The First Glitch
Pravin Varma’s first mistake was thinking it was just a glitch.
The ATM screen blinked: “Transaction Declined.”
His phone vibrated. Insufficient balance. Impossible. His paycheck had hit two days ago. He tried again. Declined. A woman at the next machine glanced at him, then quickly looked away.
At the café, his card was rejected. “Maybe try another one, sir?” the cashier suggested. He didn’t have another one.
The subway turnstile wouldn’t open. His ID wouldn’t scan. A line formed behind him—people huffing, irritated. “Sir, step aside,” a guard said, already waving the next commuter through.
By the time he reached his office, sweat clung to his back. The security guard stopped him at the entrance. “Your keycard isn’t working.”
“It was working yesterday.”
The man frowned, checking his screen. No employee found.
Pravin forced a laugh. “That’s a mistake.”
“I don’t think it is, sir.”
Vanished in Plain Sight
He knew a way into his office. What he found there, shook him.
His desk—empty.
Not just cleared out. Gone.
Someone else sat in his place, a stranger tapping away at a computer that should have been his. Pravin’s nameplate wasn’t on the cubicle anymore. The logins didn’t work. The emails were gone.
His boss—a man he had known for six years—looked at him like he was a complete stranger.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Sir, it’s me—Pravin.”
A polite smile. Blank. Distant. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
A creeping chill slithered down Pravin’s spine. His voice felt like it belonged to someone else. “This isn’t funny.”
“It’s not a joke, Mr.—” The man hesitated. “I’m sorry. What was your name again?”
Pravin felt his heartbeat in his throat.
The Apartment That Wasn’t His
He ran.
Back to the place that was safe, the place where his name was carved into the lease.
But the locks had changed.
The door opened, but the person standing inside wasn’t him.
“Can I help you?” The man’s voice was casual, but the way he gripped the edge of the doorframe said he was ready to call security.
Pravin’s eyes darted past him. The furniture wasn’t his. The pictures on the wall—a smiling woman, two kids—not his.
His mind raced, struggling to process. “This is my apartment.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Pravin pulled out his phone. His lease agreement, his emails, his messages—all wiped. His name did not exist in the tenant database. The landlord’s contact? No longer in his call history.
The walls closed in, pressing against his ribs. His entire life was a blank space.
He turned to a woman standing in the hallway. “You know me, right? I live here.”
She took a step back.
“I— I don’t think so,” she muttered.
A door shut. The hallway lights buzzed overhead.
The world continued on, without him.
Hunted by Silence
He tried the police.
“I need to report—” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence. A robbery? A fraud? A deletion?
They asked for ID. He gave them his driver’s license.
The officer glanced at it. Scanned it. Looked at Pravin.
“Sir, this doesn’t belong to you.”
“It has my name on it!”
“It’s flagged as inactive.”
“Inactive?”
The officer exhaled. “Sir, we don’t have a record of you.”
Pravin’s voice cracked. “That’s not possible.”
“We checked twice.” The officer’s face was unreadable. “No birth certificate. No passport. No tax ID. No medical records. There’s nothing here.”
Pravin’s breathing hitched. “So what? I just don’t exist anymore?”
A pause.
“Getting into that is above my pay grade.”
The officer handed the ID back like it was trash.
And then, softly—“If I were you, I’d stop asking questions.”
Breaking the System
By the time Pravin found out about the Identity Nullification Program, he was already dead on paper. For a dead man, he was really angry and ready to fight back. At the police station, someone had slipped a small notepad in his suit. He walked out of that place into an alley where he read something that drained the blood out of his face.
It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t an accident. It was a choice by certain bureaucrats, who hated any visible violence – a choice made behind closed doors, where people like him — inconveniences — were erased with a keystroke.
His emails were gone as if they had never been written. His records were gone as if they had never been filed. The world did not hunt him; it simply moved on without him.
They had erased him and many others.Thousands of people wiped away, vanished without a trace. He wasn’t the first. He wouldn’t be the last.
He had to decide if he would take up the challenge. It was no decision at all. He was in no mood to let the enemy win.
There was one way back. One crack in the armor.
The system was built to erase one man at a time. But it couldn’t handle bringing thousands back at once. If Pravin forced a mass reversal—if he overloaded the database—it would collapse under its own weight.
Systems were not perfect.
He just had to get inside.
First, he had to signal his readiness to the person behind the book that he was game for doing everything the book wanted him to. In the book itself were a set of instructions. If he backed out, the group wouldn’t care. But if he decided to play ball he would have to travel to a particular subway immediately and be ready to follow those instructions.
Walking to the subway took longer than expected. But as expected, the lights went out just as he entered. He felt a group of people pass him. One passerby jabbed him with something on his hand. He looked around. Pravin couldn’t see a thing because it was dark. Then he couldn’t see a thing because he had fallen unconscious.
The Break-In
He woke up in a car with official markings.
“Interesting”
He looked at himself. He was already in a security guard’s outfit.
“No face-to-face discussions. Just instructions to memorize. No ability to identify anyone or any address should things go south”
He stared outside. The facility sat on the outskirts of the city, quiet and sterile. Guarded not just by security personnel—guarded by silence.
He checked his pockets. They contained the Identity Card he needed to enter. Also the access cards filled with details of the erased that would overload the system. Mustering courage and acting nonchalant, Pravin slipped through the doors, past men who barely glanced at him.
Rows of monitors stretched before him in the various rooms . A graveyard of erased identities.
He went into the main server room. Pravin plugged in the access cards.
One name was uploaded. Then another. Then a hundred. Then tens of thousands.
A system designed to erase was now being forced to remember.
The first alarm sounded.
Then the second.
Pravin ran. He made it outside to his surprise. “They must have bribed people or got them on their side somehow”
Bullets begin to rain. It shouldn’t have been impossible to hit him. He was no sprinting champ. “It must be deliberate. But the guards shouldn’t make it so obvious that they are trying not to harm me”
Maybe he had spoken too soon. A bullet grazed his shoulder reminding him that he wasn’t too powerful to be hurt.
Wrenwood Highlands
The rain blurred the road ahead. His shoulder throbbed from where the bullet had grazed it. His hands clenched the wheel. He felt weak. Was he bleeding to his death? The access cards sat heavy in his pocket.
The cold mist swallowed the highway.
Headlights from a trailer. A sharp turn. Tires screaming against the wet asphalt.
Impact.
The world shattered.
Somewhere, a kind voice. A hand pulling him from the wreckage.
“Stay with me!”
A woman. A policewoman. The name tag on her jacket said Clara LeClair.
The last thing Pravin saw before his vision gave out—the stolen access cards, scattered across the road like fallen leaves.
And then, finally, nothing.
