“The Number You Have Dialed”

Part I

I hadn’t expected the house to be as quiet as it was. You’d think an old farmhouse, even one wired for utilities and insulated in the seventies, would creak or groan or do something to remind you you weren’t the only one inside it—but the place just sat there. No echoes. No mouse scratches. Not even the sighing moan of wind against old glass. Just stillness.

That might’ve been why I started poking around the desk in the corner of the study. My uncle Malcolm’s things had been cleared out by the estate people, but they’d left the furniture, along with a few weird trinkets that probably weren’t worth the gas to haul away. I’d come across a yellow rotary phone earlier in the day, still mounted on the wall in the kitchen like some forgotten relic. It had a tone adapter on the line, oddly enough—someone had tried to modernize it, maybe twenty years too late.

I was on my second beer, still waiting for my internet service to activate and debating whether to start organizing my studio gear, when I found it. A small, curling post-it note wedged under the felt lining of the desk drawer. On it, written in thin, almost spidery handwriting, were the words: For help, dial 707-999-0331.

No other instructions. No name. No explanation.

I took the note to the kitchen and stared at the phone. It was one of those glossy beige models with a long, coiled cord and a rotary wheel that clicked when you turned it. I lifted the handset and pressed it to my ear, half expecting it to be dead. But it wasn’t. There was a dial tone—warbling and thin.

I hesitated, then spun the numbers in. Seven-zero-seven. Nine-nine-nine. Zero-three-three-one. The clicks echoed through the line like a skeleton tapping its fingers against glass.

Nothing happened at first. Just silence. Then the faintest hum, like a cassette tape winding slowly through its reel. After that came music. If you could even call it that. A distorted melody played softly in the background—chimes and violins overlaid with something synthetic and arrhythmic, like elevator music from a fever dream.

I almost hung up then, assuming I’d dialed into a defunct fax line or some voicemail purgatory. But before I could, the music stopped with an abruptness that made me flinch. A beat later, a voice came on the line.

“Welcome to Eidolon Services,” it said. “Please state the name you wish removed.”

The voice was male, but mechanical in its cadence. There was no inflection. No regional accent. It sounded like an executive trying to mimic calm, or an AI trained on customer service manuals.

I paused. “What?”

“Please state the name you wish removed,” it repeated.

I assumed it was a prank—maybe one of those AI-generated phone trees that looped you through nonsense for kicks. But the longer I stood there listening to the deadpan silence that followed, the more a weird sense of obligation settled in. Like I’d been called on to participate in something I hadn’t agreed to but couldn’t walk away from either.

“Jared Marlin,” I said.

I hadn’t thought about that name in years. Jared had been a royal bastard back in school. The kind of kid who looked for bruises to press and secrets to drag into the light. The day he put gum in my headphones and blamed it on a transfer student was the day I stopped trusting anyone in my grade. He probably didn’t even remember my name.

There was a faint clicking noise on the other end of the line—like a series of keys being tapped in rapid succession. Then the voice returned.

“Processing removal. Expect results within twenty-four hours. Thank you for using Eidolon Services.”

The line went dead. No goodbye. No confirmation. Just silence.

I let the receiver hang for a moment before returning it to the cradle. The whole thing had lasted maybe two minutes, but it left a stale taste in my mouth, like metal and dust. I shook it off. Probably some underground art project. Viral marketing for an indie game. Something designed to be creepy and vague, just mysterious enough to stick in your brain.

I forgot about it, mostly. That night I microwaved a leftover calzone, watched a low-res horror movie on my laptop, and fell asleep on the pullout couch with my phone under my pillow. No dreams, thankfully. Just an expanse of static between then and morning.

At 11:43 the next day, my phone buzzed with an unknown number. I didn’t answer right away. It buzzed again, then once more after that. On the third try, I picked up, more annoyed than anything.

“Yeah?”

There was a brief delay, and then I heard it—the same warped hold music from the night before. It scraped at my ears like something trying too hard to be soft. Then it stopped, and a voice came on. Not the same one as before. This one was female, smoother, but just as emotionless.

“Courtesy recording for client Ryan Marteni,” it said. “Removal confirmation in progress. Please remain on the line.”

