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I never liked speakerphone. It wasn’t just the echoing voices or the tinny rasp that made people sound like they were talking through a tin can — it was the way people held it.

I think I should be concerned by my home automation. Something feels off.

When the world is getting weird, how do you first notice that something is wrong?

A young child and a ghost. A mother reacts

Are emergency alerts always benign? Or do some of them have a sinister hidden purpose?

The Meridian Tower had been marketed as luxury living in the heart of downtown—forty-three floors of gleaming glass and steel, with penthouses that commanded six-figure down payments and monthly rents that would make most people weep.

Sarah Chen had been thrilled to secure her one-bedroom on the fifteenth floor, even if it meant eating ramen for the foreseeable future.

The first sign something was wrong came in the third week.

The silence began at 3:47 PM on a Tuesday.

Sarah was folding laundry in her cramped Croydon semi when the Wi-Fi icon on her laptop vanished. She clicked refresh, then checked her phone—no signal bars, just an empty triangle where her network should be. Outside, she could hear car doors slamming with unusual frequency, the frustrated shouts of neighbours discovering the same digital void.

The piercing screech tore through the Tuesday morning quiet of Greater Manchester like a banshee’s wail. Sarah’s iPhone vibrated violently against the kitchen counter, its emergency alert cutting through Radio 2’s gentle morning chatter.

EMERGENCY ALERT – UK GOVERNMENT SEVERE WEATHER WARNING – IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. DO NOT GO OUTSIDE. THIS IS NOT A TEST.

Dr. Sarah Chen had been studying memory for fifteen years when she first encountered the Hartwell case. What started as a routine consultation at Millbrook Care Facility became the most terrifying experience of her life—not because of what she saw, but because of what she began to understand about the nature of forgetting.

Sarah first noticed the scratching on Tuesday night. A soft, rhythmic scraping that seemed to come from inside the walls of her new apartment. She’d moved into the converted Victorian house just three days earlier, drawn by the cheap rent and the landlord’s assurance that the building had been “recently renovated.”