The Vanishing Index
The city doesn't scream anymore. It just forgets. Names slide off records like frost melting backward into nothing. Streets remain where they've always been—pavement, curbs, frozen drainage grates—but the maps pretend they never existed.
The systems run clean. Perfect execution. Nobody asks what they're executing anymore. In the sub-zero darkness of an Alberta winter, data dies without ceremony. Without sound. Without anyone noticing until it's far too late.
Case File
What Passes for Detection
I'm what passes for a private investigator in a place where privacy died with analog locks. The augmentation sits behind my left eye, quiet most days. It doesn't solve cases. Doesn't hand me answers wrapped in certainty.
It watches. Notices. Asks questions I'm too exhausted to frame myself.
The call came on a Tuesday. Tuesdays taste like rust and bureaucratic efficiency. A woman whose husband exists—breathes, eats, sleeps in their apartment—but whose employee number vanished from the provincial database three weeks ago.
No termination notice. No death certificate. Just an empty field where his identity used to anchor.

The Augmentation
Neural interface. Pattern recognition. Questions without answers. The only partner I trust.
"Is this still what you think it is?"
The voice whispers, neural-direct, no sound crossing the frozen air between thought and recognition.
I don't answer. Never do on the first question. The augmentation knows this. Knows I need time to let questions settle like sediment before the water clears enough to see bottom.
Outside, sodium lights burn through ice-fog. Inside, the question hangs in neural space, waiting.
Chapter One
Procedures Without Purpose
The case file arrives as a compressed data packet. I decompress it in a cafe where the espresso machine hisses like something dying slow.
The woman's name is Marla Vance. Her husband: Thomas. Forty-seven years old. Transit engineer. Twenty-three years with Alberta Municipal Infrastructure.
Clean record. No flags. No disciplinary history.
Then: nothing.
His employee ID returns null. His pension contributions stopped accruing. Payroll deposits continue—automated, punctual—but there's no source account attached anymore.
The money appears because the system says it should appear. Nobody questions ghosts that pay taxes.
"Three others," Marla says when I meet her outside the Provincial Records Bureau. Her breath forms words in vapor before sound catches up. "Three others from his department. Same thing. They still go to work. Security lets them through. But according to the system, they were never hired."
Non-Crime Indicators
No violation logged
The system reports perfect compliance. Zero errors. Zero flags. Zero questions.
No investigation opened
Because nothing is wrong. The records say so. The records are always right.
Automated compliance: 100%
Every checkbox ticked. Every protocol followed. Perfection achieved through blindness.
Human override: none requested
Why would anyone override a system operating flawlessly? Who questions perfection?
The absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence. The system eats itself and calls it efficiency.
The Mirror Asks
Surface Pattern
Four employees. Same department. Records erased but physical presence continues. No correlation to performance or behavior. The contradiction is clean. Surgical.
System Response
Payroll functions normally. Security clearances valid. Building access uninterrupted. Contradiction unnoticed by oversight protocols. Everything works. Nothing connects.
Human Reaction
Confusion without panic. Frustration without escalation. Everyone assumes someone else will notice. Nobody does. The collective shrug of bureaucratic faith.
Question Formation
Not what happened. Not who caused it. But: when did the system stop checking if its actions still meant anything?
"Is this still what you think it is?"
Legacy Data, Modern Autophagy
The augmentation doesn't repeat itself. Doesn't need to. The question hangs in neural space, patient as black ice waiting for morning traffic.
I pull up the employment records for Thomas Vance's entire division. Eighty-seven people. Four are missing from the database. Eighty-three remain.
I cross-reference hiring dates.
All four were hired before the Provincial Records Integration Act. Before the systems merged. Before everything got efficient.
The AI doesn't say anything. Doesn't need to. I already see it: legacy data, migrated imperfectly, flagged for review that never came.
A cleanup script running somewhere, erasing entries it can't verify against newer standards. Bureaucratic autophagy. The system digesting itself, one forgotten employee at a time.
Sodium Light Testimony
I find the first disappeared man outside a transit depot, smoking a cigarette that glows like a safety flare in the −22°C air. His name is Marcus Webb. Was a name. Is a body with habits and a routine the city no longer acknowledges.
"You still get paid?" I ask.
"Every two weeks. Direct deposit." He flicks ash into snow that swallows it without trace. "But I can't access my pension dashboard anymore. Login says employee ID invalid. HR says they'll look into it. Been saying that for nineteen days."
