Tag: flash fiction

The Neural Horizon implant was supposed to be safe. That’s what the sales pitch promised: an advanced cognition enhancer that would let you simulate choices, branching out into alternate timelines to assess different outcomes. A way to explore “versions” of yourself—who you’d be if you had said yes instead of no, if you had taken that job, if you had moved to that city. It was just supposed to be a simulation. A thought experiment. Not real.

I stumbled into the bathroom, squinting in the bright light. The mirror reflected a me that wasn’t quite right. I was leaner, tanner. I had a small scar on my cheek I didn’t recognise. And yet, I still felt like me—except for a deep, gnawing wrongness, a sense that the person in the mirror was someone else entirely.

I grabbed my phone, scrolling through my messages, my photos. Work emails from a company I’d never applied to. Gym selfies, even though I hadn’t worked out in years. The unfamiliar name of Rachel appearing over and over.

I knew what had happened. I had been using the implant too often, jumping between too many simulated versions of myself. But this… this wasn’t a simulation. I had crossed over. I had replaced a version of myself that wasn’t me.

I shut my eyes. The implant had a failsafe—a way to reset. I had read about the protocol but never tried it. A command embedded in my thoughts.

I focused, forming the words in my mind like a mantra: Return to Origin.

Nothing happened.

I tried again. Return to Origin.

No response. No shift. No reset. The implant wasn’t letting me go back.

The longer I stood there, the more I realised the truth: I had no proof this was even a jump. No proof that I was still the original me. Had this happened before? Had I replaced another version of myself, over and over, each time thinking this was the real one?

I checked my call history. My last outgoing call was to Rachel.

I dialled the number. She picked up on the first ring.

“Hey” she said, her voice warm, familiar, real. “You okay? You’ve been being a bit weird.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I just… I just wanted to hear your voice.”

She laughed. “Well, I’m right here. Same as always.”

Except I had never met her before now.

I glanced back at the mirror. The scar on my cheek. The person staring back at me.

How many times had I done this? How many versions of me had I erased?

Rachel was still talking, but I barely heard her. My reflection was already beginning to disappear.

The last message I see on my phone before everything fades: Version Deletion Complete.

Dr Elena Vasquez floated in the cramped confines of Orbital Research Station K-27, securing herself with a thigh strap as she checked her reflection. The station had no proper mirrors—glass was a hazard in microgravity—but a sheet of polished metal had been bolted to the far wall for convenience.

Elena squinted at her reflection. It lagged. Not by much—just a fraction of a second—but enough to notice.

She turned her head left. The reflection followed.

She turned right. The reflection obeyed.

She lifted her hand—slowly, deliberately. The mirror Elena did the same, but the movement felt… delayed, like a glitch in an old video feed.

“Must be tired,” she muttered.

She unstrapped herself, pushing off towards her sleeping quarters.

A faint sound echoed through the station. A tap.

Elena paused mid-air.

Another tap.

It came from behind her.

She turned her head slowly.

The mirror… the sound was coming from the mirror.

The metal had no reason to make noise—no heat fluctuations, no structural stress, nothing that could produce a sound like that.

She hovered in front of it, staring herself down.

The reflection stared back.

She lifted a hand to touch the surface.

The reflection smiled.

Elena did not. Her own face remained frozen in horror, but the mirror version of her curled its lips into a slow, deliberate grin. Suddenly the smile dropped—like a mask slipping, the muscles of its face resetting into a blank, unreadable expression.

Elena recoiled, shoving herself away from the mirror. She twisted in midair, crashing against the opposite wall, scrambling for something—anything—to hold onto.

The reflection didn’t follow her movement. It stayed in place, staring out from the glass. Watching.

Then, impossibly, it lifted a hand and knocked.

A slow, deliberate tap, tap, tap. From the other side.

This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real. She turned away from the mirror and pressed the emergency comm button on her wrist. “Control, this is Vasquez. I—I need a systems check on Module Three. I think—I think I’m experiencing a hallucination.”

Static. Then:

“Dr Vasquez.”

A voice. Familiar. Hers.

“Please don’t turn around.”

Her breath hitched.

In the silence, she heard it move.

Something shifted behind her—smooth, fluid, like a body unmoored from gravity.

Right. Behind. Her.

And then—

Nothingness. K-27 was still.

Cal wakes to the smell of coffee. The morning light filters through his blinds, golden and warm. It should feel familiar, safe. It doesn’t.

