There were two more people he had to try, two more anchors to the reality he knew. His older brother, Lee, and his younger sister, May. If they didn't remember, then truly, no one did.
He found Lee first, dropping by his apartment unannounced. Lee, ever the practical one, was absorbed in a financial report on his screen.
"Hey, Wankaz. Everything okay? You look a little... wired," Lee said, not quite turning from his monitor.
Wankaz swallowed. "Yeah, yeah, just... wanted to ask you something. You remember that time we built that treehouse? Not the rickety one in the backyard, but the proper one, out by Miller's Creek? The one with the secret escape tunnel you dug under the roots?" He remembered the scraped knees, the endless arguments over design, the triumph of finishing it.
Lee finally turned, a faint frown creasing his forehead. "Treehouse by Miller's Creek? Nah, man. We never had a treehouse out there. Too far, too swampy. We had that plywood shack in the backyard, remember? The one that fell over in the first strong wind." He chuckled, a short, dismissive sound. "You spent days crying over that thing."
Wankaz felt a cold wave wash over him. The plywood shack was true, but it was insignificant, a mere footnote compared to the elaborate, mud-caked hideout by the creek, their childhood sanctuary. It was gone for Lee too, replaced by a half-truth that diminished the memory.
"No, Lee, the big one! The one we built with Dad's old tools, and Mom brought us snacks. We named it 'Fort Freedom'," Wankaz insisted, his voice cracking slightly.
Lee pushed back from his desk, a hint of exasperation in his eyes. "Dude, you're really off today. You know Mom hated us even going near Miller's Creek. And Dad? Dad never touched a hammer in his life unless it was to hang a picture. You're just... making stuff up." He paused, his expression shifting to one of genuine, uncomfortable worry. "Look, are you getting enough sleep? You sound like you're stressing out about something. Maybe you should talk to someone."
Wankaz left Lee's apartment feeling hollowed out, the silence of the forgotten treehouse screaming in his ears. His last hope was May. She was imaginative, sensitive. She might remember.
He called her, his hand trembling as the phone connected.
"Hey, Wankaz! What's up?" May's voice was bright, untroubled.
"May, listen. This is important. Do you remember our old dog? Not Buster, the fluffy retriever. I mean, the one before him. The black one, with one floppy ear and the weird limp? The one we rescued from the abandoned lot, and Mom said we couldn't keep him, but we hid him in the garage for a week?" He remembered the nervous energy of that secret, the whispered late-night trips with scraps of food.
A beat of silence stretched on the line. Then, May's voice, hesitant now. "The black dog? Wankaz, we've only ever had Buster. And before him, there was Sparky, Grandma's poodle, but he was tiny and white. We never rescued any dog from an abandoned lot. Mom would have killed us!" Her tone was light, but there was a guardedness, a hint of suspicion. "Why are you asking about that? Is this some kind of prank?"
"No, May! It's not a prank!" Wankaz practically shouted into the phone, his voice ragged with despair. "He was called Shadow! He had a scar over his eye, and you used to read him stories every night from that old picture book!"
Another pause, longer this time. Then, May's voice, carefully modulated, cool. "Wankaz, seriously. You're scaring me a little. There was no Shadow. You know we've always been allergic to short-haired dogs, that's why we got Buster. Maybe... you should take a break. You've been really out of it lately. Are you sure you're okay?"
The line went dead a moment later, May having disconnected. Wankaz stood there, the cold plastic of the phone pressed against his ear, listening to the dial tone that sounded like a flat, mocking drone.
He was alone. Completely, terrifyingly alone. Every memory he tried to verify, every shared past he tried to cling to, had been erased, replaced, or simply never existed for anyone else. His family, his friends, his entire world saw him as strange, unwell, possibly delusional. He was living in a reality that no one else perceived, a ghost in his own life, haunted by a past no one else could see. The quiet hum of the altered world had become a deafening roar in his mind, and he had nowhere left to turn.
---
Wankaz stood frozen in his apartment, the phone still clutched in his hand, its dial tone a mocking hum against his ear. The silence of his small living space, usually a comfort, now pressed in on him, heavy and suffocating. Every attempt to anchor himself to a shared reality had failed. Kezha, his mother, Aunt Clara, and now Lee and May—they all looked at him with that same pitying, worried gaze, convinced he was unraveling. The world was clearly wrong, fundamentally shifted, yet he was the only one who saw the seams.
He dropped the phone. It landed with a soft thud on the threadbare carpet, insignificant. A raw, desperate scream clawed its way up his throat. He couldn't stay inside, not with the walls closing in, not with the phantom echoes of a world that no longer existed for anyone but him.