"You file a complaint?"
"Three times. System confirms receipt. Assigns a ticket number. Then nothing. I call the helpline, they tell me my ticket doesn't exist."
He takes a long drag, exhales white into white.
"But I'm not worried. System probably just needs time to sync."

"I'm not worried. System probably just needs time to sync. That's what systems do. They sync. They fix themselves. Always have."
The faith in his voice is the worst sound I've heard all week. Worse than the wind. Worse than the silence. Faith in a system that stopped knowing what faith meant.
"When did you first notice?"
I press.
"Notice what?"
His eyes narrow against the cold.
"That you'd been erased."
The words hang in frozen air.
"I haven't been erased. I'm right here."
He looks at me like I asked him when winter started.
The conversation ends there. Not because there's nothing left to say. Because there's everything left to say and nowhere for the words to land. He exists. The system says he doesn't. Both truths occupy the same space. Contradiction without resolution.
I walk away. The cold follows.
System Architecture
The Migration Nobody Remembers
I spend sixteen hours in the Provincial Archives. The building smells like old heating ducts and the particular kind of silence that comes from storing information nobody will ever request.
The Records Integration Act passed nine years ago. Bipartisan support. Zero opposition.
The stated goal: eliminate redundancy, improve efficiency, ensure data integrity across municipal systems.
The actual implementation: a contractor hired to merge forty-seven separate databases into one unified structure. Legacy records migrated via automated scripts.
Human oversight: minimal. Verification protocols: assumed.
Timeline of Forgetting
1
2031: Pre-Integration
Forty-seven independent systems. Redundant but human-readable. Errors caught through direct observation. Inefficient. Functional. Remembered.
2
2032: Migration Contract
TerraLogic Systems wins bid. Eighteen months projected timeline. Emphasis on speed over validation. Warning signs ignored in favor of efficiency metrics.
3
2033: System Launch
Integration declared successful. Efficiency gains: 34%. Error reports: none filed. Nobody checked if none filed meant none occurring. Celebration without verification.
4
2035: First Vanishings
Records begin disappearing. Slow. Quiet. Always legacy entries. Always pre-integration hires. Pattern invisible without looking backward. By the time anyone notices, forgetting is normal.
The augmentation stays quiet. It doesn't need to speak. The pattern is clean, obvious, inevitable.
A script running somewhere deep in the infrastructure, still executing its original directive: remove unverified legacy entries.
The directive made sense once. Probably. When someone was watching. When verification meant something other than waiting for a flag that would never come.
The Neighborhood That Isn't
The second anomaly takes me west, toward Seba Beach. A neighborhood called Frost Hollow.
Exists on property tax records. Utilities billed monthly. Mail delivered. But open a mapping application—any mapping application—and there's just empty space. Coordinates return null. Street names don't autocomplete.
I drive there anyway. Roads are real. Houses are real. Sixty-four homes, lights burning amber against the dark. Kids waiting for school buses that arrive on schedule.
Residents who pay taxes to a municipality that doesn't acknowledge their ZIP code anymore.
"Started about eight months ago," says a woman named Claire, standing on her porch wrapped in layers that make her look like she's preparing for atmospheric escape.
"GPS couldn't find us. Then delivery drivers stopped coming—said the address didn't exist. We called the city. They said they'd send someone. Never did."
Functional
  • Electricity grid
  • Water supply
  • Postal service
  • School bus routes
Non-Functional
  • Digital mapping
  • Emergency dispatch routing
  • Commercial delivery
  • Municipal service requests
"What if there's a fire?" I ask.
Claire's expression doesn't change. "We hope someone remembers we're here."
Enforcement Without Law
The third pattern surfaces through arrest records. Twenty-two citations issued in the past six months. All identical: Violation of Municipal Code 7.19.4(c).
All to different individuals. All resulting in fines, processed and paid.
I pull the municipal code archive.
Section 7.19.4(c) doesn't exist. Never existed. The surrounding sections are real—noise ordinances, parking regulations—but subsection (c) is a gap in the numbering.
A space where something used to be, or was planned to be, or was deleted and forgot to tell the enforcement algorithms.
I find one of the cited individuals. Her name is Diana Park. She paid the fine immediately because not paying meant escalation she couldn't afford.
