Happy New Year

Should humanity be forgot and never brought to mind?

Everyone remembers Y2K as a joke now. Champagne in plastic cups. Newscasters laughing too loudly. Midnight passing like a harmless sneeze.

That’s because the fracture was quiet.

It happened in the smallest unit of time anyone bothered to log. Not a crash. Not a blackout. A rounding error that didn’t resolve. A zero that refused to stay put.

At 11:59:59 PM on December 31, 1999, the universe hesitated.

And then it forked.

Nothing exploded. The lights stayed on. Airplanes didn’t fall. Humanity applauded itself and went to bed smug, convinced it had stared down apocalypse and won.

But the math had already slipped.

People didn’t notice the changes at first. Why would they? They were subtle. A cruelty here. A tolerance for ugliness there. Empathy thinning like cheap fabric, thread by thread.

By 2001, it was easier to justify violence than to grieve it.

By 2008, suffering had become content.

By 2016, lying felt more efficient than truth.

By 2020, death became a statistic everyone pretended not to understand.

The historians—what few remained honest—called it Moral Drift. They wrote papers about environmental stressors, information overload, evolutionary misfires. They never mentioned the hum beneath reality, the one that started the night the clocks betrayed us.

Children born after Y2K were… different.

Not monstrous. Worse. Indifferent.

They learned early that pain could be optimized. That outrage was currency. That attention mattered more than consequence. They didn’t invent these ideas—they inherited them, like a virus baked into the timeline.

Sometimes, people caught glimpses of the other branch.

A world where compassion still slowed decision-making. Where power hesitated before crushing. Where cruelty wasn’t algorithmically rewarded.

These glimpses arrived as migraines. As déjà vu. As an ache that felt older than memory.

People dismissed them.

Governments didn’t.

Classified programs began cataloging anomalies: individuals who reacted incorrectly to this world. They cried too hard. They helped too freely. They asked dangerous questions like should we? instead of can we?

These people were labeled unstable.

Reality preferred compliance.

The fracture deepened.

By the time scientists realized the universe wasn’t decaying but drifting away from itself, it was too late to course-correct. The math had settled into a new normal. One where domination scaled better than cooperation. One where empathy was inefficient.

Something else noticed, too.

Whatever lived in the gap between the timelines—call it an observer, a gardener, a thing that fed on outcomes—had a preference. It leaned into the uglier branch. The louder one. The one that produced more fear per second.

Fear, it turned out, was an excellent fuel.

It nudged systems. Amplified division. Smoothed the path for people willing to do anything and feel nothing. Humanity didn’t fall.

It was selected.

Sometimes, late at night, when the noise of the world briefly dips, you can feel it—the wrongness humming beneath everything. The sense that we missed an exit. That there was a version of us who didn’t cheer at suffering or scroll past it or monetize it.

That version still exists.

Just not here.

We’re the timeline that didn’t crash.

We’re the one that kept running.

And whatever fractured the universe that night?

It’s still watching.

Still counting.

Waiting to see how much worse we’re willing to become before it stops pretending this was an accident.