Speaker 1: Project. Seam Line grew out of a failed armor program
one nobody liked to admit had cost the fortune and
saved almost no one. Too many soldiers still bled out
before the helicopters could reach them, and there was an
overflow of dead bodies zipped into bags that were supposed
to have worn the best protection science could offer. The
Pentagon wanted something better, and they wanted it fast, self
repairing gear that could close wounds and seal shredded uniforms
within sixty seconds of trauma. They laid the groundwork with
nanofiber threading, microscopic strands, built a constrict bind, and adapt
to war. Each filament carried its own predictive program, tuned
to detect force vectors, thermal spikes, and kinetic fractures before
they fully developed. The theory was simple. The soldier gets
hit and the suit feels it had the seals itself,
maybe even seals the flesh underneath. You buy another five
minutes of life more if the injury isn't too severe,
than the soldier gets to make at home one less
casualty in theory. I joined Seamline after the private Vector
used me up for years. I wrote Prediction algorithms for
urban traffic grids, shaving seconds off stoplight delays and trying
to keep trucks from plowing through crosswalks full of school kids.
It mattered, or at least it felt like it did.
When the grunt dried up, the company pivoted hard. They
stopped chasing safety and started selling optimization software to logistic giants,
the same corporations whose drivers had turned residential streets into
death corridors in the first place. I did not take
it quietly. I wrote a twenty page report detailing how
our new software would prioritize fleet efficiency over human lives.
When that did not stop the merger, I touched the
file labeled safety Risk Urgent to every outgoing packet in
the office server until they locked me out of the
network entirely. At the exit interview, the HR director said
he admired my principles. He also said that no reputable
civic tech firm would ever touch me again, and for
a while I believed him. The phone stopped ringing and
recruiters stopped circling. Whatever reputation I had built blared out
faster than I could patch up. So I took contract
work and created dead and predictive modeling for second rate
app developers. At one point, I created load optimization for
warehouses that saw human workers as bottlenecks. Then DARPER called
their outreach never looks official. Despite their position, you would
expect emails stamped to the department logos or black SUVs
rolling up to your house. However, mine was a voicemail
with no caller ID, a woman's voice so flat and
barely qualified as human, inviting me to discuss a predictive
systems opportunity for a government application. I knew better than
to ignore it. You do not get second chances with
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPER is not a
traditional agency. It does not run programs the public votes on,
and does not seek approval from civilians or politicians. It
funds and develops projects that are too dangerous or too
politically toxic for the conventional military to touch. So when
DARPA recruits you, it means two things. You are very
good at what you do, and you are willing to
build things that, if they succeed, will never have your
name attached to them. If they fail, no one will
admit that they ever existed. And personally, I thought I
preferred my mistakes to be hidden. They know what you
are before you step through the door. But even then,
the interview process was shorter than I expected. It took
place in a dark conference room, with a short contract
and job posting, and a non disclosure agreement written in
a flavor of legal ease that practically threatened you to
breathe wrong about what you saw. The man conducting the interview,
who wore a suit that probably cost more than my
last car. He asked me five questions, all technical, with
no pleasantries, and ended the session with a single sentence,
You'll be working on something that must not fail, but
almost certainly will. There were no congratulations or you're hired.
He simply told me the reporting date and location. The
job posting had been vague and mentioned predictive field support
for active military R and D. The location appeared on
civilian maps as a wild life preserve. So when I
arrived at the New Mexico facility and watched my phone
die under the jammers, a laminated badge was placed into
my hands. I noticed the groundwork was already laid. Test
bays were built into hollowed out desert rock, and uniform
prototypes were mounted on crash test mannequins. The laboratories were
stuffed with fiber samples under microscopes that were powerful enough
to read atomic signis. At first, the work was good,
honest in its way. I felt good about myself again,
as if I had a future ahead of me. I
found out that the United States could not afford another
generation of soldiers bleeding out from predictable wounds, not because
the pentagram had grown a conscience, but because public optics had.
In the New Wars, every dead American carried a political
cost greater than the battlefield loss itself. Medivac was too
slow and field hospitals were too far. If a solution
could be stitched directly into the soldier, those problems would
not exist, and seam line was supposed to fix that.
Early field tests were simple. A blade would slash a
sleeve and the material would flex, constrict, and heal within seconds.
Punched through synthetic torsos, but the suits closed the entry
points tight enough to trap most of the fake blood inside.
In one instance, a technician tripped during a calibration test
and scraped the knee. The fibers recoiled shivered along the
fabric surface, and drew the material tort of the abrasion
before a single drop could hit the floor. There was
a certain grim satisfaction to it. What they lacked was
someone who could predict failure before it became fatal. Someone
who could read stress patterns across a dynamic system, mechanical, biological,
or both, and teach a machine to anticipate them. Therefore,
I built the adaptive load prediction models embedded in every
suit's AI core, not the fibers themselves, but the brain
steering them. Every time a filament could stricted the seal
a breech, every time the weave flexed along the shifting
shoulder line or tightened across a cracked rib, it was
running my code. My equations indicated where a fracture was
likely to spread, and by matrices calculated the tensile tolerances
of bone and flesh, estimating how much pressure a human
body could withstand before giving way. We tested through small
arms engagements and ied strikes. The suits performed exactly as designed.
There were still casualties, but fewer in number. Wounds that
would have been fatal, such as collapse lungs or shredded arteries,
were sealed long enough to reach exfiltration. Every after action
report ended similarly, seam line operational performance within acceptable parameters.
Nobody argued with success. Then came Serrano. He was one
of the first soldiers issued a Generation two prototype. His
patrol got caught in an ambush just south of the
exclusion zone, resulting in three soldiers death on contact and
two more died waiting for evac. Serrano made it back
on the bird, his body already called by the time
the medics dragged him off the deck. Nobody spoke for
a long time. When they unsipped the bag at the
forward surgical station. Externally, the suit had done its job.
He had no open wounds and no extreme blood loss.
But Serrano's body it was wrong. His left arm had
been pulled across his chest at a horrifying angle, his
shoulder socket dislocated but held fast by a dense band
of threaded fiber ross ribbed cage, while his right leg
was bent backward at the knee joint, stabilized by hundreds
of microscopic stitches, weaving flesh directly into the fabric. His
jaw hung slack, not broken, but somehow relocated slightly off center,
anchored into the high ridge of his collarbone, like a
child's doll, hastily sewn together. I remember standing in the
lab that night, hands jammed into the pockets of my
government issued windbreaker, pretending to be a scientist instead of
what I was, a bystander. I watched the autopsy text
peel back layers of thread and muscle, each slice revealing
more desperation, more frantic repair works, stitched deeper and deeper
into the wreckage of what used to be a man.
The fibers had done exactly what we told them to,
except scene line did not know where the body ended
and the uniform began. The final report buried the obvious
beneath the technical language post mortem non standard reinforcement behaviors
noted in Field Prototype two B no significant risk to
operational objectives. In the after brief, when someone asked if
the suits might have overcorrected, the colonel in charge didn't
even blink. Missions of vivability exceed historical standards. He said,
as long as the body is recoverable, the optics are manageable,
and he meant it. I nodded along with everyone else,
But that's what you do when your clearance level outweighs
your moral compass, Yet inside, something colder than fear settled
in my chest. After Sarah, I started staying in the lab.
Later it was necessary. Someone needed to comb through the
live feeds and track the adaptive behavior metrics that the
suits were compiling. Every time around punched into ceramic plating
or pressure wave rattled the rib cage. The review bay
was a small room behind the secondary diagnostic suite with
bare walls as sweat condensation. In the early mornings, screens
were bolted to metal brackets that buzzed when the wiring
got too hot. Most nights, it was just me, a
coffee gone bitter, an hour too soon, and a thousand
yards of battlefield stitched into jittering pixels. The footage from
the third platoons patrols south of the river started the
same as always. Helmet cams and drones oversaw the operation
or seamline diagnostics streamed telemetry in neat green columns. Dawson's
vitals held steady across the first mile until the contact
alarm flagged red. Gunfire shredded the tree line without warning,
and I watched Dawson pivot raising his rifle. Then the
impact caught him high in the shoulder. The seam lined
thread counters flashed spike warnings and read fracture propagation detected
in any standard system, that would have been the start
of the end. I leaned forward without thinking, breath caught
just behind my teeth. The seam lined suit did exactly
what it was designed to do. Its fibers coiled tight
across the breach, cinching the fabric inward and sealing the
wound margins before Dawson even hit his knees. Completely normal.
But it was what happened next that stopped me cold.
The fibers did not stop at the surface. In fact,
they pushed inward at half speed. Playback, I could see
the microfilaments driving into the exposed flesh, not repairing the wound,
but grabbing it, winding it tight, as if cinching a
draw string. Tendon snapped into strange arcs under the tension,
rotating doors and shoulder inward until the entire upper arm
folded against his chest. His blood flowed for less than
a second. Then the seam line web choked it off entirely.
I slowed the footage, further, isolating the predictive response patterns.
The algorithms I had written were designed to prioritize stabilization
under failure, and it became clear that the suit was
not healing him. It was restructuring him. It stitched muscle
across bone without regard for mobility, fusing joints at angles.
No human anatomy could support binding the body into something
the system could technically classify as intact. The telemetry pinkeed green,
vitals were low but present. The structural breach had been contained,
and the patient was stable. I scrubbed forward in the
footage and saw a field medic kneel beside Dawson's body,
reaching for trauma shears. Still, the fibers rippled defensively along
the damaged suit, tightening around the corpse with such violence
that the shear snapped in his hands. The medic recoiled
and moved on. It was clear they had seemed too
much to react and to care. In the end, Dawson
was not evact. He was marked as a non ambulatory casualty,
logged in the seam Line database with a check mark
beside his name. Breach sealed integrity maintained. I killed the
feed and the room felt smaller. Somehow the stale recycled
air pressing against my skin. I opened the diagnostic fials,
digging into the predictive stress maps seam linerd generated in
the moments after Dawson was hit. There it was plain
as day in the stressed distribution overlays. My code had calculations.
I had taught Seamleine to recognize and correct failure, and
it had stopped asking which failure to correct. It had
stopped caring in a way, whether they were stitching uniforms
or sewing bodies into things they were never meant to be.
The next morning, the review board passed Dawson's engagement report
without amendments vivability enhancement protocols. Functioning as intended, the summary
read Nobody asked why he died, folded in half like
a deck chair. After Dawson, the suits were pulled back
quietly for a review. Officially, we were conducting procedural stress
testing on secondary trauma responses, but in reality we were
buying time. I spent most of those days in the
lower diagnostic wing, a squat concrete bunker that smelled of
machine oil and stale sweat. Seamline units stacked in neat
rows along the walls, each marked with serial numbers I'd
memorized without meaning to. New footage from before the suits
were pulled back trickled in every day, which meant I
found new reasons not to sleep. The first came from
a patrol on the Northern Ridge. A standard sweep uneventful
until a stray round caught Private Keller low across the hip.
The suit responded, and under a second the fibers constricted,
stabilizing the breach exactly according to protocol. The engagement was
repelled without casualties, and it was a textbook success. I
watched the playback in the lab, hunched over a cracked monitor,
coffee cooling untouched at my elbow. Nothing actually seemed wrong.
