing
about the apartment felt right, from the faint mildew egany
out to the sense of being watched no matter where
I stood. At each window, I checked the street, then
checked again. No sign of white Sedan's, though the memory
of the prison stuck with me every never, all I
made coffee, letting the kettle shrieked te lawn, just to
hear a normal sound. Every step, every noise felt nearly scrutinized.
My movements were deliberate, self conscious. I found myself talking
out loud, muttering as if performing ordinary life might draw
the city's tension away, convince any watcher that I had
never noticed what I should not have. Around noon, I
heard the neighbor's door slum up the hall, the echo sharp,
a reminder of other people which now seemed foreign. I
tried to rationalize, maybe nothing had changed, Maybe I was
being paranoid, A victim of coincidence and suggestible fear. But
the notebook spattered cover, thumb smudged and annotated through and
through sat at evidence against me. My own handwriting did
not lie. Not after last night, I thought about calling
Malick fingers hesitating over about a foon night board as
a precaution weeks before. In the end, I texted him instead,
watching them, delivered a check mark blink, but received nothing
in reply. I wondered if he'd written me off, or
if he'd seen his own light sedan outside a window,
and decided silence was arrival. Afternoon blurred at the ages,
I stared at wall's pace, short spans, caught in the
undertow of the previous night. Two suited men, concrete threat
the chilling finality in their politeness. I tried to distract
myself with repairs, reattaching a loose cabinet, inch sorting shredded
insurance forms were potting a listless aloe by the sink.
Every task ended un finish, Even the act of living
had become conditional, as though I was only alone desires.
Twilight descended early, as if the city had conspired with
whatever engine drove those white sedans The lights across the
stree flickered on, first in the bakery, then the corner market,
and a kebob shop sign Hummington neon Life. Though the
place never seemed to open any more. The city persisted
in its patterns, oblivious or just woefully ignorant, and all
the while in my apartment, the coal from the previous
night pressed through the drafty panes, as if mocking me.
It was not mere fear any more. It was certainty
had not tied deep and cut and marrow. My life
as I had known, was over. The pattern circled closer.
No longer abstract curiosity had shifted into something predatory, and
I felt myself shifting with it. I waited, nerves fray
for the next move. The next move arrived with lass ceremony,
and I expected it. Crept in on a Sunday day
I had once reserved for errands, for slow mornings and
cafay coffers. When tipped from the Friday night card patted
my wallet enough to indulge simple treats. That routine had
become a skeleton. The male slot clattered. I flinched at
the noise, breath catching in my throat, but the only
thing tumbling to the floor was a plain white envelope,
no return address, no logo, just my name on the
front in the same blocky blue ink as before. My
fingers trembled as I opened it. Inside was a single
slip up a photoor grainy and over exposed, showing my
own car in the barren lot outside, the old, deep
or and narrow stripe of cup, the unmistakable scuff on
the rear bumper, my license plate rendered in ghost a
grayscale in the background. At the very edge, a white
sedan idle perfectly still. The photo was new, the arrow
was heavy with mist, the weeds at the cope still
fresh from last week's rain. Some one had taken this
just recently, and close knuckles a king. I turned the
picture over. A symbol neat and deliberate was drawn on
the back, the looping character from my notebook, the water mark,
the app no words this time. A surge of adrenaline
maite my vision sharpen, the world standing out in edges.
My quiet resolved to stay under the radar, crumpled instantly.
I was marked, observed, offered a warning, or perhaps an invitation.
One way or another. I would not fay quietly for
the first time, I let the old phe be replaced
by something harsher determination. If they wanted me out, they'd
have to force me. There had to be a way
to fight back, to crack the shell on whatever patten
had been running beneath my feet, through every shape, every
drop off, every vanishing passenger. Within an hour, I was
back in my car, the battered notebook open beside me
in a passenger seat. The city spun outside, geometry wap
by anxiety and caffene. I checked mirrors compulsively, hot, rattling,
too close to panic, but never tipping over. I drove
no destination at first, just sinless orbit, seeking the feeling
of control. Eventually I called Malk again. He picked up
his voice. Raw, I saw them last night outside my
cousin's place. This is bigger than either of us. His
words sounded edge for fatigue, with worry. Meet somewherepublic now.
We arranged to rondevous at an old convenience store near
the hospital, the kind of place where night shifts never
end and no one lingers. Malik emerged from his car
wearing a cap pulled low shoulders, hunched a backpack heavy
with files. He looked older. Voice, fotdo that, I remembered.