I blinked, unsure whether I’d heard that right. “What the hell is this?” I asked.

Instead of a reply, the line filled with noise. Not static. Not music. A human voice.

“Please—please don’t do this—”

It was distant, as though being filtered through a tunnel. Then louder. More distinct.

“I didn’t do anything to you! Please—don’t—don’t let them—”

It was Jared. I didn’t recognize it at first, but once I did, something in my stomach turned over. He was crying. His voice cracked with desperation. There was a sound like scraping metal, followed by a wet, choking gasp. Then silence.

A different voice came on the line. Male. Formal.

“Removal confirmed,” it said. “We appreciate your participation, Mr. Marteni. One credit has been applied to your account.”

Then, as if it were a normal call from a bank or an insurance company, the voice added, “Have a productive day.”

The call ended. I stood there for a long moment, my phone still pressed to my ear, even though the screen had gone black. Something was wrong. Fundamentally wrong.

I stared at the rotary phone on the wall. My uncle had never married. Never had kids. The neighbors said he kept to himself. I wondered if he had made a call like I had.

I should have thrown the handset through the window and left the house behind. I should have buried the number in the backyard and never spoken it aloud again. Instead, I walked back to the kitchen, lifted the receiver from the rotary phone, and dialed the number a second time.

Seven-zero-seven. Nine-nine-nine. Zero-three-three-one.

This time there was no music. No delay. The line picked up instantly.

“Welcome back, Mr. Marteni,” the same voice from the courtesy call said. “Removal confirmed. One credit has been applied.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words tangled on the way out. There were too many questions fighting to be first. I swallowed once, twice, and settled on the only one that seemed to matter.

“What’s a credit good for?”

There was a pause—just long enough to make me think the line had gone dead again. But the voice returned, calm and clear as ever.

“Credits may be exchanged for additional services through Eidolon. Insertion, removal, restructuring, and memory compensation are available, subject to account status.”

I stared at the receiver in my hand, unsure if I had just signed up for a loyalty program from hell or stepped sideways into another dimension.

“I don’t understand,” I said, my voice low and hoarse.

“That is common,” the voice replied. “Your account has been activated. Additional assistance is available at your request. Do you wish to hear your current options?”

I didn’t answer right away. In the corner of the kitchen, I saw one of my moving boxes—still half-full, marked “studio junk” in permanent marker. Atop it was the microphone I’d used for years, the one that had followed me from city to city, job to job. The one I’d used to record a dozen podcast intros and interviews. It sat there like an artifact from another life. A simpler one.

The silence stretched between us, but the line didn’t hang up.

Outside, the wind shifted. I heard dry leaves scatter against the porch.

“I should hang up,” I whispered.

But I didn’t.

Part II

The day after the courtesy call, I couldn’t stop thinking about the voice on the other end of the line. It hadn’t just confirmed what I’d heard before—it had laid the groundwork for something bigger, something that reached far beyond a single act of removal. They’d used the word account. They’d applied a credit. Those were terms that belonged to systems—structured ones. Financial. Bureaucratic. Legal. This wasn’t some rogue supernatural prank or a freak glitch in reality. It was something designed.

I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake, staring at the wooden beams of the ceiling, listening to the wind brush dry pine needles against the window frame. Somewhere between midnight and morning, I got up, walked to the rotary phone, and dialed the number again.

This time, the voice was waiting.

“Welcome back, Mr. Marteni. You currently have one credit available.”

I stood barefoot on the cold tile floor, the handset pressed to my ear. I remembered what it had said before—that credits could be exchanged for services. But I hadn’t asked then what that really meant. Now I wanted specifics.

“All right,” I said. “You told me I had a credit. What can I use it for, exactly?”

“Current service categories include: Erasure, Insertion, Swap, and Restructure. Detailed descriptions available upon request. Please indicate which category you would like to explore.”

I hesitated, unsure if I wanted to know what any of those words truly meant. But something about Insertion caught in my mind—like a puzzle piece half-visible beneath the dust. I asked for details.

“Insertion,” the voice explained, “places a new individual, opportunity, or entity into your life. This insertion will conform to your contextual needs, based on psychological profile and situational data. Results may include—but are not limited to—romantic partners, professional contacts, material gains, or social connections.”

