Zeke had finished his oats, but the meal didn’t really “end” anything in him. It just gave his hands something to do while his mind kept moving.

He reached for his phone almost automatically.

Samantha.

The call rang once, then cut into that flat, impersonal voice.

“The number you have dialed is not available at the moment.”

He stared at the screen like it had misbehaved on purpose. Tried again. Same result.

A small pause.

Then again.

Same voice.

It wasn’t even rejection anymore. It felt like absence had taken a shape and learned how to speak.

He opened Facebook next. Typed her name. Opened the chat.

His fingers hovered.

Then he wrote something. Deleted it. Wrote again.

Nothing felt like it could cross whatever distance had formed between them. Even sending a message felt like throwing words into a vacuum and watching them lose meaning mid-flight.

Galactical message to another planet.

He sent it anyway.

No typing indicator. No read receipt. No reply.

Just silence.

That was when the Observer in him started working without permission.

It didn’t feel emotional at first—it felt analytical. Like it was trying to model what was happening to reduce the uncertainty.

She’s offline. Or unreachable. Or avoiding. Or hurt. Or gone somewhere she didn’t say.

But the Modeler/Builder part didn’t stop there. It kept reconstructing scenarios, trying to fill the missing data:

If she’s not answering, maybe her phone is taken. Maybe she’s at home. Maybe she’s asleep. Maybe something happened. Maybe her mother—

That last thought tightened something in his chest.

And underneath all of it, quieter than everything else, the Protector came in—not dramatic, not loud. Just dulling things slightly, like turning the emotional volume down so it wouldn’t overflow.

So instead of panic, what came out was heaviness.

A slow, dragging loneliness that didn’t ask for attention—it just stayed.

He stood up.

“I’ll just go check,” he said quietly, as if saying it out loud made it more logical than emotional.

The walk to her place wasn’t really a walk. It was Zeke trying to outpace his own thoughts while they kept walking beside him anyway.

He imagined conversations as he went.

“Hey, I just wanted to see if you’re okay.”
“Did you eat today?”
“Are you safe?”


Then his mind corrected itself immediately after each one.

Too much. Too needy. Too intense.

So he revised them mid-walk, like editing a system that kept failing runtime checks.

But underneath the revisions, the real thought never changed:

I hope she’s okay.

And then, quieter:

I hope she still exists in the same way I remember her.

By the time he reached her place, the Observer had already flagged the pattern: too quiet.

No movement. No signs.

The door confirmed it.

Empty.

He stood there longer than he needed to, like waiting could force reality to update.

Nothing did.

He went to the beach next, because that’s where she went when she needed peace. That detail mattered—his mind held onto it like a stable variable in an unstable system.

But she wasn’t there either.

No trace.

No presence.

Just wind and distance.

On the walk back, he started talking to himself—not loudly, not like someone breaking down, but like someone trying to keep his thoughts from collapsing inward.

“It sucks,” he muttered, “how people can just disappear from your day like you never existed in theirs.”

A pause.

Then softer:

“Maybe she’s busy… I don’t really know.”

But even as he said it, the contradiction was already forming inside him.

Because “busy” didn’t explain the silence. Not fully.

And that’s where the emptiness started to take shape—not sharp, not dramatic, just a relational gap where something used to be.

*Does she think about me at all?*

The question didn’t feel like anger. It felt like disorientation.

Like a system checking for a connection that used to return a signal and now returned nothing.

When he got home, the quiet felt familiar in a different way. Not comforting this time—just neutral. Like the house wasn’t responding either.

He passed Amanda’s room.

The door was open.

That alone made him stop.

Something about open doors in silent houses always felt like unfinished sentences.

He stepped inside.

The room didn’t feel “wrong” immediately. It felt altered in a way he couldn’t place at first. Then he saw it—symbols on the wall.

His brain tried to classify them before reacting.