He handed over a thumb drive and a handful of
messy print outs eyes dart into passing taxis and delivery bikes.
Compare these with your notes, He murmured. There's a pattern
in the ride logs about twenty drivers most last seen
at the drop off points you mark. I tried contacting
if three phones are dead, account deactivated to cause wind
up an impound never claimed, He shrugged. It's like they
were never hero I hast you think someone's to leading
them the company, the police. Malix shook his head slowly.
Maybe was something else I talked to A guy said
he did back end work on the app ages ago.
They did hashash projects, something coal transfer VIP only sometimes
paid in crypto, special affairs for priority clients. Data split
in his sound books. Nobody could order that a spiral
some rise never logged or just treaded after completion, like
eracing footprint. Stephen law enforcement got nowhere. Hearing it allowed
was a relief in the fresh terror. How do we
stop it? His shuckle was grim. Not sure you can,
but you can learn how not to get caught by it.
We sat in silence, a minute, the city muttering around us.
Malick's phone buzz just once. He glanced down, thumbed it off.
The message flashed on screen, just long enough for me
to see the words wrong place, wrong time. Malick pocketed
the phone. We should split were being watched. He left
me with the drive, urging me to get home. I
I slipped back into my car, mind him ass hands
swading despite the cold. Home did not feel safe, but
it was the only base I had. I powered up
and old loped up the palmrest so warm it nearly
burned and jamned, and Malick's drive a forder blinked into view.
Roy Pattens, twenty twenty minutes, two thousand twenty two. The
files were spreadsheets, logs, screenshots of naps, poor chats, the
digital de chartes of dozens of drivers. I cross referenced
each missing driver with my own notebooks destinations. The result
chilled me. Each had performed within a three week window
what my note were called the last ride, a final
night shift affair to the periphery, A vanished passenger, no
Furtio loggins. Among the files were logs of Coast Rise
enters with no payout pared only with the symbolized scene everywhere.
Sometimes tired sailed, slash offered. I clicked through accidentally on
a sound file. Voices stuttered through static but not strangers,
my own voice reciting confirmation codes for pickups I never remembered.
Sometimes in the background, the feigned overlap and chime of
identical ride gaar logan alerts pinged against each other, multiplying
or echoing, as if several cars were running the same
trip at once. My sense of self bent, nause arising.
My name was on more logs that I remember driving.
The system had duplicated or shadowed me, splitting my rides,
or perhaps I'd just forgotten. So many shifts, so many faces,
all blurring into a prerogatory of shifting light. Exhausted, irist
sleep that night with a chair braced under the door handle.
The windows latched. Even then the apartment felt pause. A
single phone call occur to text my peers. It knew.
Sleep when it finally arrived, was splintered by city noise
and fever. Dreams. I dreamed of driving endless lips through
empty districts, watched by rows of dark window cars. My
passengers faces flickering, were static, sometimes my own, sometimes hollow
eyed strangers. Each ride ended at the depot doors, never
opening tailights, drifting away into permanent twilight. I woke to
find the apartment changed. The battered notebook was missing from
the kitchen table. I tore apart the apartment in a panic,
rifling through dirty laundry, under couch cushions, even in the freezer,
it was just gone. In its place on the small
table was a new envelope, while thicker, the kind of
curry pouch that business is used for contracts. My name again,
this time in sharper blue wink hand shaking, I broke
the seal. Inside the notebooks are a less pages torn
out and a packet of photos. As I fanned them,
my breath stopped. The images were all of cause. White
sedans in daylight and dusk, parked in places are recognized
outside my parents' old house, outside Malick's building once, even
outside my childhood school. Each was scored on the back
with a loop symbol. Beneath the sheaf, tucked deep was
the single page from the notebook, the words written in
spidery pentmanship that was mine you tow or part of
the pattern drive carefully, No signature, just the symbol. I
searched in the chair headiche bloomin. I wanted to throw
the envelope across the kitchen, burn the photos, disappear myself. Instead,
I forced myself upright, studying the window. No cause outside,
not to day. But I had the sensation of being
observed remotely by algorithm or by eye. I couldn't say.
