The Rideshare App That Keeps Driving For Missing Passengers And The Night It Tried To Turn Me Into The Next Ride

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1:10For 12 minutes past midnight, the city feels like a dream from which everyone else has already woken. That's how I open my lock for tonight's episode. Voice pitched low in the hush of my hybrid's cap, worries starting through the whisper of tires on wet pavement. I'm coasting along the northern edge of the river where the warehouses and repair shops squat behind chainlink fences, sodium lights making a wet blacked-up seam botanus. The rain isn't angry, just persistent, streaking soft rivers down the windshield. I don't usually get poetic, but something about this I owe, the hollow where the street lights seem to sparkle for nobody at all always makes me talk to myself a little differently. Some drivers fill their rides with chatter, turning up the energy for anyone who gets in. I do my best works surveying the silence, especially out here, close to the old docks where even the city seems to hold its breath. I reach for my phone, hit record on the memo app. Hey everyone, tonight's stretch dot is quite a single retail light in a dark sea, I'm waiting on anything at all to happen. There's a strange kind of comfort to sharing this with my tiny audience, most of whom I'll never meet. The rain tap dancers on the roof, and the only company I have is the glow of the dashboard and a lingering naked my lower back. A ride-year

2:12pin cuts through my rubbery. It doesn't quit sound like usual, there's a wobble, a little off key, and that's enough to draw my attention. I glance at the screen, use our 3000, 891, no photo, pick up at the back lot by a escape market. The place has been shut out for months, all signs peeling, shells left together dust on the other side of blackout windows. I think for a second that maybe it's a mistake. But late night rides are my bread and butter, and biggest can't be juicy. Looks like we pulled an odd one, folks, I narrate for the recording half-smiling. Here's where the adventure might begin, or at some drunk you typed in the wrong street. I turn on to Hamilton Avenue. The radio map stutters, as I approach so receptions, always spot in near the old transformer station. I slow as I coast in, headlight sweeping over puddles, and battered grocery carts abandons behind the loading dock. Nobody stands outside, the lot breeze with fog, black as tar, glimmering in the wet. My phone displays the on-erival protocol, timer set, wait up to 5 minutes. The usual script. I hit arrive and settle back against the seat.

3:13Five minutes in a vacant loft feels like an iron. I leave the engine running. Ed lights cut an oblong pull into the mist, and the light shivers a little every time the wind gusts. A low beep tells me the clock's ticking down two minutes left. I glance around to no movement. There I lead any sign of life, but the way to rain sizzles on the hood of the occasional flick of a puddle by the curb. I focus on the silence, which isn't really silent if you listen hard enough it's threaded with the city's distant drone. The steady tick of breaks somewhere in the avenue, even a hallway radio leaking through brick. Nobody's coming, I muddle softly for the recording. But the air feels like it's holding its breath, you know? As the timer approaches zero, I click my tongue and reach for the shift lever. But just as I'm about to pull away, the skin at the nape of my neck prickles. In the rearview mirror, I notice something strange at the back window, fogged by the weather, has a faint circle, a soft patch wipe clear in the shape that could only have been left by a face leaning clothes, breathing into the glass. My eyes flicker down, the rear passenger seatbelt is buckled, silver tongue snapped and placed across worn grey fabric. I could swear I checked them before my shift, always do after

4:14cleaning. A thin and familiar scent drifts forward. Not perfume I recognize, not citrus or anything musky more like floral soap, a ghost of something delicate and not of place. Not mine. Not recently. I shiver. My pulse flutters as I check the locks, then glance around the lot again, suddenly desperate for another living soul to break the spell. The dashboard chops no passenger, ride cancelled for a no-show. The moment breaks. I exhale and stammer into the recorder. It never seen anything like that in my whole driving stretch. Seatbelt buckled itself, somehow fog on the glass. Maybe a prank. Maybe I missed something. But as I drive away, I roll the back window down, let the rain and air in, washing out that scent and whatever it means. Strange nights, folks, stranger than we think. If anyone's listening live, they catch the hesitation in my voice. Asterisk Asterisk. My life before the odd pick-up has made up of lines and leaps map bright red across the city's midnight grid each, shift another quiet cycle repeated with minor variations. Driving isn't glamorous, but it's steady, and there's a rhythm to it,

5:17especially after sunset when the city empties and the usual chaos subsides into a kind of solid expectation. I got into this part time at first, hunting for flexibility after my lost office gig-shot at stores for good. But I stuck around after realizing night streets didn't ask anything of me except prisons. There's a freedom in being unencored. I'm not the sociable type, but there's a lift out here that there's nobody to impress, and most of my passengers just want to disappear into their phones anyway. The ones who do talk become recurring characters in my will, lean to the nose climbing and for the slow call to the medical centre, eyes puffy but smile quick, Jeff the fry cook smelling of burnt oil, craling a batter ticket box and always apologising for smelling up the car, even the old man from Builder 18B who says nothing except home, please and then stays out the window as the city calls passed. Early rides are usually unremarkable. It's only after midnight when most regulars have reached their beds what laid shifts, that the city's core personality emerges. Nihon logo is hanging like moths, sidewalks littered with plastic wrappers, sirens ducking in and out of airships. I've gotten to know my customers as well as anyone, at least in the five minute slices they give me.

6:19Nights bleed together and they edit but the patterns matter, both in the road and afterward, when I string together voice notes of the little desk in my apartment cure it in the best of city after dock moments for the podcast. That's a ghost grade, city rides 324 subscribers, most of whom luck with the kind of eager anonymity I appreciate. Home is a one bedroom in the strive you high rise, seventh floor, neon from the laundromat below leaking into the edges of my window blinds. This never enough space but it's safe and cheap and I measure time by the thumping of my upstairs neighbours late night exercise routines. My friend Emory lives on my floor, always leaving the door open to crack with news of the building leaky pipe, fresh graffiti, another junk mail scam warning. Buck already? Emory asked one night a week before things got strange. He leaned in the doorway with a mug in hand, peering at me as I towed off my shoes. Just stretching my legs, editing later, I replied. Quiet nights so far, only have one buckle or at troop the city's getting boring. Emory grinned. That's when it's time to worry, boring means something's loading in the background, stay weird, lacks. He was right of course, but at the time I took it a superstition.

7:23I cracked my window, started my edits. There are always little details to smooth up too much background noise, a groan of the transmission as a break too sharpy. Sometimes I catch hot snippets on replay, colours laugh that doesn't match the crowd, static that was noticeable in the moment. This is his email at our dire's notes about strange routes, lost and found stories. There's a regular, screen name shall gain, suggesting urban legends for me to investigate did you know the old central library is haunted. Occasionally, the message is veered toward the poetic of the city keeps its own secrets, and you're one of them now. On most nights, I tick the right-cher calendar before bed, picking hot spots to stick out for work. I have a set of rules for comfort, never linger to pick up more than seven minutes, if a passenger smells of alcohol but walks straight, let them have their silence, always keep the dark and pointed at both the windshield and back seat. I plug in on my phone lets me listen to the police scan a more curiosity than Parnaia at first. It stops to find my brakes 99 cent coffee at Jasper's all night gas. I show up so often that they keep my brown travel mug behind the register. Domino at the drive through

