They Were Never Here — Part 2: The Others

 I didn’t sleep that night.

Every creak in the walls sounded like a footstep. I kept the lights off, watching through the slats of my bedroom blinds, phone in hand, ready to record or run. Nothing came. Nothing visible, anyway.

By morning, I was a wreck. But I had a plan.

I started with the library.

The real one—the old one downtown, still mostly analog. I figured if they were rewriting history digitally, maybe the paper trail was harder to fake. The librarian, an older woman named Gloria, recognized me. She smiled and handed me a stack of archived newspapers without asking what I needed. Bless her.

I sat in the corner with dust and silence, flipping through headlines.

In 2008, the mayor was a man named Douglas Finch. I remember him—thick mustache, always wore bolo ties. But the paper said it was someone else: “Mayor Khera addresses city following energy shift.”

Khera. I’d never heard that name before the change. But in this version of reality, he’d been elected twice.

More importantly, there was no mention of Douglas Finch. At all.

It was like he’d been... edited out.

That’s when I met him. The boy with the threadbare hoodie and the tired eyes.

He sat across from me without asking.

“You see it too, don’t you?” he said.

My pulse jumped. “What do you mean?”

He tapped the edge of the newspaper I’d been staring at. “The cracks. The missing people. The other timeline.”

He had a small scar above his left eyebrow and a nervous energy that felt familiar, like someone who’d spent too much time running but never quite got away.

His name was Milo.

He remembered the before, too.

There were others. He showed me a forum—hidden, constantly shifting URLs, only accessible through encrypted browsers. They called themselves The Unwritten. People like us. Immune. Resistant. Still piecing together fragments of the world that used to be.

One woman remembered a son who no longer existed. A boy who’d been erased from every photo, every birth certificate.

Another claimed to have worked in government—said she saw the first ripple before she “woke up” in a different office, with a new title, surrounded by colleagues who swore she’d always been there.

We weren’t crazy. We were survivors of a war no one else could see.

But the more we learned, the closer they came.

Two of the forum members went dark last week. No sign, no goodbye. Their last posts were panicked—talk of shadowy figures outside their windows, static on their phones, dreams that weren’t their own.

Milo says we only have two choices: go underground or go public.

If we run, we stay alive. But if we speak out—even knowing the world won’t believe us—maybe, just maybe, we can wake up a few more before it’s too late.

I haven’t decided yet.

But I know this much:

They’re rewriting us. One by one.

And I don’t know how long I have left.