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It was the microwave that woke me up.

It wasn’t the sound it makes when you first set the timer, you know that single, purposeful beep, it was the cheerful bing it does when it’s finished nuking your leftovers. The only problem was I hadn’t put anything in the microwave. And it was 2:58 in the morning. Microwaves, much like foxes in the bins, have no business making noise at that hour.

I lay in bed, telling myself it was probably nothing, maybe a glitch from the storm earlier. But then I remembered that storm had been two days ago. And then, it binged again.

You learn interesting things about yourself at three in the morning. For me, one of them is that I do not deal well with uncertainty, especially on my own, and in the dark. My rational brain, which usually has the courtesy to switch on about five minutes after the panic starts, tried doing its job. Had I somehow left the microwave on all night? No. Could the neighbours have come in to zap a takeaway without me noticing? Not unless they’d mastered the art of tiptoeing through locked doors. I live alone in my apartment; my front door is a magnet for bills and junk mail and nothing else. And yet the beep had happened. Twice.

Determined not to have to get up and endure the frigid air in my bedroom, I slid my phone off the bedside table and opened the smart-home app, which I only half-trust. It showed two events at 02:58:02 and 03:00:05. Each labelled, blandly, MICROWAVE:FOOD READY. I flicked on my kitchen Blink camera app and watched the last few minutes of recording. There was nothing happening until 02:58 when the microwave light went on, binged and the door popped open. A couple of minutes went by and suddenly the picture shuddered as if an earthquake had run through my kitchen. Immediately after that, the microwave light came on, binged and the door opened again.

There was no plausible explanation for any of it. I realised had no choice; I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, I needed to investigate. I flicked the bedside lamp on first because cold, unsubtle horror prefers to be seen. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown, shoved my feet into my matching slippers, and shuffled towards the kitchen with the determination of someone who isn’t at all convinced they’ll survive the night.

The microwave door was open. The plate inside spun slowly before stopping. The display said: Loading… 72%. Now, microwaves don’t load. They cook. That’s their thing. I told myself I was half-asleep, closed the door, and went back to bed.

In the morning, things were... off. Small things, mostly. I sat in the window, both hands around my first cup of tea, staring down at the street. My neighbour Ralph’s blue van, the one with the flaming seagull sticker, drove past at 07:12, then again at 07:13, and again at 07:14. Each time he went past, Ralph made the same wave out of his window, to nobody that I could see. The man on the bus which had stopped at the bus stop opposite stared straight up, almost directly at me for a full minute, mouth open, until he shook his head and looked away. The pigeon that usually does a very precise three-step strut under the bins froze mid-step, and didn’t resume until I blinked my eyes. When I looked at my phone, the little battery icon in the corner was… wrong. It didn’t say a percentage. It said: ‘Synchronising… 88%’.

I know, I know, it reads like the start of a conspiracy forum thread. Fortunately, my phone still worked so I told Alex about it on WhatsApp. Alex is inexplicably calm about most things, and he replied with the shrug emoji and, “Maybe you slept weird, or perhaps you’ve been hacked.” Then: “Coming over. Also, I’m bringing cake.” Because apparently cake fixes existential dread. Alex is good that way.

When Alex arrived, we poked at the microwave. Same thing. The moment you opened the door; the display showed a progress bar. No food inside, no heat — just ‘Loading… 92%’. Weirder still: it wasn’t just the microwave. My TV, when turned on, skipped its usual home page and instead displayed ‘Update in Progress: Please Wait’. My laptop wouldn’t load its desktop, just a bright white screen with the words ‘Completing Update… 94%’.

Alex joked, “Maybe the whole world’s getting a software update.”

I laughed. Then immediately stopped laughing when the clock on the oven skipped from 14:03 to 14:04 three separate times in a row, each time flickering like it was struggling to decide.

I showed him the Microwave log and the Blink video recording of the kitchen on my phone. The recording skipped for exactly 0.6 seconds just before the second microwave bing; the whole kitchen sort of stuttered and then resumed as if the universe had hiccupped and cleared its throat. “Frame drop,” Alex said, because he watches too much streaming tech. “Like your flat buffered.”

So, I started testing things, as anyone with an iota of stubbornness would. I moved my plant from the windowsill to the shelf and left a yellow post-it on it saying DO NOT MOVE. Half an hour later, the plant was back on the windowsill and the post-it remained, politely apologetic in its own sticky way. I left a biscuit on the windowsill and came back to find it untouched. I tried good old-fashioned analogue approaches. I put a smear of nail polish on the inside edge of the front door frame and photographed it. When I checked again a few minutes later, the polish was gone. The photograph still showed the smear. I filmed the pigeon; on my phone it fluttered three times and vanished mid-air for a split second.

“People don’t break like this,” I told Alex, who had now accepted the biscuit and was dunking it in his tea.

“Even if the world is glitching, you’d expect continuity. Not... duplication,” he said, helpfully.

I stared out of the window.

“All right, call the police, or the council, or maybe Virgin Media and see if they are running updates on their broadband?”

I called. Numbers rang out, answered with recorded scripts, or were not recognised at all. When an actual person did pick up once, a sleepy voice said, “Technician dispatch,” and then they repeated themselves, like a scratched CD before hanging up.