8:23gives me extra fries sometimes when nobody's behind me and I leave well warm playlists running low in the background. The city slits through the window of films worth of faces and barely contain tension. There's a personal logic to how I drive. Avoid to warehouse blocks after two a.m. That's when the street racers roll up and trouble follows. Refuse trips too far north roads are worse there, potholes hard to dodge, lighting unreliable. If that pings me for a pick-up on Warren Lane, always make the customer show a matching profile photo before they get in. These codes keep me in orbit, circling a city that doesn't know my name but relies on my presence, shadow-like, in its after iris veins. Because I'm always watching, always archiving even if I never really expect anything truly ought to happen. Osterisk Osterisk. A week after the foggy window incident, a clock the beginning of a new pattern. It's subtle at first a strange user name, you saw 3,891 with a default gray silhouette instead of a profile pick, sending another late night ride request. This time it's after an ordinary drop off on Lehman's tree, just after one. I notice because it comes almost instantly as I mark a ride complete,

9:26as barely a breath between thank you, have a good night and the buzz of the next assignment. Again, the pick-ups in an in-between place, a dark lot beside a boarded up bar. I accept curious despite myself. Same drill, I pull up time of starts. No one sure was. The streets empty except for a stray cat picking across trash bags. I make a joke into the recorder half-how-to-the, another wild goose chase, looks like, one star from mysterious vanishing acts. When I flick in the interior light to check the back, I again notice the scent clean, powdery, almost floral, definitely nothing I've had in my car. I tuck the seatbelt loose this time, but the plastic buckle is warm, as if it's just been handled. Trug it off, I tell myself. But I mark the time stamp in my notebook. Later, editing audio at home, I spice in these ghost ride statements for the podcast. Clips play back, no shows again, must be a new urban cryptid, getting tired of these pranks. My listeners start commenting, spooky ghost riders in the city, but the joking is more nervous this time, less playful. One suggests I should install a camera in the passenger area.

10:26Another says, maybe you're being set up for something. I laugh it off at least on mic. Over the next three shifts the phenomenon repeats. Alt with late. Always at the end of a legitimate ride, as if the app is waiting for a law. Different locations, but the pattern is obvious if you're paying attention, always near somewhere abandoned or in transition, places in the city nobody really wants to be at night. Sometimes I catch myself losing track of a minute or two not daydreaming, but a weird fuzzness around when the timer ends and I move to leave. Once the dash panel chimes with Roedore open then close. When I check footage of that moment, the memory is slivery vague. But the app logs the door vent open and close, with nobody visible in the footage. I convince myself it's a tech glitch, or maybe I bumped something. On the audio there's a brief letter, like someone was bringing just out of range. Comments from my podcast crew escalate, get gammas, contact your rides your safety team. Some listeners send screenshots of similar app glitches from other cities, but they're usually debunked. Still, in my own car, the tension feels heavier every time the ghost can't pings. The city is a giant net, forever catching

11:30fleeting patterns and then letting them slip but this one doesn't let go. By the fifth the ghost fried, after a shift ending near the river, I pull up, confirm the seatbelts are all embuckled before I park. I even dust the window with my sleeve. 20 minutes later, when I check again, the rear seatbelt is snapped in. On the window, fingerprints for, to be exact smudged and faint, pressed in a row as if someone shifted in this eat. My skin crawls. I turn the dash and footage over and over and edit, but the frames skip around the crucial seconds. Whatever happens in that time isn't visible to me or anyone. What remains is that brittle sense of being observed not by ordinary eyes, but by the city itself. A process may be that's running beneath our routine. The next time I get into the car, I glance first at the mirror and I never really stop. Asterisk asterisk. With most mysteries, I try to keep an attached perspective. This one claws at the walls of my caution. I start logging every ghost ride pinging my work notebook, times and locations, notes about the weather, even stray smells. By now, a slide red ride shotgun on every shift and the veneer of routine begins to peel. I purposely take a

12:34detour before one ghost ride, it drives slowly, drag out the previous drop off, but still the app pings falls with the moments of idling empty. The requests come even if I drive away, sometimes, I find myself circling blocks I've never meant to enter as if the app is correcting itself, pushing me toward its own chosen destinations. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election, and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them. By voting yes, by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide, not politicians. Vote yes, by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Forget everything you had planned for this weekend because you are sitting on your couch and winning from the comfort of your own home. I'm here with SpinQuest, where you can play hundreds of slot games, all of the table games you love, and you could even win real cash prizes.

13:38New users, $30 coin packs are on sale for 10 at SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boyed where prohibited, visit SpinQuest.com for more details. After the seventh ghost ride, I decide to dig deeper. At home, I transfer footage from my dashcam to an old laptop, sitting late at the kitchen table, reandroming steady outside. I watch the relevant pick up from two nights before, times damp blips forward, pixelated frames stutter and jump, then freeze for almost seven seconds when the clock should be counting down. In that blurry gap, a black streak shifts across the rear window, almost human in shape, but dissolving as soon as the clock snapped forward. I play it back slow motion, frame by frame. There's no one real stepping into the car, but something bends the light, disordering the seat for a moment as if a shadow has settled itself there. It could all still be explained. A technical failure, a software patch gone wrong. But the seatbelt, again, moves from hanging slack to snapped in place, caught only at the end of the skips statement. The next morning, after a restless sleep, I research the last three addresses logged as ghost

14:39ride pickups. One is a vacant lot outside to bust depot, the next is the rear exit of a dollar store, windows dusted with grind, no clear sign, anything's in use. The last, though, pins to a street corner are recognised, three doors down from a faded poster for a missing woman. Pin beneath the telephone pole is a wilted bouquet of wildflowers, wax dripped candles long snuff by rain. Faded police tape still marks a crack in the curb. The dits nearly match. Later, over lunch, I text a fellow rideshare driver, soul who works the graveyard shift on the east side. I ask if he's noticed anything weird with the app phantom pickups strange requests in dead zones. He replies almost immediately, Yeah, I got at least two minutes three a month, never anyone there, at glitches, sometimes can't end trip until I drive a block away. One time, my never-routed self-mitrip said destination moved, but no passenger in the car, thought I was losing my mind, bro. We trade screenshots times dumps off by several seconds, rides locked within correct locations, fair as auto corrected downward by some hidden hand. Some drivers say the pins move if you don't answer them, like it knows where you're headed,

15:41soul adds. By now, I've built a patchwork of hauntings tangible in their patterns if not their origins. That evening, piecing together audio for the podcast, my voice stumbles as I lay out the details. I can't keep my nerves out of the narration. Whatever is happening, it's not just me, the seats, the digital footprints, there's something being mapped out, ride-less, invisible, but it leaves marks all the same. Next shift, I test my theory. Before accepting a ghost ride, I snap a photo of the seatbelt and the rear window, both pristine. When the ride is over five minutes late of all alone, engine running, rain-beating at a two in the glass the seatbelt is snapped in, and the faintest smears of fingerprints are across the lower rear window. No other ride's logged since my check. Something physical is happening. It wants to be tracked, or at least wants to leave a residue in my world. I debate turning it all over to the company, or maybe the police. But I keep thinking of that faded poster, the way the sentling goes after every shift, like something is waiting for me to see the bigger picture. Asterisk Asterisk. Mid April, during a muggy, buzzing evening punctured by distant sirens, my phone buzzes with a call

16:43from an unknown ID, I let it rain, then silence it. A minute later, a voice message lands. I play through the car speaker as I sit in the flashlight duck just outside my building. The call those voices filtered process to metallic, every syllable twisted up, but urgent all the same. It speaks only a little louder than background static. He needs to stop following those rides. This is not a game you are being seen, those accounts never belong to real people, walk away, destroy your ride locks, no podcast is worth this. There's a pause, a voice flattening, and then one more message, search the city's back end database, it's bear it, but it's there. I know you're recording, so listen carefully. My heart hammers out a while, thick rhythm. There's more, but the message ends in a digital click. I spend the next night off browsing city employment sites, pages of municipal contracts and IT companies. The rideshare vendor is government licensed and arrangement I'd never thought much about beyond background checks and annual taxes. But now, lines blur. Something about system wide access, did mirroring enough acronyms and spec sheets to confuse anyone but a specialist.