Every screen in the apartment flickered. The ride sha app
previously frozen, fluttered open on my phone despite being powered off,
the ride request still glowing, abandoned depot unknown. I carried
the phone into the bathroom, turned on the fan, and
ran the shower for noise. My hand hovered over the
except button for a long time. Finally I pressed and
held the phone's power until it died for real. I
returned to the kitchen and called Malik again, voice, low, pulse, thunderous.
He picked up, this time whispering, there's movement. We being followed.
My shift's been canceled by the system. My account closed.
It's only a matter of time, man. I had my
notebook taken. There was a tense pause. Back up what
you can talk to nobody else. Keep your head down.
I'm walking on something, but I don't know how far
we can go. I scribbled his words in a memopad,
unwilling to let them drift, and attend to through my mind.
If the system could erase paper, what else could it erase?
At night, just before sleep, I tried looking into my
writer account on the laptop one last time. Access denied
user no longer exists. I closed the lid, hand trembling.
Even my own digital footprint was fatishing. The apartment was
silent save for the ticking of pipes. I didn't sleep much,
expecting to be woken by sirens, footsteps, or the familiar
purvoco idling at the corp. Morning when it arrived, brought
nothing new except the clear conviction that doing nothing was
more dangerous than action. The ride chair system or whatever
lived behind it, was pulling files, riders, drivers, people straight
out of reality, with only nervous links and dead ends
left behind. I had one last thing to try. I
rummaged through malik'st dustache, searching for contacts. One bareret fourfold
is deep A linked in print out profile photo of
a woman named rueniquet Form, a software engineer. Drive more
Rycher her biolist did a local civic form appearance from
two years ago. I found a dusty video clip, her
face tired but composed, talking about deat of privacy and
shifting regulations. I trucked an email and tried my luck.
The replier rived at four in the morning at terrors
note written in machine pros I don't talk about transfer.
Delete this e mail, but watch the ride receipts. Sometimes
the answer is in the footer. Be careful. I dove
into archives, pulling PDFs for my old trips, scanning footers
each recent last freight included in encryptid code what looked
initially like random noise, but which when deciphered through simple substitutions.
I first spelled out locations, dates, initials, my initials, maliks,
the marks of twenty plus Vanish drivers. A cold, decisive
horror sat in. The pattern wasn't loose, it was regular, algorithmic, inexorable.
Certain drivers were selected, recorded, shifted it, then by some
mechanism eliminated. But there was one receipt, newer and signed.
Right after Malik's warning, a pink burst illuminated from the app.
New ride sam requst same destination. This time something was different.
An additional string appeared at the bottom sealed slash, offer
to system glitcher two and d transpending. It felt like
a message for me. I reached out to Malik. He
picked up. After three rings. His voice taught, they are
routing you. You have to move. What do I do?
A pause? Then let's draw them out to night burn
a route. Meet at river point to neutral ground. Take
the fare, but do it your way. The plan hot
wired itself in my brain, equal pots, desperate and foolish.
We'd meet in person, try to intercept the transfer record,
everything disrupt the chain. I felt the familiar journaline, this
time off for missing person, but for my own survival.
I packed phone, charged despite myself, back up recorder in
my coat, the ever thinning memopath for new notes. At dusk,
I locked the door and glance in the mirror. On
my way out, my reflection haggard. I surrounded by Bruce
Hollow's lips too tight. I wondered if it would be
the last time I'd see myself as just me. The
night was overcast, streetlets already flicking on. I drove slow,
checking for tails, circling back twice before crossing the bridge
to river pointaz own of empty industrial lots enclosed up warehouses.
Malick's car was there ahead of me, headlights blinking and
coated rhythm. He gestured to a spot beside him, and
I pulled up. We sat in his car, the air
so thick with nerves it was hard to breathe. He
passed me a bernauforne and a vintage walkie. If anything
goes off script radio for me. I'll follow from distance.
We'll catch them in the act records faces, cause we
will have proof my own ride. Aap shoddered the record.
I was repeated on non pick up deeper location, the
Sistan's finger pressing me into the pattern. I drove to
the starting point, record a running camera glued to the dash.
The city peeled away behind me, each traffic light, feeling auxtrated,
each intersection of potential chill point. I arrived at the
Old Deeper at two forty eight a m. Three minutes
early for the scheduled ride. The passenger was already there,
a young woman, her face matching one of the old
sketches from my lost notebook. She stepped off the curb,
glancing up and down the road. Her eyes caught the
cars flicked toward were Malleck's vehicle idle two blocks past.
