The visitors move on predictable routines—shepherded, prompted, unseen hands guiding along.
A deviating sequence. No preprogrammed path, no preprogrammed function. A flaw within the system. Beneath its cloak is hidden a presence out of sequence: unrecorded, unauthorized notion. Something previous, previous, than network, previous, previous, than control, buried under its coat.
And authority takes interest in them.
The aberrations begin subtly enough. Streetlamps blink on each pass through them. Ad hoardings stutter, scrambling to compartmentalize them. Up top, drones make minute compensatory adjustments of path, changing by infinitesimally by changing by infinitesimally of direction, anticipating out of sequence presence within its path. A shake of algorithmic gears, a murmur within the machine.
Their pace quickens, cutting through flows of mobile flesh, each locked within its preprogrammed life. Individual heart beats swifter. The hand dips within the pocket, closing around a small object—a bauble of an earlier era, a memento, organic within its roughness, within its humanness. A key of an earlier era.
A murmur falls upon the visitors. Something happened. Screens around them shift, on each screen flashing one word only: **IDENTIFY.**
They do not hesitate, cannot hesitate. With great, raging exhalation, press object upon wrist. Heat flows through tissue, reality convulses around them.
For one, infinite instant, for one, infinite breath, they view through the construct—beyond artifices, beyond control of reality by algorithm