Protocol for the Unseen
by Landon L. Gow
Every day was like the 4th of July. The late afternoon sky was clear and blue, a perfect day for an outdoor celebration. Beyond the plaza stretched a wide lawn, the green grass vibrant and clipped short. Families sat in loose circles on blankets spread neatly across the ground. Children waved sparklers, their movements tracing small, bright arcs.
Vendors worked at their carts along the paths. Hot dogs hissed on grills, steam rising into the air with the scent of mustard and onions. Paper tubs of popcorn were handed out, bottled drinks clinked in ice baths, condensation shining on their sides. It was an idyllic and joyous day for all.
At the center, the stage held the band, instruments ready, uniforms pressed, waiting for their cue. Screens above showed the president’s face, his voice carrying across the plaza as he spoke of unity, strength, and independence.
Everyone was looking forward to the drone and fireworks display that was said to be the most elaborate the city had ever put on.
Abilene smiled, caught in the rhythm of it. She felt grateful to be part of such a wholesome community.
From the shade of the trees at the far edge of the plaza, an older gentleman stepped forward. His hair was neatly combed, his expression was friendly. He lifted a hand in greeting and started toward her.
“Beautiful day,” he said.
She offered a small smile and polite nod.
“Beautiful day,” he repeated, louder. “Couldn’t ask for better.”
The enthusiasm in his voice was a bit strong. Still, she gave another quick nod, a reflexive courtesy, and tried to angle past.
“Have a nice day!” His voice carried across the plaza, too loud, too bright. Heads did not turn. No one seemed to notice.
He stepped closer, blocking her path. The grin stayed wide, fixed, his eyes locked on hers. “So good to see you!” he shouted, his cheer sharpened into something manic.
Her stomach tightened. She took a half step back. His hand rose, and then came down hard on her shoulder.
“Perfect weather!” he roared. “Wonderful day!” He shook her once, violently, still smiling, still bellowing pleasantries into her face. She was frozen in shock, unable to resist. He shook her again. Her left eye’s contact lens fell out.
The system lost sync.
Environmental noise flooded in, disorienting her even more. Suddenly she could hear arguments, sirens, a bottle breaking nearby. And the stench hit her like a punch, the clean air curdled into piss, alcohol, and musky soil. The pavement beneath her blurred from pale stone to stained concrete, pitted and dark.
The pleasant man was gone. In his place a ragged, gray-bearded figure crouched over her, breath sour, eyes wild with fury. His cracked lips sprayed spit as he screamed into her face. “They’ve stolen the world!” His voice was torn raw. “They’ve caged us in delusion! Why won’t any of you fight for reality?”
She lay stunned beneath him, her body rigid, her mind splitting between the clean geometry of the right lens and the filth pouring through her bare left eye. Spittle struck her cheek, hot and stinking. His hands pinned her shoulders, shaking her again and again, forcing his words into her skull: “Look at it! Look!”
She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t fight. The horror of it pressed against her, completely paralyzing her. She was trapped in a moment that would not resolve.
The first crack of a baton exploded across his spine. The sound was so close, so sharp, she thought for an instant her own body had been broken. Pain shuddered through her chest. Then she saw them: two officers in matte combat gear, visors blank, pulling the man off of her.
One voice, calm, polite, as if nothing were amiss: “Hold tight, ma’am. We’ll take care of this.”
And then they did.
The batons rose and fell in clean arcs, striking again and again. The man crumpled, tried to cover his head, failed. Each blow landed with a wet finality, bone giving way, flesh splitting. His cries became gurgles, then silence. The officers kept going until the body no longer moved.
Abilene sat on the ground, shaking, her palms scraped raw, her throat tight with sobs. Around her the plaza remained unchanged. Families still picnicked. Friends still laughed. Couples strolled by. No one looked at her. No one looked at the body lying in a widening pool of blood.
They took him by the ankles and dragged his body toward a van idling at the curb, its door already open. His head left a smear across the pavement, dark and ugly. In her right eye, with the one contact still in place, the smear shimmered like reflected light. In her left, it was nothing but blood.