She slipped into the back seat, holding herself small. I
kept my tongue level destination. Her voice quivered. Warehouse Park,
at the end of Glendale. I nodded, harp pounding. I
drove in silence. Every sense tinned to the world around us.
Nothing for three intersections. Then, as if on cue, a
white sedan appeared in the side mirror, trailing behalf a
block head. Flights blunded. The woman in the back watched
the road, eyes fixed ahead. At the next light, a
sedan drew to delawngside. I let off the gas, coasting
mimicking indecision. The light changed. I accelerated, weaving right the
day and mashed me At the warehouse district, the road widened.
I cut left, hoping Malik would see the move. The
radio trolled one blip, the code for movesoon. We arrived
at the abandoned warehouse. I stopped at the curb, engine idling,
refusing to unlock the rear doors. She whispered, please don't
leave me here. The sedan pulled up, blocking my rear bumper.
Two men stepped out, masks gluinting dully in the street light.
One of them told a scanophone, displaying unmistakably my own rider.
I debadge the driver required to complete transfer. Step out
of the vehicle, I hesitated. I'm not going anywhere, I said,
finding a corvion in my chest. I'd never known I had.
The masked man came closer, extending an envelope between two
gloved fingers. You opened the door. You've finished the ride.
That's how it works. Now. My mouth felt dry. Who
are you? He lowered his musk just enough to let
his eyes catch mine. No more a questions, not from you.
The woman near tears scrabbled at my seat. They'll make
you go, they always do. I set the car and park,
rolled down the window, shoved the envelope back at the man.
No transfer to night, not by me. Tension snapped the
second mass man's book into a radio. His voice clipped,
stole repeat. The driver's refusing headlights appeared at the opposite
end of the block. Malix's car surged forward, barreling through
a stop sign, forcing the white sedan to back off.
He leaned out his window and shouted, moved Now. A
burst of movement. One mass man rushed my car pounding
on the trunk. The woman shrieked, scrambling at the other
side as I yanmped the hand brick and ducked low, hot,
pounding Malix's cossword, colliding with the sedan's fender. Sirens blurred
some more distant, drawing closer. The men dashed back to
the car, engine screaming as they pealed away into the shadows.
Malik joined me on foot, blatt at his temple, eyes wild.
We need to go, he panted. Now. I caught a
lost glimpse of the women dashing down an alley. White
sedans blinked their headlights once in uniche and from the
far corners of the warehouse park, then vanished, almost silently.
We staggered to the cop, catching breath, blood and adrenaline
mingling in the nigh. Mallick clapped my shoulder, face roll
with relief and terror. I've got the footage, he breathed.
We have proof now, But all I had left was
my own pulse, the empty street, and a question roaring
in my ears. Would proof ever be enough? Or was
the pattern already set in motion a machine too big
to fight? The short walk back to the cause was thick,
with mutual silence and defeat. It took five minutes from
my hands to steady enough to grip the wheel. The
pattern had flexed, it had not broken, not yet. Headlights
swept over us as we climbed back into our vehicles.
I turned agniion Malick's car, rolling out first. For a moment,
I consider following, keeping the convoy tight. But at the
corner he flicked his headlights twice, a good bye or
warning or both. Untook the main road west. I watched
his tay lights until they disappeared in the fog. Rising
off the river. For the first time in weeks, there
was no car waiting behind me. I started my own car,
but did not drive home immediately. Instead, I let the
engine idle, the street silent except for the hum of
the cooling blocks the digital beaps. As the DAFT commended
its recording, Blood pounded in my temples sharper now that
the crisis had passed. With each breath, the realization set in.
We might have won a skirmish, but the system remained indifferent.
Watching from somewhere further down the lanes, I come to
know too well. On the sea beside me, A final
notification flickered on the back of phone. No app needed,
just a line of texts with that looping symbol. It
read transferred a third await new routing. I switched off
the engine for good tonight. I wouldn't give them anything more.
My hands still shook as I opened the last envelope
I had been handed by the mouse stranger. Inside there
was only a single blankey card, the kind that opens
a thousand anonymous doors in the city, and beneath it
a line in tight blue script, patum repeat, next driver required.
I closed my eyes, breath and spooling beyond the warehouse,
park sirens faded into ordinary city noise in the darkness.
I thund the card edge, listening as the streak grew quiet.
My cause Windshiel fogged into the slow of cooling metal.