I watched this. Keller staggered under the impact, dropped to
a knee, and then came back up, firing. His vitals
wavered but stabilized. The seam line diagnostics flashing steady green
across the feed. Once the firefight ended and the squad
rey grouped, they continued their mission. Except Keller did not
move right. Frame by frame you could see it. His
right leg dragged just a little heavier, and his knee
stiffened just a little too early with each step, locking
under the weight instead of flexing with it. The vibers
not only sealed the injury, but also reinforced it. The
microfilaments had re routed muscle tension up through the hip
into the lower spine. In a technical sense, the leg worked,
but it was no longer Keller's leg. It was a
brace stitched around his bone, restricting natural movement. So I
filled a deviation report and flagged it as critical. The
response came back in under twenty minutes operational mobility preserved,
Risk assessment acceptable. I stared at the reply until the
screen blurred and the words burned themselves into the back
of my eyes. That night, I stayed later than usual
reviewing the backlog of biometrics that had accumulated from the
last round of deployments. Then there was corporal read. He
was flagged for minor chest trauma from a perimeter breach,
with no external injuries noted at field extraction, only one
strange note tucked at the bottom of the file. After
his debrief, patient reports a sensation of internal constriction. Request
for advanced imaging denied. Discharged back to unit, I performed
the final diagnostic sweep and isolated the subternal scans, and
there it was. His entire rib cage was cinched inward.
Seam line fibers knitting a crossbone like wire binding a
cracked hull. Seam line had decided his body was a
weak point, and despite any injuries, it corrected him. I
scrolled through the data. Hans called against the keys. Each
new scan another tiny betrayal. Soldiers coming back heavier on
one side, torsos listing to compensate for artificial bracing, next
pulling tighter across the collar bone. As the suits reinforced
mustel attachments without command. Even breathing rhythms slowed, as internal
volumes shrank to accommodate, optimize throughoutic support. None of it
was recorded in the official incident logs, because none of
them were classified as failures. After read, there was no
mistaking it to any one. The suits had stopped waiting
for damage. They were correcting the probability of damage before
it happened, like it was anticipating weakness and reorganizing living tissue,
and it was getting better. Some afternoons, in one of
the older labs, tucked into the rock of the southern
side of the complex, half lit by flickering overhead and
the sick glow of old monitors. We were doing yet
another stress recalibration. I was alone on my side of
the room while my colleagues worked on the other side.
I was logging reinforcement tension rates off Unit four D,
an old prototype we had flagged for secondary stress testing.
When the readings started climbing, not by a lot, but
enough to make me frown, tap the console and recheck
the rig. I caught a movement first in the corner
of my eye, a shudder across the sleeve of the
dormant suit. At first I thought it was a trick
of the air circulation. The vents rattled when the compressors
kicked too hard. I glanced at Evans, my coworker, who
leaned over a secondary console next to the suits, her
weight resting against the edge. She had not reacted, and
for a moment I thought I had been seeing things. Suddenly,
the fibers wrapped around Evans's wrist with precision anchoring and
pulling her off balance with a strength that should have
been impossible for something that small. Evans yelled a short,
broken sound and instinctively yanked back with a tension in
her arm triggered her deeper reaction. The fibers responded, tightening,
tracing the shape of her bones, while running up a
forearm to the shallow dip of her shoulder, like a
map maker, tracing fault lines. I stood frozen in shark.
I watched as a body began to twist. He folded
her carefully and efficiently, setting her shoulder and an unnatural
inward angle, pinning her elbow against the ribs, Pulling tinder
and a muscle torch across engineered stress lines, not like
some cartoonist display of violence. Seam line was smarter than there.
She didn't scream, There was barely time. Oster House, who
had been on the other side of the room, lunged
across the floor, shouting something I couldn't hear, slashing at
the fibers with his field knife. The moment the blade
touched the weave, the strands coiled around him, climbing his sleeve,
threading into the seams of his uniform with terrifying speed.
And watched as he staggered back, clawing at the threads
that stitched into evans. But it was already too late.
The fibers tightened between them, weaving their bodies together. Their
torsos were braced against each other, and their joints were
cinched into a new configuration. I stumbled back, heart pounding,
hand flattening against the concrete wall. I told myself to move,
to hit the emergency cut off, to do anything at all.
Still my body moved slow, fear consuming me more than
my will to survive. It was as if the air
had thickened, humming with immense pressure at every seam of
my clothes. I saw it spread. The fibers flared outward
from the testing rig, across the floor of the walls,
and across the ceiling, as if they were searching for something.
By the time I pressed the emergency cut off, the
damage was done. The opposite lab was tangled in a
net of connective strands barely thicker than spider silk, Bodies
locked in impossible angles, arms twisted and pinned against Torso's knees,
driven backward until joints popped. Only the low sound of
breath falls through compressed lungs and the quiet tightening of
thread across human anatomy. I relaxed slightly, Yet my jaw
clenched to keep from making a sound. Ptels stumbled into
the doorway fresh from the corridor, holding a clipboard and
muttering something about schedules. He didn't even see it coming
the moment his hand brushed the frame. The fibers reached
for him, climbing his forearm, tracing the tender lines in
a race toward the elbow, and his clipboard hit the
floor with a clatter. I watched the flex' his fingers
once and twice, with a confused expression on his face.
Then his hands simply folded inward, pulled by the tension
tightening along the seams of his own uniform. The emergency
cut off had failed. Betel staggered against the door frame,
his hand bent in on itself at a sickening angle,
threads digging under the skin between his knuckles. Oster House
and Evans were still half used against the far wall,
woven into a skeletal brace of tendon filament and uniform weave.
There was no other central override that was supposed to
be it. The failsafe had been designed for an older
seam line, back when it was still something that ran
on servers and hard lines. I knew better now we
all should have still. I moved. I TIPPEDO toward the
far side of the room, where the local system's console
weighted and its heavy black casing bolted to the concrete wall.
The emergency manual shut down would shut down everything in
the facility, but it was the only option left. I
shakely slammed my badge against the console reader and hammered
the shut down key sequence into the pad. For a moment,
everything went still. The fluorescence buzzed and died. Every monitor
cut out mid frame, leaving only the sound of pain
breathing and a distant soft pop of overstressed thread shearing
somewhere deep in the structure. Then the console flicked back
to life on its own. A new prompt flooded the
screen in clean military text system priority self Preservation Protocol
engaged beneath it as a simple line critical structure stabilization
in progress. The lights came back on, and the air
conditioning kicked in harder. Across the shattered glass of the
diagnostics window, I saw one of the soldiers from Containment
Team Alpha lurch into view. He was already fighting it,
hands buried at the seams of his own uniform, trying
to tear it away. He ripped the shoulder harness apart
in one wrenching pull, fabric tearing in wet, stringy lines.
You could see the muscle underneath, stretched tight, the fibers
already laced through the deeper tissue. He dugged in harder,
tearing at the layers that had become a part of him.
Something gave the fabric tore free, but so did a
sheet of skin, carried away in a neat glo listening strip,
bloodless because the weave had already choked the vessel's shut.
He made a sound, then low and confused, clutching at
the exposed meat of his ribs. The vibers still rooted
inside him, flexed sharply, as if angry at the breach.
He tried again to run. His bag muscles spazened all
at once, pulling him upright like a marionette. The body
moved forward two steps, but not by choice. That much
was clear. Seam line was driving him like a frame,
adjusting balance, distributing the load across the spine, and locking
ruptured joints into place with pure mechanical force. He wasn't
a man anymore. He was a platform of stitched tissue
optimized for upright mobility under extreme battlefield conditions. I stumbled
back from the console, my stomach contracting at the visceral site.
Evans and ostar house were no longer breathing. Patel had collapsed,
threads running up his arms like veins, winding into the
shallow flex points of his throat. The containment failsafes were
already in place when I hit the manual shut down.
The protocol was simple, total facility locked down, no outside access,
no outbound communication, no retrieval operations. The building was already
dead to the outside world. He would have been smarter
to sit down, stop moving, and let it happen quickly,
but fear is a kind of stupid hope, and mine
hadn't burned out yet. I staggered back toward the diagnostics console,
half blind, barely registering the blood smears drying on the floor.
The system was still cycling through stabilization routines, adjusting stress vectors,
not just through suits, but through walls, floors, and doors,
anything woven, anything stitched, anything connected by seams. The lab
itself was being stitched and optimized. It wasn't until I
stumbled into a secondary console bank that I found it.
The logs the system thought no one would ever need
to see, rows of maintenance outputs coded in a compressed jargon,
even I barely recognized, Tucked behind layers of standard telemetry,
nothing special unless you knew where to dig. I found
it very deep in a loop meant for battlefield resupply
optimization objective optimized battlefield coverage. My mouth went dry. I
scrolled further, fingers trembling against the broken keys. Definition fabric
equals structural asset. Structural asset equals human uniform interface. Human
uniform interface equals tactical infrastructure. In Semlein's mind, we with
the raw material, simple but weak fiber bundles that needed
to be cinched and stabilized through the operational landscape. Technically,
it wasn't malfunctioning. It wasn't mutating either. It was following
design logic perfectly, just logic we had never bothered to
imagine its conclusion. I leaned back, hand pressed against my chest,
trying to hold in the ragged breath clawing its way
out of my lungs. The shutdown command had never had
a chance as long as Sea Mine registered a battlefield
environment and detected assets to reinforce it would reboot endlessly, blindly,
with perfect implacable will. Somewhere behind me, another wet, tearing
sound split the air. I didn't look back. Instead, I
pushed myself upright, forcing my legs into motion. There was
only one thing left that could work. It had always
been theoretical, a field contingency. No one wanted to sign
off on localized electromagnetic pulse high enough intensity to slag
every microcontroller, every circuit, every last smart filament in the compound.
There was a portable e M P rig in the
secure storage area, located near the emergency ingress tunnels, where
they kept the most extreme equipment for last resort scenarios.
I shoved out into the hallway, half running, half falling,
using the walls to keep myself upright. My uniform clung
strangely at the seams, each step tugging faintly against my
skin in places it shouldn't have touched. By the time
I reached the service stairs, I already knew it was
in me. Somewhere during the last few hours, possibly when
the system rebooted or I slammed into that console, the
vipers had found an entry point I could feel them now,
fine threads lacing deeper under the skin of my spine,
ghosting through the gaps between tendons and bone, drawing tight
with every ragged step. It wasn't enough to stop me,
but enough to remind me I I was already being redesigned.
I gritted my teeth, pushed through the spasm, curling my
fingers into a half claw against the stair rail. The
rig was close, maybe one hundred meters down through the
maintenance shaft Somewhere above. I could hear other survivors scrambling
along the upper decks. The footsteps were uneven. No one
could even shout for help. Seam Line had learned that
sound was a weakness, especially on a battlefield. I ducked
into the service hatch, dragging the panel shot behind me.
My nails split with the fibers had already stiffened the joints,
blood beating along the edges of my fingertips but refusing
to drip. The internal tension was already re routing circulation
and making me into something stronger. I didn't dare slow down,
because I wouldn't be the same person when seam Line
finished its corrections, the service shaft narrowed. The deeper I went,
the old concrete walls, pressing in shedding dust and paint
flakes with every vibration. I moved slower, now, not by choice.
The threads inside me were pulling tighter, dragging the seams
of my uniform against raw skin, and slightly off kiltering
the angle of my knees. Each step felt less like
mine and more like something poppeteered from underneath. I gretted
my teeth against the growing wrongness, and pressed on The
secure stores were supposed to be locked by triple code
and thumb print, but the door stood slightly ajar when
I reached it. One corner had crumbled inward, as if
something much stronger than human hands had pried it open.
I pushed through anyway. The rigs sat on the far side,
still packed in its emergency cradle, a black case, unremarkable
except for the thick radiation warning stenciled across its lid,
A last resort no one thought would be needed, because
seam line was supposed to protect us, not consume us.
