> "That’s how it is! That’s how it is!"

Anomalies don't hide; they leak. One of the last structural deviations I documented within Normality occurred on a Sunday at the beginning of the year. The clock marked 20:00. As I crossed the perimeter of the main house, the first glitch appeared: two relatives—active pieces of the conspiracy surrounding me—were talking in the street. Attempting to isolate the noise, the simulation forced an interaction. — "Hey, Charles?!" I maintained silence and moved forward. Right at the first corner, the matrix began to unravel. Strangers emitted disconnected phrases, a vocabulary completely ejected from any local context. Even after distancing myself beyond the acoustic capture range, the frequency of one of those voices continued hammering against my cortex—a persistent verbal attack, defying physics. The path became a minefield. At another corner, a woman dressed in black seemed displaced from the neighborhood's palette, yet I detected none of the nauseating negativity found in the others. Soon, the algorithm reacted. Pedestrians began spawning at opposite corners as if they had just loaded into the scene. They walked toward me, exhaling the same Corrupted Speech from their throats—a dialect of pure systemic failure. I rerouted, changing sidewalks, but more empty husks were dispatched to intercept my vector. Passing a residence, I captured the Corrupted Speech associated with an invasive protocol I call the Fishing Technique. They approach, and instantly, a dark memory erupts in my mind. Energy is drained, and the biological hardware is polluted with unwanted memories, injected directly into consciousness. At the bus terminal, more specters. In the distance, the sound from a music venue pulsed like an aggressive challenge, an untouchable acoustic imposition. Passing a building where a service was being held, the distortion reached the sacred. Words meant to be praise had been replaced by insults and filth. I diverted my path. I mentalized a route, stared at the destination, and the moment I decided to change, the sensation of the system’s frustration was dense. The foul music increased in volume, delivering the exact message the Corruption wanted me to hear: — "That’s how it is! That’s how it is!" I reached the market in the final minutes of operation. The foreign clerk appeared to have a positive normality, intact. But right behind me, another customer approached, exaling a thick negativity, almost like a physical stench. Outside the establishment and at the adjacent gas station, incorporeal specters whispered. The cashier tried to simulate naturalness while using Corrupted Speech. The return was a continuous stress test. A car crossed my path at the exact millisecond I stepped into the parking lot entrance—a mathematically calculated interruption. At the bus stop, shadows gathered, attempting to render a physical body until a corrupted voice emerged from the static. I crossed the avenue testing the matrix's reactivity: the travel time was impossible for any human to cover the distance without being in my line of sight, yet when I stepped onto the sidewalk, they were already there, waiting at the arrival point. On deserted streets, voices of discarnate entities simulated despair. An abyss bluff. I executed unreal evasive maneuvers, but the husks pretended not to notice me. A motorcycle threatened to collide with me and made a U-turn the instant I looked over my shoulder. Before turning the final corner, I mentalized that the cluster of corrupted ones would have dissipated. It didn't happen. The system challenged me, keeping the pieces on the board, chattering to prove they were reading my patterns. I arrived home. My relatives were still there, processing their fractured logic. The external local network was completely saturated with anomalies.