The Gravity of Tomorrow
Copyright© 2026 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 13: Eyes of the World
The world did not notice Ty and Ann all at once.
It noticed them the way storms notice pressure; slowly, uneasily, only after the air had already begun to change.
It started with anomalies.
A man in Fort Wayne who should have died on a cold sidewalk ... didn’t. A woman who collapsed in a shelter hallway recovered faster than doctors could explain. A string of quiet, unremarkable survivals that never made the news—but did make it into systems.
Hospital databases flagged them. Insurance models adjusted probabilities around them. Emergency response logs marked moments that didn’t fit expected patterns.
No one said miracle.
They said outlier.
And outliers always attracted attention.
Ty felt it before he understood it.
He was at work, tightening bolts on a relay mount, when he noticed the van parked across the street from the site.
Not unusual.
Except it had been there all morning.
Same angle. Same dark windows. Same sense of being watched without being seen.
Ty didn’t panic.
He observed.
When the van finally pulled away, he let out a slow breath.
That night, he told Ann.
“People don’t watch you unless they think you matter,” she said quietly.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Ty replied.
The first official notice came three days later.
Not to them.
About them.
At the shelter, Ann overheard two volunteers talking near the break room.
“You hear about that guy who collapsed at the bus stop?” one asked. “Yeah. They say he was basically gone and then just ... stabilized.” “That’s not how it works.” “Apparently, it did.”
Ann froze for half a second before continuing down the hall.
By the time she reached her office, her hands were shaking.
That evening, she told Ty.
“They’re starting to talk,” she said.
Ty nodded. “That’s how it begins.”
The presence came that night.
Not as a warning.
As a statement.
“Attention is forming.”
Ty leaned back in his chair. “That sounds ... ominous.”
“Attention is not danger,” the system replied. “But it is the doorway to it.”
Ann folded her arms. “So what do we do?”
The answer was immediate.
“You remain ordinary.”
Ty let out a quiet laugh. “That ship sailed.”
“You remain human,” the system corrected. “Visibility comes not from what you can do ... but from how you choose to live.”
Ann looked at Ty. “That means we don’t hide.”
Ty shook his head. “No. It means we don’t perform.”
They kept living their lives.
Ty went to work. Ann went to the shelter. They met at the park on Wednesdays. They talked about small things on purpose—movies, bad coffee, the way winter never seemed to end.
But the sense of being watched did not fade.
It sharpened.
A man at the shelter asked Ann one day, “You ever notice how you always seem to show up right before things turn around?”
Ann smiled politely. “That’s called timing.”
He studied her for a moment. “Yeah. But timing usually has an explanation.”
She didn’t respond.
Two weeks later, the first real inquiry arrived.
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