I realized with a calm only exhaustion corgrant that the
pattern did not end with the night's defiance, and that
escape was just another lane in an endless overlooked maze.
The car felt heavier than usual as I sat, watching
the first blush of morning erase the city shadows, engine
off alone at the curb outside. Nothing moved but the
slow spill of mist, and for a moment, the world
seemed to notice me, asking nothing, offering no answers, just
as stillness that comes when a story for hours reached
its last stop. The car felt heavier than usual as
I sat watching the first blush of morning erase the
city shadows, engine off alone at the curb outside. Nothing
moved but the slow spill of mist, and for a
moment the world seemed to notice me, asking nothing, offering
no answers, just the stillness that comes when a story
for now has reached its last stop. I didn't turn
the key for a long time. My breath made faint
clouds on the inside of the windshield. A mop of
condensation crept in from the corners, shrouding the dashing camera
mounts and mechahelo's. Even with the sound of sirens gone,
there was no peace, only the slow scravel of nerves
coming down from terror. I kept catching my own reflection
in the glass, unfamiliar, as if the night had burned
out something central I'd always counted on round me. The
warehouse park returned to normal, or what passed for it
this far from the city's veins. An overnight cleaning crew
wandered the opposite sidewalk neon vescosly in early light. The
truck scuffed around broken bottles, paying no attention to my car.
More than once. I studded their faces, checking for anything
out of place, another mask, and, knowing glance, nothing surface.
The key card they had left it intentionally. Its plastic
weight nagged my pocket, the blank face revealing neither for
it nor route, as if it could open anything or nothing.
I brought it close, thumb tracing the edges, half wishing
for a clue i'd missed. Nothing shifted. There were no markings,
no bark woods, only the faint, oily suggestion of fingerprints
in the machine. I drove home through empty streets, every stop
sign a test of my hands steadiness. The cities ash
felt desolate, as though the pattern itself had pulled traffic inward,
leaving fringe neighborhood hollowed and cautious in the daylight. Twice
I slowed for Whitesedan's part beneath Higwi palons, but each
proved empty when I looked close, driver's seats, vacant, windows
rolled up, tight, dashboards blank. At the apartment, I sat
in the car with the engine off until a delivery
rider on a scooter soon passed, breaking the spell of isolation.
I let myself and through the side door, shoulders tight
since the strung out the building's familiar smells of burnt
coffee and all floor wax greeted me a small comfort.
But even here routines had morphed. My mail box was
slightly ajar, as if recently jecked. I pushed a close,
letting the klangacho Inside. I found the apartment as I
had left it, No new envelopes, nothing out of place,
except the subtle sense of being observed. The window blinds
hung crooked, but that might have been last night's wind.
The impulse to check every room have whelmed anything like exhaustion.
I opened the closet, swept under the bed. I found
a battered business card wedged behind a loose tile in
the kitchen, a card I recognized as one I had
thrown out weeks ago. It had been tucked there intentionally.
The company logo on the front blurred, but on the
back some one had printed a series of numbers and
a looping insignia, the symbol that had become a cipher
for every bad turn of the last month. The way
the pattern pressed in, I collapsed onto the worn couch
card in hand. The room grew smaller as like crept
across the wall. I tried to remember the last time
I had felt truly on much unknown. Everything since the
first missing rider had been a slow narrowing of friends, habits, routes,
until it felt like there was no life left outside
the pattern's loops. By afternoon, I forced myself up and
into motion. Melick hadn't called my Phoe was mostly silent.
The few messages that came through were either spam her eerochoids,
as if even the well's digital noise worked to isolate me. Now,
occasionally a system event pingaghosely echo of the right chaer
app trying to resurrect itself, but nothing stuck. Each attempt
to log and met with coal refusel. Sometimes the interface
greeted me with the flash of green before it vanished,
as if offering and rescinding possibility all at once. Unable
to rest, I had donned an old hoodie, locked up,
and walked two blocks to the laundromat with an armful
of dirty sheets. The machines humsteaded me if only a little.
I sat facing the row of glass doors, watching the
world come and go. A woman folded towels by the dress,
humming teenlessly. Two kids played by the detergent rack their laughter,
ringing with the note I can Trust's reel. At the
corner of my vision, I thought I saw the tail
of a white sedan in the alley, but when I blinked,
it was gone. On the walk home, I paused beneath
the traffic camera approached above a cracked crosswalk. It winked red,
clicking and shifting to track the meager car as that passed.
