Yuuya Kurose had never been anything. Not popular. Not gifted. Not even memorable. He was the kind of student who could sit in your class for three years and vanish from your memory five minutes after graduation.
That was fine by him.
Until last Wednesday.
It started with a number. A license plate, to be exact. Blurred by rain and motion, half-covered in road grime. But three days later, the full plate popped into his head while brushing his teeth—clear, clean, like a photo burned into his skull.
He hadn't tried to remember it. He didn't even care.
Then came the chalkboard equation. Mr. Arai had scribbled something during class and erased it before finishing the sentence. Gone in under five seconds.
That night, Yuuya could recite it. Every line. Every loop of the teacher's handwriting.
Then he remembered Mika's backpack zipper being broken for a week. Then he remembered how many times Haruto laughed during lunch. Then he remembered the order of the vending machine's items.
Not because he was trying to. Because his brain had stopped forgetting.
> [Background Sync Initiated – Node Alignment: 0.01%]
The message came like a thought he didn't have. Not in words. Just felt. Like a ripple across his skull.
He blinked. Hard. He looked around. Nothing on the walls. No screens. No voices.
But something in his mind had changed.
His heartbeat felt off—not faster, not anxious. Just machine-regular.
At gym class, he stood near the back. The others played volleyball like usual. Someone shouted his name.
He turned.
A ball was flying at his head.
He stepped aside casually. The ball missed by a hair and smacked into the wall.
"Nice reflexes," someone muttered.
Yuuya said nothing. He hadn't seen the ball coming. He'd just... moved.
That night, he stared at the ceiling for hours. It didn't stare back. Not yet.
By Friday, it was worse.
He answered three questions in History without raising his hand. Just reflex. Before the teacher finished the sentence.
He walked through the halls and started recognizing patterns. How people shifted their weight before turning. How someone's laugh looped every day at exactly 12:34. How Mika scratched her arm when lying.
> [Sync Ratio: 0.04% – Neural Re-indexing Stable]
He didn't know what "re-indexing" meant. But he knew his head was a storage unit now. A live server. Every sound. Every motion. Every micro-expression.
Stored. Filed. Understood.
He stopped sleeping. Or rather—he stopped needing it. When he lay down, his thoughts sorted themselves. Dreams were replaced with clean rows of memory. Time-stamped. Labeled. Archived.
His world wasn't changing. He was.
And then Monday came.
A pigeon landed on the school gate. It didn't move. Didn't blink. Just stared.
He stared back.
Its feathers shimmered, faintly. Not color—data. Glowing blue lines pulsed under its wing like a low-power screen.
He whispered, "What are you?"
Nothing happened.
Then he blinked.
> [Observation Confirmed – Passive Echo Active] [Node 000: Earth – Indexed 0.06%]
His heart didn't skip. It recalibrated.
And he knew.
He hadn't awakened. He wasn't chosen. He hadn't earned anything.
He had been noticed.
And now… Earth was listening.