The Replaced World

The end of the world doesn't have to come apart at the seams. It can also be waking up one day to find everything looks normal, only some of the details aren't quite the way you remember them — and apart from you, nobody thinks anything is wrong.

There are signs that this world is being covered over, piece by piece, by another version. The scope of the covering eats backwards: photographs, records, other people's memories all change along with it, change until it looks as though it was always this way.

There is no wide shot of this, only samples, one frame at a time. A batch of pre-dawn sighting posts vanished within 6 hours, accounts and all, 4 left out of 17. Only two snapshots survive on the web archive, the last crawl stopping a month ago, and the post from this morning's small hours does not exist in them. A wall that held 41 photographs held 39 three weeks later; the nails were still there, and the wall carried no mark where a frame had pressed.

"Everything looks normal" is the hardest part of this to describe. Asked about what was outside the window, the clerk in the convenience store lets his eyes drift that way first, holds them there about 2 seconds, then turns back and says "Nope," in exactly the tone he had been using a moment earlier for the restocking. The residents' committee register has no entry for the old woman who sat at the end of the alley three nights running, and the clerk finishes going through it and says no woman over 60 has lived on this street in 28 years. Every record is clean, complete, and squares with every other one.

The accounts run their own way. Official copy puts it down to the atmosphere and to electromagnetism; night-shift drivers, sanitation crews, all-night store clerks — the Late-Nighters — refer to it in private groups as "that time," an understanding none of them spells out. Some insist it is collective fatigue. Some refuse to say another word and hang up.

The speed, at least, can be estimated. Extrapolating from the rate of that wall, two gone in three weeks, a person disappears from every print entirely in about 61.5 weeks, a year and three months. But nobody knows whether that speed is linear, or whether it accelerates.

One question is left: on the day the replacement is complete, will there still be anyone who remembers the original version?