Signal three

The unsettling part was not that something hidden existed.

It was the possibility that it had always existed quietly enough to be mistaken for ordinary life.

Elias had started noticing it everywhere after his father’s death — not in dramatic revelations, but in patterns. Conversations that ended too carefully. Questions people answered before he finished asking them. The strange certainty with which strangers treated the transition as though it had been expected long before he arrived inside it.

Most systems survive because no one believes they are systems at all.

— The Executor’s Silence

—Thomas