My lips were dry. I wet them with the edge of my tongue and said, “Okay. One insertion.”

There was no ceremony, no dramatic flourish. Just a soft tone like the end of a transaction at a self-checkout kiosk.

“Insertion confirmed,” the voice said. “Processing. Please allow up to twenty-four hours for placement. Thank you for using Eidolon Services.”

The line went dead.

I hung up and stood there in the kitchen for a long time, the phone cord swaying slightly from the movement. I didn’t know what I expected—maybe a doorbell, or an immediate change in the room around me. But nothing happened.

I spent the morning cleaning up the garage, trying to keep my hands busy. Around noon, I checked my email and saw a new message from an agency I didn’t recognize: Obsidian Audio Collective. The subject line read: Podcast Partnership Inquiry – High-Tier Freelance Opportunity.

I opened it.

The message was short and professional. They had reviewed my public portfolio, admired my editing and sound design, and were offering me a contract position to assist with their newest serialized true crime show. Compensation was generous. The timeline was flexible. I didn’t remember submitting anything to them. In fact, I had taken my portfolio offline two weeks ago when I moved.

I scrolled to the bottom of the message, looking for a catch. There wasn’t one. Just a digital signature and a link to a secure file sharing platform for project materials. I clicked it. Inside was a full set of scripts, interview audio, and raw B-roll, all tagged and organized. The kind of prep work I only saw on premium commercial projects.

The insertion had worked.

For the rest of that week, I immersed myself in the new contract. I edited files, submitted drafts, and received prompt, glowing feedback. The money hit my account in two payments—early. Every time I heard the name Obsidian Audio Collective, I felt a jolt of unease. They had no LinkedIn page. No social media presence. The people I emailed didn’t exist anywhere else online.

But I didn’t stop.

Three days later, I picked up the rotary phone again.

“Welcome back, Mr. Marteni. You have zero available credits. Would you like to acquire more?”

I didn’t respond right away. The voice waited.

“I want to remove someone,” I said.

“Please state the name.”

“Thomas Bell,” I said. “He was a client. Ghosted me on a $700 invoice two months ago.”

The voice processed the name. I didn’t even wait for the confirmation this time. I hung up.

The next day, I searched his social profiles. His account was gone. His company’s site redirected to a 404 error. The shared folder he’d sent me the raw files through no longer existed in my drive. Even the email thread was gone.

The removal was absolute.

Two days later, I called again. This time, I named the neighbor’s dog.

The dog stopped barking that night.

I started to lose track of when I had last made a call. Sometimes I’d wake up thinking about names, or catch myself writing one down while I stirred my coffee. At first, I thought I was still operating under a normal rhythm, like I was managing a to-do list. But then I started noticing the gaps.

One afternoon, while organizing photos on my phone, I came across a picture I didn’t remember taking. It showed me and a woman, seated on the porch steps, smiling at each other. She had shoulder-length auburn hair and was wearing a thin cardigan and jeans. Her hand was on my knee. The sun behind us painted the whole image in gold.

I stared at it for almost a full minute before checking the metadata. The timestamp was from three days ago. There was no name saved to her contact file. Just “L.”

When I backed out of the photo app, I noticed something else. My phone’s wallpaper had changed. It used to be a forest trail I hiked once with my uncle. Now it was a close-up shot of that same woman’s face, laughing in mid-motion.

I scrolled through my messages and found a thread titled Lina Vaughn. The chat history stretched back two weeks. There were inside jokes, pictures of takeout, a voice memo of her singing softly off-key. I listened to it three times. I didn’t remember her voice. But the more I read, the more my brain tried to convince me I did.

By the time the week ended, I had forgotten how many people I had called in about. Names swirled through my mind like oil on water. Some slipped through my fingers. Others stuck.

On the seventh night, I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling again, when I heard it.

The music.

It wasn’t coming from the phone. It was seeping through the walls—distant, distorted, and barely audible. The same eerie blend of violins and synthetic chimes I’d heard the first time I called. I rose from bed, slowly, and followed the sound.