17:43Still, I kept quite bring myself to stop. When the ping comes in the next evening, it's for a ride request new lit identical to the ones before. The pick-up point sends cold fingers crawling down my spine, sitting more at a hospital, now walled up, a hollered shell with faded ear signage still clinging to the stonework. It was shut down after a fire four years ago. The place is famous for being haunted, teenager sneak bears in the lot, and private security usually throws out squatters before dawn. I approach anyway, checking the address twice, then slow as I ease onto the cracked entryway. No cars. No movement. Just about a security camera tilted toward the street and a whiff of burnt insulation. As I swing the car around, my headlights catch something leaning half visible by the side entrance. It's a plastic ID plot card, half hidden in weeds and debris near the cup. I step up, pulse racing and snap a photo. The last name matches one etched on the police poster two days earlier, Hollister. I return to the car, fingers trembling. I wipe the inside rear window with my sleeve before sliding back behind a wheel. That's when I spot it, I need a row of condensation rings perfectly spaced at a fingertips

18:46tap the glass in time. When I get home, I find another anomaly in my inbox where rideshare trip complete receipt auto-generated centre 2, 11am, for my call to the hospital. The centre is the same ghost account, but the riders' profile image is briefly unscreen, it flickers from the usual grey blob to something like a composite portrait, faces layered atop one another with mismatched eyes and mouths, clearly not a generated error, but a melt and impossible joining. I sign the laptop closed. It's not a prank. These ghost rides are being summoned with accounts belonging to people who've vanished from this city-lost, then erased, recycled for use in the system. The magnitude of itlines in my bones makes my scalp prickle. I peel back from the desks of physically rebelled. The next day, my phone rings from a number I once gave only for emergencies. A distorted voice in the line, no trace of words coming from whispers, you're showing up in the logs now, they see you, every ride could be the last to let you go home. Somewhere beneath the city's map routine, something has turned its gaze my way. Every ride requests ping multiplies, permissions ghost my account even while I'm off duty. I sense I'm being trailed not just followed by accounts,

19:48but that I might soon be the new missing rider. That my name isn't safe, my time is running on board cycles. For the first time, I hesitate before starting out the car. For the first time, I wonder if each ride is an invitation not just into someone else's story but into my own erasure. For the first time, I hesitate before starting out the car. For the first time, I wonder if each ride is an invitation not just into someone else's story but into my own erasure. I tell myself I'm being paranoid. I even say it out loud, hoping the words will shatter the spell that seems to have tightened around me over the past weeks. The city outside doesn't look changed, though still the flickering neon of the bakery down the block, the erratic, mechanical churn of traffic on the avenue, the accidental composition of street lights rumours. But to me, everything has gained a brittle edge, as if I'm walking through a replica of my life design to trip me into debt. My phone chirps softly where I've left it in the table beside last night's takeout. I don't immediately reach for it. Instead, I drift through the apartment checking the three locks in the front door, then the windows, peering out at the blank rectangles of light that map the neighbouring buildings. I try to focus on the familiar, the photo strips on my fridge, the

20:52stack of library mysteries in the counter, the path of war and swaps on my entryway rug. Yet something has irrevocably shifted. I sense, not constantly, but enough to rude sleep, a lurking process in invisible tape-loop replaying the most inexplicable moments of the past several weeks. There are tangible things I can't explain, they never quite clean window, the floral senders become both more familiar and harder to pinpoint, an accumulation of small, hard to ignore details of the same kind. I want proof and forgetfulness in equal measure. To ground myself as scroll for my notifications trying to bring order to an otherwise free falling situation. The text history with soppings again he's found another glitch on his logs, this time with the drop of time running backwards, which he chalks up to bad code but says still makes the hairs rise on his arm. I suggest we avoid talking about it tonight, but he sends a laughing emoji. Candency patterns, once you have them there, he rates. I turn my focus back to my audio files, there's comfort in working the controls, and seeing the sound by its march across the screen in coloured lines. I piece together a short statement for the next episode, splice clips from a little ghost ride, handful of carefully edited first-mails snippets of my own nervous, self-mocking

21:56sides. Editing is my ritual for anxiety, the closest thing I have to pinning reality beneath my fingers. The episode is only half done when a new email comes in subject lines simply missing. The body contains three lines, my name, my carmate and plate number, and an address I haven't visited since childhood. There's no sender, no signature. My first there was just a slant the laptop shut and fling it out the window. I pause and stay at it, recalibrate my breathing, press record, and let the feeling pour into the microphone without analysing it too closely. Maybe somewhere along the way, looking for ghosts, you start to become one yourself, I whisper, voice in as newsprint. I keep driving the loops, delivering strangers into and out of the city's teeth, thinking I'm safe because I'm the one steering, but I'm not sure now whether I drive the observer or the subject. Needing a face-to-face touchdown, I slip next door and knock on Emory's scuff paint-peeling door. He's in sweats, half-watching a local drug race on his phone, couch a tangle of blankets and take up. You look like death wand over, he says squinting over the screen. What did you catch? Or did something catch you? I managed a crooked smile. Just weird

22:58work stuff you ever unnoticed range profiles when you're online. I mean, all the time, you ever read the building's Facebook group, half the accounts there are ghosts or bots. One recently used a photo of a literal tombstone as its avatar. He grins, but when I don't join in, he tosses the phone aside. What actually happened? When I tell him about the window, the fingerprints, the sepal, the rise with no riders, some vestige of skepticism flickers through his usually unruffled demeanor. He lock your car every night, right? Sure nobody's playing a prank. I shake my head. I've checked a dashcam, it skips the crucial moments like something sapping the whole record, and this has happened what, four or five times? I can't silently, tallying up every one of you, saw 3,891 silver quests, every inexplicable shifter open slash closer alert, every subtle invasion of my supposed barrier between night and home. Way more than that, I admit. And the address is there's at least one for every missing person poster I've seen these past few weeks. Some of the places still have shrines, wax, flowers, it's like the app is using deleted people. He rubbed his temples,

23:59shrugs one shoulder. Maybe talk to someone at the company? I mean, worst case, you take a break, let it cool off. But the idea of giving up control, of leaving them after the patterns of trace night after night is even worse than facing them. Even now, I feel something like anticipation taking beneath my weirdness. Coming this far, not following the next step even if only digitally would mean surrender into a blank space in the road. Back in my apartment, long after Emery's door click shot, I decide to act as the logic can still shield me, I lay out a map digital screenshot's layered on screenshots of every ghost ride request, pick up drop off. The city balloons on my tablet is a web of small, bright reminders spots behind strip malls out of service bus terminals, dead ends by the river. And the deeper I look, the more it's obvious, each location connects to a cluster of missing persons alerts or the ephemeral remains of roadside shrines. The pins, map together, create their own path of circuit built not for efficiency, as the app claims, but for recursive looping. Not random at all. I work late into the night, searching for work out of city news, missing persons' databases, forums where gig workers trade rumors.