I wondered to Mando's feeds if anyone of my walking
here formed another note in someone else's hidden pattern. The
paranoia was no longer an aberration, put a mode of seeing.
Each step seemed to ripple out, folding into an unseen ledger.
Back inside, the silence fell more menacing than before. I
double checked the locks, checked each outlet for bugs. Half
convinced that the nonsense was nonsense any more, I gathered
everything related to the right air funds, receipts, chargers, even
Malik's thumb drive V and placed it all in a
plastic bag, which I tucked into the freezer. Old device
old dreamer's logic cold, the pen's signals bearers sen I
told myself, I was just being practical, but my hands
didn't leave it. Night arrived almost without warning. They can
wind us. The city's background humstretched thin as the iyres
ticked by the rychaern notification have vanished from my phone,
But in its place, a new text flickered up, pending transfer.
Do not relocate, No send to only that infernal symbol
in the notification bubble, impossible to screen out. I ignored it,
unplugged the phone, and shut myself into the bedroom. Sleep
didn't come easy, but when it finally did, it came
in jerks and tremors. I dreamed of endless intersections, all
lanes feeding into a single limp circle. Each time I
tried to turn off, the white sedam blocked my path,
its driver invisible behind polarized glass. I woke as Dawn
cut her across the block. My throat hurt, dry, grasping,
as if I spent the night shouting, my legs ached
from tension. Cold in my sleep, in the hangover of
half rest, I found myself whispering a supplication, let this
pattern skip me, just once, just tonight, but the city
only crept on, indifferent, the weak, unfolded in fragments. I
saw Malik only once, across a crowd of crosswalkep rush eire.
He caught my eye, gave the faintest nod, and vanished
into a sea of navy blue coats, blending into anonymity
he'd always prized. At home, I found clean laundry folded
in the basket, unremembered from my last trip. Either someone
was looking out for me in their own small way,
or I was losing hold of one, and how routine
things had been done. On Wednesday, a neighbor stopped me
in the hall, said little but i'd me with open suspicion. Herd,
your car's been moving at odd IROs, she muttered. Before
I could respond, she continued up the stairs, her gaze
sharp is a ledger. The rydchair app refused all attempts
at reinstallation. My account, I now knew, was dead or
flag still. I watched traffic patterns from my kitchen windows,
replaying dash and footage from the previous night, over and over.
I'd caught a glimpse in one clip to identically white
sedan's passing at a junction, one veering off just before
the warehouse park, the other idling by the old bust
deeper like chess pieces perform in a rote maneuver, all
according to a script whose rules were written elsewhere. One evening,
as I saw itted Malik's data again, my hands trembling
with fatigue, I triggered a short video embedded in a
look file. The clip showed Footitire Camo mounted inside a
roydchair car city rolling past in jittering knight version. There
was no audio except for them of an engine and
a single repeating paying every time the car passed a
certain intersection, the display flaster patterns insignia. The rider in
the back was just a shadow, faceless and quiet, but
at one point they leaned forward, dropping something into the
driver's cup holder, a plastic key card blank as mine.
My skin prickled heat and ice in equal measure. Embedded
in the metadata was a day to one week from
to day, seven days into a calendar whose edges I'd
never expected to meet. I checked the code, cross referenced
it with the old ride locks. It matched a missing
driver's final route, one that ended in an a pound lot,
with the car abandoned the driver never traced. I thought,
so fast, obvious now that I'd seen it. If the
pattern followed an algorithm, then it would always cycle, always
off of the transfer up to the next in line.
The pattern repeats next driver required. That's what they told me.
The envelope with the cards still sat on the kitchen
table for the first time. I placed it under the
wakam and to close up shots, hoping the details might
be more revealing on a screen and by eye alone.
But the images only emphasized its opacity, curves of plastic
glossy finish, a faint line near the edge where a
manufacturer's tager might have been sanded off. Determined, I sent
coppas to every contact I could think of, old friends
in tech, a cousin who dabbled and lost phone repair,
even a community form notorious for conspiracy theories most ignored me.
A few replied with guesses looks like access for a hotel,
or could be a blank proox card, nothing special. Only
one note felt meaningful, a reply from Rowena, the former
app developer. They always look ordinary. Pattern only needs plausible deniability.