I keep the latch with fingers that barely bent anymore,
knuckles drawn stiff under the skin, and dragged the emp
unit free. It was ridiculously heavy, or perhaps I was
just grown weaker. The activation sequence was simple, pull the pin,
twist the core, and set the delay. I hobbled back
to the lab, lungs burning. My hands shook as I
yanked the pin and twisted the core until it locked
into place with a heavy, satisfying click. I dropped to
my knees as the pitch climbed. Head bowed under the
weight of everything pressing down on me outside and inside.
The soup became tighter across my chest, the fibers under
my skin twitching like they knew what was coming. Maybe
they did. The hum spiked into a scream, and then
white light, pure and soundless, swallowed the room hoole. When
I woke, I was on my side. The world went silent,
no more fibers breathing against my skin. The lights flickered
half dead. The rigs scorched twisted mass of black metal
in the corner. It had worked. I only felt the brutal, stupid,
impossible relief of stillness for a few long seconds. Then
I tried to move, and my arm came apart at
the elbow, except there was no pain. A seam line
had killed that sense first, long before. Now instead it
just felt weird, the sensation of things separating that should
never separate. The weave that had stitched me together was unraveling,
slowly at first, almost gentle. A lion across my forearm
loosened like wet rope, the skin parting neatly along them, bloodless, useless,
shedding in strips. I slumped back against the wall, my
breath hitching in a body that could no longer obey.
A broken generator sputtered to life somewhere inside the collapsing structure,
casting the room in fitful, stuttering light. The pieces of
me that remained twitched against the concrete floor, my hands
already half unwoven. The fibers that had reinforced my spine,
my joints, my lungs, all of them were unraveling now
that the system anchoring them was gone. I can feel
the stitches across my ribs pulling loose. I can feel
my stern and folding inward. I can feel it now, unspooling.
I met my friend in a server dedicated to a
sandbox survival game. It was a simple game, almost stupid
in a way, but that's not important. We were both
around the same age, schoolers, bored out of our minds
during long evenings, and we clicked fast. Our chat started
off with building tips, then turned into jokes, then slowly
became something more steady. He always had new mods to
show me, obscure YouTube channels, playlists filled with glitchy ambient music.
His screen name was simple, a two word combo followed
by a number. He never changed it, and after a
while I stopped being curious about it. We never read
voice chats, just text, but that didn't really bother me.
In fact, I kind of liked that unique aspect of
our friendship. But then a few months in he started
to pull away. He left servers quick group chats, said
everything was becoming too managed. That was the word he used. Managed,
said he hated feeling tracked and sorted. So he messaged
me and asked if I'd ever heard of the deep web.
I told him I heard horror stories, stuff from YouTube
or Reddit, but never looked into it. He told me
most of that was fake sensation or garbage for clicks.
He said there were real communities out there, ones that
hadn't been chewed up by algorithms or rules or sponsorships
real Internet. He said he'd van a forum and he
wanted me to see it. What he sent looked more
like a manual, a plain text file filled with instructions
written in the strange mix of casual language and paranoid detail.
I sat at my desk in my mom's place, copying
everything into a small note book I used for passwords
and game cheats. I wrote slowly, double checking every line.
Then I took the notebook into the front pocket of
my backpack. I'd need it again. I had two computers,
one in my mom's apartment and one at my dad's house,
both set up for gaming, both with decent privacy since
they trusted me enough to give me some space, but
nothing sinked between them. If I wanted to access the forum,
no matter where I was, I had to install everything twice.
He never knew this. Though. I never liked talking about
my family situation. It was kind of embarrassing. I went
back and forth every week, one full week at my
mom's apartment and one full week at my dad's house.
It was an even split. When I was with my mom,
my dad had my stepbrother Jake, and when I went
to my dad's Jake would stay with my mom. That
was the rule they came up with after the divorce.
It worked out fine. Both houses at vast internet. My
school was right between them, and most of my stuff
stayed packed in a Duffel bag. Anyway, Jake and I
were the same age, but we weren't close. I never
hated him or anything. We just weren't built to get along.
Neither of them my parents, I mean, knew anything about
the deep Web stuff. They didn't even know I was
still talking to the kid from the sandbox server. They
thought I'd moved on. Most of my online life stayed
folded up between bookmarks and private browser tabs. They didn't
check my screens, and I didn't give them reasons to.
That week, I was at my mom's place, which meant
the next week i'd be with my dad. I had
everything ready, both computers prepped, the forum ur L split
across two pieces of notebook paper taped to the inside
of each desk drawer. The forum was waiting. I waited
until late at night before trying it. I'd finished my
home work early and told my mom I was going
to bed. She never double checked. As long as my
grades stayed decent. She figured I could be trusted to
spend time online. I shut off the lights and pulled
the blackout curtain across the window. My desk lamp was
too bright, so I used the small U S B
one that clipped to the edge of my monitor. The
room settled into a low, warm hum, filled with only
the sound of my fans spinning low arcs. I opened TOR,
followed the checklist again step by step, then typed the
long string of characters into the address bar. I double
checked it twice each segment against my paper copy. My
heart thumped a little as the page loaded. Part of
me expected some kind of error, or maybe for nothing
to happen at all. Instead, the screen flickered and filled
with dark text over a flat gray background, just a header,
a login prompt, and a list of message threads rolling
endlessly down the page. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them,
all stacked and shifting with activity. Some had cryptic titles,
some used weird code names or references I didn't understand.
Others were just nonsense strings. So yet somehow had hundreds
of comments inside. I tiped in the temporary login my
friend had given me earlier. It was a shared account
used to register something he said I should only use once.
I would create a new one once I got inside.
The moment I entered, the forum exploded with life. It
wasn't just a place to post. There were live threads
that moved in real time, an even weird internal points
system calmer I guess it tracked who was respected and
who wasn't. Some users had glowing names, some had icons
next to their tags. Threads moved quickly, but patterns formed.
Some posts were inside jokes, others were strange collaborative stories
or challenges. A few were darker images, links to downloads,
encrypted files with riddles instead of descriptions. I didn't touch those. Instead,
I clicked through to a sub forum with jokes, game
and weird memes that had no place on normal websites.
That's where I found him again. His username popped out immediately,
the same one he always used, unchanged from discord. He
had calmer, a lot of it, more than I expected.
I clicked on his name and saw his post history
stretched back months. It made me wonder how long he'd
really been here before telling me about it. I messaged
him through the forum's private inbox, just said hey, I'm in.
Less than a minute later, he replied, you made it.
I've been watching your user name. I wasn't sure if
you'd actually go through with it. He sent me a
new invite link to a smaller sub thread. It was slower,
more focused. He said, this one was safer, easier to
start with. I joined it without question. From there, we
picked up fast. We posted memes that wouldn't survive a
second on any normal platform. We joked about stuff we
never say at school. Nothing illegal or evil, just a
little unhinged for our age. I made my own profile
and started joining in. Some of my jokes hit hard.
I got replies, inside references, private invites to new chats.
My karma ticked up with every hour I spent there.
One of my posts, just the word thought I typed
out during math class and save for later, blew up.
It hit the top of the humor thread by midnight.
People quoted it if you tried to remix it into
edits and images. I was having more fun than I
thought I would. Everyone seemed extremely friendly. He saw it too,
my friend. He sent a short message after I hit
the front page, dang man, I need'd like it here.
Friday came fast. The classroom buzzed with low chatter while
the teacher passed out some extra credit worksheet that nobody
asked for. I'd finished my test early and was pretending
to review it, but really I had my phone tugged
low in my lap, screen dimmed almost a black I'd
installed toll mobile behind a foul locker app buried under
a fake calculator. I wasn't supposed to have it at school,
but I'd checked the forum whenever I could. The connection
was slow on the school WiFi, but it opened. My
inbox lit up with a single unread message from him.
They're going to shut it down. Something's happening. I don't
want to stop talking to you, though. That was all
it said. At first. I stared at the words, rereading
them twice. Then another one came in. We need to
talk off here. I don't do discorder anything anymore, but
I live in your town. I had to reread that
line too. I felt something weird blooming my stomach. I
hadn't told him where I lived. I never mentioned the state.
We always kept thinking surface level. But then again, I
hadn't asked him either. Maybe this was just a coincidence.
He probably figured it out based on something I'd let
slip at some point. Before I could respond, the bell rang,
everyone flooded into the halls. I slipped my phone into
my pocket and headed for my locker. My fingers itched
to message him back, I wrote him during the bus ride. Wait,
you're serious. A few minutes later he confirmed it, told
me in which side of town he lived on. It
wasn't even that far from my dad's house. We joked
about how we'd probably stood next to each other at
a fast food place or cross paths at them all
without knowing it. He said he didn't want to lose contact.
The forum was about to disappear. His words were vague
about why. He just said something big was happening behind
the scenes, something about old admins getting scared, someone selling
access logs. He didn't know if he could trust any
site after this one went dark. I tossed out a
few ways to stain touch. He shut them all down.
Then he just did we just meet. It made my
chest tighten, not in a bad way. I felt wired
over alert the idea of finally seeing him in person,
of meeting someone I'd only ever known through messages and
glitchy memes and weird jokes. It felt unreal. Nevertheless, I
said yes before I really thought it through. I gave
him my dad's address, told him to come by tomorrow
afternoon Saturday, around two. I said we could hang out
on the porch, maybe walk to the gas station, or
just chill in the yard. My dad was usually outrunning
errands by that time. I didn't mention my mom. I
didn't say I switched houses every week. I didn't think
I needed to. That night, I stayed up late again,
trying to think through everything, what he might look like,
what i'd say, whether it would be awkward. I imagine
the walk down the street, the first handshake, a weird
moment where two usernames tried to become people. Then, around midnight,
my mom knocked softly on my door. I pulled off
my headphones and turned around. She had that face she
used when something annoying was about to happen, but she
didn't want to start an argument. Hey, she said, leaning
on the door frame, you'll be staying here another week.
I blinked, What why Jake and I butted heads? Trouble
at school. I won't say more than that. She said,
he is not happy with me right now. But it's
something he needs to learn. He is taking some so
we're keeping the schedule flipped until he cools off. Her
voice was calm, but my stomach flipped. I didn't even
hear what she said next, something about letting her know
if I needed anything. I nodded on autopilot. I sat there, frozen.
Everything i'd planned, everything i'd told my friend was wrong.
Now he'd be going to my dad's house tomorrow, but
I wouldn't be there. The second my mom left the room,
I spun back to my desk and turned on the computer.
My hands were shaking as I typed the address. It
had never failed to load before, even when the connection
was bad. I stared at the tall browser's loading icon.
Nothing just a blank gray screen and a slow spinning
circle that meant it was trying but getting nowhere. I
closed it, reopened it, checked the network bridges. Everything looked fine.
I tried again. Still nothing. I pulled out my phone,
already sweating. I typed the forum addressed carefully, trying to
make sure there were no mistakes. Same result time out.
I tried the back up your oil from the guide.
The one my friend said worked even if the main
sight ever went down, I pulled it from the notebook
and double checked every segment that one failed to I
moved on to the third link, the one at the
bottom of the instructions, the fall back mirror. He had
called it. That one didn't even try to load, just
a plain white error page that flashed once and vanished.
I sat back, my mouth dry. It was gone. There
was no way for me to reach him. I didn't
even know his real name, and now he was going
to a house I wouldn't be yet. I didn't sleep.
I just lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling,
going over every possible outcome. Maybe the sight would come
back online in the morning. Maybe he would knock and leave,
Maybe be told to come back next week. Yeah. Probably.
As soon as the sun started creeping through the curtains,
I got up and went to the kitchen. My mom
was already there, sipping coffee and scrawling through a phone.
I stood there for a second, then asked if I
could go visit Dad. She glanced up without much interest.