It led me to the back hallway. The wallpaper there was beginning to peel, revealing faint symbols etched into the plaster beneath—concentric loops, numbers, and what looked like tally marks.

I pressed my ear to the wall.

The music continued, looping again and again, until it faded away.

I returned to bed, but I didn’t sleep.

Part III

The following morning began like any other, though I noticed the shadows in the hallway seemed to stretch a little farther than usual, like the sun had shifted its position behind the trees without asking permission. I didn’t take it as an omen at first. I chalked it up to my sleep-deprived brain and the paranoia that had crept in since the music in the walls. But when the phone rang at 7:14 a.m.—a time when I never received calls, not even spam—I knew something was wrong.

The display on my phone showed no number. Just a blank screen and a single word: “PRIVATE.”

I answered it without speaking.

A new voice greeted me. It wasn’t the same one I’d come to expect—the calm, corporate tone with its detached inflections. This one was softer. Still professional, but more clinical than conversational.

“Mr. Marteni,” the voice said. “This is Operator Seven. You are being contacted in regard to an internal audit.”

I didn’t respond. The voice continued.

“Our system has flagged your account for unauthorized overuse of services. You have exceeded your approved engagement threshold for a Class 1 Probationary Member.”

The words dropped into my chest like weights. I turned away from the window and sat down at the edge of the bed.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means,” the voice replied, “that your activity has triggered a compliance review. You are now within the restructuring window, pending remediation. To avoid automatic compliance restructuring, you are required to refer five eligible individuals within seventy-two hours.”

The words had the cadence of a legal disclaimer, but they landed with finality. My mouth felt dry.

“What happens if I don’t?”

There was a pause on the line, as though the operator were considering how much to say. When the voice returned, it was slightly lower in tone.

“If remediation is not achieved within the allotted timeframe, your file will be subject to non-consensual restructuring. You will be permanently removed from primary identity alignment.”

“I don’t know what the hell that means.”

“You will no longer be you,” the voice said. “Not as you understand it.”

I stood and began to pace, the floorboards groaning under my bare feet.

“And these referrals—what happens to the people I give you?”

“That depends on their compatibility with our service,” the voice answered. “Most are offered introductory access. Some elect to proceed. Others are deemed incompatible and processed accordingly.”

I didn’t ask what “processed accordingly” meant. I had a feeling I already knew.

“We have couriered a referral packet to your residence,” the voice continued. “It should arrive today. Contained within are five access tokens. Each must be distributed to a separate subject, with an initial contact timestamp recorded. You will receive notification for each completed engagement.”

I pressed my hand to my face, trying to steady my thoughts. “And if I do this? If I find five people?”

“Your compliance status will be reset. Your restructuring appointment will be suspended pending future review.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You are already within the ledger, Mr. Marteni. Refusal is not a valid input.”

The call ended before I could respond. The line cut off with no tone and no confirmation. I stared at the screen for a long time, waiting for it to blink back to life. It didn’t.

The package arrived by noon. A man in a black polo shirt and dark sunglasses left it on the front porch without ringing the bell. By the time I opened the door, he was already back in the van, which bore no logo or license plate. The moment the wheels touched the road, the van was gone—faster than seemed possible.

The packet was black and square, about the size of a hardcover book. Inside were five matte-black business cards. Each was embossed with a silver symbol that resembled an eye partially eclipsed by a crescent blade. There was no name. No address. Only a number printed in sharp, minimalist font across the center: 707-999-0331.

I held the cards in my hands, feeling their strange texture—smoother than paper, rougher than plastic. My name was written on the inside flap of the box in clean white lettering: Referral Authority: Ryan Marteni.

That night, I didn’t eat. I didn’t turn on the lights. I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the cards like they might rewrite themselves if I waited long enough. But nothing changed.

The next morning, I placed the first card in my coat pocket and walked down to the café near the edge of town. The place wasn’t busy—just a few people working on laptops or murmuring over half-eaten pastries. Behind the counter stood a young woman I recognized from previous visits. She always wore a red scarf and black stud earrings shaped like moons. Her name tag read Samira, but she went by Sam.

When I handed her the card, I told her it was something for a podcast she might find interesting. She smiled politely and thanked me before sliding it under the register.