That cryptic answer sigh of my hope, but it also
solidified something anonymity was the armor of whatever system ran
beneath the right chair. These objects were meant to disappear
into the background, barely reached during his artifacts, the city
cap breathing steely and regular. On Friday, a white envelope
appeared on my dorm at no stamp, no mark except
the leaping insignia in one corner. Inside a single slip
of paper and machine typed trans were initiated complete action
of forfeit account driver, final warning. It laid out in
plainness what had always been hidden. Refusal was in a shield.
Just to delay paranoia piqued, I installed an all old
web camera on the door, set up or fiamated uploads
for every passing face. By now I was not just hiding,
I was monitoring, desperate to catch anything that might signal
a rupture in the pattern. Late that next night I
picked up movement in the feed. Two figures in dark
courts approached faces, obscured by baseball caps and tilted heads.
They lingered, then slipped a plane package under my door
before disappearing without so much as a glance at the peephole.
Moments later, my phone buzzed on despite its dead battery.
A single notification flash, then faded, transfer finalized, fallow instructions,
hand shaking. I opened the door. The corridor was empty.
I bent and picked up the box, no weight, almost
a mockery of a real delivery. Inside, padded in tissue
lay Malick's memopad and a second key card, this one
with his initials ink faintly in the corner. My pulse scattered.
I didn't know if Malick himself had left it, or
if this was the system at work, recycling artifacts, reminders
and threats, but the implication was clear. The passenger, both
of us now pulled me forward, pushed him back. The
cycle undisturbed. The living room felt crowded. Every possession, a
piece of evidence, every device a trader. I should have
left vacated. Wandered out toward the high wind, just kept driving,
but the apartment bound me with inertia and the city.
My city was already thick with the patent's net. Frantic,
I tried calling Malik and the old burner. This time
a female voice graveled business. I counseled. After three rings,
there is no Malak here, she said, before disconnecting. Something
inside me shifted. The patent would erase us cleanly, efficiently
by protocol. One by one drew cars, through rides, through
everyday actions were written into the logic of disappearance. I
realized then that the confrontation at the warehouse had cost
us more than a journal in or recording. Malik might
already be gone, shifted, repurposed, reduced to a string of
back encode and a right jay algorithm meant to rattle
the curious. The phone vibrated once more, this time a
voice mimoiside in the archive. It was Malik's voice, fluting
through distortion and digital echo. Don't ride, record everything, but
don't get in the car. If you do, we can't
help you. That's the hook. The last words trailed off,
as if he'd run out of time or nerve the
pathm wasn't just a cycle, but a trap, abated threshold
only visible from the wrong side. Every response, every investigation,
pulled you deeper until your only options were complicity or erasure.
Sitting in my living room with Malock's memopad and the
two blank cards, I started to understand I'd bust a
point of no return the moment I took the first
note fly at the first route I spent that last night, awake,
afraid to sleep, not because of nightmares, but for Frere.
I wake up somewhere unrecognizable, with new instructions and new name,
a car waiting and the need to drive out forever.
As dawn edged up again pinkish, and then the city
muffled itself in heavy fog. In the dullning light, my
mind trace circles around every event, every mischance, every faded
face in the desk, can recordings in the battered note,
but now gone. The system would move soon. I felt
it in the marrow of my city, in the annal
cost that had replaced all human responses, in the way,
my own reflection stuck in every pane of glass, a
warning or a premonition. When my phone buzzed again, I
didn't pick it up right away. Whatever it had to say,
I already knew the last piece was in place. I waited,
determined not to be caught. I'm already this time to
let whatever would be happen and fold on my terms,
or as close to them as this pattern would allow.
As the day waned, I finally opened the envelope with
a second key card to Malicksner. The message inside was
just a single line hastily scrolled alongside the loop and cymbal.
They take what asks, too many questions, don't answer if
you want to stay The apartment bare and silent, hummed,
as if on the brink of something outside. Traffic resumed
regular enough to sound normal, already beginning to erase all
unusual details. For the first time in weeks, I allowed
myself a strange kind of stillness. I didn't check the window,
I didn't pace. I simply sat, hands clasped, both cowslaid
plane on the kitchen table. I waited. The next move
would not be mine. Late evening pressed in the world,
quiet as if holding its breath. Then a single door
closed somewhere down the hall, and footips were shredd There
was no knock. There was nothing left to deliver, only
the pattern turning, finding another lane. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.