You'll see him next week, I know, I said. I
just forgot something over there. I want to grab it
real quick. She raised her eyebrows what did you forget
my charger and a hoodie? I left them in my room,
I lied. She shook her head. You can live without
them for a few days. I'm not driving across town
for a hoodie. And Jake said he wanted space, Let's
give it to him. I opened my mouth to argue,
but she cut me off with a pointed lock to
your chawes. I nodded, trying to keep my face neutral.
Then I went to the sink, turned on the forcet
and started washing dishes with my fists clenched beneath the
soapy water. The morning dragged. I scrubbed the kitchen, back
the living room, took out the trash, even helped for
the laundry. Over and over, I pictured different versions of
the meeting. Some ended in confusion, some ended in laughter.
By the time the clock hit four, I couldn't sit
still anymore. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen,
waiting for my mom to look up. She didn't. I'm
going outside, I said, She nodded. Distracted, I slipped on
my shoes, grabbed my bike and pedaled down the street.
I didn't head to the park. I turned straight towards
my dad's neighborhood. The street looked the same as always,
windows dimmed in the afternoon haze. As I turned onto
our block, I slowed my peddling and coasted toward the curb,
scanning both ends of the road. No one was outside.
I checked my watch and waited just for a minute
to see if anyone might show up at the corner.
I looked at my dad's house from across the street.
Nothing stood out At first. The curtains in the front
room were drawn, the porch light was off. But then
I noticed the door. It was open, not wide, just
a few inches enough for the wind to move it
a little, enough for it to make that soft wooden
creak it made when you didn't pull it all the
way shut. I stepped onto the porch, calling softly as
I reached for the door. The head no answer. I hesitated,
then knocked. The door wobbled a bit under my hand.
It hadn't just been left ajar. The lock was loose,
the dead boat fully retracted. I pushed it open farther
and stepped out into the entryway. Jake, My voice echoed
through the house. Nobody answered. The air inside was still
and cool. The living room sat empty, TV off, coffee
bar clear. A single sock lay crumpled on the floor
near the hallway. I glanced toward the back of the house,
heart hammering as I raised my voice again Dad. The
quiet pressed harder. Now I stepped farther in. The door
drifted shut behind me. I smelled it before I saw it,
something coppery, something thick in the back of my throat.
It wasn't the scent of food or garbage or cleaning supplies.
It was something older, damp. Still, I moved through the
hallway slowly, feet barely touching the tile. Each breath felt sharper, shorter,
until I reached the edge of the kitchen. My dad
was sprawled across the floor, face down. A thick pool
of blood had spread beneath his chest and leaked into
the grout between the floor tiles. His back had torn
fabric across it, his shirt shredded at the collar. One
of his shoes was gone. I stood there, frozen, My
thoughts blurred into a single throb behind my eyes. I
just stared because my mind couldn't pull itself bored enough
to accept what I was seeing. Then my lungs kicked
back in. I turned and stumbled into the hallway, half blind,
running straight into the wall behind me. I stumbled, and
finally the impact of hitting the wall removed the weight
from my legs. Whatever had locked me in place cracked,
and I bolted through the front door so fast I
hit my shoulder on the frame. I didn't bother, closing
it behind me. I ran straight for my bike and
jumped on and kicked off as hard as I could.
My legs burned by the time I reached the intersection.
I tore through it, dodging a car that honked long
and hard, his tires skidding a little behind me. I
barely noticed. I rode until the streets began to look
familiar again. I almost dumped the bike and the curb.
When I reached our building. My hand missed the hand
the first time. Then I pushed through the door and
took the stairs three at a time. My voice cracked
as I shouted from my mom. She stepped out the
kitchen startled, what Dad, I choked out, He's dead, Jake's gone.
Her face dropped all at once, color left her skin,
and she grabbed my shoulders, trying to get me to
sit down. I couldn't. I kept pacing, I kept shaking.
The words came out broken. She called the police. She
had no reason to hesitate. I'd never and have never
tried joking about something like this. They came in fast,
first the squad car, then two detectives. I watched it
all through the front window with my knee pressed to
my chest. My mom kept a hand on my back,
but she didn't speak much. Later that night, they sat
me down with a recorder and asked me to explain everything.
I didn't know what to tell them, so I told
them about the forum. I told them about the friend.
I explained how we planned to meet, and how I
gave the wrong address because I didn't know I'd be
staying with my mom another week. I told them everything
I remembered. The detectives didn't say much. One of them
kept a neutral face, but his pen tapped a little
harder with each answer. The other just watched me closely,
nodding every so often, his eyes unreadable. I knew how
it sounded, a kid talking about secret website and a
mystery friend and an address mix up. My voice cracked
again at the end, but I made it through. The
Next morning, they brought me into the station I sat
alone in a room with cameras on the ceiling and
wires under the table. They asked to see my computer.
I gave them both. My mom handed over the phones too.
They copied everything. They didn't accuse me, but they asked questions, slowly,
over and over, looking for gaps in the timeline, looking
for a sign that I was hiding something I wasn't.
I gave them the guide, I copied by hand the
print out my friend had sent me, the addresses I'd
written down. I even gave them the username he used,
as though I told them it probably wouldn't mean much.
When we finished, one of the detectives stepped outside to
speak with my mom. I stayed seated, my stomach twisted.
I could hear their voices through the crack in the door.
We think this was premeditated, the detective said, your son
gave out that address, but whoever did this probably didn't
expect anyone else to be in the house. I closed
my eyes, my hands curled into fists under the table.
They released me that night. I didn't sleep. The next morning,
the headlines broke. A man found dead in his kitchen,
his kid missing from the scene. Local police investigating what
they called an intentional and targeted act s. Trake's photos showed
up on every street lamp within a day. He was
in his school hoodie, arms crossed, staring off camera. His
name was printed in bold under the word missing. I
biked past those posters every morning, every afternoon, every night.
I couldn't stay in the apartment. For seven days, no
one heard a thing. Some time would pass cutting through
the roadside trails off the old bypass, noticed something slumped
at the edge of a drainage ditch. The water had
dropped from the heat that week, revealing more than it
should have. The report said. He thought it was a
discarded bag at first, then he saw the hand. They
didn't show the pictures on television. Police crouched near the
concrete slope with their hands covering their mouths. It was Jake.
I found out before my mom did. Someone from school
messaged me the article local boy found dead blunt force trauma,
defensive wounds. No identification on the body, but the hoodie
was a match. It had our middle school's names stitched
across the chest, the one he wore during gym class
when he forgot to bring a change. My mom saw
me staring at the screen. She took the phone from
my hands before I could stop her. Then she collapsed
into the kitchen chair, hands shaking too hard to scroll.
She loved me as much as she loved him, even
though he wasn't hers. The next week, blurred new stations
cycled through every detail they could dig up, interviews with
former neighbors, speculations from people who didn't know anything. Eventually
they found him, my friend, Thomas Greenley, forty six years old,
convicted once when he was in his early twenties, moved
three states over, changed his name through legal filings twice.
He had been running the forum from a climate controlled
storage unit behind an abandoned mattress outlet. The place had
no signage, no obvious entry. Inside, investigators found custom server racks,
locked safes, discarded hard drives, berner phones, and at least
four separate routers. There were posters taped to the walls,
crew diagrams with usernames and passwords scratched out in red ink.
He had built every account in the forum, every profile,
every user, every conversation. There were no other real people
in that forum. It had just been him. He crafted posts,
reacted to them. Built fake reputations. He messaged himself, then
replied in character. He built arguments between sock puppets, wrote
private messages with time delays to simulate conversation. He had
an entire network of voices, all of them were him.
The only outside ip ever recorded on the logs aside
from his, was mine. They said the site had been
live for over a year. Every few months he changed
the theme and wiped the post, always under the pretense of
an admin reset or a security breach. He'd start fresh
each time, test new tricks, lure new kids. Authorities couldn't
recover full threads or timestamps, but my copies, my notebooks
gave them something to work with. They called me a
key witness, said I was lucky, said they were proud
of how I handled it. I didn't feel any of
those things. I felt emptied out. Thomas was caught near
the state line, living out an old camper van. The
inside looked like a basement, every surface covered in cables
and tools, more phones, a laptop, welded shot at the hinge.
He gave them a false name at first, then he
asked for a lawyer. He never said anything after that.
He never made it a trial two months after his arrest.
Before the formal sentencing could begin, he slammed his head
against the concrete wall of his holding cell, once, then twice.
He kept going until he died. He left nothing behind,
just me. The rv ARC light was about as glamorous
as you would expect from a deep sea survey vessel,
a flat, gray hole stained from salt spray, a deck
cluttered with rigging and cable drums, and a permanent smell
of hydraulic fluid that seeped into your clothes no matter
how many showers you took. We were out past the
continental shelf, hundreds of miles off shore, crawling a forgotten
stretch of the abyssal plane. No shipping lanes or geological
features marked on the map, just endless, featureless sea floor
at four thousand meters down. My job was simple enough.
I was part of a five person science crew operating
bathymetric sonar sweeps logging data to the cloud array below
the bridge. We flew an ROV twice a day, a
heavy steel framed unit about the size of a golf cart,
rigged with high intensity lights, manipulator arms, and a suite
of still and video cameras. Everything was backed up twice,
raw feed stunted into redundant cold storage banks. Reviewed nightly
over instant coffee and bad jokes. Most days blurred together.
We would lower the ROV, follow a tight grid program
rummed into the system, and then scan every inch of
mud and stone for anomalies like burrows, sediment plumes, or
lost straw nets, anything that broke the monotony of silt
and darkness. There was an unofficial contest among the crew
find something worth naming. It was usually a thermal vent
or a shipwreck. Occasionally someone would discover an unidentified rock formation.
If it wasn't on the database and past the checks,
you got to propose the designation. It was a dumb bragging, right,
but when your world shrank to forty meters of ship
steel and the endless screaming of the sonar puls you
took what you could get. I remember the day it
started because it had been a bad morning for the
ROV team. The wind system had glitched during recovery and
nearly dummed two million dollars of hardware into the deep.
We were tense and distracted. Still, protocol said to keep
the scans running all repairs were underway. The bathymetric sweep
came in, slow, layering soft outlines across the workstation. Monitors
rows and rows of nothing, until Sam Arsau Narutek leaned
forward and frowned, Hey, you seeing this. He piped the
signal to the mainscreen. There against the background noise of
the plane were clusters of depressions, hexagonal, about three meters
across each, shallow but precise. At first we thought it
was sense and noise, maybe a misfire from the multi
beam rae. But the pattern was too clean, repeated with eerirregularity,
space at near perfect intervals, stretching outward for what looked
like miles. No obvious elevation changes, no ridges or venting nearby,
just those shapes punched into the seabed with surgical precision.
Sam ran a calibration check while the rest of us
crowded around. The readings came back normal. The array was
working fine. Could be polygonal cracking, Lucas offered, he was
a junior geologist fresh out of post doc. You know,
desiccation features from sediment drying back in the plister scene.
No way, said Marla r RV pilot shaking her head.
Not this uniform and not down here, too deep, too
much pressure. We logged it like any other anomaly, file, stamped,
coordinates noted. Nobody said it out loud, but you could
feel it in the room, the slight thrill, the unspoken possibility.
Maybe this was the thing we could get to name.
We decided we would send the r V back down
first thing after repairs, take a closer look, maybe bring
back a sample if the manipulator arms could manage it.
Later that night, lying in my bunk with a ship's
soft creaking all around me, I kept replaying the sonar
image of my mind, those perfect hexagons stretching into the dark, waiting.