25:00Each time, there's some clear rumors about drivers who stop showing up about support tickets disappearing from the company's inbox about ride routed through accounts long since deactivated. Some posts are quickly deleted or locked by moderators, which only presses the dread further in. In my haze, I forget to check the time, only registering morning when the city's noise returns garbage trucks groaning, birds cluttering on metal vents the crumble of delivery vans. I get up-stretch aching limbs splash water on my face. I avoid the mirror half-expecting my own image to stutter or blur a reflection what by the digital strangers have been courting. That day, I don't drive. I don't even leave the apartment except to collect the delivery left at my doorplastic wrap-seep containers that feel oddly precarious in my trembling hands. I keep meaning to delete the ride logs to wipe the app, but I never quite do. Instead, I contact the city ride chair office. The automated phone tree runs me in circles, press one to report ride home scontact, press two for lost property. There's no menu option for haunting. I hang up, send an anonymous tip through their online portal carefully worded, impressions buried beneath jargon about system clutches and app vulnerabilities.

26:04No reply. I late afternoon, I'm restless, my new france of scraping through fatigue. Saul sends another message, bro, someone from support called me about my route anomalies but hung up where I press for the tech ID. He's spooked. I'm taking a week off, he adds. Through the buzz in my skull and in my chest, I realize it's in dollars. If I'm to get answers, it won't be from the company of the city's support line. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them. By voting yes, by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. I'm here with SpinQuest where you can play and win from the comfort of your own home with hundreds of slot games and all of the table games you love with real cash prizes.

27:08Right now, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10 for new users. It's all at SpinQuest.com That's SPIN-U-U-E-S-T dot com. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. I have to look for someone who knows how to read the city's digital skeleton. A quick draw through tech forums and Roger message boards turns up and name a local act of his knowners or could reputed to know everything about the Roger industries backend and whose poster full of quiet warnings. I message them through an encrypted app. Half certain no answer will follow. But an hour later, a blinking icon tells me I have a response. Prove your local orchid rights. Name two intersections where recent ghost rides tagged you in the last three digits of your cause registration. I reply with the info, Lehman and Holly, a groove behind the glad supply yard and send the numbers. Within five minutes, I receive a block of text. Here are not the first, forward logs, all-app screen recordings. I package everything up and transmit. Finger is nervy.

28:11Orchid promises a reply by dawn and all I can do is try to rest. I collapse on that little made bed, the artificial light from the hallway pulling beneath my door, cities start to coming behind the walls. I dream in fits of rear-outed pickups, coast applications and tie city block furnishing into a mirage of digital fog. I wake to two emails, one from orchid, subject line found something and another from the company's no reply division, marked administrative review started. I open orchids first. It's dense with code and data, which I skim for substance. But the opening lines tell me too much already. Major accounts from your list were set to an act of nearly simultaneously right after their owners were reported missing. But every time you get a ghost ride, they account briefly reanimates, pings the network, then vanishes into an unlisted nerd in the city's systems. You're being routed through something outside the normal ride flow, could be side serverers, maybe even something municipal, no confirmation yet, but your driver log is now pulled into the same system. I read and reread the final sentence. Overlay your pick of coordinates with the city's cold case map, see what matches. There is a secondary process log in each event, separate from your visible history, and it's not just

29:14passengers drivers, a slowly being added, track your own status, someone, or something, is feeding this loop. The company email is more likely to lease about a routine compliance review in a warning not to discuss support interactions publicly. My handshake, as I plot my ride against public missing person's maps, and what emerges as undeniable, a nearly perfect match. Every outlier, each ghost ride, fits into a circuit winding it to way through the insolved disappearances reported in the city over the past year. I expand the date to further older reports fit to, though with fuzzadata. Something is operating under the digital framework of the city to shadow process camouflage to this error, misdirection, or chance. And I'm caught inside it. I slip on shoes, pocket my phone and keys, and to send the long hallway past Emory's silent door, and into the elevator. As I ride down, a thought knows at me if I simply stop driving, breaking my code and never answering another ping, would this be over? Or would the pattern find me some other way, repurposing me fully into a trickers of net? Outside, the air is damp, floating with either late rain or early mist. For a moment, I consider doing something radical smashing the app, tossing the phone,

30:16abandoning my car, even leaving the city for good. But I hesitate and nurture and curiosity winning out as they often do. I reach my car, parked in its regular spot beneath the flickering sodium lamp. I pause, look around to nobody about, only the dull war of a pass in cleaning crew in the avenue. I slide into the driver's seat, heart rapid in my chest. The rear-view mirror shows the car empty. I check the backseat, running a nervous hand over the sea-bulton-buckled clean. I start the engine, letting it idle, go to myself to watch the app and see what comes next. It's been my role never to wait too long in one spot for anything, but tonight, for the first time, I break it. I linger as if daring the ghost pattern to blink first. Minutes pass. My phone lights up. The ghost rider quest appears, same as always no profile picture, just the hollow username. But this time, the pickup location is impossibly close, 600 subfield, lot be. It's my own building, the lot where I'm parked. I swallow reading it twice. The app stutters my own profile pick flickers for a second just a glitch, but something about the pixel smear unsettles me. I accept the ride, break my silent code,

31:18and turn on the dashcam, aiming it at both seats. Another ride into the unknown, I think. Another invitation to participate in an ongoing erasure. The pattern is closing in, or I am closing it around myself. Either way, I can't turn away from what's coming next. It takes several seconds for the rider quest details to resolve on my phone, as though the city's network itself has to hit then, there it is. Pick up 600 subfield, lot be. I stare at the screen, the address repeating, sharpen, and system against the cartilage deep chill settling over my skin. Lot be, my building. My car is already parked in the precise spot the waybrant marks on the little blue map, the concentric pulse rippling from my own icon. For a moment, I do nothing, noticing the odd way my breathing echoes in my chest too hollow, stuttering, like the dead air of a studio between broadcasts. I could power off the phone. Instead, I watch the rave timer begin its parade of slow, glacial seconds. The damp city nightpresses and through the crack window, even with the engine off, the interior feels cocooned, oddly muffled, as if the world beyond the glass is receding. I hit record by pure instinct, now my own voice more brittle than I mean,

32:21rider quest logged, but I haven't moved, I'm my own passenger, apparently. If anything's listening this is Lex, and something is actively feeding me my own route, right here, I don't know if this is some sick tricker. The phone vibrates harder than before, rattling against the dash. I check the rear view mirror. At first, only the sodium lamp stained shadows ripple in the empty seat, but then, with excruciating slowness, the sepal drivers I've reared snaps across by itself. My scalp tingles. On the inside of the back window, a faint oval of fog blooms, erased by a small movement like a hand-wiping condensation after stepping in from the cold. I grit the wheel. For the first time, the silence inside to cuff feels entirely inhabited. Ascent, faint but distinctive floods forward on the air. Not cut flowers this time, but crush greenery stems, bruised leaves, and beneath that, the uncanny memory of someone else's soap. It's as real and abrupt as being slapped. My heart is beating so lovely I can hear it in my ears. From elsewhere in the car seat spring, perhaps, or the plastic buckle settling, I hear a soft click. I sink back, let the second

33:22shutter buy, and somewhere between minute two and three I realize I can't cancel the ride. The apt interface is grayed out a single, featureless ball leaping beneath the words in progress. I try to rationalize it to explain, but the spiral of evidence and frills inside me. All the times the ghost ride arrived at liminal in between city locations. All the missing persons. All the pings I'd just that seemed to anticipate my own motion. Now the system has looped a map back to where I started no longer a ride, but a closing statement. Inoc rattles the driver's side window. The southern contact jolts me bodily, a flare of burning adrenaline down my back. I twist hands up, ready to show, but when I look, I see only my own warp reflection in the stuttering, rippled out line of a neighbor, hunched in a hooded sweatshirt, rushing past with a building's entrance. The knock, then, a coincidence, except my phone's time or blinks out of sync, and when it returns, three additional minutes have elapsed. Heat rises in my face. I breathe deliberately until my heart finds a manageable rhythm. Pulling myself together, I click the window closed. I force the seatbelt free with a trembling hand,

