Lataio continues running breathlessly, his heart not just racing but trying to escape through his mouth. He fights the urge to vomit, wave after wave of nausea hitting him with each new crash, each new scream. The guilt intensifies like a physical weight crushing his chest. Another car plows into two pedestrians - instant death, their bodies crumpling like discarded puppets. The driver, wild-eyed, forces the car over the bodies, tires crushing bone and flesh until something jams the wheels. He abandons the vehicle, running past another crash where a pole has fallen. The second driver emerges, dazed and bloody, only to be thrown down by the first, who steals his car in desperate flight - before another vehicle smashes into them both.
Another car rockets into a storefront directly in front of Lataio, glass and metal exploding outward like shrapnel. His guilt screams at him, louder than the chaos around him: "All this because you couldn't accept things!" The sounds - screaming, metal grinding, explosions - begin to merge into a single rising tone, an impossible echo that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. Lataio runs faster, thinking only of home, of his mother - but that thought feels strange now, like trying to hold onto water, the memory dissolving even as he reaches for it.
He pushes harder, faster, but his foot connects with something soft - a body, still warm. He looks back, tears blurring his vision, seeing people transformed into creatures of pure panic and rage. "This isn't survival," he thinks, watching them tear at each other, "this is self-destruction." A car flips overhead, so close he feels the heat of scraped metal, scorching his hair. His hand instinctively moves to his head, feeling the burnt strands, wanting to stop, to check, to understand - but something is changing.
The colors begin to drain from the world, like paint running in rain. Everything slows, as if reality itself is exhausted. Still he runs, watching the sky pulse between impossible colors, the ground beneath his feet losing substance, becoming liquid, then gas, then something his mind can't comprehend. He wants to stop, needs to stop, but terror drives him forward into the dissolving world, into a path that no longer exists.
Something bright catches his eye as he runs - screens, emerging from nowhere. He slows his pace, suddenly aware of how much ground each stride covers - his legs impossibly long now. The screens demand his attention:
[System Recalibration Initiated] [Current Status: Emergency Protocol]
[Reality Parameters: Adjusting]
He stops, transfixed. The ground beneath him has regained structure, but with different colors - darker, fixed black and blue squares. His heart still pounds, but less from exhaustion now. He looks at his hands - larger, stronger. His arms wider. The sky above is permanently clouded. No reflections anywhere to see himself.
Stolen story; please report.
The screens continue their display:
[Implementing Control Systems]
• Mandatory Device Integration
• Behavioral Monitoring Network
• Information Flow Control
• Reality Adjustment Authority [Status: Perfect]
[Deploying Enforcement Measures]
• Aerial Surveillance Drones
• Sonic Pacification Arrays
• Emotional Manipulation Grid
• Thought Pattern Screening [Status: Perfect]
The streets are empty now, no bodies, no accidents, just silence. His attention jumps from screen to screen as the messages become more urgent:
[Alert: Anomaly Detection] [Non-Compliant Subjects: 33] [Reclassifying:
Dissidents → Terrorists] [Status: Processing]
[System Alert] [Critical Security Breach] [Display Protocol: Compromised] [Information Exposure to Targets] [Status: CRITICAL ERROR]
[Administrative Analysis] [Error: System Self-Exposure] [Unintended Information Distribution] [New Threat Assessment Required]
[Emergency Reclassification] [Dissidents + Terrorist Designation = Potential True Rebellion] [Scenario: System-Generated Opposition] [Status: CRITICAL OVERSIGHT] [Perfect???]
Suddenly, all screens go dark. Lataio holds his breath, waiting.
[SYSTEM REBOOT INITIATED] [IMPLEMENTING PUBLIC NARRATIVE] [3... 2... 1...]
The screens burst back to life. In that same instant, the streets fill with people, each clutching devices, faces illuminated by their glow. Car drivers sit frozen in their seats, eyes locked on their screens.
"Janewsy ShowTime" blazes across every display. Lataio stares as a woman with seven-colored hair fills the screens, her eyes wild with manufactured panic: "CLIMATE TERROR! Citizens, we are under attack! Thirty-three CLIMATE TERRORISTS seek to destroy our perfect environmental systems!"
The camera zooms tight on her face as she points accusingly at surveillance footage of grey skies and strange weather patterns. "Look at our skies! Our perfect atmosphere - corrupted by these agents of chaos! These CLIMATE TERRORISTS wage war against our stability!"
Her seven-colored hair whips around as she pounds her fist: "They manipulate our weather! They threaten our environmental harmony! Every strange cloud, every unexpected temperature shift - all part of their plot against order itself!"
Splitting into multiple screens, her voice rising to fever pitch: "CLIMATE TERROR must be stopped! These 33 enemies of stability will face justice! Report any suspicious weather-watching! Anyone questioning our perfect system could be a CLIMATE TERRORIST!"
[Weather Disruption Alert] [Climate Terror Threat Level: Maximum] [Environmental Stability: Threatened] [Perfect]
The number hits him like a physical blow. 33. Just like the earlier screens had shown. His heart races again. Something is seriously wrong. He turns and runs, desperate to get home, aware of how different his body feels, how changed everything has become. Not a single mirror anywhere. "I have to get home," he thinks, as the new reality settles around him, Janewsy's seven-colored hair still burning in his vision like a symbol of something he can't quite understand.