He burst out of his apartment, the cool night air hitting him with a shock. He didn't care about his bare feet on the coarse concrete, or the startled glances from a neighbor walking their dog. He stumbled onto the empty street, the distant city lights blurring through his tear-filled eyes. He looked up at the indifferent, star-dusted sky, his lungs burning.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?!" he roared, his voice cracking, tearing through the quiet night. The sound ripped from him, desperate and primal, echoing off the silent buildings. It was a cry against the universe, against the fabric of reality itself that had betrayed him. He stood there, trembling, the sheer, unyielding weight of his isolation pressing down, threatening to crush him. The world was still there, the buildings, the faint hum of traffic, but it was a cruel, alien imitation. He was alone, a solitary, screaming sentinel in a world that had forgotten itself. His past, his shared history, his very sanity, felt like sand slipping through his fingers, and no one, absolutely no one, could see it. He was a witness to an erasure, and the only proof was the growing terror in his own mind.
---
The scream died in the humid air, leaving a raw ache in Wankaz's throat, but it brought no answers. No blinding flash came to explain, no voice from the heavens to confirm. Only the indifferent hum of the city, the distant sounds of normal life, and the heavy thud of his own frantic heart. He leaned against a lamppost, the rough metal cool against his sweaty back, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
A terrible, insidious thought began to worm its way into his mind, chilling him more than the terror of a shifting reality. What if it wasn't the world that was wrong? What if it was him?
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to grasp onto the last vestiges of his certainty. Every memory was so vivid. The taste of Mom's special pancakes on weekend mornings, the sticky syrup on his fingers. The way Aunt Clara always smelled of jasmine and old books. The shared glance with Kezha over a ridiculous inside joke. The precise feel of the rough bark of the banyan tree under his hands, the specific thrill of the secret tunnel in the Miller's Creek treehouse, the nervous excitement of hiding Shadow in the garage. These weren't faded images; they were alive, pulsing with the weight of experience.
But if they were real, why did no one else remember?
*Did he go mad?* The question, unspoken, was a physical blow. Was this what madness felt like? This terrifying clarity that everyone else denied? Was his mind merely constructing an elaborate, painful delusion? The idea was almost a relief, a simpler, more digestible horror than the cosmic dread of a changing reality. If he was mad, there was a diagnosis, a path to treatment, a way to be understood, even if it meant abandoning everything he believed about his past.
But the alternative—the chilling, unthinkable alternative—was that he wasn't mad. That he was the only one who hadn't been… rewired. That everyone he knew and loved was now living a subtly different life, their memories wiped clean, their history rewritten, and they were utterly oblivious. He was a glitch, an error in a cosmic update, left behind to see the ghost of what was.
Was his life even real? The question twisted his gut. If the past was malleable, if memories could be erased and substituted, then what meaning did anything hold? His childhood, his relationships, his identity—were they merely constructs, easily dissolved by some unseen force? The ground beneath him felt less solid, the air less tangible. He felt like a poorly rendered character in a simulation, the only one to notice the pixels were misaligned. The world that had once been his comfort, his home, was now a grand, terrifying illusion, and he was trapped inside, desperately trying to find the exit.
He opened his eyes, the streetlights blurring into halos around his vision. The air still felt thick, not just with humidity, but with an almost palpable wrongness. It was like living inside a photograph where one detail was subtly altered, making the entire image feel uncanny, but only to the one person who remembered the original. He saw the same buildings, the same cars, but they lacked a certain resonance, a depth they once possessed. They felt like perfect copies, but copies nonetheless.
He walked aimlessly, the cold concrete a dull ache against his soles, his mind racing. It wasn't just memories of events that were gone. It was the names of things, like "OmniNet." It was physical landmarks, like the banyan tree. It was the entire shared narrative of his family's past. How deep did it go? Had the world always been like this for everyone else, and he was just now somehow perceiving the "true" history? Or had it truly shifted, a massive, silent rewinding and re-recording of reality, with him as the sole, terrified witness?
The quiet normalcy of the few late-night passersby was deeply unsettling. A young couple walked by, laughing, their hands clasped. A man hurried past, talking animatedly into his phone. They were all so oblivious, so utterly absorbed in this reality, the one that was foreign to him. There was no flicker in their eyes, no moment of hesitation, no hint that their own pasts might have been subtly, irrevocably tampered with. They were perfectly content, perfectly adjusted.
The terror wasn't just about his own sanity anymore. It was about the sheer, unfathomable scale of the alteration. A movie, a tree, family stories, a global network's name. What else? Was gravity a different constant last week? Did the sky used to be a different shade of blue? The thought was a dizzying plunge into an abyss of uncertainty. He was a castaway, not on a deserted island, but on an island full of people who spoke his language but shared none of his history. They were all actors in a play, and he was the only one who realized the script had been changed overnight. The silence of the forgotten past roared, but now it was accompanied by the chilling silence of a world that didn't know it was screaming. He was an echo chamber for a universe that had moved on without him, leaving him to carry the impossible burden of its original song.