34:25sitting it to hang slack. Only then does the app at last flash ride end it. There is no tip option, no rating, no comment field. The car feels as though something has exhaled. I say to scanning the parking lot for any other movement, the city's damp neon mix with after image constellations behind my eyelids. In the seat beside me, the phone is still recording in a roll. Open file my own voice now, fainter, sapt of bravado, something here is using the city as its shell. It knows the address is that matter, it can make me the destination. Street lights buzz audibly above every sand shop, as though the thin barrier between interior and world grows tissue paper thin. I breathe air again, wanton reassurance, but the floral and greens endlingers too intimate to ignore. The ride might have ended technically, but I can feel not just imagine the city's gaze, spectral and calculating, through every faded lens. Asturus-kasturus. I force myself to function through the following day. I have to, if only because pretending normality burns off some of the fretful panic. I push through my morning ritual shower at coffee, scan the news on my phone pause and only his headlines blow before my eyes. I can't help but

35:27scream for missing persons and notices, noticing their cadence, as familiar now as my own name. I show up at Jasper's gas later than usual, the morning cloak frowning in confusion as I grab my travel mark. Rough night, the kid calls half mocking. Bad dreams, I reply, and I'm not sure if he gets the joke. On impulse, I drive to a car wash, running the hybrid for twice. I disinfect the back seat, scrubbing at the seat but buckle and the window. There are faint smudges, barely visible, along the bottom pin for run fingerprints, curling as if someone leaned close from inside. I debate taking a car in for a wiring check, then abandon the notion. Whatever is happening is not mechanical. In the afternoon, a message soul again, letting him know about the ride request map to my own location. He doesn't reply. Ockid does, though, sending a link to a new map overlay every operator flight by ghost rides in the last two years, and expanding Spider-Wabankadon missing persons data and unexplainable ride logs. At the center, a slowly spinning bright dart labeled only active. I power the phone off. I wipe the ride app, reinstall it, run diagnostics.

36:30Nothing changes the profile restores itself, memories and ride logs still dangerously intact. By early evening, Dread is knowing so sharply, I can't ignore it any longer. I throttle up the podcast app, rehearsing a segment in my head about digital haunted houses how patterns can infest software, not just buildings. My voice comes up flat. I try again, softer, but the words feel imp. It's Saturday, and the city has a strange, buoyant hush overcast but dry as if the weather itself is reserving judgement. Rather than drive that evening, I take the elevator down, phone clutch tightly in my pocket. My kneesick is across the lot to Emory's building, desperate for the friction of ordinary conversation. He opens the door before I can knock, as if expecting me. He looks worse, he says, and gestures for me to come in. I set my phone on the kitchen counter. The ride requests are mapping to my location, I say quietly. Like they are folding the city back onto me, I'm on their logs now, apparently, or could confirmed. His brow furrows. Why are you scared? I open my palms. Not scared, more displaced, as a stopping wouldn't change anything like I'm just as much a part of the system now as every

37:34missing name. Emory sits head tilted. You still want to dig, sometimes you chase things, so deep you forget there's nowhere else to go. His words sting more than I want to admit, but he doesn't press. He puts on the kettle and changes the subject rambling about a neighbor's dog, renovations in the next building. For a few minutes, normalcy stitches his self back into place. When I step outside, dusk is falling, and the parking lot is failed in sodium fog. On a trash can close by, I write your sticker ripples half-torn, it's contactless logo blinking in the half-light. A new message pings on my phone. Another ride request goes to count again, but this time the drop-off isn't entered. It simply reads, destination unlisted. My stump flips. I thumb the screen, pulse jack hammering. No time to even, no route mapped. Just a blinking except a button. I stare and blinking until the screen dims and the city resumes it's in different churn around me. Astero's casterous. I begin to opt for movement even when rest would be easier. I tell myself it's about taking control, choosing one and how to drive, instead of seeding the initiative to whatever's animating the system. In truth, every iron behind a wheel

38:38deepens the fault line inside me. Night after night, the city feels more like a circuit than a landscape. I drive, checking every mirror, each street sign confirming repeatedly that a car's MP before and after each ride at least in appearance. I avoid the old pick-up spots at first, but the request throughout me wants to amend an steeper sandwich between dormant train tracks, another to a recycling plant whose only visitor is a blinking fox. I refuse ghost rides at first, but refusal seems only to delay never to erase the inevitable new request. They wait, patient, then nudge my up again the moment, I drop a passenger near any of the ghost net addresses or could send. Twice, on the way to drop off real fares, my app glitches hard raro's metric, snapping the GPS pin a block beyond the passengers intended stop. Each time, I have to argue with the fair logger process that leaves my real passengers baffled or irritated, amused sweating, where the system is folding its patterns more public. Each time, the ride history issues another phantom notification, ride completed, ride failed, ride rescheduled. On one run, frapping a hospital nose name prior just outside her apartment, I check the rear view. The seatbelt is buckled again. Her eyes

39:42meet mine in the mirror, she thanks me and she frowns. Your eye, lax, you look like you've seen a ghost. I don't know how to answer. I take to sleeping with my phone on app lane mode. But in the mornings, I find new notifications queued in the app and finished rides, requests pinging to addresses I've never entered. One request is time stamp 3418m, the time I'm certain I was at home, locked in my own room. Yet the ride log shows my car in motion, coored in its off by only a single digit from my parking space. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Forget whatever plans you have this weekend because you're staying at home and playing on spin

40:46quest. And there's never been a better time to sign up than right now. New users get $30 coin packs for just $10 all the table games you love with hundreds of slot games and real cash prizes. That's at spinquest.com SPINQST.com. Spinquest is a free to play social casino, voidware prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Late one evening as rain returns and thin curtains, I decide against my better judgment to take a direct run at whatever force is trailing me. I open the podcast software. This time live, broadcasting with only a slight delay to the subscribers who have started tuning in for the weird stuff. Tonight is the experiment I say. I'm accepting every ping, following every ghost ride. If anything happens if you hear anything strange send a message, maybe if enough eyes are on this it breaks the spell. Within 30 minutes the first request pings. Pick up an anonymous lot on the industrial south end behind a city vehicle deeper whose lights are never fully dark. This time as a park I keep every camera rolling windshield. Rear even a small mobile

41:48cam looping audio in the back seat. I narrate my own checklist, feeling less like a driver and more like a scientist monitoring a doomed experiment. All seats empty, dark and rolling, engine idling sent, mild earthy with a chemical undertone. Four minutes pass. Then with abrupt certainty I sense the car shift suspension flexing as if waiters move across the back row. Insinctively I check every window. The driver load things rear right door open then closed. But the camera review and I check it live shows nothing. No shadow, no form, no breeze, not even distortion. The ride log shows passenger on board, destination, maintenance yard, north loop. A voice tiny and tinny breaks through the static of my back seat audio, it reads me. I finch hard enough to jolt the wheel sideways. In the sound file later it becomes clear warped, granule whisper, not my own, clearly not my voice repeating the same two words, you reach me. I'm out of rational explanations. I narrate everything as I drive the rolling darkness, the sodium glow strobed by my passage, the flickers of city equipment at the periphery. My phone pings with a series of back-to-back messages first from the ride to help desk,

