The diner was a grease-trap on the edge of a highway that led to nowhere. It smelled of burnt coffee and old cigarettes, the kind of smell that gets into your skin and stays there for a decade. I sat in the corner booth, watching the rain streak the windows in long, jagged lines. My name is Miller, and I was the guy they called when the world started to leak.

In the city, they called it the "Spatial Drift." To the people in the suits, it was a scientific curiosity. To me, it was just more work. I was a "Patch-Worker"—a blue-collar technician hired to seal the holes in reality that popped up in the slums. One day you're fixing a leaky pipe in a basement, and the next, you find a doorway to a version of the city where the buildings are made of salt and the people have no faces.

I didn't care about the "why" of it. I just cared about the pay.

But lately, the patches weren't holding. The holes were getting bigger, and they were getting hungrier.

I spent my afternoons walking through the "Grey Zones," neighborhoods where the Drift had become permanent. I saw a woman trying to hang laundry on a line that existed in three different time-zones. I saw a dog barking at a ghost that was just a delayed echo of itself from ten minutes ago. No one talked about it. They just lived with it, the way you live with a noisy neighbor or a chronic cough.

"Hey, Miller," the waitress said, sliding a plate of lukewarm eggs in front of me. She had a tired look in her eyes, the kind of look you get when you've spent twenty years watching the world dissolve around you. "The landlord says the ceiling in 4B is starting to ripple again."

"I'll get to it," I said, not looking up.

I didn't tell her that I'd seen the readings. The Drift wasn't a series of accidents; it was a tide. The entire coast was being pulled into a higher-dimensional drain. We weren't experiencing a glitch; we were experiencing a liquidation.

I spent the rest of the day in 4B, staring at a ceiling that looked like liquid mercury. I could see things in the ripples—vast, cold geometries, the outlines of a civilization that viewed our world as a smudge on a lens. They weren't attacking us. They were just cleaning.

I sat on the floor of the apartment and lit a cigarette. I thought about my ex-wife, about the house I'd lost in the crash of '08, and about the way the light used to look in the summer. None of it mattered anymore. The math was simple: eventually, the ripple would reach the floor, and then it would reach me.

I didn't try to save anyone. I didn't call the authorities. Why bother? You can't argue with a tide.

As the sun set, the ripples in the ceiling finally touched the floor. The room began to stretch, the walls becoming long, thin ribbons of grey. I felt my own body starting to elongate, my thoughts becoming sparse and distant.

I took one last drag of my cigarette and flicked the ash into the void.

"Well," I whispered, "at least I don't have to worry about the rent."

The room vanished with a sound like a soft sigh. I didn't feel pain, just a sudden, absolute lightness, as if I had finally stopped carrying a weight I'd been lugging around for fifty years. I drifted for a moment in a sea of white noise, a single, unimportant spark in a vast, indifferent ocean, and then, with a quiet, unremarkable click, I was gone.