A sinister and worrying occurence which began shortly after the Moonrise event is the forming of Echoes. People are becoming Echoes seemingly at random and with unknown cause.

An Echo is a person who no longer interacts meaningfully with the world in new ways. Typically a person with a daily routine who has become an Echo will continue to go about that routine for a while, but this is highly sensitive to even the slightest thing being different.

For instance, a man who every day woke up, went to the same store for a loaf of bread, asked after the shopkeeper’s family and then left would continue to do so after becoming an Echo. But if the next day that shop closed down and was boarded up he would wake up, go to the store and walk right into the boarded up door. Even if the force knocked him to the floor, he’d greet the shopkeeper that isn’t there in the abandoned building he didn’t make it into, and ask after her family with a smile.

Echoes sometimes seem to have a very limited capacity for responding to some outside stimuli, but this seems to be only a replaying of previous interactions with such things. Typically they can only be expected to survive for a week or so at most in rare cases, before come to some end, often through starvation. Even as they starve, they do not seem to be in any pain, though.

Obviously this is quite a terrible fate to be landed with, and so there are those trying to understand this affliction. In most of the Myriad Nations the general response has been to treat this affliction like they would a disease, and to try to keep them alive in the hopes that a cure will be found. Though there has been no official stance from the Lead Nation, and debate is ongoing as to whether Echoes should be considered dead even whilst they are still up and walking around.