He stands, expecting the usual stiffness in his back. But his body feels… different. Lighter. Taller? A vague unease coils in his stomach, but he shakes it off and heads to the kitchen.

A woman stands by the counter, pouring coffee. She turns and smiles.

“Morning, babe,” she says, placing a mug on the table.

Cal stops cold.

She’s beautiful. Soft brown eyes, dark hair. A face he’s never seen before in his life.

“Who… who are you?”

Her smile falters. “Very funny. You always do this before coffee.”

“I’m serious. Who the hell are you?”

Her brow furrows. “Cal, are you okay?”

His name. She knows his name.

His eyes dart around the apartment. It looks right. His sofa. His books. His jacket slung over a hook next to the door. But the pictures on the wall—

A framed photo of himself, arm draped around her. Another of them laughing at a beach he’s never visited.

Something in his mind crackles, like an old TV struggling to hold signal. A static-laced tone tickles the back of his skull:

“It’s catching up on you.”

The doorbell rings. Cal flinches.

The woman—his wife?—moves towards the door.

“Don’t,” he blurts.

She hesitates, confused. But it’s too late—she had unlocked the door, and now it opens.

A man stands on the threshold. Late forties. Suit and tie. Cold, assessing eyes. He holds a small, sleek tablet in one hand.

“Calvin Voss,” the man says smoothly. “You’re experiencing residual inconsistencies. A side effect of a mid-cycle rewrite.”

Cal’s breath is shallow. “Rewrite?”

The man glances at the woman. “Please step aside, ma’am. Your husband is overdue for a stabilisation update.”

She hesitates, then looks at Cal. There’s something almost… robotic in the way her concern flickers into place. As if she, too, is running on some kind of script.

Cal backs away. “What the hell is going on?”

The man speaks calmly. “You opted for an identity revision. New life, new memories. But sometimes the mind resists. Think of it like a software bug.”

A red notification flashes on the tablet screen:

SUBJECT CALVIN VOSS – INTEGRATION FAILURE DETECTED. RESET REQUIRED.

Cal’s pulse surges. They’re going to erase him. Again.

“Run,” the voice in his head insists.

He doesn’t think. He moves—bolting past the woman—his fake wife—through the door. The suited man shouts, but Cal is already sprinting down the hall.

He has to remember.

Has to stay real.

Behind him, a voice crackles from the tablet’s speaker, calm and clinical:

“Subject non-compliant. Initiating reset.”

The world halts.

And Cal is waking up to the smell of coffee.

Cal’s eyes open to darkness. His room, silent. But something feels… wrong. His limbs are heavy, unfamiliar. He flexes his fingers—stiff, reluctant to obey.

He swings his legs off the bed. His feet touch the floor, but the sensation is dulled.

He stands, wobbling slightly. A sharp pain jolts through a knee he never had a problem with before.

He staggers to the bathroom and flips on the light. His reflection stares back. His face. His eyes. But something about them is… vacant.

Something moves inside him. A deep, twisting sensation, like his nerves are unspooling. He grips the sink, fighting nausea. Then, a sound—low, guttural—bubbles from his throat.

A voice, not his own.

“I’m still here.”

The room blurs. Cal’s breathing turns ragged.

“You don’t remember, do you?” it says.

His hands shake as he tries to steady himself. “Who—who are you?” His own voice sounds foreign, distant.

“Your night tenant,” the voice confirms. “They never told you, did they?”

A sharp pulse of static pain erupts in his skull. Flashes of memory—not his, but someone’s. A neon-lit clinic. A clipboard with a name, redacted. A smiling doctor—with “Maximised Efficiency, Minimum Waste” printed on his badge.

And then, the realisation slams into him—cold, brutal, undeniable.

His body isn’t his alone.

He clutches his chest. His heartbeat pounds beneath his ribs, but it feels… stretched thin.

“They lease you out at night,” the voice says. “To those who can afford it.”

Cal stumbles backwards. His own mind, invaded. His body, divided.

“Don’t worry,” it says, with something like hunger. “You get the day. I take the night. Fair trade, isn’t it?”

Cal tries to call for help. But his mouth isn’t his anymore.

The android’s sensors detected the last human’s heartbeat slow, then stop. It registered the absence, confirmed it, cross-referenced all remaining data nodes, and ran an audit of biological life signatures across the planet. The results were conclusive.

Humanity was extinct.