Medics reached her almost immediately. Their hands were brisk, practiced. A capsule pressed against her tongue dissolved cool and bitter, calm flooding her veins in a wave that smothered panic. A lens applicator descended, slotting the replacement lens into her eye. The sting blurred, cleared.
Blue sky reasserted itself. Clean stone. Orderly voices. The plaza whole again.
She breathed evenly. Her shoulders released. The memory already softened into something manageable: a brief dizzy spell, quickly corrected. Helpful officers. Kind medics. Nothing more.
A notification shimmered at the edge of her vision: treatment completed, no penalty applied, spa credit awarded. She smiled faintly, reassured.
She returned to the celebration. Maybe she’d get a hot dog.
* * *
The next morning she woke screaming. The sound tore out of her before she even opened her eyes. When she did, the room was calm. Blue-white light diffused through the smartglass of her bedroom window.
Her chest heaved and her hands clutched the sheets. Fragments tumbled in her mind: a man’s face too close, spit on her cheek, the crack of something breaking, blood smeared across pavement. Then nothing but blankness, as if the memory had been edited with hard cuts.
She pressed her palms to her eyes, tried to pin the dream down, but the harder she focused the less shape it had. Just noise. A hallucination. A bad dream. Or maybe something else.
When she stood, the lenses reasserted themselves. The room sharpened, its lines too clean, its surfaces too even. A faint shimmer clung to the walls, gone when she blinked, back again when she opened her eyes.
In her ears, the buds canceled all outside noise and provided a subtle soundtrack, currently it was soft piano notes woven with something indistinct, engineered to gently wake her up. The thermostat clicked; the band on her wrist pulsed once, and a cool note of citrus slipped into the air. Her shoulders loosened as she let herself relax.
Everything was designed for this. The contacts, the buds, the wristband, together, they filtered her senses, curated her experience, masked the unpleasant, ignored the unnecessary. That was the technology’s promise: clean sight, clean sound, clean breath. A version of reality worth living in.
She brushed her hair back, watched herself in the mirror. The girl who stared back looked polished, rested, even radiant. And if she leaned closer, if she searched for the broken image beneath the surface, she couldn’t find it.
She noticed the blouse she had worn yesterday, folded crooked on the hamper. The fabric at the shoulders was torn, threads hanging loose. Strange. She couldn’t think of how that had happened.
Abilene stepped out into the morning. The sky was the same flawless blue it always was, clouds soft and drifting. Birds sang in the branches of lush, healthy trees. The street looked as though it had been scrubbed by hand, clean enough to eat from. Even the gutters were immaculate. No garbage, no debris. Everything orderly and serene.
People moved past her, neat and unhurried, hair perfect, clothes pressed, every face had a healthy glow, full of vitality. The wearables saw to that. The filters made everyone appear as the best possible version of themselves.
She caught her reflection in a window. No stray strands of hair. No unevenness in her skin.
Billboards towered above the avenue. They didn’t belong to the buildings themselves. She knew that. The walls were bare. The ads were overlays, projected into sightlines and swapped out daily. Sometimes hourly.
She remembered a time before it all. She had been twelve when she was first fitted with smart contacts. Back then the filters had been playful, exaggerated. Pink clouds, cartoon rainbows, digital fireworks on command. She used to switch them constantly; they were fun then. But the updates kept coming. Personal customization disappeared, replaced by a single system, the same filters for everyone. No one complained, because it made the world better.
For a moment the trauma of last night came back: spit on her cheek, a man’s voice torn raw, the thud of batons on flesh.
“They’ve stolen the world.” The words bubbled up to the surface.
She looked again at the city: harmonious, peaceful. Idyllic. This world was better, wasn’t it?
She drew a long breath, decided not to dwell on it and headed to work.
* * *
That evening she stood before the bathroom mirror. The wearable maintenance kit lay open on the counter. She had never actually used this kit before. The devices came with packaged tools for emergencies, which were very rare.