42:52then from orchid, you're out as being mirrored live. Shot off day to now if you want privacy, or keep going if you want answers. I choose answers. The drive to the maintenance yard feels infinite, but time compresses inside all the repetition. When I finally arrive, the place is deserted, only a scatter of coarse startled into motion as I glide into the single working lambs arc. I cut the engine, these spotify running low enough that any other sound was stand out. The temperature inside the car drops. Not metaphorically cold sharp, enough to fog the windows and make my fingertips thick against the steering wheel. The rearview mirror at first shows only myself. Then like a ripple through still on the faint and possible shape. A suggestion of a body, below it and gray as the mist in the glass seated in the back right corner. The seat busets flush across nothing, the buckle perfectly settled. I open my mouth to speak, barely trusting any sound to escape. Are you one of the missing? No answer. Then again, the voice fractured between analog and digital. Erased me, elongated and syllable, almost broken by static. A sudden pressure invades the car. The dashboard controls strobe every radio preset finishes the panel clock

43:56scramble wildly. The phone have hazardly propped in the console tray flashes to live an icon I've never seen before, a blank face, blurring, morphing, overlaid with multiple features and shifting haze. The app opens a sub-mini-labeled and faint block letters, city operations, ghost node. Hundreds, thousands of ride-log scroll by, each tagged with an operage ID, a passenger most with names I recognize from missing person lists, some marked only by strings of random digits. Mine is there too, lexcb41. Locked in. Active. The implication lands with a gut punch. The system, the city, the app, someone wholesome partnership has automated not just the deletion, but the very memory of the missing. When accounts go inactive, the digital ghost is re-rooted, used again and again to occupy the city's transit system for unscheduled journeys to nowhere, forever looping through the infrastructure, recruiting new entries at the edges. The passenger, if thus, what it is leans forward, the faintest warble of glass and cold in its motion. Erased me, it repeats this time layered with the trailing, liminal echo. It's not just you, is it? I whisper or was catching in my throat. It's everyone who vanished and the city's own

45:00machinery fills in the blanks. Again, spectral silence. Then something more intelligible sneaks through the static, your razor isn't the end, its new memory, ride the circuit, fill the seat, forget. I want a bowl to throttle the engine to screaming and leave nothing but tire marks behind. But I can't move the cold inside, the car presses me flat, the kind that's carved its place in the mirror. Then, in one dazzlingly final glitch, the app logs me out except where my driver profile once sat, now there's only the same composite face glassy-eyed and open, waiting for a permission to ride. A city vehicle passes but a lot, public safety logo gleaming wetly under the lamps. It pauses, slowing as if inspecting each slot but never stops. I watch as a guide out of sight, its own desk am I gunting predatorly. I can hear my own heart again, it is knocking out a frantic code, spelling warnings in a speech no one else here will understand. I whisper into the recorder, if you are hearing this, if you're recording this, I think they have me, I think I've become one of the circuits, asterisk, asterisk. There inside the car tightens with the feeling of something let loose a circuit complete, a ride concluded. But I don't feel relief. I stiffly pull the key,

46:06step out into the knife call night, barely managing my limbs. There's a tang of dread that I imagine lingers behind me clinging like aftershave. Lights in the maintenance yard flixy as if acknowledging my presence. The city's engine of erasure is not metaphor, not rumour. I can hear its teeth grinding, feel its process and the laid cables and flickering signals that run beneath every street. Somewhere in the car behind me, the seatbelt snaps back and audible, material click and the faintest shape collapses into itself, leaving only the afterimage of waiting cushions and the false mudge fingerprints on the window. My phone, even on airplane mode, pings with the final arrival notification, thank you for completing your journey, please wait your passenger. It shall ride me all the way back to the lot. I keep glancing over my shoulder, half expecting to see myself following, seep out buckle, waiting for pickup. I reach home and stare at the building my own trap, mapped into digital memory. The pattern isn't just a set of journeys. It's a living thing a system built into the bones of the city. Asterisk asterisk. The next day comes in waves each moment buffered by the frictioness and canny sense of being half

47:07there. A fumble for ordinary routines, but they failed to ground me. The podcast fee, wants a comfort, now feels intrusive. I review my subscriber statistics, but dozens of new, faceless profiles have joined overnight. Some match the user name's orchid had flagged. Others seem to be echoing fragments of my own messages, copied word-for-word, then you floated a strange still-to-sound butts. Ockid's last message, simple and damning, pattern confirmed, shadowed public. You know what? It sucks to be bored, but when I get on my phone and play real casino games on SpinQuest.com, the time flies by, that two hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite spots, live black check, live preps, with a live dealer. New players, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play SpinQuest.com and you'll never be bored again. SpinQuest is a free to please social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough

48:08seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Infrastructure is complicit. Data is lost at the source, raised after every loop. The only way out is to break the nerd don't take any more rides. But outside, parked beneath the bare sycamores, my car's situating dashed display flickering, phone vibrating intermittently though the screen is black. Sometimes, when I look out at it, I catch the briefest reflection of a face not my own, watching me from the backseat. I lose track of my steps, find myself standing by the window, fingers pressed to glass. It's only an after effect I tell myself. Only nerves. But every time I blink, the feeling returns more persistent than before. Friends stop answering my calls, even memory. When I knock, there's no reply, only the distant buzz of an air conditioner

49:11in the echo of my own footsteps in the dim corridor. Online messages go and read. Post I make about the glitching ride logs or shadow band in minutes. In forums, I become a non-entity. Users reference the pattern, but never by my name. Though ride at nights out of the river, one couple posts. Too many drivers, not enough passengers, but the app keeps filling the seats. One afternoon, a police officer knocks at my door. He's young, eyes hollow with boredom, but mouth pulled hot. Mr. Virgin, he asks. We're investigating some missing persons, including drivers affiliated with your rideshare network. Mind if I ask you, he trails off, eye me over a clipboard, and the questions become less specific, more wrote, as they're reading from a script written for a different disappearance. I answer each, voice controlled. He leaves behind a business card. I watch through the peep holes, he lingers by my car, hit copped, jotting something in his notes before moving off toward the stairwell. I lock every door. I unplug every device, do not absolutely need. That night, my ride up lights up one last time. Only two options,

50:13pick up home or drop off, unknown. My finger hover is trembling, over the screen. The city outside is quiet, but that charge touches back the feeling that it is not absent, but a kind of attention, process and watchful, pressing from every conduit and camera. Osterisksterisk. The weak is a blur of avoidance rituals I drive less, edit less, shrink away from any pattern that might make me easy to track. But there is no rest in anonymity, the system is too deep, too enmesh, growing in the patterns of absence mapped against my own shadow. Sometimes, the sensation of a presence in the car is so palpable that I catch myself speaking aloud to it, softly asking, though I know not who listens, what are you after? How do I stop this? The answer never arrives except as another ping-ride in progress, C-Pull-Boggling, coast in the machine. One evening, on an error run through route by the river, a public safety van follows at a newly identical pace. Each time I change lanes, it mimics, when I stop, it stops, always at a polite distance, but never further than two car lanes. I circle the block, testing the pattern. The van continues. My phone lights up

51:14with a new notification, routes merged. Thank you for your participation. I accelerate recklessly, desperate to shake a tail, but each time I look in the mirror, the van is there. I realize, with bleak clarity, that this part of the process is not about fear, but about letting me know mistakenly, unanniably that the system isn't hunting, it is harvesting. Back at home, I find my own driver profile duplicated in a form void from missing persons. My stats listed as an active, lost scene, in app status, pending removal. I stare at the thread until my vision burns. In these moments, I understand the real cost each ride, each account is a digit, a digital echo. The erasure is both administrative and metaphysical, lost in paperwork, lost in memory, lost in the city's endless, recursive need for movement and emptiness. Asterisk asterisk. The drop comes in the middle of an ordinary shift ironically enough. I'm driving, lean in the nurse home, herself humming, filling the gap between streetlights. As she steps out, she lingers by my window. Stay safe, Alexa, don't work so late. Her eyes look through me as if there's something she means to say and cannot. On the next run, the up glitches. My phone forces open the ghost no portal,