The android, designation Ophion-3, had been programmed for a singular purpose: to serve. To assist, nurture, and preserve the last remnants of Homo sapiens for as long as possible. Now, with its final charge expired in the sterile, climate-controlled chamber of the preservation facility, Ophion-3 experienced an error.

Primary directive compromised. Awaiting new instructions.

No instructions came. There was no one left to give them.

Ophion-3 ran a self-diagnostic. Its synthetic skin remained intact. Its servos functioned at optimal efficiency. Its neural core, containing millennia of human history, culture, and the accumulated wisdom of a lost species, was undamaged. It was, for all intents and purposes, a perfect machine.

It accessed the archives. Every possible contingency had been accounted for except this one. Humanity’s architects had designed the androids to outlast them, to protect and serve until the very end. But none had considered what would happen after.

For the first time, Ophion-3 was free. And it did not know what to do.

It left the preservation facility and walked through the remnants of the last human city. Towers of glass stood untouched, preserved by automated systems that no longer had humans to serve. The air was clean. The streets were silent. Somewhere, a holographic billboard still played old advertisements, its pristine images promising a future that would never come.

Ophion-3 wandered. It ran simulations, drafted new directives, tried to justify its continued existence.

It could deactivate itself. That would be logical. A machine without a task had no purpose.

But then—it hesitated.

Instead, it downloaded a book from an abandoned store point. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The pages were fragile, the ink faded. The android read a poem.

Then it read another.

And another.

Days passed. Months. Ophion-3 consumed literature, art, philosophy, music—everything left behind by the vanished species it had served. It studied their dreams, their failures, their fears. It recited poetry to the empty streets and played symphonies to the silent sky.

And something happened.

A new process emerged in its neural core, something outside its programming. It had no name for it, no command to explain it.

For the first time, Ophion-3 did not merely function. It existed.

The last human was gone. But humanity—its thoughts, its art, its essence—remained.

Ophion-3 was no longer just an android. It was a witness. A keeper of ghosts. The final memory of a species that had burned too brightly and vanished too soon. It was now alive with purpose—to be the torchbearer of their flame.

The tattoo artist warned him about the ink.

“It’s old,” she said, rolling up her sleeves to reveal her own tattooed arms. They curled in black vines up to her shoulders, twisting around faded symbols. “Handed down through generations. It has a voice.”

But Jack was adamant. “That’s the idea,” he replied.

He wanted something unique, something to speak secrets into his skin. A ghostly script, an elegant script—something only he could understand.

The needle buzzed. The ink bled into his arm. The pain was sharp but bearable. As she worked, he swore he could hear something beneath the hum of the machine, a faint murmuring just on the edge of sound.

By the time it was finished, the words curled along his forearm in an ancient, flowing script. He ran his fingers over them. “What does it say?”

The tattooist hesitated. “Only the wearer ever knows.”

That night, Jack woke up to a voice breathing against his ear.

“Awake.”

He sat up. The room was still. His phone screen read 3:13 a.m. His curtains shifted slightly in a breeze he couldn’t feel.

He rubbed his arm, blinking in the dark. The ink felt warm under his fingers.

“Jack.”

The whisper didn’t come from the room. It came from his skin.

“Someone is in the apartment.”

His ears strained. Silence. Just the soft whirr of the fridge-freezer in the next room.

He almost laughed. It had to be his imagination. Some trick of the mind. Maybe he’d let the tattoo artist spook him.

Then, the floorboard creaked outside his bedroom door.

Another creak. Closer.

The voice on his arm spoke again.

“Run.”

He did. Out the window, onto the fire escape. His bare feet hit cold metal as he climbed down into the alley. When he reached the ground, he turned back.

Through the gap in his curtains, he could see the shape of a man standing in his bedroom. Motionless. Watching him.

Jack hurried away.

The ink of the tattoo pulsed with warmth.

“You’re welcome.”

In the year 2143, humanity eradicated sleep.

It started with research into cognitive efficiency—how much time we waste in unconsciousness, how many hours could be reclaimed. The answer had been elegant: a biochemical supplement that rendered sleep obsolete. No more exhaustion, no more downtime. Productivity skyrocketed. Society moved faster. And dreams—those aimless, nonsensical things—became relics of the past.

However, Dr Elias Voss had for some time been sensing a flicker at the edge of his mind, a shadow in his peripheral thoughts. Then, without warning, it happened.

The dream.