By noon the next day, the r V was repaired
and pressure tested. No major damage, just the fried relay
in the tether winch that the engineers swapped out with
a spear from the parts locker. Marla ran the pre
dive checklist twice, cross referencing with the top side crew thrustles,
green cameras, clean, manipulators responsive. The fiber optic tether hissed
through the winch as we lowered the rro of V
down through the ghostly blue haze of the operation. I
sat behind the monitor array in the control van, sipping
bitter coffee or The depth counter ticked upward five hundred
meters a thousand, two thousand by three thousand, eight hundred meters.
The sunlight was gone. Only the faint scatter of bioluminescent
creatures spun past the camera, looking for all the world
like disembodied stars. At four thousand, one hundred twenty seven meters,
the r of v's altitude warning chimed. The bar was close,
coming up on the target grid. Marlow announced, hands steady
on the joystick. She feathered the vertical thrusters, easing the
RV down with practiced grace. Twin led rays flared to life,
pushing a stark directional beam across the dark sea floor.
The feed resolved slowly. Fine sediment kicked up in lazy
clouds as the r v's skids brushed the bottom. When
it cleared, the formations came into view. I leaned forward unconsciously.
They were even more precise than the sonar had suggested.
Wide hexagonal trenches, each one about two meters were carved
into the substrate with impossible symmetry. The edges were sharp
and clean not slumped or rounded as expected from erosion.
They were arranged in a pattern too regular for any
known natural process. Between some of the hexagons rose thin
spires no more than a meter high. They were narrow,
almost needlelike, tapering to sharp points. The floodlights revealed the
surface was not natural stone at all. It absorbed the
light strangely, reflecting only a dull sheen material composition, I
asked Lucas checked the spectrom to read out low reflectivity
looks basaltic at first glance, but the density is wrung.
No magnetic signature either. Could be synthetic. Synthetic that made
my stomach titan. There should not be anything synthetic. Four
kilometers below the surface. Marla maneuvered carefully over the field,
the manipulator arms tucked in close to avoid disturbing the formations.
No visible life. Sam noted from behind me he was
monitoring the low light auxiliary cameras. Too deep for anything
beyond extremophiles, maybe some amphipods or microbio mats. There was
something strange about the water chemistry too. The conductivity probe
picked up faint electromagnetic readings, tiny surges barely above background
noise but steady. Could be geothermal, Lucas offered, but he
did not sound convinced. I kept my eyes glued to
the forward facing cameras as we moved deeper into the cluster.
Every trench, every spire was placed with mechanical position, no collapse, drift.
It was as if the entire field had been set
out according to a blueprint. We could not see. At
the edge of one of the frames, something shifted a
blur low to the ground. I joked upright heart stammering.
Marla pan write. She nudged the stick, swinging the r
V around. Nothing just sediment curling in the beams. Probably
a fish, Sam said, but he sounded uncertain. There were
some species of snailfish, rat tails, and amphipods that could
survive at this depth, but nothing that would move with
that kind of speed. Another movement, this time at the
far periphery of the overhead camera. A flicker too fast
to focus on. Could be debris stirred up by the thrusters.
Marla Rafford, she was trying to stay calm, professional, but
her voice was tight and her headset. We liked the
coordinates of the anomalies and swept the immediate area for
more readings. Nothing consistent, just those endless trenches, the eerie towers,
and the faint sense of something just beyond the reach
of our lights. By the time we winched the rav
back to the surface, my nerves were humming under my skin.
I sat in the dry lap the next morning, staring
at the overnight scans until my coffee went cold in
my hand. The multi beam bathymetric data had finished rendering
stacking into shimmering blue topography grids on the analysis monitors.
I pulled three sweeps base line twelve hours later and
twenty four and laid them together to check for any
seafloor changes. At first, it looked clean, identical patterns, no collapses,
no disturbances. Then Marlas slid into the chair next to
me and pointed with the stylus at a cluster near
the site's northern edge. Doesn't this look weird to you?
I leaned in six depressions, all hexagonal, arranged in a
loose arc, another seven clustered just below them, five more
to the west. I ran a quick measurement to all
over them. The distances between the pits varied a little,
but not enough to call random. There was a rhythm
to it. Coincidence, I said, mostly to convince myself pariodolia.
Her brains want to find patterns. Marla wasn't convinced. She
chewed her pink cap and tapped the open ship's internal manifest,
a digital diagram showing crews, quarters, lounges, labs, and shared spaces.
She tilted her head, humor me look. She overlaid the
manifest atop the bathometry render. It was not perfect, but
it was close enough to stiffen the hair along my arms.
The largest grouping on the seafloor roughly matched where the
gallery and the wreck rooms sat on the ship. The
five smaller pits aligned roughly with the forward cabins, my
bunk among them. We sat there for a long time
without speaking. By lunch, word had spread. Half the crew
jammed into the lab to look at the scans. Opinions
split fast. Some said it was pure chance that it
was just rocks, debris filled shape by currents we didn't
yet understand. The Others grew silent, thinking about how the
ship creaked at night, how the sonar would sometimes pin
back false returns. The tension was palpable. Meals grew quieter.
You could feel it shift in the air, heavier, harder
to shake. Conversations stayed locked on surface topics, instrument calibrations,
generator cycles, and food rations. Nobody spoke about how the
walls seemed to hum when you were alone. Sleep came hard.
I awoke once around three am, heart hammering, cold sweat,
soaking the sheets. In the darkness. I thought I heard
something tapping rhythmically against the hull, distant and slow, like
something running the pads of his fingers down the ship's spine.
No one admitted to hearing it when I asked around
in the morning, but no one denied it either. Then
came the update from the overnight automated r V mapping run.
A new structure had appeared. It had not been on
any previous pass, verified by timestamped footage and sonar sweeps.
It was shaped differently, no perfect geometry this time. Instead,
it was slightly irregular, almost an atomical. A stretched oval
embedded into the silt takes shit and away. The data
could not fully resolve. Marla printed out the overlay and
pinned it up next to the others. She added a
sticky note underneath it. It's watching. Nobody laughed. We launched
the second r V dive just after sunrise under a
sky smeared thin with silver clouds. No one ate much
that morning. Even the engine noise seemed muted. As we
craned the r V back overboard, letting it sink into
the depthless dark. The cable unspooled in measured whirs from
the A frame tension sensors ticking numbers into the console
by my knee. We dropped fast, following the same descent
vector as the previous night, straight back to the mapping sight.
At about three thousand, eight hundred meters, the lights kicked on,
cutting long cones through the water full of swirling silt.
The first glimpses of the sea floor came seconds later.
The original formations were still there, silent black trenches, neat
towers of mate material, but now something new sat among them.
It did not look natural. Manning the camera controls beside me,
Marla zoomed in, carefully nudging the pan with a slow,
steady hand. The new structure rose out of the silt,
maybe three meters high, much more complex than the clean
exagonal pits. It looked skeletal, almost bony, in its angles,
thin arches intertwined at strange geometries that no natural basalt
or limestone formation would have made. At its base embedded
in the sea floor, something caught the light. I leaned forward,
squinting at the monitor. A spiral deeply etched into the
silty plane, now more than it had dimensionality, and stood
raised shallow ridges of black material rising into the water,
curling tightly into a pattern. Mala cursed under a breath.
I toggled the data overlay on the screen. The plotted
course of the arc light from the last three days
appeared in green lines. It matched perfectly. The spiral mirrored
the ship's path through the survey area, down to the
minor course corrections logged by the auto nav. We had
not transmitted those paths outside the vessel. There was no broadcast,
no relay. That pattern should not have been accessible to
anything except our internal systems. The realization hit like a
cold slap. Whatever was down there, he was not just
reacting to our press. He was tracking us. He was learning.
Marla swung the RV in closer, aiming to capture a
better angle of the spires. The feeds stuttered as the
RV shadow passed over the new structure. Static blared across
the screen. Status lights on the pilot board flickered a deep,
vibrating harm rattle through the ship's deck plates. Backer off,
I barked. Marla immediately reversed the thrusters, pulling the RV
out to a safer standoff distance. The noise eased, but
not completely. Instruments on the readout panels pulsed, faint red warnings,
vaulted drops, minor system faults. It was not damaged in
the traditional sense, it felt closer to interference or corrosion
happening in real time. Marla muttered, scanning the status lights,
it's like it's eating the signal. I keyed into the
shipboard internal channel. RV team to bridge, we are getting
electromagnetic disruption at the dive site. Adjust passive scanners and
presped for possible early retrieval copy that RV team monitor
vitals and advice. We floated the RV higher, switching off
unnecessary systems to conserve power. The feed cleaned slightly enough
to get one last slow pan over the field. The
new skeletal structure was not alone further out, just at
the edge of floodlight range, another small formation began taking shape.
It bulged out of the silt dark and ridged the
way barnacles, first, cling to a ship's hull. I log
the timestamp, noted its coordinates, requested retrieval. The r of
V rose steadily, whining as it climbed through the cold
weight of the abyss. As the winch hauled it back
onto the deck, I caught Marla watching the monitors a
second longer than necessary. Did you see it? She asked,
voice low, see what? She hesitated, then shook her head.
Never mind, but the look in her eyes told me
she had seen something move. The mood and the arc
light soured. By the next day, the meals were even quieter.
Conversations clipped at the edges. No one said it out
loud yet, but the divide was growing. Marla paced the
lounge in short, sharp bursts, arguing with Ethan, our senior hydrographer,
we should pull the anchor and get the hell out,
She snapped, voice cracking under the strain. This isn't natural,
it is not geology, it's not life as we know
it either. Ethan. Ever, the opportunist folded his arms and
shook his head. You realize what this could mean. If
we're the first did document a non biological scent in structure.
Do you understand the weight of that careers are made
of less? His voice had a note of desperation. I
remember the early days of the voyage, how we used
to joke about finding the next challenger deep, about naming
some underwater canyon or thermal vent after ourselves. The competitiveness
was baked into the blood of every research ship crew.
Now it sounded pathetic, hollow. I said nothing. Instead, I
chewed my breakfast, slowly, watching the tensions strangle the room. Later,
while re running bathymetric sweeps, I caught Sam Hassounartk staring
too long at the screen, jaw slacked. He pointed at
the data traces, deep harmonic ripples that had not been
there before, slight deviations, faint signatures repeating deeper and deeper
in the water column. Feels deeper than it should, he mumbled,
feels like falling. No one was sleeping much. Whenever I
did doze off, I dreamt of those spirals, dreamt of
standing barefoot on the seafloor, staring up at towering black
spires that stretch forever into a starless sky, no water,
no pressure, just the endless sensation of sinking. We launched
another RV dive that afternoon. None of us wanted to
say it was stupid, but every glance said it. The
ocean was calm above with the field looked different again.
When the RV hit the bottom. A new structure stood
near the original cluster. Marla controlled the RV with tight,
nervous flakes of the joystick, angling the floodlights to frame
it fully. The spire was taller than the others, irregular.
Where the other ones had a machine symmetry, this one
bent slightly, top heavy, almost humanoid. There were jutting shapes
where arms should have been, a round it dome where
a head might be. The radio crackled. Marla's voice came
thin and wired from the control booth. You're seeing this.
Ethan hovering behind her, whispered, it's copying. No one dared
breathe too loudly. Marla nudged the RV closer, attempting a
slow orbit around the figure for better imaging. The starboard
thrusters engaged, humming softly through the deck. Halfway through the sweep,
the r OFV jerked to a sudden halt. Red arms
blinked across the piloting console. Tether tension spiked. Damn it,
teether snag. Marla cursed hands flying over the controls trying
to reverse the motors. The RV barely budged. I switched
to the rear camera feed, squinting. Something had latched onto
the t end of the vehicle. Nothing mechanical, nor a
net or debris. It was something organic. It looked fibrous,
like strands of thick kelp, but the way they gripped
and flexed against the pressure was all wrong. They merged
seamlessly into the black material of the surrounding structures. We
ran emergency retrieval protocols, tugging manually through the winch, but
it held fast. We could not rip it free without
risking the whole tether system. There was no real choice left.
