Kael Vey awoke to the scent of antiseptic and the hum of machinery, his fingers brushing against a cold metal table. The sterile air tasted metallic, like blood and rust. He sat up, his pulse a frantic drumbeat in his ears. A single overhead light flickered, casting jagged shadows across the room. His reflection in the glass wall was wrong—eyes too wide, mouth slack, a stranger staring back.
A voice crackled through the speakers, flat and synthetic. “Subject 7-B. Report to Sector 9.” Kael’s throat tightened. He didn’t remember being assigned a number. The walls around him pulsed faintly, as if the building itself were breathing.
He stumbled toward the exit, his boots echoing in the cavernous corridor. The floor was seamless, polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting the same distorted image of himself. He paused, squinting at the reflection. A symbol glowed briefly on his wrist—a spiral etched in silver, its lines twisting like liquid. He yanked his sleeve down, but the mark remained, burning against his skin.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” a voice said. Kael spun. A woman stood at the far end of the hall, her uniform dark blue, her face obscured by a mask. Her eyes were sharp, calculating. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“I’m your handler,” she said. “But you’re not supposed to be awake. Not yet.”
“What does that mean?”
She stepped closer, her boots silent on the floor. “You were never meant to remember. The project’s unstable. If you keep digging, you’ll collapse the entire framework.”
Kael’s breath came in shallow bursts. “What framework?”
The woman hesitated. “You’re not real, Kael. None of us are. We’re echoes, fragments of a failed experiment. The world you think you live in—it’s a shell.”
He laughed, brittle and loud. “That’s insane. I can feel the floor beneath me. I can smell the antiseptic.”
“Feelings are illusions,” she said. “The symbols on your wrist—they’re anchors. They keep you tethered to this reality. If you remove them, everything falls apart.”
Kael’s hand trembled as he touched the mark. It pulsed, a slow, rhythmic beat. “Who put them there?”
The woman’s mask tilted. “You did. Or rather, the system did. You’re a construct, Kael. A composite of stolen memories, engineered to test the limits of perception. The experiment failed. Now we’re all trapped in the wreckage.”
He staggered back. “I don’t believe you.”
“You will,” she said. “When the fractures start. When the walls bleed.”
Before he could respond, the lights exploded in a shower of sparks. The building groaned, a sound like tearing flesh. Kael hit the floor as the ceiling cracked, jagged lines spreading like veins. The woman vanished, her voice a distant whisper. “Run.”
He crawled toward the nearest door, his fingers scraping against the cold floor. The symbols on his wrist flared brighter, their edges sharp and searing. He ripped off his sleeve, but the mark remained, etched into his skin.
The corridor was now a labyrinth of shifting walls, angles that shouldn’t exist. Kael’s breath came in ragged gasps as he ran, the sound of collapsing structures echoing behind him. He didn’t know where he was going, only that staying meant death.
A door stood open ahead, its frame warped and blackened. He stepped inside, the air thick with the smell of burning plastic. A desk lay overturned, papers scattered like dead leaves. A terminal flickered on the wall, its screen glowing with a single line: “ERROR: REALITY CORRUPTED.”
Kael approached, his hand shaking. The screen blinked again, and a new message appeared: “RECOVERING MEMORY FRAGMENTS.” He typed without thinking, his fingers moving of their own accord. The screen filled with images—flashes of a life he didn’t recognize. A child laughing in a field. A woman with eyes like storm clouds. A city burning, its skyline jagged and wrong.
The symbols on his wrist pulsed again, and the images coalesced into a memory: a lab, identical to the one he’d just left. A man in a lab coat, his face obscured, speaking to a group of people. “The experiment is failing. The constructs are destabilizing. We need to reset.”
Kael’s knees gave out. The memory was his own, but it wasn’t. He was watching himself, a stranger in his own body. The man in the lab coat turned, and Kael saw his own face—older, wearier, haunted.
“You’re the architect,” the woman’s voice said behind him. “The one who built this place. But you’re also the flaw. The experiment was never about control. It was about survival.”
He spun, but she was gone. The terminal screen darkened, leaving only the flickering of emergency lights. Kael pressed a hand to his chest, his heartbeat a deafening roar. The world around him was unraveling, and he didn’t know if he could stop it.
The symbols on his wrist burned hotter, their lines shifting into something new—a pattern he’d seen before, in the memory. He traced the design with his finger, and the room around him shuddered. The walls melted, revealing a vast expanse of stars, infinite and empty.
Kael fell to his knees, the weight of the truth crushing him. He wasn’t real. None of it was real. The project had been a desperate attempt to escape a collapsing universe, and he’d been its unwitting pawn.
A voice echoed in his mind, not from the woman, but from himself. “If you want to fix this, you have to let go.”
He closed his eyes, the symbols fading from his skin. The stars pulsed once, then vanished. The world snapped back into place, the lab restored, the walls solid. Kael stood, his breath steady.
The woman appeared again, her mask gone, revealing a face he recognized—his own. “You did it,” she said. “You severed the anchors. The experiment is over.”
He looked down at his hands, now free of symbols. “What happens now?”
She smiled, a shadow of something sad. “Now, you become real.”
The lights dimmed, and the building fell silent. Kael stepped out into the night, the sky above him vast and unbroken. The world was still broken, but for the first time, he wasn’t afraid of what came next.