Referral one.

The second card went to a man on a podcasting forum I frequented. His screen name was DeepCutZ, and he often posted questions about gear and voice processing. I messaged him, told him I had something off the beaten path. We agreed to a private chat. I gave him the number and watched as the message was marked read.

Referral two.

The third went to my neighbor, the one with the cracked satellite dish and the rusty smoker on his back porch. We’d exchanged nods but never words. I pretended to be organizing a neighborhood project. He didn’t seem particularly interested, but took the card anyway.

Referral three.

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept the other two cards tucked in a drawer beside my bed, but I kept dreaming they were in my mouth—sharp-edged and metallic, pressing against the backs of my teeth. I woke up gasping, though I knew better than to say the dream had felt real. It hadn’t. It had just felt inevitable.

The next day, I received a call at 6:02 a.m.

“Referral One completed,” the voice said. “Referral Two pending. Referral Three—non-viable.”

I sat on the edge of the tub with the phone pressed to my ear, my reflection fractured in the mirror across from me.

“What happened to Referral Three?” I asked.

“Incompatible,” the voice replied. “Subject underwent terminal rejection.”

“You mean he died.”

The voice didn’t confirm. It simply waited for another question.

I swallowed hard. “What about Referral One?”

“Currently undergoing integration. Status: unstable.”

“What does that mean?”

“Subject remains under observation. If integration fails, secondary processing will be initiated.”

The call ended.

I spent the rest of the morning glued to news alerts. Around noon, I came across a local report about an unresponsive woman found behind the counter of a café, her name withheld pending investigation. I didn’t need them to tell me it was Sam.

Referral Two messaged me late that night:

“Dude. What the hell is this thing? I called, and now I can’t sleep. I feel like someone’s watching me. If this is a joke, it’s not funny.”

I never responded. The message marked me as active. The site flagged me for online presence, which I hadn’t authorized. I unplugged my modem after that.

The next evening, I called the number from the rotary phone.

“You said I needed five referrals,” I said. “I gave you three.”

“Only one remains viable,” the voice responded. “Remaining quota: four. Time remaining: twenty-six hours.”

“This is impossible,” I said. “I did what you asked.”

“You are within the ledger, Mr. Marteni. It is no longer a matter of consent.”

“I want out.”

“There is no out.”

The line went silent for a moment, and I thought the call had ended. But the voice returned, low and firm.

“You are woven into the ledger. You are part of the system. Your actions are recorded. Your debts are assigned. You may delay compliance, but you may not erase obligation.”

I stood in the dark, the phone cord twisted in my hand, listening to the dial tone as it returned.

I didn’t make any more calls that night.

Part IV

The next morning, I left the house for the first time in three days. The air outside was brittle and cool, the early frost still clinging to the edges of fallen leaves that crunched under my boots. I walked into town with the intention of clearing my head, but the streets felt unfamiliar, as if the buildings had shifted ever so slightly in the night. A coffee shop stood where a hardware store had been a week ago. A mural on the side of a post office now depicted a scene I was sure had never existed before—two children sharing an apple beneath a sky split by concentric rings of light.

I wandered through the local square and noticed a man standing perfectly still by the public fountain. He wore a gray overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed most of his face, but something about him rang a distant bell. I couldn’t place the memory, though. I passed him slowly, expecting him to move or shift, but he didn’t even blink. Only after I turned the corner did I dare glance back.

He was gone.

By the time I made it home, the world felt distorted, like an out-of-sync audio track sliding just behind the video. I didn’t feel feverish, but the house no longer welcomed me in the way it had before. The shadows didn’t wait until sunset anymore. They pooled early in the corners of the kitchen. The hold music—thin, wavering, stitched with that strange synthetic harmony—now whispered just below the range of hearing, whether I was near the phone or not.

I stopped checking the time. I started checking the mirror.

I’d see movement behind me, sometimes—reflections of people I didn’t recognize. One of them was a teenage boy with bruises up and down his arms. Another was an elderly woman with her mouth sewn shut. They never appeared in the room itself—only in glass, only when I wasn’t paying attention.

Then there was Lina.

