The first time Ethan heard it, he assumed it was feedback from his headphones.
Bzzzt. Kzzzt.
A sharp, grating distortion. But there was something… wrong. It wasn’t mechanical. It wasn’t even a sound, really. It was inside his head, vibrating somewhere deep in his consciousness.
Two days later, he heard it again—this time, while walking through the city. The air shivered, like reality itself had glitched for a fraction of a second.
He wasn’t alone.
People on the street froze. Their expressions twisted—some grimaced, others clutched their heads in silent agony. A few opened their mouths, as if to scream… but no sound came out.
And then… they were gone.
Not collapsed. Not dead. Not even a trace left behind. One second they were standing there. The next, nothing.
Ethan stumbled backward, his pulse pounding. People around him looked confused, dazed. A woman sobbed, shaking her boyfriend, who no longer existed. But no one spoke about it. No one acknowledged what had happened.
It was as if their minds refused to process it.
The Unfolding Horror
Ethan locked himself inside his apartment, scrolling through forums, news reports, anything. But there was no mention of people vanishing. No missing person reports. No panic.
As if they had never been real.
Desperate, he played back his phone’s audio recording from the moment it happened. Silence. But if he cranked the volume up—way past safe levels—he could hear it:
A sound that shouldn’t exist.
It didn’t come through the speaker. It came from inside him.
A realization settled into his gut like ice.
The sound wasn’t a glitch. It was a filter.
Something outside of reality—something incomprehensible—was tuning the world, deleting pieces that no longer fit.
People weren’t disappearing.
They were being edited out.
And Ethan had just heard it again.
His vision flickered.
He looked at his hands. His skin blurred, like an unfinished rendering in a computer simulation.
The sound.
It wasn’t an attack.
It was a correction.
A wave of panic surged through him. He turned to grab his phone—
But his fingers dissolved before they reached it.
His body pixelated, breaking apart into nothing. His thoughts fragmented, spiraling into silence.
Ethan never existed.