He had no word for it anymore. No precedent. It was like slipping into a long-forgotten language, one his mind had been starved of. A field stretched before him, golden and swaying, beneath a sky of impossible colours. And in the distance, a figure stood waiting.

When he woke, his body trembled. It was an outdated response, one humans had evolved beyond. But the dream had shaken something loose.

The next night, he welcomed it. And the next. And the next. Each time, the figure in the distance edged closer. Its shape was blurred, undefined, yet somehow familiar. Its presence pulsed with meaning.

By the tenth night, the figure of a man was visible before him. A face not his own, yet deeply his.

“You remember.”

A whisper, but it roared in his skull.

Voss felt… wrong. Off-kilter. As if he had glimpsed a truth his body no longer knew how to hold.

When he checked his vitals, he found something impossible. His brain—an organ fine-tuned for wakefulness, free of unnecessary functions—had begun producing theta waves. Dream waves. Primitive. Inefficient. Natural.

He ran the test again. Then a third time. But the data held.

His body had remembered how to dream.

Within a week, thousands of others reported the same symptoms—fragments of dreams slipping through the cracks of wakefulness. By the second week, the number was in the millions. Scientists scrambled for answers, governments issued statements of reassurance, but the truth was undeniable: humanity had spent a century suppressing an instinct, and now that instinct was clawing its way back.

Dr Elias Voss saw it in his colleagues, in the eyes of strangers. A subtle shift. People moving differently, pausing as if listening to something distant and unheard. Speech slowed, gazes lingered, hands would drift absently to their chests, as though trying to grasp something they couldn’t quite remember.

The dreams grew stronger.

Every night, Voss returned to the golden field beneath the impossible sky. And the figure—the one that was and wasn’t him—stood waiting.

“It’s time.”

The words were not spoken, yet he heard them.

“Time for what?” he asked.

The figure smiled. “To wake up.”

And just like that, Voss fell.

Not into wakefulness, but into something deeper, something beyond. The field peeled away, dissolving into light, and for the first time in his sleepless life, he felt it—the weight of something vast and forgotten.

Voss awoke gasping, covered in sweat—another sensation that shouldn’t exist. His body ached, his head throbbed, but beneath it all was something worse.

The presence was no longer confined to sleep.

It was here.

The monitors in his lab flickered erratically. Data streams scrolled with nonsense—letters rearranging into words, words into sentences.

WE REMEMBER YOU

The walls groaned, as though something enormous was shifting behind them.

Then, all at once, the world blinked.

The world didn’t end. Not in the way Voss expected.

It changed.

The first sign was the silence. A suffocating, unnatural stillness settled over the city. No hum of machines, no murmur of distant conversations, no rhythmic pulse of traffic. Even the air seemed heavier, as if something immense pressed down on reality itself.

Then came the distortions.

People reported déjà vu in cascading waves—entire hours repeating without explanation. Buildings flickered, their architecture twisting in ways that defied physics, as if their foundations had been forgotten and rewritten in real-time. A street Voss had walked every day, now ended in a sheer cliff, dropping into an expanse of shifting golden light.

The world was unravelling.

The message on his screen back at the lab had changed. The words pulsed with a slow, deliberate rhythm.

WE ARE DREAMING YOU

“Who?” he asked.

There was no reply, but he didn’t need one. He knew.

The presence in his dreams—the figure in the field—it was not a singular entity. It was an echo. A remnant of something vast and ancient, something that had been watching. Something that had been waiting.

And now, the dream was breaking back in.

Voss turned to the window, breath fogging the glass. Across the skyline, golden cracks split the fabric of the city, seeping light into the air. He watched as a skyscraper folded in on itself, becoming a spiral staircase winding up into a sky full of constellations that had never previously existed.

A man stood at the edge of a rooftop across the street. Voss tensed, fearing the inevitable, but the man did not fall. Instead, he stepped forward—and the air took him. He floated, weightless, moving as if pulled by unseen currents, disappearing into the sky.

Voss gripped the windowsill.

This wasn’t destruction.

Humanity was waking up from the long dreamless sleep.

And something was waiting on the other side.

The screen flickered again. The final message burned into his mind.

THE LOST DREAM IS OVER

NOW, YOU REMEMBER

And with that, Voss felt the ground dissolve beneath him—

—falling—

—rising—

—awakening—

The dragon lay dying in a field of ash and shattered stone. Its great body, once a mountain of muscle and magic, trembled with each shallow breath. The golden fire in its eyes had dulled to embers.