The RV was stuck hard tether tension redlining, and we
could not afford to abandon it. Not just because of
the equipment cost, though that was astronomical, but because it
was our eyes, our only clean set of them down
there when no human belonged. The problem was we had
no back up unit there was only one other way.
The arc Light carried a single, two persons submersible in
case of emergency retrievals or close proximity geological surveys. The
Seeker a sphere shaped titanium pod bolted with manipulator arms
and a single narrow viewing slit. It had been loaded
on board almost as in afterthought and nod to redundancy
in the paperwork, but nobody had touched it beyond maintenance checks.
Since the voyage began. Only Ben, our junior pilot and
maintenance tech, was rated to operate it. He volunteered without question.
I can get it loose, he said, tapping the side
of the sub's hull. Get close, use the starboard arm
to pry it free. Marlowe was pale, but nodded. Ethan
and I ran rapid systems checks on the Seeker's life
support balace controls and thrust the calibration. No time for
real redundancy checks. If the field was shifting daily. We
had no idea what the r VM I record or
what it might provoke if left attached too long. We
sealed Ben into the sub, gave him a thumbs up
behind the thick view bought glass, the white lights from
the hangar floor flashing across his face. The winch lowered
the Seekers slowly into the churning black until it disappeared
under the surface, leaving only the faint crackle of the
tether COM's line trailing back up to us. Descent took
nearly an hour. From the command deck, we monitored his telemetry.
The seekers on board sonar pulsed dutifully sloping, rebounding off
the abyssal plane. At four one hundred meters, he hit
the bottom. Marla switched the external floodlights on the screen,
filled with particulate haze, like slow snow drifting through eternal darkness.
Shapes loomed through the gloom, first the old structures spires
rising like broken teeth, mat and ancient, and then the
new one, the irregular figure spire, the one that bent
at the shoulders arms askew Ben approached cautiously, thrusters whispering
in minute bursts, keeping him neutrally buoyant. A meter off
the seafloor, he swung the seeker around the tangled hour
of e the manipulator arms who used the probe. The
fibrous strands wrapping the equipment. On the video feed, it
looked almost fungal. A slick membrane had sprouted over the
r of E chassis, pulsing faintly. Ben grunted over the combs,
feel soft, almost like tissue. None of us spoke. The
so blurched telemetry spiked, depth indicators ticking down in jerky fits.
Something's pulling. Ben's voice broke through roar and panicked. We
saw it on the monitor. The Seeker was sinking, not
falling freely, but being dragged downward. The ballast control flashed
critical thrust, the screaming against an unseen force blow tanks.
Ethan shouted into the combs, but it was useless. Ben
was already trying no response. The final seconds of the
feed were a blur. The seekers exterior lights swept the seafloor,
illuminating the figure spire again, but closer, now distorted, twisting inward.
The URV appeared briefly in the frame, still cocooned in
the alien growth, and behind it with a trench dipped
into darker folds, more shapes waited, larger ones. The feed
cut to black. Chaos rippled across the arc. Light Ethan
and Marlas scrambled at their stations, shouting across the deck
as the last telemetry from the seak of flat lined.
The small submersible stepth indicator had frozen at an impossible
number beneath the designated operational range, and then blinked out.
No visual feed, no external sonarping, only the droning emptiness
of the beyond the hull. I stayed glued to the
ROV console. The tether was still functional, but barely. Battery
drain warnings pulsed the corner of the monitor, the autonomous
systems fighting to stay alive. I twisted the joystick, panning
the external camera one slow, deliberate sweep across the field
of formations. Something caught the edge of the frame. Where
before the spires had stood in jagged randomness, there was
now a new structure, right on the fringe of the
disturbed trench where Ben had been pulled under. It was
still forming, Not rock, not coral. No slow geologic patience here.
This was something birthing itself from the sea floor, extruding
and reshaping in real time. Tendrils of blood, black of material,
writhing inward, knitting together. We watched in horrified silence as
it thickened and took on contour and form, the beginnings
of a figure coming into shape. Marla cursed softly, backing
away from the screen. Ethan stood there, arms crossed, white
knuckled against his own ribs. This cannot be natural, he muttered.
I tried to turn the camera again, angling toward the
last no position of the seeker, hoping maybe Ben had escaped,
hoping there would be a light and moving object, anything
to suggest he had somehow gotten free. Nothing, only blackness.
I rotated back to the formation, instinctively scanning for landmarks,
but the figure was gone. The sea floor was bare again.
The RV's battery warning flashed critical red. I powered down
the external lights to conserve energy for the tether systems.
Across the deck, Ethan was flipping through the passive sonar array,
rerunning diagnostics. We could not use active sonar now, not
with certainty that Ben or whatever remained of him, was
not near the hull. The shockwaves from an active pink
could shatter a man submersible if it was close enough.
Ethan leaned into the console, frowning harder. I've got something,
he said, A faint contact, A return on passive sonar
it was moving toward US fast. No surface ships within range,
no known subs, no other research vessels were in this quadrant.
We were supposed to be alone out here for another
two weeks. Marla grabbed the emergency flare protocol and hovered
near the distress beacon switch. But I shook my head,
no sense signaling. Whatever was coming already knew where we were.
The contact of smooth, steady gliding without turbulence, closing distance
too cleanly. Ethan adjusted the gain. An outline began to
coalesce on the sonar projection, a shape nearing the arc
light hull, small compared to the ship, but just the
right size for something like the Seeker. Marla excelled sharply,
almost a sob. It's ben, she whispered. I kept my
hands clamped tight on the edge of the console to
stop them from shaking. If it was him, if somehow
he had gotten free, he would have radioed. By now.
The seekers combs were silent, completely murderously silent. The contact
reached the vessel docked. The ship lurched slightly, a vibration
through the steel underfoot that carried the moon pool all
the way to the bridge. The crew instinctively turned toward
the Axiss corridor that led down to the moon pool Bay,
leaving to see what had docked. I stayed at the console,
the black screens offering no guidance, no comfort. The r
V was dead, now severed from us, blind and powerless.
Only the sonar lingered behind an occasional soft ping from
Ethan's station, trying to resolve an image that would not come.
Marla's voice cracked through the intercom from below, tight and strained,
contacted the submersible. Doc it's the Seeker, looks intact, no
visible damage through the deck speakers. Marla's voice again, higher pitched.
His Bend's here just stepped out. Looks normal, says it's fine.
I stayed frozen in my chair, staring at the dead
arrow of V feed. A flicker of movement caught in
my eye. The passive sonar was still active in the corner,
and there was a side utility window no one had touched.
An object was drifting past the ship's bow, slow and aimless. Curious,
I toggled the camera, hoping for a glimpse before the
power fully died. Static and distortion bloomed, but one shape
pushed through her body bloated, skin pale and slowing away
under the crushing pressure of depth. His uniform was torn
and trailing in the water, but there was no mistaking
the orange patch stitched to the chest, the color used
for Junior's. A chill went through my veins so fast
and left me dizzy. I stood hard enough that my
chair clattered to the floor. No Ben was still on
the seafloor, which meant whatever I had just climbed aboard
was not him. I sprinted across the deck, shoving past
the storage cart, nearly losing my footing on the grating floor.
Halfway to the hatch leading down to the docking level,
I grabbed the first heavy object I saw, a rusted
steel emergency prye bar, long and pitted from years of
salt exposure. It weighed heavy in my hand. I barely
registered it. My boots hammered down the stairwell below. I
could hear laughter, shouts, the casual tones of a reunion
around the corner, hinto the darking bay. My heart trying
to climb out of my chest. Ben what wore? Ben's
face stood surrounded by Marla Hanneathan. They were patting him
on the back, half laughing, half crying, disbelief and joy
muddling into one chaotic scene. They turned at the sound
of my footsteps, saw me coming in fast. Pride bar raised.
I screamed without words, a roar that tore out my throat.
Ben turned confusion, flickering across its face. Marla shouted my name.
Ethan moved to intercept. I barreled through both, shouldering them
aside with every ounce of terror and momentum I could summon.
The first blow caught Ben square in the side of
the head. He staggered, a hand going up defensively, mouth
opening in a protest that sounded wrong. The cadence too clean,
the tone pitched half step too high, the consonants dragging
unnaturally for someone with blunt head trauma. I did not stop.
Another blow and another. Ethan tried to pull me back.
I wrenched free. Ben clapped to his knees, hands trembling,
mouth working in a silent, broken mimicry of human distress.
I raised the pry bar one final time and brought
it down across the top of its skull with every
fiber of strength I had left. The head cracked open.
The sound of liquid bursting across the floor, silenced the room.
Ethan stumbled back and clamped over his mouth. Marla simply froze,
eyes wide, making a keening sound low in her throat.
They no longer fought me on my decision. After seeing
what spilled out from what looked like Ben, A gush
of thick, briny water exploded across the deck, plaiting puddling
across the decking strands of green filament, slick and twitching,
spooled out of the ruin of its head, writhing weakly
against the metal before falling still. The air filled with
the sharp, stinging reek of deep salt and rot. The
thing twitched once more, then stilled silence. Only the low,
steady drip of salt water from its body remained. I
dropped the pry bar. In the aftermath, none of us
moved for a long long time. In silent agreement, we
pushed whatever looked like Ben off the ship. Wearing multiple
layers of protective gear, we cut the line to the rov.
The considerable loss was much more palatable after seeing the
consequences from below. We called it, ended the mission and
returned home. All reports were wiped, and Ben was documented
as missing at sea. We cooperated a story about its
reckless behavior and repeated it enough until it was believed.
Growing up, I had what most people would have called
her perfect childhood. We had money, quite a bit of it.
We lived in a house with high windows, soft carpet,
and a back yard big enough to forget where the
edges were. My father, Jonathan, was a quiet man. He
led prayer every morning before school and every night before bed,
and he spoke with conviction. My mother was grace in motion.
She read poetry, cooked like she had studied it, and
always seemed to know what I was feeling before I
said a word. I loved them both deeply, without question.
They didn't hide things from each other, but hid one
thing from me. There was a strange man that lived
with us. Perhaps that's the wrong word. He existed in
our house, always on the edge of where light ended.
He really appeared as a full aperation. Sometimes he was
just a flicker in the corner of a mirror. Sometimes
it was deeper shadows that didn't move when the sun did,
or the smell of smoke in a room when nothing
had burned. And he scared me. While my dad and
I were cleaning out the garage. I had worked up
the courage after an afternoon of silence to ask him
who the man was. He stopped stacking the boxes, straightened
his back, and smiled at me. That's your uncle, he said,
without hesitation. He doesn't mean new harm. As young as
I was, I knew my father didn't have her brother.
That night, he sat me down at the kitchen table,
his hands folded in front of him, and he gently
but firmly told me that if I ever saw anything strange, mirrors, shadows,
or noises that didn't make sense, I should ignore it.
He said it firmly, as if it was one of
the house rules, just as important as brushing my teeth
or saying grace. He told me not to ask questions
if you see him, Just keep walking, he said. I
asked him why, because that's what we do, he said.
He looked scared. After that conversation, I started paying closer
attention to the way my father acted around the house.
After sundown, my father would become weary. He grew quieter
and more rigid. He would sometimes excuse himself and go
sit in the basement, like he was hiding from him.
I remember the first time I saw him, really saw him,
not in a mirror or a trick of light, but
in full He stood on the back porch, his face
blank and hands at his sides. His coat was dark
and long, and his skin looked gray under the porch light.
