Everyone Forgot Me After Midnight
At exactly 12:00 AM, my phone vibrated.
No notification.
No message.
Just one sentence on the black screen:
"You will be erased at midnight."
I laughed.
It had to be a prank.
But when I woke up the next morning—
Something was wrong.
My mother looked at me strangely.
"Who are you?" she asked.
I thought she was joking.
But she wasn't smiling.
At school, it got worse.
My best friend walked past me without a glance.
My name wasn't on the attendance list.
My desk was gone.
Like I had never existed.
I ran to the office.
"Please check again," I begged.
The staff stared at me.
"There's no record of you here."
My hands started shaking.
This wasn't normal.
This wasn't possible.
That night, at 11:59 PM, the message appeared again.
"Erasure complete: 87%"
My heart nearly stopped.
So it was real.
Someone—or something—was deleting me.
From memories.
From records.
From the world.
I searched everywhere.
Online.
Old photos.
Government database websites.
Nothing.
In every picture I used to be in—
There was now empty space.
A gap where I once stood.
At school, I noticed something terrifying.
I wasn't the only one.
In the hallway, I saw a girl staring at her hands in fear.
Above her head floated a faint blue text.
"Next Erasure Candidate."
She looked at me.
And whispered—
"You can see it too… right?"
That was the moment I realized:
The world was running on a system.
And every night, it deletes someone.
No crime.
No warning.
Just… gone.
At 11:58 PM, I found the source.
An old abandoned server room beneath the school.
Dusty computers.
Blinking red lights.
On the main screen:
Population Control Program
Stability Level: 99%
Emotional Variables: Too High
Solution: Reduce Attachment
My chest tightened.
It wasn't random.
The system deleted people who were too loved.
Too important.
Too emotionally connected.
Because emotions made the world unstable.
My timer appeared again.
00:01:30
One minute.
The girl grabbed my hand.
"If we shut it down, maybe we survive."
"But if we fail?"
She looked at me calmly.
"Then at least someone will remember we tried."
The timer hit 00:00:10.
The room started shaking.
Screens cracked.
Reality flickered.
I slammed my hand on the shutdown key.
White light exploded everywhere.
When I woke up—
It was morning.
Classroom.
Normal.
My name was back on the list.
People were laughing.
Talking.
Alive.
I looked at the girl across the room.
She slowly looked up.
Above her head—
No timer.
Above mine—
One word.
"Administrator."
And far away, in the sky,
A new message appeared:
System Reboot Failed.
Human Emotion Restored.