The first sign wasn’t a noise; it was a physicalsubtraction.

  I woke up on a Tuesday and realized I could no longer feelmy left pinky toe. I looked down. It was there—pale, attached, seeminglynormal—but when I bit it, hard enough to draw blood, I felt nothing. It waslike biting a piece of rubber.

  I ignored it. We all ignore the “glitches” of beingalive.

  Then came the socks. I found them tucked under my pillow: apair of gray wool hiking socks, damp and smelling of stagnant, undergroundwater. When I shook them out, three human teeth cttered onto my sheets. Theywere mors, still wet with pink, stringy nerves. I checked my own mouth in themirror. My teeth were all there. But when I brushed them, the reflection didn’tmimic me.

  The “Me” in the mirror didn’t brush. It just stoodthere, holding the toothbrush perfectly still, staring at my neck with a hungerthat made my stomach turn.

  I stopped looking in mirrors. I started looking at my phone.

  My Smart Home system began sending me “Health Alerts” at3:00 AM.

  3:12 AM: Heart Rate Zero.

  3:14 AM: Respiration: Ceased.

  3:15 AM: Subject is standing in the corner ofBedroom B.

  I live alone. There is no Bedroom B.

  I locked myself in the bathroom, the only room without a “smart”sensor. I sat in the tub, clutching a steak knife, watching the gap under thedoor. That’s when my phone—resting on the porcein ledge—vibrated. It was avideo file from the cloud. No sender. Just a timestamp from ten minutes ago.

  I hit py.

  The video was shot from inside my own chest. It was dark,wet, and rhythmic. I saw the pulsing of a lung, the wet snap of a heart valve.But there was something else in there with my organs. A hand. A pale,translucent hand was reaching up through my diaphragm, slowly wrapping itsfingers around my windpipe from the inside.

  I tried to gag, but my throat felt full of wool.

  I looked down at my stomach. The skin was stretching.Something was trying to unzip me. I saw the jagged shape of a fingernail—yellowand sharp—poke through the skin of my abdomen like a needle through silk.

  The SmartHome app chirped. A final, calm notification:

  “Firmware Update Complete. Old Version: Deleted.”

  My skin began to slough off in long, gray ribbons, fallinginto the bathtub like wet tissue paper. I wasn’t bleeding. I was just…emptying. Underneath my skin, there wasn’t muscle or bone. There was just moregray wool, tightly packed and humming with the sound of a thousand distortedlulbies.

  I looked up at the bathroom mirror one st time.

  The “Me” in the gss was stepping out of the frame. It waswearing my skin, but it hadn’t buttoned it up correctly. My left eye wassituated where the mouth should be. It looked at me—the pile of wool and teethin the tub—and it smiled with a mouth full of my own mors.

  “Thank you for the house,” it whispered, using avoice that sounded like static and breaking gss. “I'll try to remember toblink."

  It walked out and closed the door. I heard the click of theSmart Lock.

  "Front Door: Secured."

  I am still here, in the dark, a pile of wet wool in a coldtub. I have no mouth, but I am screaming. And the worst part is, I can hear itthrough the walls—the "New Me" is in the kitchen, humming a song I’venever heard, while it deletes every photo of who I used to be.

  Author's Note:

  Hi everyone!

  I'm a student and a storyteller. I wanted to share thispiece to explore how the technology we trust might one day decide we are the'glitch.' I'm looking to improve my writing, so I would love to hear yourthoughts. Did the ending give you chills? What would you do if your phone toldyou that you no longer existed? Please leave a comment and let's talk!