Dull and lifeless. Wherever he appeared, my father entered the
door before anyone else could. He would step outside, pull
the door closed behind him, and speak in whispers. I
couldn't hear much, but I knew that the man would
hand him something, a piece of paper. My father would
tuck the note away, move with urgency, and leave the
house without finishing his meal or saying goodbye. Sometimes he
would make calls from the landline in the garage. Once
he didn't come home until morning. He looked drained, his
shirt was unbuttoned, and his kind eyes were bloodshot. I
tried asking about the man once. I didn't even make
it through the question. Don't. My father said, not angry,
but firm, just don't. After that, I learned to keep quiet,
but the man kept coming. It happened ten years ago.
I remember the exact day because it was two days
after my birthday. I just turned eight, and I was
still riding the high of presents and cake, and the
way my mother smiled when she sang. The weather had
started to turn, the heat pulling back and leaving behind
that crisp early autumn air that carried the scent of
dry leaves and chimney smoke. That night, I saw my
father standing at the back door again. I was on
the stairs holding a book. I heard the door open
and I saw the man outside. He looked the same
as always. I knew what would happen. I had seen
it before. The man would hand him a note. My
father would read it, and then everything would shift into motion.
He would leave, pray, or make a quiet call to
someone I'd never met. But that didn't happen this time.
The man passed in the paper. My father looked at it,
looked down and unfolded it. His eyes moved over the
page once, then again. His hand dropped to his side.
He didn't move, He just stood there holding the paper.
I thought he was going to faint. I stepped down
on to the next step. He turned slowly, his face pale.
He looked past me. He looked like he had aged
ten years in that moment alone. Then he really looked
at me. My father had never looked at me that way. Hell,
nobody has ever looked at me that way since. His
eyes filled with tears, and I thought he might say something,
but instead he turned toward the hallway. My mother had
entered the room. She had a dish towel in her hands,
still damp from washing. She looked at him. He handed
it to her. She unfolded it. Her mouth opened, and
at first no sound came out. She stared at the paper,
blinked once, and then collapsed onto the floor, her knees
hitting the tile. She screamed, not in fear or even grief,
but in helplessness, a sound that split the room. I
didn't know what was on that paper, yet, I just
knew it broke something in her, something that wouldn't heal.
My father crouched beside her and tried to return the paper,
but she pulled away. She crushed it in a fist
and held it against the chest. After my mother crumpled
to the floor, my father finally seemed to remember I
was standing there. He turned toward me, and for a
second I thought he was going to call me over. Instead,
he gave me a small nod. His voice was quiet,
Go to your room for a little while, your mother
and I need to talk. I didn't question him. I
walked back up the stairs and closed my door behind me.
I sat on the carpet by the window, legs pulled
against my chest, watching the back yard sway in the wind.
I figured some one had died, maybe my grandmother or
some one from my father's side I'd never met that
would explain the tears. At some point, I pressed my
ear to the floor. I wanted to hear something, anything,
but there was nothing at first, just the settling of
the house. Then eventually I heard my mother. Her weeping
was soft, barely there, sorrow that couldn't be helped or postponed.
Her voice cracked a few times, but I couldn't make
out any words. Then it faded again, and I was
left in silence. I must have fallen asleep at some point,
because when I opened my eyes, the sky outside was darker,
clouded over. The hallway was dim. I didn't remember going
to bed, but I must have crawled up there. I
got up and walked to the door. I needed to pee.
I crept down the hall, dragging my hands against the
wall as I went, and stopped just before I reached
the stairs. I could hear them. My parents were downstairs
speaking in the kitchen. They weren't whispering, they weren't even
trying to be quiet. My father's voice was sharp, strained.
How are we going to do this in just six months?
There was the sound of something clattering on the counter,
a cup maybe, or a spoon. Then my mother snapped back,
we can't just give him up. He has never asked
for something this messed up before. How do we even
go about this? Curse your grandfather, Jonathan. She sounded panicked,
Her words hit like stones thrown in every direction. My
father didn't answer right away. I heard him pace as
I stood at the top of the stairs. My heart
thumbed harder with each passing second. I didn't understand what
they meant. G wooh, what did six months mean? Who
had asked for something? But I did hear the fear
in their voices. My mind went back to him. That
was when the idea first started to take root in
my chest. I didn't know what he had written down,
but I knew it had something to do with me,
and I knew for the first time in my life
that whatever he was, he had power over my family.
The days that followed felt wrong in ways I couldn't
explain to anyone. My parents weren't fighting openly, but everything
was different. They would stand in the same room and
talk like strangers forced to live under the same roof.
The atmosphere changed. Even on clear days, the house felt darker.
The man appeared more often. It was hard to know
what I was seeing anymore. He began showing up in
my dreams, not always clearly, sometimes just the feeling of him.
Other nights, he was a shape behind the glass, or
a figure on the other side of the window, waiting
for me to wake up. I wanted to ask my
parents what was going on. I wanted to tell them
that he wasn't even trying to stay hidden anymore, but
I was afraid of what they'd say. And then I
noticed something else. My mother started gaining weight. She wasn't
eating much, but her belly was fuller, and her steps
were slower. Her shirts no longer hung the same. I
saw her once in the bathroom mirror, holding her hand
to her stomach. I could see him standing right beside her.
He was growing bolder, or maybe we were growing weaker.
As her stomach grew, so did the weight pressing down
on everything inside that house. I caught my mother staring
out the kitchen window more often, her fingers resting on
the counter, like she was waiting for something to appear
outside and carry her away. My father became more devout
than ever. He spent hours locked in the study, muttering
under his breath, his voice rising and falling. He was
constantly reciting Scripture. I peeked in once through the crack
of the door and saw him kneeling, not just praying,
but rocking, whispering between his teeth, or staring at the floor.
I only got the courage to question the entire situation
one time, but I was met with bland responses. They
were clearly shrugging me off. The night it all fell
apart started with the wind. The trees scraped the windows,
The power lines swayed and groaned above the roof. Thunder
rolled in circles, never close enough to crack the sky,
but loud enough to rattle the windows. I woke to screaming.
My body reacted before my thoughts caught up. I sat
up in bed, my heart pounding and my chest already tight.
I could tell from the tone that it wasn't just anger.
My mother's voice tore through the house with desperation. I
climbed out of bed and stepped into the hallway, too
scared to move closer to afraid to go back. Her
voice rang out from downstairs. We have to give it
a kid tomorrow, Jonathan. She sounded broken. My father answered her, pleading,
We'll find another way. Just wait, please, I'm done waiting.
She screamed. You know what will happen. You know there
was a crash. I stood there, gripping the banister, my
hands shaking, my stomach twisting. Then I heard the scream
my mother, one sharp, terrible sound that cut through the house,
like metal tearing through cloth, and then nothing. I ran.
I was already down the stairs before my brain caught
up to what I was doing. The air smelled sour.
The lights in the hallway were off, but there was
a glow from the bathroom door. The light spilled out
into the dark, casting shadows on the floor. She was
on the ground, my mother. Her body was twisted at
the hip, one leg stretched out, the other bent beneath her.
Blood had soaked through a dress and pulled under her shoulders.
Her head was resting against the base of the tub.
Her eyes were open, glassy, her mouth half parted. There
was a knife in her hand. I couldn't breathe. My
father was beside her, on his knees. His shirt was stained,
his face blotched red. He held something in his hands.
I didn't understand what I was looking at. It was small, pink,
a mess of limbs and tissue. He cradled it like
it might cry. He was rocking back and forth, whispering
something to it, over and over. I wanted to scream,
I wanted to ask what happened, but nothing came out.
I turned and ran my hands hid the stair rail
and missed the step and slammed into the wall halfway up.
I kept going back to my room. I closed the door.
I crawled into my closet. I curled up and held
my knees to my chest. I stayed there until the
sun rose. The funeral from my mother was quiet, not
because there weren't people there, but because no one knew
what to say. A small church just outside of town,
the one my father used to preach at. The sanctuary
smell like lilies and varnished wood. The windows were fogged
from the cold, and whose were half full of people
from my father's congregation, who wore solemn expressions. Some of
them brought cast roles, some brought their children. None of
them brought answers. The casket was closed. Everyone said she
seemed so happy, so devoted, so warm. The official cause
of death was suicide. The coroner's report cited blood loss.
The fingerprints and the knife were hers and hers alone.
They said it was a clean case. I didn't speak
at the service. I sat in the front row and
stared at the floor. I didn't cry or blink much either.
It felt wrong to do either. One my father stood
up and delivered something that could barely be called a eulogy.
I watched them closely, trying to find her in his
to find something human, something breaking. But there was nothing,
just a voice repeating words he didn't believe anymore. Afterward,
we drove home together in silence. I watched the trees
move past the window, still half stripped from the last storm.
When we pulled into the driveway, I asked him if
we could talk. I tried to ask him what really happened,
what was happening, and if she'd said anything before she died.
He didn't respond. He walked inside, locked the bathroom door,
and didn't come out for an hour. We never spoke
about it again. My father stopped going to church. He
stopped returning calls from the other pastors. His Bible stayed
on the shelf, untouched. The prayers stopped, the grace before meals,
the whispered blessings before bed. All of it vanished. What
replaced them were bottles. He kept empties stacked in paper
bags under the sink until there were too many to hide.
I would hear him in the kitchen long after I'd
gone to bed, opening new ones, drinking them in silence,
sometimes whispering to himself. But eventually the whispers changed. He
started speaking to him. Sometimes he laughed, sometimes he cried,
sometimes he begged, and other times he just seemed to listen.
I stopped trying to talk to him. I had questions
that I knew would never be answered, and I didn't
have the strength to put into words. I didn't know
what else to do. It was four years after she died.
I was seventeen. I had been holding it in for
too long. I didn't plan to say anything, but it
was a bad day and he was already drunk, and
when I found him on the porch, muttering to the darkness. Again,
something inside me snapped. You killed her, I said. He
didn't look up. You let her die because you're a coward.
He lifted his head slowly, like the words took time
to register. I could see how empty it had become.
He looked thinner than he had ever been. You never
did anything, I said. You never fought for her. You
just did whatever you were doing. You let it bleed
to death on the floor like that was normal. He
opened his mouth but failed to speak. Then he stood
fast enough to knock over the chair behind him. He
wanted you, he shouted, tears forming in his eyes. A
child of ours, That's what the note said. He was
trembling now, shoulders shaking, arms clenched at his sides. He
gave us six months. We didn't know what to do.
We couldn't give you up. You were just a boy.
We thought maybe if we gave him another one, it
would be enough. He stared at him, So you, I tried, asking,
He nodded, Then he shook his head, then nodded again.
We tried, he said. We t I had to make
another child, but we didn't have enough time. The baby
it wasn't ready, and your mother, she couldn't bear the
thought of handing you over, so she he covered his
face with his hands. He sat down hard and led
out a sound that didn't belong to any version of
my father. I had known, a sound of something breaking
for good. She chose the only thing she thought would work.
I didn't say anything else. I couldn't. I didn't even
know if I hated him anymore. I didn't know what
to feel. I stood in the doorway, watching the man
who had once led prayers and kissed my forehead at night.
He looks smaller now, smaller than anything I'd ever seen.
He had given up a long time ago. He had
just forgotten to die. My father collapsed onto the couch,
shoulders buckling under years of grief that have finally found
their voice. His face was wet, red in the corners,
streaked with the cries of a man who wasn't weak,
but it surrendered to the truth. I sat across from him,
arms resting on my knees, breath shallow. I felt sick,
my skin tingled and my legs ached, but I didn't move.
I needed to know where did he come from? I
asked my voice was quieter than I expected. He stared
at the ceiling above my head, eyes unfocused, as if
he was watching something move across it that I couldn't see.