At first, I told myself she was a fabrication. Something the system had stitched into my memory to reward compliance. But the way she looked at me, with that particular slant of the brow and the gentle pause she left before laughing—those things didn’t feel artificial. They felt familiar. They felt real.

She came by that evening with Chinese takeout and two beers. We sat on the couch together, her legs curled beneath her, and watched an old thriller on my laptop. She leaned into my shoulder the way someone would if they’d done it before. And yet, each time I closed my eyes, I couldn’t picture the first day we met. I couldn’t remember introducing her to anyone, couldn’t recall a single photo I’d taken with her—only of her.

When she went to the bathroom, I opened my phone. The message history with her still stretched back weeks. Dozens of conversations, all full of inside jokes and shared references. But every time I read one, a hollow sensation spread behind my ribs, like my brain was flipping through pages I hadn’t written.

My phone buzzed. A new call came in from a restricted number.

I answered without thinking.

“Mr. Marteni,” said a voice I recognized. It wasn’t Operator Seven, nor the calm male voice from before. This one was more personal. Familiar.

I realized, with a chill, that it sounded like me. Not exactly, but close enough to raise goosebumps on my arms.

“You have exceeded the acceptable window for restructuring compliance,” the voice continued. “Your credit balance remains at zero. You are now within the mandatory restructuring threshold.”

I stood, pacing toward the far side of the room. “You said I could defer restructuring by referring others.”

“You failed to meet your quota.”

“I gave you three,” I snapped. “One of them worked!”

“Yes,” the voice said, calmly. “One was compatible. Two were processed. Total credits earned: one. Total balance remaining: zero. Restructure pending.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “What are you going to do to me?”

There was a pause, as though the voice were parsing through something behind the curtain.

“Standard restructuring removes identity persistence. Behavioral continuity is recycled. Personal origin and psychological profile are rewritten according to system demand.”

“That’s not an answer,” I said. “You’re just stringing words together.”

“You will no longer exist as yourself,” the voice clarified. “You will continue. But not as Ryan Marteni.”

My chest felt tight, but not with panic. The fear had passed days ago. This was something different—like the air was being compressed around me.

“Can I stop it?” I asked.

“You may delay restructure by voluntary sacrifice,” the voice said. “One offering must be submitted. Subject must be known to you. Relationship must carry emotional significance.”

The answer arrived as quickly as the words were finished. I didn’t need to think about it.

“Lina,” I said.

The voice acknowledged the name with a brief, metallic tone. “Full name: Lina Vaughn. Classification: inserted partner. System compatibility verified.”

“Will this give me another credit?”

“No,” the voice said. “It will reset your restructure clock by seventy-two hours. No further extensions will be offered.”

“I understand,” I replied.

“Confirm submission?”

I hesitated. I looked toward the hallway, where Lina’s coat hung on the rack and her purse sat on the floor beneath it. I thought about her laugh, the way her lips curled when she pretended to be mad at me. But I also remembered that none of those things had happened before two weeks ago.

“Confirm,” I said.

“Submission accepted. Final synchronization in progress. Estimated resolution: three minutes. Please do not attempt to interfere.”

The line went dead.

I returned to the living room.

Lina never came out of the bathroom.

I waited for twenty minutes before I finally knocked. When I opened the door, the room was empty. Her jacket was gone from the rack. Her purse had vanished. My phone no longer had any messages from her. The contact name was missing. The photos I had looked at just hours before were no longer in the gallery.

Her toothbrush was gone from the sink. Her hair was gone from the shower drain.

And yet I remembered her. Not just as an inserted stranger, but as someone who had become part of my life’s rhythm. I knew how she laughed, what she liked on her dumplings, which section of the couch she always claimed.

Now that she was gone, something in me felt… altered.

I walked back to the kitchen, trying to find something grounding, something that still felt tethered to reality. I reached for a glass but missed it by inches, my fingers gripping nothing. I stared at my hand. It didn’t feel unfamiliar, but something about its movement seemed delayed—like I was watching it through a frame buffer.

Then the pain started.