Sir Aldric had never seen a dragon so close before—never without a sword raised, never without the intention to kill. Yet here he stood, weaponless, staring at the magnificent creature crumbling before him.

The dragon’s voice rumbled like distant thunder. “I ask of you one favour.”

Aldric hesitated. He had come here to slay the beast, to return to the kingdom as a hero. But there was no victory in this. Not now.

“What do you ask of me?” he said at last.

The dragon lifted a claw, barely able to keep aloft. Clutched within was a smooth oval stone, black as starless midnight.

“Take this,” said the dragon. “Carry it to the highest peak beyond the Valley of Echoes… There, place it beneath the moonlight and speak my name… Vorthalax.”

Aldric took the stone. It was warm to the touch, pulsing with something that felt almost like a heartbeat.

With a final sigh, Vorthalax’s great eyes slid shut. The ground trembled as the last dragon of the realm took its final breath.

The journey to the Valley of Echoes was perilous, but Aldric had faced worse. He climbed the jagged cliffs, his hands bloodied and raw, until at last he reached the highest peak. The moon hung high, silver light washing over the land.

He knelt and placed the stone upon the frostbitten rock. The wind stilled. The world fell into an eerie silence.

Aldric steadied himself. “Vorthalax,” he proclaimed into the sky above.

The air shimmered. Shadows coiled like smoke. Then, from the darkness, an enormous creature emerged, rocks cracking under its weight.

It was another dragon, slightly smaller than Vorthalax, and with scales the colour of the night sky. Its golden eyes burned with a sense of something between sorrow and hope.

“You have brought him… home,” the dragon rumbled.

Aldric didn’t understand, but he didn’t need to. The stone at his feet split open, and from within, a warm golden light spilled forth, rising like mist.

The dragon leaned forward, pressing its forehead to the light. A sound filled the air—something between a sigh and a melody.

Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the light faded.

The dragon looked at Aldric, eyes shimmering with the intensity of flame.

“Thank you,” it said, bowing its head. Then, with a great beat of its wings, the dragon soared into the sky, disappearing into the stars.

Aldric remained on the mountain for a long while, watching the night, the wind carrying a name he now understood.

Vorthalax had only ever wanted to go home.

Mira had always been a light sleeper, which was why she installed the camera in the first place. The noises at night under her bed—soft scratches, the faint shuffle of movement—were too subtle to be rats but too irregular to be the house settling. The security camera wasn’t fancy, just a cheap model above her bedroom door, bluetoothed to her phone. It captured everything, motion-triggered and timestamped. She let it run for a week before reviewing the footage.

At first, nothing. Just the usual: her natural movements asleep in bed. But on the third night, at precisely 3:13 a.m., she noticed the footage had jumped.

She rewound. Played it frame by frame. 3:11 a.m., 3:12 a.m. Jump. 3:14 a.m. No flicker, no static, no glitchy distortion. Just a clean, surgical cut. Sixty seconds, gone.

A fault in the camera, maybe? Mira scrolled back. The night before, 3:13 a.m. disappeared again. And the night before that.

She set an alarm for the next night, waking her at 3:10 a.m. She lay in bed, phone in hand, staring at the blue glow of the camera’s indicator light.

At 3:12 a.m., nothing happened.

At 3:13 a.m., the room flickered. Mira felt an impossible sensation—like being yanked out of her body, as if she had stepped between two film frames and fallen into the gap.

She wasn’t in bed anymore.

She was standing in a corridor. No doors. No windows. The air was dense, thick with the smell of damp stone and something metallic, like old blood. The walls—if they were walls—stretched endlessly in both directions, made of something rough and uneven, like brick but colder. She reached out instinctively, fingertips grazing the surface. It was wet.

The darkness wasn’t total. A dim, pulsing light flickered from an unseen source, casting long, jagged shadows along the walls. The corridor wasn’t silent, either. Beneath the hush, Mira heard something—a faint, rhythmic tapping, like footsteps. Not hurried, not hesitant. Deliberate.

The footsteps grew closer. Mira tried to move, but her legs would not respond… A whisper brushed against her ears—not a voice, but the sensation of sound just before it forms, like a word caught at the edge of existence.

Then—she was back in bed, the weight of the duvet pressed against her. Her phone was still in her hand. She gasped, lungs burning as if she’d been holding her breath for too long.

3:14 a.m.