She took out the removal tool. It was no larger than a pen, ending in three delicate prongs. She slid it into her right ear. The prongs expanded and seated themselves into the inner ear bud. A small twist, a tug, and the disc came free.
The system lost sync. Sound rushed in. A car horn blared somewhere outside, muffled shouting came through the thin walls of the apartment. From her kitchen, she heard the raw buzz of the refrigerator motor, a nuisance she had never noticed.
She repeated the step with her left ear. Both buds sat in her palm. Noise pressed in on every side, uncurated, raw.
Her hand hesitated on the next tool. The contact lens extractor was small, shaped like a silver insect. She had never used it. The lenses were meant to stay in place for a year at a time and were replaced only at her annual exam. The only care required was the weekly lubricating drops.
She held the extractor to her right eye. A soft suction took hold, tugged, lifted. A sharp sting as the lens peeled away. Her eye watered, blinked. She repeated the process for the left. Both lenses now sat in the case, much larger and thicker than old-fashioned corrective contact lenses, their curved surfaces faintly clouded.
The mirror now showed a stranger. Strands of gray threaded through her hair. Dark hollows sagged beneath her eyes. Her skin was pale, blotchy. She looked older, thinner, more fragile than she expected. For the first time in decades, she was seeing her true, unfiltered reflection.
Her frown deepened and her pulse spiked. Though the system was desynced, the band still tried to help, releasing a sharp spritz of citrus meant to steady her nerves. She heard it this time, the mechanical hiss the earbuds would normally have masked. She unclasped it with the key from the maintenance kit and slid the band free. Her wrist felt exposed. Altogether, she felt naked and raw.
She slipped on a jacket and left the apartment. Outside, the world assaulted her. The air was humid, thick with exhaust and rot. Traffic was backed up, engines idling. Garbage piled in the gutters.
She walked past alleys blocked by coils of barbed wire. Signs warned of restricted zones. Behind one fence, she stopped. Trash was heaped high, shifting with rats tunneling through it. At the other end of the alley sat what appeared to be a family: hollow-eyed, their skin blackened with soot. The children looked skeletal, starving. They stared at her without expression. She moved on.
The police were everywhere. Two by two, in heavy armor, rifles at their chests, visors blank. No overlays softened their images for her now. No pleasant filters, no curated calm.
The trees stood where they should, lining the streets, rooted in the medians. But they were gray and brittle, branches bare. The planters at the corners held nothing but clumps of soil, plastic trash wedged where her lenses would have shown flowers.
She kept walking. This was her street, her neighborhood. She knew every building, but now they were stripped of illusion and revealed as crumbling structures scrawled with graffiti. Windows were black with grime, some broken, covered with plywood or metal bars. Billboards towered over the street, their surfaces faded and peeling, the overlays gone.
When she reached the plaza, it was unrecognizable. The lawn was gone, only bare dirt patched with weeds. Trash lay scattered across the ground, caught against the bases of broken benches. On the concrete where she had fallen, a dark stain spread wide and uneven, soaked deep into the cracks. The place where the man had died. His blood. Still there.
His words came back to her: “They’ve caged us in delusion.”
* * *
The next morning she got ready for work. She fastened the band onto her wrist. She inserted the buds back into her ears. She put the contacts back into her eyes. The world brightened. Her pulse steadied. She stepped outside. Reassimilated.
The office passed in a blur of meetings and chatter. That afternoon she asked her co-workers if they wanted to get drinks. They met at the Skylounge, high above the city. Glass walls, polished floors, a patio with a perfect view.
They carried their cocktails outside. The skyline was breathtaking. The entire city glimmered. They laughed, clinked glasses, talked about nothing.
Abilene leaned back against the railing. She lifted her glass, drained the last of her drink, and leaned backward into open air.
Her co-workers didn’t notice. They kept talking, kept laughing. On the street below, people walked past. Everything was calm, idyllic, perfect as always. Abilene’s blood streamed unseen into the gutters.
Copyright © 2026 by Landon L. Gow