I felt a growing, animal panic that had nothing to do with failing to get hold of Virgin Media, and everything to do with the reality of my world subtly coming apart.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on,” I shouted.

We sat in silence for a bit. Then the room went quiet in a way that felt… wrong. No distant traffic. No dogs yapping. Not even the low hum from the fridge. The silence pressed in until the only sound was the feint tick of the oven clock — which, I realised, had frozen entirely at 15:00.

Later that afternoon around dusk, fed up with the passive approach of waiting to be debugged, I walked up the narrow concrete steps which led from the top landing of the stairwell to the roof of the apartment block.

I don’t know why I went outside. Maybe it was just to prove the air was still there. It’s a cheap, flat roof with a view of other cheap, flat roofs and a large satellite dish that has obviously been on eternal mute since 2011. Standing up there, my breath visible in front of me, the horizon usually gave me the kind of clear, comforting, calmness that makes existential dread manageable. That day it gave me something else.

The sky, or whatever pretended to be it, sputtered. Not a cloud; the whole westward view hiccupped like an overloaded slideshow. A thin seam of light appeared in the growing darkness, near where the moon should have been, then another, and the stars rearranged themselves in a clean diagonal line like someone dragging icons across a desktop. For a second I could see structure behind it: hard edges, long fluorescent strips, and rows of faces lit by monitors.

I laughed, I guess because laughter is a reflex when terror is too big to swallow. “That’ll be the council,” I said aloud to no one, because saying it made it feel less absurd. I wished Alex had stayed after all.

Then something moved in that strip of light. A hand reached out, tentative, like someone testing for a pulse. The hand was the wrong colour for the sky. It had freckles I recognised intimately, and a chipped nail on the right index finger that I had repaired the day after a particularly enthusiastic attempt at opening a tin of beans. I watched my own chipped nail flex.

They were inside. Outside. Whatever.

Panic struck. I stumbled down the stairwell, slipped on something and just managed to catch myself as my phone clattered across the painted concrete of the top landing floor. I was about to run down the next flight of stairs to my apartment when I spotted a bright light around the edges of the plant room door, the one nobody ever uses. I pushed inside. It smelt faintly of water and dead leaves. Behind what looked like a boiler, through a gap, was a ladder. The obvious choice was to climb up it, apparently. Almost on auto pilot, I took the first step. The ladder was warm under my palms.

At the top of the ladder was a door, an actual metal door with a small glass porthole. I hesitated. If this were a novel I’d have burst through without thinking, but it wasn’t a novel, this was my life, and I do, occasionally stop and think before acting. However, this time thinking seemed somehow less appealing than nose-first exploration, especially after the events of the day, so in I went.

The room beyond was all hum and light. Rows of desks. Towers of servers. And people, not the people of my block, not the tired office workers, but people in plain black t-shirts, slouching in ergonomic chairs, eyes fixed on banks of screens. One of them looked up as I entered and it was like seeing my own face slightly delayed. Not similar. Not related. Mine. Same cheekbone, same faint scar in the eyebrow from a bicycle fall at six. She — I — blinked slowly and smiled like someone who had been waiting for a very specific interruption in her day.

“Welcome back,” she said, and it was with my voice.

My hands, in the fluorescent light, among cables that smelled faintly of ozone, searched for explanation. She gestured to a monitor, and I saw, spinning gently on the screen, a window that said: ACTIVE INSTANCE — Consciousness: Amelia-47 — STATE: running — LAST SYNC: 03:17:05 — PATCH: scheduled (apply/rollback).

Someone else in a black t-shirt tapped a key. The room hummed. My stomach, which had been doing its own nervous rendition of the microwave bing, dropped.

“We’ll apply a hotfix,” my face said to me. “Shouldn’t take long. You might feel… dislocated.”

“Dislocated?” I said, which sounded ludicrously polite for someone considering a metaphysical eviction.

She — I — smiled again, and this time there was the world’s smallest crease at the corner of her mouth that I recognise as my authorising expression when I delete things online.

“You asked for perspective,” she said softly. “We gave you the back room.”

I don’t remember whether I laughed or whether it dissolved into a sob. What I do remember is the click, small and precise, like a seatbelt fastening. The monitor glowed. The room smelled like old coffee and new code. Above the hum, over the racks and the lights, dozens of tiny panes lit up as other instances recalibrated. Faces in those panes opened their mouths, and in a terrible, synchronised chorus they all asked the same question I had been asking in the half-glimpses of the night: Who is watching who?

My face turned toward the console. My own hand — the one with the chipped nail — hovered over a large, friendly button labelled in cheerful sans serif: APPLY PATCH.

I am not good with big metaphysical decisions. I hovered too. Then I realised the thing I’d wanted most in all those small, ridiculous checks I’d been doing earlier — the nail polish, the plant in the wrong place, the microwave’s hiccup — was the same as the thing the room offered: a choice. Not to fix or break, but to know.

The finger with the chipped nail pressed down. The button gave a soft, obedient clack. The lights flickered. For one long second, I watched my own face on the screen smile and then the smile folded into something smaller, quieter.

Outside, the pigeon finished its three-step strut. The blue van drove past with the flaming seagull sticker. The microwave binged once, as if someone had finally heated their supper.

And then, with the same clean, bureaucratic efficiency that had started the whole day, everything picked up again and I — felt someone else take the wheel.