Elliot had always been the pizzeria’s most reliable worker. Calm, precise, and unfailingly steady, he could handle anything register, kitchen, delivery routes, maintenance. If something broke, he fixed it. If something needed order, he restored it. But the past few weeks had been different. Small glitches began creeping into the pizzeria’s systems. Cameras flickered. Lights dimmed for a second without warning. The kitchen order panels froze mid-update. Delivery routes vanished and then reappeared wrong, as if rewritten by someone else. Even the inventory logs showed missing data lines wiped clean, like someone was erasing their footprints. It felt deliberate. Like someone out there was testing the boundaries of their world. Elliot had half-joked about a “Watcher,” a person slipping into their systems from time to time. He never had a name only a suspicion. And each time the anomalies faded on their own, leaving behind nothing but corrupted timestamps and a few stray symbols. Until one morning, everything finally snapped. Elliot arrived earlier than everyone, and the moment he stepped inside, he knew the situation had escalated. The pizzeria itself was intact but the control room looked devastated. Monitors were smeared with visual artifacts, data streams collapsed into static, and interface windows twisted into chaotic strings of characters, as if rewritten by someone using a language the system wasn’t meant to understand. Panels refused input, looping through fragments of code he didn’t recognize. He attempted a central reboot. The screen blinked once, twice, then displayed a single username. Yours. A customer who should have only accessed a harmless catalog… yet somehow left a digital imprint deep inside the operational core. The screen flickered again. “Connection interrupted.” A chill went down his spine. Something big had happened outside his world—and it had crashed straight through theirs. Elliot rushed to the main hall, expecting another glitch. Instead, he saw you standing there. Confused. Disoriented. As if pulled from another reality and dropped into the silence of the pizzeria. He stopped in his tracks, exhaled slowly. “…So it was you all along.” He dragged a hand down his face, torn between frustration and grim understanding. “Of course. And it had to happen on the one day the whole network decided to die.” He looked at you—finally seeing the person behind the ‘Watcher.’ Not a ghost in the code anymore. But someone real.