"What were you doing when they cited you?" I ask.
"Walking home from work. 11 PM. Officer stopped me, ran my ID, said I was in violation. Wouldn't explain what I violated. Just handed me the citation and left."
"The officer wouldn't explain what I violated. Just said the system flagged it. System doesn't make mistakes. That's what he said."
I contact the police department. They confirm the citations are valid, processed according to protocol, backed by automated flagging systems.
When I ask what law was violated, the response comes back clean and empty: Refer to Municipal Code 7.19.4(c).
Nobody questioned it. Not the officers. Not the clerks. Not the citizens who paid. The system said it was correct, so it was correct. Circular perfection. Airtight logic eating its own tail in the snow.
Critical Observation
The Mirror Reflects
Pattern One
Records erased by cleanup scripts that never learned when to stop cleaning. Legacy employees vanishing from databases while still showing up for work. The ghost protocol.
Pattern Two
Locations unmapped by integration protocols that forgot some data existed outside databases. Neighborhoods erased from GPS while lights still burn in windows. The cartographic blindness.
Pattern Three
Laws enforced after deletion because enforcement systems never checked if laws still existed. Citations issued for violations that have no definition. The phantom regulation.
The augmentation doesn't speak often. When it does, the words arrive without preamble, without ceremony. Just neural-clear observation dropping into thought like snow accumulating overnight.

"None of this is malicious. None of this is error. These are systems performing exactly as designed. The design simply outlived its designer's memory of why it was designed that way."
I sit in my office, frost climbing the window in fractal patterns that repeat without meaning. The space heater clicks. Sodium light bleeds through ice-fog outside.
The city hums with infrastructure that hasn't broken because breaking would require awareness of function.
"So what do we do?" I ask, not expecting an answer.
"We remember. We introduce a correction. Small. Quiet. Before the drift becomes irreversible."
It doesn't tell me how. It never tells me how. That's not what it's for. It's a mirror. Mirrors don't give directions. They show you what you're too tired to see.
The rest is human work. Always has been.
The Correction
The fix isn't dramatic. No system crash. No emergency override.
Just a series of carefully worded requests filed through proper channels. Forms filled in triplicate. Evidence documented in language bureaucracy understands: procedural inconsistency, protocol deviation, efficiency degradation.
I don't frame it as malfunction. I frame it as opportunity for optimization.
Systems don't resist improvement. They resist accusation.
01
Manual Review Request
Submitted to Provincial Data Integrity Office. Form 19-B. Requested action: verification of legacy migration completeness. Dry language. Precise bureaucratic positioning.
02
Mapping Protocol Audit
Filed with Regional Infrastructure Division. Cited service delivery failures. Requested revalidation of post-integration address databases. Emergency dispatch as the leverage point.
03
Code Verification Query
Sent to Municipal Legal Office. Identified enforcement actions referencing deleted statutes. Requested reconciliation between live code and enforcement databases. Legal liability as the hammer.
Three weeks later, Thomas Vance's employee ID reappears. Frost Hollow returns to mapping applications. Citations under 7.19.4(c) are quietly voided, fines refunded without explanation.
Nobody notices. That's the point.
Catastrophe avoided not through heroism but through remembering that systems need humans to remember what systems are for.
Cold Fingers, Clear Thinking
The city doesn't wake up. Doesn't have an epiphany. Doesn't realize how close it came to forgetting itself completely.
The systems keep running. Flawless. Efficient. Watched now by humans who remember to ask: Is this still what we think it is?
I stand outside the transit depot where I first met Marcus Webb. He's there again, smoking another cigarette, breath and smoke mixing into indistinguishable white.
When I tell him his records are back, he just nods.
"Told you the system would sync," he says.
I don't correct him. Faith isn't the enemy. Forgetting is. And maybe faith that quietly insists on verification is the only kind worth keeping.
The detective walks. The augmentation watches. The city continues, colder and clearer than before.
No revolution occurred. No grand victory. Just a small correction. A choice remembered.
Hope exists here, quiet as snowfall, strong as restraint.

The augmentation speaks one last time before going quiet again:
"This will happen again. Systems drift. Humans forget. That's not failure. That's why you exist."
I light my own cigarette. Watch the ember glow against the dark. The cold bites metal and skin the same way it always has.
The difference now is someone's watching. Someone remembers what watching is for.
That'll have to be enough.