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Dreadhorse Chapter 18
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Miles had spent half his adult life searching for patterns—hidden numbers, codes only he could see, whispers that warned him of dangers his family never noticed. Lately, these patterns had stopped making sense. At first, it was small things: repeating numbers on digital clocks would skip sequences, birds outside his window would fly backwards, and when he tried to tell his wife, Kara, she only offered him a nervous smile. “You’re just tired. Being cooped up is getting to you.”
But Miles couldn’t dismiss it. He’d developed strange abilities—he could see strange light shimmering around people, or hear the hum of electricity through walls. Sometimes, when he was upset, objects would jitter or even levitate. It was why he’d sent his family away, for their safety and his own peace of mind. “There’s something happening to me,” he told them, “and I can’t risk you getting hurt.”
Now, alone in their apartment, Miles paced. The world felt wrong; the neighbors’ faces blurred at the edges, and the city outside his window warped like a funhouse mirror. He kept lists—impossible weather events, his own episodes, the time the TV melted off the wall—but whenever he tried to connect the dots, everything unraveled.
He blamed stress. Or electromagnetic interference. Or maybe, as the officials on the news liked to say, “a collective adjustment disorder.” The more bizarre things became, the wilder Miles’s explanations grew. Maybe the city’s quantum towers were malfunctioning; maybe neighbor Joss, with her glitching cybernetic implant, had infected the building’s systems, scrambling everyone’s reality. Or perhaps it was an elaborate practical joke, some AI experiment gone wrong.
He catalogued every irregularity with frantic determination. On bad days, he was sure the world was a riddle designed uniquely for him. “I solve this, I bring my family home,” he insisted, as if reality would knit itself back together if he just thought hard enough.
But the one constant in his unraveling world was his friend and mentor, Dr. Haemmer. She’d been the first to notice his powers. “Trust me, Miles,” she’d said, voice as steady as iron. “You must isolate yourself, or you’ll lose control. The anomalies will pass if you’re vigilant.”
He had followed her rules to the letter: no contact with his family, never leaving home, reporting every oddity. It was only after all else failed—when Miles, at his wit’s end, reviewed every conversation with Dr. Haemmer—that it struck him: her answers never actually solved anything. She’d change the subject, offer vague reassurances, or mix up facts he’d just told her.
He’d trusted her, and that trust had blinded him. What if Dr. Haemmer wasn’t trying to help him at all? What if everything—the isolation, the escalating anomalies, even his fear for his family—was orchestrated, not for his protection, but for his manipulation? It was only after this realization that things started to make a warped kind of sense. The world had always seemed off because he’d trusted someone who’d misled him. His faith in her narrative had clouded his judgment.
Out his window, Miles saw Joss, the neighbor with the faulty cybernetic implant, standing on the curb, tapping her head in frustration, her eye flickering blue. For a moment, he almost laughed. Maybe, for both of them, the glitch was in the story they’d chosen to believe.
With a trembling hand, Miles dialed his family. The world wouldn’t stop being strange, but at least now he understood why.