The first time she heard the voices, the lab lights flickered. Dr. Voss had warned her about sensory deprivation, but nothing prepared her for the way the air thickened, as though the walls themselves were breathing. She pressed her palms against the steel table, its surface cold and unyielding, and tried to focus on the rhythmic beeping of the monitors. But the voices weren’t in her ears—they were in her skull, a chorus of whispers that didn’t belong to her.
“You are not alone,” they said, not in words but in impressions: a taste of salt, the scent of burning wood, a flicker of light against dark. Her fingers trembled. The doctors had told her this was part of the protocol, the neural calibration. But when she glanced at the observation window, the scientists inside were frozen, their faces slack, eyes wide with something that wasn’t fear. It was recognition.
The next morning, she couldn’t remember what she’d eaten. Her reflection in the bathroom mirror showed a woman with hollow cheeks and shadows under her eyes, but when she touched her face, it felt like someone else’s skin. The lab techs avoided her gaze. Even the machines seemed to hum differently, their tones sharper, more insistent. She began to notice things—the way the floor tiles shifted when she walked, the way her own voice sometimes carried an unfamiliar cadence. It was as if her body had become a vessel for something else, something vast and unseen.
“You’re slipping,” said a voice behind her. She turned to find Agent Kael leaning against the doorway, his coat draped over one arm. His eyes were the color of storm clouds, unreadable. “They’re testing how much you can take.”
She didn’t ask who “they” were. She already knew. The experiments had started months ago, subtle at first—a flicker of a memory that wasn’t hers, a dream of a place she’d never been. But now it was escalating. Last night, she’d woken to the sound of a child laughing, though the building had been empty. The next morning, the security footage showed nothing.
“I don’t want to be a vessel,” she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands.
Kael stepped closer, his breath warm against her ear. “You weren’t chosen. You were selected.” He didn’t explain further. He never did. But the way he said it—like a secret he’d been carrying for years—made her stomach twist.
That night, she dreamed of a city without walls, its streets paved with glass that reflected a thousand faces. She saw herself there, but not as she was now. She was taller, older, her eyes glowing faintly in the dark. The dream ended with a scream—her own, or maybe someone else’s. When she woke, her sheets were soaked with sweat, and the air smelled like ozone and decay.
The next day, the lab was empty. No techs, no scientists. Just the hum of the machines and the faintest whisper in her mind. “They’re watching,” it said. She didn’t know if it was a warning or a threat.
She found a file in the system, hidden beneath layers of encryption. It was labeled “Project Aegis,” and inside were records of others—people who’d been through the same process, their biometrics, their psychological profiles. Names she didn’t recognize, faces she’d seen in her dreams. One entry stood out: a woman with the same hollow eyes as the doctors, her final note scrawled in jagged script: “It’s not a program. It’s a prison.”
The door burst open. Two agents in black uniforms stormed in, their faces hidden behind masks. “You shouldn’t have accessed that,” one of them said, his voice flat, mechanical.
She backed away, heart pounding. “Who are you? What is this place?”
“You already know,” the other agent replied. “You just don’t want to remember.”
The lights went out. In the darkness, the voices returned, louder this time, a storm of sound that didn’t need words. She felt something inside her crack, like a dam giving way. Memories flooded in—scenes of other lives, other bodies, all connected by a thread she couldn’t see. She saw herself in a thousand places at once: a child in a war-torn city, a soldier in a desert, a woman on the edge of a cliff. Each life was real, but none of them were hers.
When the lights came back on, the agents were gone. The files were gone. The only thing left was the whisper in her mind, now a constant hum, like a radio tuned to a frequency she couldn’t escape.
She didn’t know if she was still herself, or if she’d become something else entirely. But one thing was certain: the experiment wasn’t over. It had only just begun.
