Chapter 6: Missing is a speculative thriller about a world that has perfected continuity by removing a single, inconvenient number. In this society, time flows smoothly from five to seven. Birthdays skip. Books comply. Memories politely step over what everyone agrees never existed. The absence is so normalized that no one questions it-until one man finds the page that should not be there.
Elias works at the Ministry of Continuity, an institution devoted to keeping reality tidy. His job is simple: make sure records remain seamless, that page numbers never stutter, that history never hesitates. On his twenty-eighth birthday, Elias realizes he remembers his twenty-sixth vividly, but the year in between is a total blank. This is not alarming. It is standard. The Missing Sixth is a fact of life, like gravity or sleep.
Everything changes when Elias discovers a stray page numbered six-handwritten, smelling faintly of ozone, describing a conversation with a sister he has never known. As he reads further, the world itself arrests. Clocks freeze mid-tick. Streets fall silent. Elias is suddenly awake in a city that has gone blank. In this frozen interval, he encounters the Editors-janitors of reality who scrub away crimes, grief, and failure before they can ever be recorded.
Guided by Sarah, a woman who exists only inside these gaps, Elias learns the truth: the missing chapters of human lives are harvested to power a flawless utopia for the elite. The ugly years, the painful growth, the mistakes that shape identity-all are siphoned away to keep the surface world clean and calm. Elias's own sister, Lyra, was erased not because she was evil, but because she was inconvenient.
As Elias dives deeper, he is forced to confront an unbearable question. Is a painless world worth the cost of meaning? The Editors argue that suffering is unnecessary noise. Elias begins to suspect that it is the very substance of being human.
When the gaps start to widen-jumping not just over six, but over entire stretches of existence-Elias becomes the center of a growing resistance. Art, music, and memory turn into weapons. Each awakening brings truth, but also trauma, as people are forced to absorb years of loss in an instant. Elias must face the possibility that restoring reality may hurt more people than it saves.
In the final confrontation, Elias is given ultimate authority over the sequence of time itself. He can preserve the lie, or reinsert what was stolen-along with every war, heartbreak, and failure humanity once endured.
Chapter 6: Missing is a haunting exploration of memory, control, and the cost of perfection. It asks a dangerous question: if you could erase the worst years of your life, would you still be you?
