[OC-Series] Something Is Wrong With The World And I'm The Only One Who Notices. | Chapter 4: The Empty Seat

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I sat in the car with the phone in my hand for longer than I should have.

I know you found it.

Four words from a Sherbrooke area code. No name. No context. No way to tell whether the sender was Dr. Moreau, someone working with her, someone working against her, or someone whose interest in the matter I had not yet imagined.

The rational thing to do was to call the police. Or call Elliot. Or turn the car around.

I am a scientist. I did none of those things.

I put the phone face down on the passenger seat. I started the engine. I checked the mirrors. I pulled out of the parking lot and onto rue Sherbrooke and merged onto the autoroute heading east, because the alternative was sitting in a parking lot waiting for the situation to become more comprehensible, and the situation was not going to become more comprehensible. Comprehensibility was not on the table today.

The sky over Montréal was the particular November grey that doesn't suggest rain so much as state it as a position. I drove with both hands at ten and two and the radio off, the way I always drive when I am thinking.

I worked through the DIDP rotation schedule problem somewhere east of Saint-Hubert.

The page had listed Elliot as the current researcher. He was not the current researcher. He was at his desk in our apartment this morning, drinking coffee from his usual mug, asking me about parking permits. He had not been underground for seven months. He had been, all morning, three metres from me in our kitchen.

Both facts could not be true. One of them was wrong.

The wrong one was the rotation schedule.

It was the same kind of wrongness as the orange mug. The book on the shelf I had not bought. The hydrogen line that had shifted at 03:14 AM. Whatever had rewritten the world overnight had not done it perfectly. It had updated some records and left others in their previous state. Public-facing databases are typically low-priority for institutional updates. The DIDP project page might have been showing data that was accurate in a version of the world that no longer existed.

I reached for the notepad on the passenger seat without looking, the way you reach for things in a familiar space, and I wrote one sentence at the bottom of the visible page.

The rewrite is not perfect.

I underlined it.

I did not yet understand the size of what I had just written. I understood it as a useful working hypothesis about how a global information overwrite would behave at the level of institutional records. I did not yet understand it as the central operational fact about my situation, and possibly the central operational fact about every situation, including ones I had not yet identified.

I would understand that later.

The feeling started somewhere near Saint-Hilaire.

It is hard to describe in a way that does not make it sound like superstition. I am going to describe it accurately and let the description sit where it falls.

I had the sense, faint but persistent, that there was someone in the car with me.

Not visible. Not audible. Not anything I could point to or measure. Just present. The way you feel watched in a room you know is empty. The way the back of your neck registers attention from across a crowded train station before your eyes find the source.

I glanced at the passenger seat.

The notepad was there. My phone was there. The seat was empty.

I returned my eyes to the road.

The feeling did not go away.

I am a scientist. I do not believe in things I cannot measure. I believe in things I cannot yet measure, which is different. I sat with the feeling and did not dismiss it because dismissing it would have been intellectually dishonest. I had spent the morning confirming that the fundamental electromagnetic constant of the universe had shifted overnight. I was not in a position to rule out subtler perceptions on grounds of implausibility.

The feeling was specific. It had a direction. It was on my right.

It was not threatening. It was something closer to attentive.

I kept driving.

My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.

I glanced down. Not the Sherbrooke number this time. Elliot.

Did you remember to take the parking permit out of the car. I really cannot find it.

I read this twice.

I had texted my partner I'll be home late two hours ago and received no response. I had texted a stranger from a Sherbrooke area code one word and the world had not ended. And now Elliot was texting me about a parking permit while I was driving toward the woman who had collapsed the universe, with a presence in the passenger seat that I could not name, and his message was about a piece of paper in the glove compartment.

I did not respond.

A few minutes later, the Sherbrooke number replied to a message I had not sent. Three words.

Pull over. Now.

I read this and kept driving. I was past Granby. I was committed. I was closer to Sherbrooke than I was to Montréal and I was not in the habit of taking instructions from strangers.

The feeling in the passenger seat sharpened.

That is the word I want. Sharpened. The presence had been low and quiet for the last twenty minutes, like a radio tuned to a station too weak to resolve. Now it was clearer. Not a voice. Not an image. Just a more focused version of the same feeling, like the station had found its signal and was now broadcasting at low volume into a room I could not quite enter.

It felt like someone was trying to tell me something.

It also felt like something else was trying to stop them.

I pulled over.

Not because the Sherbrooke text had told me to. Because I had been driving with the feeling for almost half an hour and I could not keep driving without acknowledging what was happening to me.

I put the hazards on. November grey field on my left. The hum of the highway behind me. The car ticking as the engine settled.

I turned in my seat and looked at the empty passenger seat.

I am from Québec City. I was raised by parents who took language seriously. When I am alone with something I do not understand, I default to French, because French is the language my interior life uses when it has run out of professional vocabulary.

I said, quietly, to the empty seat:

Si tu es là, dis-le.

If you are there, say so.

The car was silent. The notepad sat on the seat. The hazard lights ticked.

Then the dashboard radio, which had been off for the entire drive, crackled.

Half a second. A single pulse of static, structured, not random. It was the specific quality of sound that comes from a radio receiving a signal it does not know how to interpret. Then silence.

I stared at the radio.

I waited.

It did not crackle again.

I picked up the phone.

The last text from the Sherbrooke number was still there. Pull over. Now.

I had pulled over. The instruction had arrived before I had decided to comply with it. The sender had known where I was and what I was about to do approximately one minute before I had known.

I typed three words.

Who are you.

The reply took almost a full minute. I watched the screen and the empty passenger seat and the dashboard radio in rotation, like a person waiting for one of three things to happen and not sure which one.

The reply was four words.

Someone who can help.

I sat with this.

The presence in the passenger seat had not moved. Was not moving. It was just there, the way it had been since Saint-Hilaire, low and quiet and attentive. I had the strange and entirely unverifiable sense that whoever was in that seat could read the text on my phone over my shoulder, and that what I was reading was being read by both of us simultaneously.

I did not believe in this. I was experiencing it anyway.

I typed two more words.

Where are you.

I put the car in gear.

I checked my mirrors.

I pulled back onto the autoroute heading east.

The phone sat face up on the passenger seat next to the notepad. The hazards clicked off. The dashboard radio remained silent.

I drove toward Sherbrooke with two strangers in the car. One of them was on my right, invisible and patient. The other was somewhere ahead of me on a number I did not recognize, waiting to tell me where.

I did not know which of them I was driving toward.

I did not know if they were the same person.

I did not know anything anymore, which was becoming the only consistent fact of my day.

The reply from the Sherbrooke number arrived as I was passing the exit for Magog.

I did not look at it.

I kept driving.