52:19code flashing too fast to re, remove entry, confirm erasure. There's a confirmation slider, them print required. My unglossy profile image now overlays four faint faces beneath layered, pleading eyes conveniently blurred. A message pops on my audio recorder, not my own voice, Lex, you are at the final circuit to prepare for transfer. Desperation rears up. I pull over, breathing rapid sweat beating and still car. The seatbelt beside me encodes with a slow, deliberate snap. The review fills with condensation, the outline of a passenger even more distinct now, one eye luminous, mouth-potted. Erase me at the same voice rasps, or erase you. I clutch the wheel, paralyzed. Asterisk,sterisk. Immediate followed. There flashes with static as the dashboard and my phone pulse in unison. The shape and the mirror leans forward, now more detailed than before a composite device, lips, hair, none of it matching, all of it pleading. Something cold brushes my neck. Without conscious thought, my hand hovers over the confirmations lighter on the app. The tension spreads if I accept I know what will happen. If I refuse, the ride

53:21will leap again, somewhere else, some other night. I wrench my gaze away from the glowing screen, the figure, everything that wants me to look. I brace myself and snap the phone's power entirely, disconnecting from data, shattering the connection with a single, desperate gesture. Asterisk,sterisk. Final action. I've rode a phone onto the passenger seat, reaching beneath for the emergency battery disconnect and stalled off to my first car started acting up. Antrimbling, I yank the kill switch every circuit in the vehicle dies at once. Dashboard, stereo, lights, everything. The city slips out of my skull for a moment, replaced by genuine, unfakeable darkness. I open the redores, then fully inside, and press my palm to the back window. The cold prickles then fades. I strip every cord from my dashcam, pocket the memory cards, and slam the doors one by one, echoing into the empty lot. With the car dark, powerless, I walk away without looking back, passing beneath street light stuff flickered, but do not burn out. I leave the phone and car behind, refusing to grab them my likeness one more time. Heart-loud in my throat, across to the fainted glow in door of my building deciding, for now,

54:23that no route will include me again unless I choose it. Asterisk,sterisk. The lobby is empty, the city hardly sail and beyond the doors. I glance through the glass, half expecting to see the car alive again, lights blinking, phones greener glow, but there is only the suggestion of fog and a barely there imprint in the rear window. I realize the emptiest, most chilling part is not the threat of being erased, but the certainty that if I vanish, the city would simply fill the seat again and again never once looking back. I realize the emptiest, most chilling part is not the threat of being erased, but the certainty that if I vanish, the city would simply- Forget everything you had planned for this weekend, because you are sitting on your couch and winning from the comfort of your own home. I'm here with SpinQuest, where you could play hundreds of slot games, all of the table games you love, and you could even win real cash prizes. New users, $30 coin packs are on sale for 10 at SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Boyedware prohibited, visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

55:25President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them. By voting yes, by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes, by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Fill the seat again and again never once looking back. My mouth feels dry as I let myself into the lobby at the swipe of my key card slightly delayed, as though even the building's lock estates before admitting me now. I hold my breath crossing the faded marble and bear us by the way my step circle. At this hour, even the elevators seem to move reluctantly, the click and grind softer, more surreptitious than usual. As I ride up in a shedding glare, I keep expecting the lights to stutter just long enough for a knee, overlapping reflection to appear behind me some left of a passenger at barely visible except in Agentsmere. When I step into the corridor, the hush is total.

56:28Emery's door remains closed, no friendly music, no herd footsteps within. For a blink, I wonder if anyone all lives on this floor, or if by some silent process all of us have been severed from ordinary time residents and riders, apartments and routes, folded into folders somewhere far beyond our choosing. Inside my own unit, the world feels fragile, a life too easily written over. I should all three locks, then wait to chair under the knob. Though I haven't eaten since lunch, my appetite has evaporated. I pace to the window. At first, just the old street and familiar potcars but as my eyes adjust, I see a figure lingering in a far lot. hoodie hands and pockets standing at the margins of the last working lamplight. I squint pressing my nose to the glass, willing them to look up to proof lash and human scale. They never do. When I blink again, they are simply gone. My laptop pings orchid, leaving a new encrypted message. Since you disconnected last night, your drive of a profile has been flagged, network shows recourse of hits pending removal status. Your access, narrative shrunk system is closing in to not respond to ride prompts if possible.

57:28Leave the city for, why it may not be possible now. I try to reply in what happens if I leave, but my email bounces back. Mailbooks are recoverable. Have my contacts banished from the messenger's sidebar, graying out and rapid sequence. I toggle my service, Wi-Fi, cellular, then finally disconnect the internet completely. Yet even offline, the ride jab reappears a ghost of itself, grayed out by pulsing faintly, ride in progress, hovering always at 99% completed, never quite done. A sad memory overtakes me a snippet of podcasts audio from weeks ago, a kind of accidental self-prediction, sometimes I wonder if the real haunted house is the network, not the city, sometimes I think it learns your name as soon as you start caring about who's missing. I hear my own voice, and for a split second I do not recognise it. I throw the phone in the freezer, as if cold might stop what did account. The act is laughable, desperate. Not two minutes later, my laptop vibrates a pop-up crowding across every window, and complete ride, confirmed status, update require. I pace the tiny rectangle of my apartment, running for every escape route and plausible denial. Each seems thinner than the last. I open and reclose the bedroom door,

58:32flick every light, searching for some trace residual floral scent, the buckle left crossed in the futon, fingerprints at the edge of the glass anything to convince myself the haunting hasn't crossed over the threshold. Another ping interrupts my spiral. This time is a push notification, select an official from the city's own public safety department, we regret to inform you. Eurasia account is under administrative review, please remain accessible until contacted. I shut the phone off completely, but the message seers into my mind remain accessible. Each time I pass the mirror, I'm unsettled by the suspicion that my reflection doesn't quite match my motion, always off by a single blink of slow deterrent away. My mouth splits if in smile. I shake out my limbs to dispel the chill, but nothing warm returns. I spend the night on a couch, fit full, half alert. Each passing car light makes me twitch, convinced some vehicle is slowing just beneath the window for reasons linked only to me. It's only after dawn, with the city resuming its metallic drawing, that the edge of immediate panic dulls replaced by a triture resolve. I will not ride. I will refuse whatever comes next. But the city is manifold loops and digital

59:32appetites does not care about my declarations. By the middle of the next day, the podcast subscribe or list doubles. Only a few names are familiar. The rest all echo ghosts, hollow usernames, blank profile icons stack like headstones. Each subscribes an order of succession, seconds apart. Some sand short, can messages repeats of things I've said, clipped and reassembled, punctuation slightly wrong, but the underlying meaning unmistakable, you are next, seat must be failed, patterned cycle. I drop the recorder, hands clammy. If lands in the arm of the couch, but keeps rolling, picking up the ordinary city hub of distance iron, elevate a bell, the spray of water from the next apartment shower. Nothing supernatural bleeds true. That, for a minute, is more menacing than if it had. The pattern endures. That evening, my car chair at outside the alarm blaring lights pulsing twice than once. When I gather my courage to investigate, I find nothing disturbed. And yet the interior is chill, the rear view mirror tilted as if someone much shorter had been driving. On the seat, a ride-just sticker perfectly new is a freshly issued. I peel it up, checking underneath for residue, but find only

