The First Rift

At 03:17, a gash tore open in the sky over Taipei and vanished a few minutes later. The vast majority were asleep; the few who were awake could not, the next day, say clearly what they had seen.

One reporter captured a RAW file. The cloud layer in the photo was flatter than the scene he remembered—unnaturally flat. Stranger still, after that photo had sat overnight, the 'too-flat' quality of the cloud layer had, of its own accord, weakened a little, while the file's modification timestamp had not moved.

That was the first Overwrite Trace ever recorded, and the starting point of all of this. From that day on, the moment of 03:17 began to recur, again and again.