Sebastian Pearce – Flash Fiction and Sports Betting. What can go wrong?

A story by Sebastian Pearce based on the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt:

You tell people it’s the small things that bother you. The way your coworker clicks her pen during meetings. How your neighbor leaves his garbage cans out two days past pickup. The sound of people chewing with their mouths open. Normal irritations that everyone can relate to.

You don’t mention the real thing that bothers you.

The thing that keeps you awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling while your heart hammers against your ribs. The thing that makes you check and recheck the locks on your doors, even though you know it won’t matter. Even though you know locks can’t keep out what’s already inside.

It started three months ago with the peripheral vision incidents. You’d catch movement in the corner of your eye—a shadow where no shadow should be, a figure that vanished the moment you turned your head. Your doctor suggested stress, recommended meditation, prescribed anxiety medication that sits unopened in your bathroom cabinet.

The medication can’t help with what bothers you, because what bothers you is the growing certainty that you’re not alone in your own body.

You feel it most clearly during routine tasks. Brushing your teeth, and suddenly your hand moves with too much precision, angles you didn’t consciously choose. Making coffee, and your fingers know exactly where the sugar is even though you moved it yesterday. Walking up stairs, and your feet find the creaky spots to avoid them, though you’ve never mapped which steps make noise.

What bothers you is how your reflection sometimes seems to be moving a fraction of a second before you do.

What bothers you is the way you’ve started noticing things you shouldn’t notice. The license plate of every car that passes. The number of steps between your front door and the mailbox (47). The exact time your neighbor’s cat crosses your yard each morning (8:23 AM). Your brain is collecting data with the efficiency of a machine, cataloging details you never cared about before.

What bothers you is the dreams that aren’t dreams. You lie in bed, eyes closed, but you’re still seeing. Watching yourself sleep from a point somewhere near the ceiling. Observing your own breathing, noting the way your face looks slack and vacant. Sometimes, in these not-dreams, your body gets up and moves around the house while you watch from above, powerless to control where it goes or what it does.

What bothers you most is what you found this morning.

A notebook in your own handwriting, filled with observations about your daily routine. Pages and pages of meticulous notes: “Subject wakes at 6:47 AM. Takes 12 minutes to shower. Prefers coffee with two sugars, no cream. Checks phone 73 times per day. Shows signs of increasing anxiety about cohabitation.”

Cohabitation.

What bothers you is that you don’t remember writing any of it.

What bothers you is the way the handwriting subtly changes throughout the notebook. Your letters, your words, but the spacing gradually shifts, the pressure becomes more controlled, the style more clinical. As if someone else was learning to mimic your writing while you slept.

What bothers you is the final entry, dated today, written in handwriting that’s almost but not quite yours:

“Integration proceeding ahead of schedule. Subject remains unaware of neural mapping completion. Recommend accelerating timeline for full personality transfer. Original consciousness becoming increasingly problematic—shows signs of detection. May need to implement emergency suppression protocols.”

“Host body adaptation: excellent. Motor control: 97% efficiency. Memory access: complete. Emotional mimicry: requires refinement but adequate for social interactions.”

“Note: Subject’s primitive fear responses are creating interference. Consider these the final observations from the original occupant. Tomorrow, there will be only one consciousness in this vessel.”

What bothers you is that as you read these words, you realize your hand is writing new lines beneath them, adding to the report, and you’re not controlling the movement.

What bothers you is that you can feel yourself fading, like volume being slowly turned down, while something else grows stronger behind your eyes.

What bothers you is that tomorrow, when people ask what bothers you, the thing wearing your face will smile and say, “Oh, nothing bothers me anymore. I’m a completely different person than I used to be.”

And it won’t be lying.

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© Sebastian Pearce 2025