Rift Vision

A perception that can see the "overwrite." The unnatural seams in wall surfaces, roads, photographs, surveillance footage rise to the surface under this kind of sight — the thing other people are looking at and cannot see.

Its limit is in the same place. It can mark the position of what has been changed. What it was changed into, who changed it, why this particular patch was picked out — to all of that it gives no answer. Seeing the problem doesn't mean being able to solve it. The rest has to come from investigating, from cross-checking, and from putting yourself at risk one time after another.

Its performance isn't stable either. The first time the rift in the sky was seen, the naked eye and the camera's image agreed; six days later, the same camera pointed at the same brick wall, and there was a 1 metre wide opening on the LCD and brick wall when he looked up, switching back and forth about 30 times and getting the same thing every time. Two weeks after that, in the underground passage, the naked eye and the camera could both see it again. The same person, the same machine, looking again a few days apart, and the result may not be the same.

The trigger conditions haven't been worked out either. On the several occasions he ran into an anomaly, he was moving, he wasn't looking for anything, he was busy with something else, and the sign came in from the corner of his eye. The other way round, parked across the street on purpose to watch the same sign from 03:00 to 03:30, and a sign was a sign. But those stakeouts changed three variables at once, the route, the time slot and the manner of attention, and there is no control group that can pull "looking on purpose is why you don't see it" out on its own. For now it sits in the hypothesis column and nowhere else.

The more you see, the higher the cost — over-observation brings memory disturbance and sensory distortion. Days on end without sleep, fishing for signs with the corner of the eye, sitting in a car at three in the morning waiting out those 161 seconds, those go on the bill as well.

There is one more deviation that can't be pinned down: you understand it, and you can't draw it. It is true of those block characters, and true of the circular mark on the grey metal box — laid out on the desk in a photograph they are perfectly clear; close your eyes and call them back, and the shape falls apart.