It wasn’t sharp or sudden. It began as a pressure in the center of my chest, slowly expanding until it reached my shoulders, my spine, the back of my eyes. I fell to my knees and clutched my ribs, not because it hurt, but because I felt like I had lost something crucial—like a nerve had been severed, or a chord inside me had been plucked and then cut.

There was no blood. No trembling. But when I finally stood up and looked around the house, I realized I no longer remembered what it had looked like when I first arrived. I didn’t remember where I had placed my boxes, or which shelf held my books, or whether the windows had always faced east.

I didn’t remember the name of my mother’s favorite song. I didn’t remember the last words my uncle had said before he died. I didn’t remember how old I had been when I first moved out on my own.

I only remembered a phone number.

And that someone named Lina had once loved me, even if she had never existed at all.

Part V

The next morning, I tried to burn the card.

I lit it with a match over the sink, watching as the black surface curled and hissed at the flame. The silver eye, with its crescent blade pupil, melted down into bubbling plastic before disintegrating entirely into a soft, gray ash that scattered down the drain. I didn’t feel satisfaction. I felt like I’d just buried something that was still breathing.

Then I opened my phone and checked my recent calls.

The number was still there.

707-999-0331.

I deleted it again, this time from my contacts and from the system call log. I even factory reset the phone and reloaded only the bare minimum apps I needed to function. For a few hours, I believed it had worked.

That night, I woke up in the hallway outside my bedroom. The phone was in my hand. The screen was lit. The call had just ended.

Duration: 12 minutes, 42 seconds. Contact: “PRIVATE.”

I didn’t remember making the call. I didn’t remember dreaming. But the hold music was still playing—faint, distant, impossible to locate, yet undeniably present.

I started keeping a log. I began locking my phone in the toolbox out in the garage, placing the key beneath a floorboard in the living room. Every morning, the phone was back on the charger. The toolbox was untouched. The key was still where I had left it.

On the fifth night, I fell asleep on the couch with the television playing static. When I opened my eyes, it was morning, and I was seated at my uncle’s old desk in the study.

The rotary phone sat in its cradle, perfectly still, its long coiled cord resting in the exact position I remembered from the day I moved in.

It rang once.

I reached for it without thinking, the motion fluid and automatic, like turning off an alarm I had heard a thousand times.

The sound was softer now, deeper. As if the pitch had been adjusted to meet my own internal rhythm.

I held the receiver to my ear.

The line clicked. Then a voice, calm and composed, said: “Welcome to Eidolon Services. This is Operator Marteni. Whose reality would you like to alter today?”

The words hadn’t come from the other end of the line. They had come from me.

The room was silent. The receiver was cold in my hand.

“Sir?” came a voice—a real one this time, from somewhere far away. High-pitched, uncertain, young. “Is this… is this where I can make a removal?”

I tried to answer. I wanted to tell him to hang up. I wanted to scream at him to burn the number and never look back. But instead, my voice obeyed the script.

“Please provide the name you wish removed.”

He hesitated.

I recognized his silence.

Then he said a name. One I had never heard before. A woman. His voice trembled when he spoke it.

I felt the signal pass through me—like a current, or a signal routed through an unseen switchboard. I knew the process was already beginning.

“Removal confirmed,” I said. “Expect results within twenty-four hours.”

The call ended.

I stared down at my hands. They looked the same, but they no longer felt like mine. I opened the desk drawer. Inside was a fresh pack of cards, matte black with the same silver emblem. There were five of them.

And now they bore my name.

Referral Authority: Ryan Marteni.

* * * * * *

You’ve read this far, which means you know I’ve told you the truth. Or at least the truth as I understand it. There are still parts I don’t remember—names, details, fragments of places and conversations that feel like they belonged to someone else. Maybe they did. Maybe I’ve been rewritten so many times that only the core structure remains.

I wish I could tell you not to worry. I wish I could say there’s a way out. But the truth is, by the time you’ve finished this, you’re already in the ledger. You’re not a reader anymore. You’re a witness. And witnesses leave impressions.

Impressions get recorded.

And records… become assignments.

I can’t ask for your help. It’s too late for that. But I can ask you something else.

Do you remember the last time your phone rang and no one was there?

The next time it happens, don’t answer.

Because if you do, I’ll be waiting.