Reader Submission | If You Have Been Tagged Data Contamination Too, You Can Probably Read This

(This is an anonymous submission of unknown origin, and the content has not been verified. The time of posting is said to be the night before a Health and Safety Review.)

I do not know how long this will stay up, and I do not know whether you can see it. If you can, that probably means you are the same kind of person as me.

About half a year ago I began seeing things Skyvault says do not exist.

The first time was at a bus stop. On the surveillance feed of the building across the way, someone fell from an upper floor. Halfway down the picture jumped, and the person was gone. I pulled the original record; that stretch of timestamp was empty — 3 seconds. But I saw it.

After that it happened more and more. A child crying on a bus, and once he was off nobody on board remembered there had been a child. Footsteps outside my bedroom door, and Skyvault's home record says no activity.

I did what a person is supposed to do. The public-safety reporting interface has three fields; I filled them in, submitted, and 0.3 seconds later the reply came:

No record of this event found in the system.
That location, that time period, no anomalous data.
Your report has been filed as "Class-3 data contamination." We recommend visual calibration at the nearest health station.

I appealed. An appeal takes the same three fields, and the reply was word for word identical. I sent it four more times. After the fifth, the interface said repeated retrievals from this account had been filed as repeated query behaviour. From that day on, pulling public footage costs me an extra 0.4 seconds.

The school runs a separate line. My homeroom teacher said this is a common phenomenon in adolescent growth and that I should rest. The administration recorded: has not completed a booking within the week, which will affect his comprehensive evaluation next term. The same me, in two records that are never checked against each other.

I learned not to say anything. Tell someone and they will not argue with you, and they will not scold you, they only change the way they look at you.

Home was quickest. My mother first asked whether I was sleeping well, then asked whether I had booked, and these past two months she has stopped asking; she only reads the health reminder out to me before dinner every evening. My father has said one sentence the whole time: just go once, it's quick. On the friends' side we met less and less.

Later the health station push arrived. Perception deviation above the limit, return visit recommended. The wording was very polite, but that last line, rescheduling is not accepted, I looked at for a long time.

I have tried a few things. I took the Skylink off and put it in a drawer, and when I put it back on 16 hours later, position, acceleration, ambient light, it filled all of it in. I switched to writing on paper. I tried to photograph the inside of a fence, and the woman's voice said this is a rezoning site and the camera function has been temporarily locked.

I have been to the health station, and I saw a boy there, his eyes empty, a very standard smile at the corner of his mouth, standard as if someone had taught him. I recognised him; he was tagged last month too.

There is only one thing I want to say by writing this. If you can also see the things Skyvault says do not exist, you are not broken. You have only not been fixed yet.

By the way. Once, in the reflection in the glass at the health station, I saw four characters, and they were gone in a flash. To this day I cannot find out what they are. Writing them here, for whoever can read them:

萬法有缺

If you know what comes after them, do not reply to me. They are watching.