The scent of half-rotten oranges lingered in the air, sweet and sour and clinging, like memory.
Orin wiped his hands on the hem of his dark blue apron, the synthetic fabric stiff with dried detergent and time. The store's overhead lights buzzed softly, flickering in a rhythm that wasn't quite broken—but wasn't quite right, either. Like the pulse of something trying to mimic life. He didn't remember when they started flickering. They just did.
Just like the customers. Just like the aisles. Just like everything.
"Mid-shift stock check," he muttered, his voice barely audible under the hum. No one responded, of course. He was alone.
He always was.
The grocery store, like the rest of Bray Hollow, had been oddly stable—too stable. Time didn't move here; it repeated. The same customers cycled through every few days, wearing the same expressions, buying the same brands of preserved noodles and water packets. Even the dust settled in familiar patterns. It was as though the world had decided to rehearse a scene until it got it perfect—but no one told it what 'perfect' meant.
Orin didn't question it. Not out loud. Not anymore.
But lately, something had been... off.
It started with the cold spots. Then came the dreams. And now—now there were the carvings.
He stood in aisle seven, staring at the endcap display of canned beans. They were slightly rearranged. Again. Every morning, someone—or something—shifted them just enough to unsettle him. A small change, insignificant, deniable. But Orin noticed.
He always noticed.
His eyes dropped to the base of the shelf, just above the cracked linoleum floor.
And there it was.
A word, etched into the metal frame with something sharp. Fresh. Deliberate.
KAITO.
The letters were deep. Not like a casual scratch from someone bored. No—this was done with intention. Force. Each stroke embedded with purpose.
And yet...
He didn't know the name.
Did he?
His breath hitched. Pain bloomed behind his eyes like a migraine opening its wings.
The world around him rippled.
No sound. No movement. But everything twisted—just slightly. The ceiling stretched upward like smoke. The air thickened, humming with static. Shelves flickered. For one second, the cans in front of him became books. The floor shimmered with glass instead of tile. He heard... a bell? Distant, echoing. And the faint sob of someone calling—
"Get out of the aisle, Kaito—"
The voice cut off as quickly as it came.
Orin stumbled back, knocking into a shopping basket stand. The ripple collapsed, reality snapping like a taut rubber band. The lights overhead returned to their regular flicker. The cans were beans again. And the name on the shelf...
Gone.
Erased, like it had never been there.
But the pain remained.
He pressed his palm to his temple. His fingers were trembling. So were his knees.
The world had just glitched.
He knew that word. Glitch. He'd heard it whispered before in the market district, from the man who sold old memory drives and forgotten tech relics. "A glitch in your loop," the man had said, wild-eyed and half-drunk. "Means you're waking up. Means the System sees you."
The System.
The name that everyone knew and no one spoke.
It wasn't a government. It wasn't AI. It wasn't even a voice. It was… reality. It governed weather, memory, time. You didn't question it. You didn't think about it.
Orin hadn't. Not until now.
Something was breaking.
He straightened up slowly, forcing his breath to steady. He looked around the store. Still empty. Still his domain.
But the silence felt different. Watching. Listening.
He reached down and ran his fingers across the shelf.
Smooth. No sign of the name. But his mind still buzzed with it.
Kaito.
The name throbbed like a wound in his memory, as if it belonged somewhere inside him—but didn't. Like a transplant rejected by the body.
Who the hell was Kaito?
And why did he feel like he was remembering something that hadn't happened yet?
That night, Orin dreamed of mirrors.
Not reflections—mirrors. Endless rows of them, stretching into shadow. Each one flickered with a different version of himself.
Some were crying. Some were screaming. Some were smiling in ways that made his skin crawl.
But one—only one—stood still.
A man with his face, but not his eyes. Taller. Leaner. Covered in scars made of light. And behind him, the world burned in reverse—buildings rebuilding themselves from ash, people rising from craters as if rewound by an invisible hand.
That man turned, looked straight at him through the mirror, and spoke.
"You took my name."
Orin jolted awake, gasping.
The store's breakroom ceiling greeted him, plain and water-stained.
He rubbed his arms. Cold. Even though the air system hadn't worked in years.
Orin dressed in silence, his movements mechanical. Shirt, apron, badge. ORIN. The name glinted on the tag, printed cleanly.
But it didn't feel like his anymore.
He returned to aisle seven the next morning. Not to stock. Not to clean.
To confirm.
And there it was again.
KAITO.
Fresh. Unmistakable. Even though it had vanished yesterday.
The moment he looked at it, something inside him buckled.
And the ripple hit.
This time, harder.
The floor dropped. Orin staggered, grasping the shelf. Aisle seven stretched. Shelves bent like plastic in heat. The lights pulsed in unnatural rhythms—binary, maybe, he thought crazily. Ones and zeroes in luminescent Morse.
And the voices returned.
Soft at first. Whispers without source.
"You weren't supposed to remember—"
"The Diver failed—"
"System protocol anomaly detected—"
Then, a scream. From inside his mind. His own, but older. More broken.
He saw flashes.
A stone chair surrounded by data screens.
A girl sketching in a spiral notebook with hands made of glass.
A symbol—an eye inside a circle, pulsing red.
Then darkness.
And silence.
When he woke, he was lying in the aisle. Floor cold. Lights humming.
He felt something wet under his nose. Blood.
He touched it and laughed weakly.
It wasn't a stroke. It wasn't a dream.
It was real.
Something had broken through.
And now?
Now he was part of it.
A name that wasn't his was lodged in his memory like a virus.
Kaito.
And the System knew.
It had seen him.
And worse—he had seen it.
Who was Kaito—and why did the name feel like the key to a world Orin was never meant to remember?
© 2025 Ofelia B Webb. All rights reserved.
This is an original work published on WebNovel.