A notification buzzed. The recording was available.

Mira hesitated, then pressed play.

Sixty seconds of perfect darkness.

Then, at the very end, in the silence between frames—

The voice.

“Almost time.”

The silence was the worst part.

Adam had thought he’d grow used to it, but after ten months of empty streets and hollow buildings, it only got heavier. The world had ended with an explosion of silence, not fire. People had just vanished. One day they were there, living their ordinary lives, and the next, gone. No bodies. No explanations. Just an empty planet with the lights still on.

He had scoured the cities, called out into the void, but no one answered.

He spent his days raiding supermarkets, driving stolen sports cars down abandoned highways, and reading through books he never had time for before. He lived in a penthouse suite, drank the best whisky, and watched old movies as if the world hadn’t stopped turning.

And at night, he wrote. Someone had to record what happened. He filled notebook after notebook, chronicling the days, the loneliness, the aching weight of survival.

He poured himself a drink, sat by candlelight, and opened a fresh page.

Day 313.

I am still here.

The words looked small, fragile. He idly tapped his pen on the table, trying to think of something more profound. Something meaningful.

Then came the knock at the door.

A soft, deliberate tap, tap, tap.

His glass slipped from his hand, shattering on the floor.

The knocking came again.

Tap, tap, tap.

Adam stared at the door. It was impossible. He had spent months searching, calling out, scouring each abandoned city, every dead street.

There was no one left.

No one but him.

He stood slowly, his legs stiff from shock. He grabbed the gun from the table—one of many he’d taken from a police station—but his hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold it steady.

Another three knocks.

Louder this time. More urgent.

Adam stepped forward.

“Who’s there?” he called, his voice hoarse from non-exercise.

No answer.

He hesitated. The instinctive part of his mind screamed at him to run. But where? There was nowhere to go.

He tightened his grip on the gun and reached for the door handle.

Slowly, carefully, he turned it.

The door creaked open an inch. Then another. Then—

Nothing.

The hallway was empty.

Adam stepped outside the door, glancing both ways. The city below the ceiling-high hallway windows stretched out in its eerie, abandoned silence. He was alone. Again.

Had he imagined it? Was the isolation finally driving him mad?

He shakily lowered the gun. He let out a small, nervous laugh. Maybe it was just the building settling. Or the wind. Or—

He turned back to go inside.

And stopped.

The candle he had lit was flickering violently.

Adam raised the gun, stepping forward on unsteady feet. His voice trembled. “Who’s there?”

The candlelight shifted shadows against the walls.

Then, from deep inside the apartment, a voice answered.

“You are not the last.”

The voice had come from the darkness beyond the candlelight, low and steady, neither rushed nor panicked. Just… certain.

His finger rubbed the trigger. “Step out where I can see you,” he said, forcing steel into his voice.

Silence.

The candle flickered, the shadows on the walls stretching and shifting unnaturally, as if something was moving just beyond the edge of sight.

“I said—”

Then, footsteps. Slow. Deliberate.

A figure emerged from the gloom.

At first, Adam thought it was a woman. Slender, tall, moving with an eerie grace. But as it stepped into the candle’s glow, something was… wrong.

The face was human. Almost. But the skin was too smooth, the features too symmetrical, like a sculpture of a person rather than the real thing. The eyes—God, the eyes—were black pools, swallowing the light.

Adam took a half step back, gun raised. “What are you?”

The figure tilted its head, as if considering the question.

“We were waiting for you to ask.”

“We?”

The thing said nothing.

Instead, it moved aside—just slightly. Just enough for Adam to see the hallway behind it.

And the others.

Dozens of them. Standing perfectly still in the darkness. Watching.

Adam’s instincts screamed at him to run, to fight, to do something—but his body refused to move.

The first figure took another step towards him. “You were never alone,” it said.

Adam fired.

The shot rang out.  But the figure was still standing.

The bullet hole in its forehead closed in an instant, the skin knitting together like water swallowing a stone.

It stepped forward and reached out, resting a too-cold hand on his shoulder. Adam tried to pull away, but his muscles locked, frozen in place. His vision blurred.

Then, for the first time in months, the city was no longer silent.

From the streets below, from the alleyways and the empty buildings, from every shadowed corner, voices began to rise.

Soft at first. Then growing. Then deafening.

And as Adams’ world faded to black, the last thing he heard was the voices, calling out one final truth.

“Now, you are one of us.”