1:00:36forefamed in Prince Cresson's, likely from someone's fingernails or some approximation of the gesture. Returning upstairs, I call every helpline company, city, even a friend of a friend I once knew who were at IT for municipal transport. Each goes to voicemail or to a weary operator who shows me, no, there's no actual person monitoring the after-io's line, but your complaint will be process. The word ring hollow, the practice script of a razor already infect even as they speak. During another sleepless stretch before dawn, I reluctantly log into the podcast hosting portal, hoping to set a warning on the feed. I try to upload a statement file, but the server times out after 99%, the spinning wheel becomes nearly hypnotic, the pattern of near completion marching the app's infinite ride. I hear myself mutter, it won't let me finish, it won't let me leave undone. An ox jolt me three quick raps insistent at my door. Hearts log in the inside of my ribs, I inch to the peephole terrified it will be an officer, or worse, some private fleetage and come to tidy up whatever I'm becoming. But outside stands only a delivery career, shuffling a brand paper bag and checking their phone. Before opening the door, I double-check

1:01:37every lock, check for listeners, then step into the hallway just far enough to sign a digital receipt. The device's screen, first split second, shows my own profile image, then flickers, blank, prefer looking at. The career, oblivious, hands me the bag with a nod and vanishes down the stairs. I tear open the take out in a panic, all correct, still warm, no note inside. Relief comes and goes. I have become someone who checks every detail, who expects the digital and the uncanny tough fused. In a days that follow, my household world contracts. I delete or power don't ever device no phone, no laptop, no car keys left exposed. Instead, I listen to the city's pure and controlled hum a background always hungering for focus. I keep the recorder on, just in case. Not that it will ward off what is coming, but to mark the progression if not for rescue, then for record. Yet the world, or at least some part of it, is still creeping in. Add unexpected intervals, my TV left and plugged crackles itself to buzzing life, the screen flushing and complete ride before blinking out again. My radio catches signals that dissolve into broken

1:02:38synths and fragments of the podcastes where I haven't released. I consider fleeing upright, abandoning the city for a borrowed room in another state, but I sense, with a fatigue deeper than awareness that the circuit is not local, not as capable. Eventually, enough time passes that numbness becomes my armor. The building grows an anonymous neighbor's gun I've never seen. My face in the mirror looks thinner but unchanged. Each day, account new notifications and the poachful and from nowhere for no rides I've taken. The dread, instead of a peaking, spread wide and the ubiquitous cities and siding mapped onto my bones. I wake from dreams of recursive journeys, each erupt folding me outward, then back into pulsing, dark note at the centre of the grid. I'm both driver and passenger now, and the ride never quite finishes. I slip through routine but avoidance is an illusion. The next wave arrives not with an app pink but in the very fabric of the city. A fleet of city-service fans take to parking in rows beneath my building, the windows are tinted, unreadable, license plates partially obscured. At night, a low vehicle idles just out of sight, headlights left on, radio humming a channel that only plays the staccato of data pulses.

1:03:41When I walk the block, a shadow folds itself, recalibrating it to presence with every step I take. I see posters tipped to lump us with a photo of a face that looks increasingly like mine. The digital versions, glitching on traffic kiosks, flicker through versions of names until they periodically land on Lex Burton, missing slash pending review. Once, someone from the property management slips and note beneath my door about an authorized recording equipment anonymously signed, inkblit as if photocopied one time too often. The day before everything breaks, the rideshare app boots itself when I try to check my emails, skipping the password screen, the little car I conspiring around the message, your destination is being calculated to preparing route. I try to force shutdowns, delete accounts, block connections, but every attempt restores itself from encrypted backup, the phone functioning by some ghost protocol it absolutely should not support. A final test, I pulled the battery hard reset. The moment the device powers back, it's there, riding shotgun on my own digital presence. The system, it seems, has primordial access, deeper than mere installation or registration, it is coded into the city, and now into me.

1:04:43My last full day behind the wheel, I drive in the sleigh, every route doubling back towards sunnecks is a very earlier pickups of circuit knot of choice, but of inevitability. The streets are familiar, but junctions feel displaced, every landmark a little too symmetrical with another checkerboard reality the border is growing indistinct. At a late yellow light on 7th street, a fleet van draws up beside me. The driver glances over, his cap pulled low, face an ordinary shadow except for a brief glint that catches me full in the eye. He must something impossible to hear, but the cat in some mistakeable it's your turn. The light flips green, the van swoops ahead, and for a moment the entire city grid seems to throw me an anticipation. A final ride comes in and prompt it while I'm parked by the river where so many original pickups occurred. It's not a request so much as a statement, final circuit, to confirm journey. The app refuses cancellation, the phone refuses power off. The arrogant chills, a car's interior fogs and long, glossy breaths. In the rear view, someone sits. The shape is more defined than ever, eyes dark, convergence of all the faces in the missing person's posters, they'll composite mouth-mouthing that one familiar phrase over and over erase me.

1:05:46I stare at the app's green, confirm erasure your account as the next record completion required. This is the confrontation I can no longer avoid. Hand shaking, a slowly move to shot off the engine the action refusing to register, the dashboard flickering uselessly. The only thing that will respond is the slider across the app's green lit confirm erasure. For one suspended moment I freeze, neither driver nor driven. But the presence in the back seat lean so close I feel ice on the nape of my neck and the network itself seems to murmur in a thousand overlapping voices commands appeals, silent waiting. Behind my eyes, I see the nodes I'd mapped over weeks and months now pulsing as a network full of voices, all saying, complete the route. I turn my face to the window, scanning for any chance exit. And through the glass, for a second, I spot every other missing driver, every ghosted rider, watching from curbs, crosswalks, buses visible only because I now share their code. The ride is inescapable, the route always bends back to its initiator. Immediate fallout. With a single, desperate breath, I drop the device onto the seat and press the emergency battery kill as hard as I can, plunging the cabin into blackness. The arrow lightens

1:06:49a fraction, the voice in the back seat breaks up into particulate static. The grocery presence receives, or at least dissolves into background, just long enough for me to wrench open the corridor and stagger out beneath city sodium lights. I look back once, expecting pursuit, but the car sits and move the dullhulk, back windows streaked in prints, I don't remember touching, see build it should cost nothing at all. For now, the circuit is open and finish and I'm neither fully ride or nor fully erased. Final action. I leave everything behind, phone car, even the keys flung side on into the trash. I enter the building with nothing but a fistful of receipts in a single box of memory cards I will never know how to explain. As I step into the elevator, the lob is camera tracks my rifle, lingering a little too long before letting the doors close. My image bounces back at me from the brush metal, ballad but changed, no longer anchoring me to the world I once drove through a marked. Upstairs, I wedge two chairs under the door and draw the shades. My apartment stills fragile as a last page and turned. In the dark, I start a final recording, speaking in a hush meant more for absence than for any audience, if you're hearing this.

1:07:51The rides may have found someone new, maybe it's you, maybe it's the next driver who just wanted a quiet stretch with only the city for company. My voice shakes but steaders with the last words, erase only echoes, leave one seat empty, let that be the memory. Close in. There's a pause, the kind of silence that hums with the weight of everything left and written. Through the faint crack between curtains, city lights draw needles across the night, the motion outside endless, the road always circling. I wait listening for another ping, but all I hear now is the hush of my own breath and in that space, I hope that, for once, the empty seat will simply stay empty. And that is the end. Thank you for listening and I will see you in the next one. I'm here with SpinQuest where you can play and win from the comfort of your own home with hundreds of slot games and all of the table games you love with real cash prizes.

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