Corrector

In every society there were people who fixed what others didn’t even notice.

They had no uniforms.

They had no badges.

Their names weren’t in any state registry, and their work didn’t exist in any laws.

Yet without them, the world would have fallen apart.

They were called Correctors.

Their duty was to watch over reality.

Not people.

Not crimes.

Reality.

Sometimes it made mistakes.

An extra door would appear in a hallway, leading to a room that didn’t exist.

A second moon would briefly hang in the night sky.

A passerby would walk down the street without a face, and no one around them would notice.

A fountain would sprout up in a square that hadn’t been there yesterday, yet everyone would swear it had stood there since childhood.

Such mistakes were rare.

But every one of them threatened to unravel the shared fabric of the world.

The Correctors arrived quietly.

They didn’t take photographs.

They didn’t write reports.

They only observed the anomaly until they understood why it had appeared.

Then they erased it.

Not with a hammer.

Not with fire.

They changed a single thought.

Sometimes it was enough for one person to stop believing in something.

Sometimes they had to convince thousands.

When the last consciousness gave up the error, reality itself rewrote itself.

The door would vanish.

The second moon would dissolve in the sky.

The person would regain their face.

The city would disappear as if it had never existed.

People wouldn’t even notice.

Only their memories would quietly adjust to the new version of the world.

He was one of the best Correctors.

In twelve years of service, there was only one anomaly he had failed to fix.

He still didn’t know that it was the one that had already been correcting him.