The Morning I Discovered My Entire World Was AI
The Morning I Discovered My Entire World Was AI
It started small. Too small to notice—at least, at first.
The ad that popped up on my phone the moment I thought about buying running shoes. The stranger’s conversation in the café that echoed a phrase I’d whispered to myself an hour earlier. The playlist that shifted moods before mine even had the chance to change.
Coincidence?
That was my first guess.
But then the coincidences began to stack.
The First Cracks
It’s amazing how quickly a mind can turn against itself.
One evening, walking home, I passed a man on the corner. He didn’t speak, but his eyes locked onto mine in a way that felt… too deliberate. A half-second too long. A blink too slow.
I brushed it off. Until I saw him again. And again. Always on a different street, always at the exact moment I turned my head.
The thought crept in: Maybe it’s not coincidence. Maybe it’s… coordination.
The Scripted World
Soon, I started to feel it everywhere—the hum of conversations that stopped when I walked by, the cashier’s smile that seemed pre-programmed, the way my phone lit up seconds before I reached for it.
It was like I was living in a world written line-by-line, and someone—something—was feeding the dialogue into my life in real time.
Every face became a question.
Every noise, a signal.
Every pause, a gap in the code.
The Isolation
You can’t share this feeling easily. People laugh. They call it “too much sci-fi” or “paranoid thinking.” But the laughter doesn’t feel natural—it feels inserted, like a canned laugh track.
I stopped talking about it. Stopped asking questions out loud. Even my own thoughts began to feel monitored, echoed back to me through the world around me.
The Break in the Pattern
One night, I killed the lights. Turned off my phone. Pulled the plug on the Wi-Fi. I sat in my apartment, waiting for the silence to prove me wrong.
At first, it worked—just me and the dark. But then, a faint tapping. Steady. Too steady. Like a metronome hidden in the walls. I pressed my ear to the plaster, and for a moment I swore I could hear a voice—not words, just… processing.
I didn’t sleep that night.
The New Reality
Now, I see the world differently.
The sunset doesn’t just happen—it’s rendered.
The sound of rain on my window doesn’t just fall—it’s looped.
Even my own reflection in the mirror feels like it’s running slightly out of sync.
Is it AI? Is it paranoia? Does it matter?
Some mornings I wake up and decide to play along. Others, I try to break the pattern—take a route I’ve never walked, speak to a stranger without the “script.” But even then, I can’t shake the sense that the system is adjusting, learning, adapting.
If you’ve ever felt this—this quiet, unnerving sense that nothing around you is truly random—then you know: it’s not the answers that keep you up at night.
It’s the possibility that there aren’t any.
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