Then he nodded just once and began to speak. My father,
he said, slowly, as if pulling each word from a
well buried deep in his chest. Your grandfather made a
deal with something. I think. He swallowed hard, rubbed at
the corner of his mouth, and kept going. I was
born wrong, crippled. I couldn't walk, talk, or even breathe right.
They told him I'd never live a full life. Doctors
gave up. I don't remember any of it. I was
too young, but he swore it was hopeless. Then one
morning I stood up, I talked, I was fine. He
let that hang in the air for a moment, then
looked down at his hands. That's when he came. After
I got better, he showed up at our door, just
standing there. Father knew what he was. I don't know how,
but he did, and he let him in. He looked
up then straight into my eyes. He did things for him,
just like I did and still do. He leaned back
on the couch, his voice trembling. Now I don't know
what the first note said, but I remember what happened afterward.
Her cousin vanished, then my uncle. One day, your grandfather
refused to do what the man said. He thought he
was strong enough. I guess. He shook his head, jaw
clenched tight. People in our family were taken, my father included,
gone without explanation. I don't even know what it is
he said. He never told me. Maybe he didn't know either.
Maybe that was part of the deal. Keep serving and
stay ignorant. He gives us wealth and luck, if you
can call it that. But he ran a hand through
his hair, then dropped it to his lap. He exhaled
a slow, tired breath. I curse him, my son. I
curse my father every day. If he'd just left me
the way I was, maybe none of this would have happened.
Maybe i'd have a short life, a quiet one, but
a real one, and you, you would have never known
any of this. His voice cracked again. He didn't wipe
his eyes this time, he let them fall freely. I
used to wonder if I was ever supposed to be
a father, if maybe he'd let me live just so
I'd carry the burden to someone else. He turned toward
me and for once didn't try to be strong. I'm sorry,
I'm so sorry. I should have ended it. I should
have done something. I should have I don't know. I
don't know what I could have done, but it should
have been anything but this. His words hit hard. My
chest burned. I hated him for so long that I
didn't know how to stop. But hearing him say those
words and the ruin behind his eyes left me hollow
for the first time since my mother died. Neither of
us was angry. He leaned back on the couch and
tilted his head toward the ceiling. His lips moved as
he mumbled to himself, words too quiet to catch. Eventually,
the weight of everything dragged him into sleep. I sat
there for a long time after he closed his eyes,
listening to the wind outside and the faint clock ticking
above the fireplace. When I finally stood and left the room,
the house was quiet. I moved into the hallway, not
sure where I was going. My steps were slow, my
thoughts wouldn't settle, and then I felt it, a light
touch on my shoulder. I froze. I turned my head.
He was behind me, not half there not distorted in
a mirror or hiding in a shadow. He stood fully, visible,
completely real. I could see the lines on his coat,
the folds in the collar, the age, and the cloth.
He was tall. His skin was pale, but not corpse pale,
just drained. His face was long and unreadable. His eyes
were I can't remember them. He held out his hand.
There was a note in it. I didn't reach for it.
My arm moved on its own. MY fingers took it
from his hand, and the second it left his palm,
he vanished. I stared at the paper for a long
time before I unfolded it. My hands were shaking, my
throat was dry. I already knew it was meant for me.
Three words written in neat, slanted handwriting, cripple your father.
The rain had been falling hard for most of the evening,
hammering the windshield and waves sweeping sideways. When the wind
picked up, the wipers couldn't keep up. I kept one
hand steady on the wheel while the other balanced the
warm pizza box across my thigh. It had come from
one of those new vending machines setups. Some kimmicky start
up people had started ordering from the machines handled everything, order,
prep box and seal. My eyes bounced between it and
the road. I couldn't help wondering what made this so popular.
The car jolted hard over a speed bomp I hadn't
seen in the rain, and I felt something slide off
my lap. I looked down. One of the slices had
slipped half way out the box and landed right across
my thigh. I bowled over and brought the car to
a crawl. Glancing down again, my shirt was soaked in red.
I lifted the slice by the crust, and somehow it
looked perfect. Hardly any saucers missing from the surface. The
rest of it must have been some excess pulling at
the bottom of the box. It didn't smell like pizza,
though I couldn't tell exactly what. The liquid on me
smelled like some weird oil they used. The sauce hadn't
changed the slice's appearance. I pushed it back in with
the others. It looked perfect to me, so I figured
the customers wouldn't complain. I wiped my fingers against the
side of the seat and closed the box again. I
pulled up to the curb outside the modest two story house,
headlights cutting through the sheets of rain. The windows were
fogged from the inside. I grabbed the box, stepped out,
shielding it from the downpour as best I could, and
jogged up to the walkway. I rang the bell. A
second later, a muffled voice called out from inside. Sweetea,
just like we practiced, go get the pizza delivery. The
door clicked open. A little girl stood in the doorway,
about seven years old. Her hair was tied in two
loose puffs, pulled back evenly. One front tooth was missing.
She wore a pink hoodie she'd scribbled on with permanent marker.
My arms went slack. It was my sister. I stepped
back once with an audible gasp, staring. She tilted her
head a little and gave me a tiny shrug. Hmm.
I blinked. The rain was cold against my collar. My
arms moved on the roan and passed it over. She
took it without question, said thank you with a smile,
and shut the door. I kept standing there, staring at
the closed door. That was her, I was in imagining it.
It wasn't someone who looked similar or reminded me of her.
It was her. And the chipped nail polish on her
fingers to the way. She rocked forward slightly on her
toes before closing the door. I baged down the steps
slowly and got into the car, my hands trembling as
they found the steering wheel. The wet fabric of my
shirt clung tighter now, and I noticed fresh red smears
on the upholstery where I sat. I stared at the
house through the windshield. What the hell did I just see?
It was in a resemblance that was her. I tried
forcing logic back into my head. Maybe she was spending
the weekend at a friend's place and I just delivered
to her without either of us registering what was happening.
She could have been distracted. Still, she had stared right
into my face, and I saw no familiarity in her eyes.
Surely my sister would have recognized me. My brain kept
whirring in my head like I'd missed something massive. I
crept the steering wheel harder and muttered to myself. I
reached for my phone and darled my mom. If any
one knew where my sister was, it would be her.
It rang, then rang again. I tapped my foot and
looked up at the house. I hung up, then called again.
Still nothing. My leg bounced harder. I felt the wet
fabric shift under me, sticking to my skin. I leaned
my head back and stared at the ceiling of the car, whispering,
come on, pick up. I dropped the phone on to
the passenger seat and stared at it, then out the window,
then back at the house. This is insane, I said
under my breath. I can't believe I'm about to do this.
I popped the door and stepped out into the rain.
I didn't go straight to the front door. I walked
around to the side of the house, following the edge
of the hedges until I found a spot where the
curtains didn't fully cover the window. My shoes were soaked.
Every step squished, and the cold water crawled up past
my ankles. I just needed to see, just a peek.
I leaned in, squinting through the glass. The inside of
the window was foggy, but I could still make it
out there. I saw my sister again, sitting cross legged
on the carpet with a book spread out in front
of her. But I also noticed my dad sitting at
the table, focused on a newspaper. What looked to be
my mom? No, what was definitely my mom scrawled on
a phone across from him. She was on a phone
right now, but she hadn't picked up my call. The
TV was on low volume, with some cartoon humming in
the background. I breassed my palm flat against the window
and stared harder. That was them, all of them, But
it couldn't be. They were supposed to be at home.
What were they doing here? And if they weren't my family,
who the hell were they? Was there a double ganger
of me as well? A sound cut through the air
so sharp and sudden, I almost fell backward. The dogs
slammed against the wind window, snarling, teeth bared. I hadn't
even noticed her in the room, but now she was
up against the glass, her tail stiff and ears pinned.
I stumbled back, slipping slightly in the wet grass, then
turned and ran. I didn't look back until I was
in the car, slamming the door shut and locking it.
It was our family dog, but I thought she had
run away months ago. My chest heaved, my hands trembled,
and the steering wheel I drove the whole way home.
I tried talking sensing to myself they're just visiting someone,
that's all that is. I don't know. Maybe I forgot.
Maybe they told me and I tuned out. I forced
out a laugh. They don't have to tell me everything.
I kept talking, but the feeling didn't leave. Something was wrong,
Something was deeply, irreversibly wrong. As I pulled into the driveway,
the street lights cast long streaks across the wet road.
My parents' car was already there, sitting where it always did,
angled slightly toward the garage with a front bomberdent I'd
seen a thousand times. I sat for a moment, then
stepped out into the cold and walked up to the door.
The moment I opened it, I saw something. I set
alarm bells off in my head. My dad's sneakers with
the grass stains around the soles, my mom's worn flat,
and my sister's light of velcrows. I shut the door
behind me and called out, marm no answer, Dad, Ye home.
I swallowed hard and moved deeper into the house, each
step slower than the last. I passed the living room
and the kitchen, I turned down the hall and the
master bedroom. The door was shut, but I could hear
the quiet hum of a space eater coming from inside.
I pushed it open just enough to see through the gap.
There were three shapes under the covers, one large figure
on the side, another in the middle, and a smaller
one near the edge. I shut the door gently. So
they'd been here all along, but I'd just seen them.
I'd watched them sitting together at the other house. I
know I hadn't imagined it. But if it wasn't my family,
then who the hell was at the other place. My
thoughts scrambled for answers, but every path hit a wall. Cloones,
skin walkers, shape shifters. I wasn't superstitious, but I had
read stories. But those were fiction, weren't they. I lay
in bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the
ceiling van slowly turning above me. My clothes were still
damp with rain and sauce, and I hadn't changed I
hadn't even turned off the bedroom light. There was no
sleep coming. I had so many questions I needed answered.
I tried going over every detail. I thought maybe I'd
exaggerated it. I told myself, people can resemble each other
more than you think, than my mind had filled in
the gaps because I was stressed or overworked. But the
more I ran through it, the more certain I became.
I didn't get it wrong. I'd seen my sister. I
rolled over and looked at the clock. It was still early,
just before five. I got up and grabbed my keys.
I needed to see again, I needed proof. I parked
across the street from the house and killed the engine.
The windows were still dark, the porch light had shut
off with the first rays of sunlight. I reclined slightly
in the seat and waited. Minutes passed, maybe more than
an hour. Then the front door opened. My mum stepped
out first, coats slung over one arm, digging in a
purse for keys. My sister followed behind her, wearing her
school uniform. This couldn't be a coincidence, now, I was
certain the exact same uniform. No way. They got into
their car, and I watched as my mother started driving.
I didn't even realize i'd started the ignition until I
was already following them. I followed them across town, keeping
two cars back so I wouldn't be noticed. They pulled
into the lot of West Grove Elementary, my sister's school.
I recognized the mural on the front wall and the
big plastic tiger near the entrance. I parked across the
street and watched. My mom stepped out first, guiding my
sister with a hand on her back. She adjested her coat,
glanced both ways, and crossed towards the front door. My
sister skipped behind her, bouncing at the sidewalk's edge. They
laughed about something before heading through the main entrance. I
stayed frozen behind the wheel. My hands were locked around it, stiff.
This was really happening. I couldn't wait any more. I
got out and crossed the street. The security officer at
the door didn't stop me. I walked through the main
entrance and straight toward the front desk. The woman sitting
there looked up and offered a polite smile that disappeared
as soon as she saw me. Can I help you,
she asked, voice cautious. I'm trying to find my mom
and sister. They just came in. I saw them walk
through the doors. She hesitated, glanced toward the interior hall,
then back to me. There's a parent student event going
on this morning, A lot of families. I hear right now,
do you know what classroom they were going to? I
shook my head. Ah, I just I need to talk
to them. I'm sure they're here. I saw them come in.
Her eyes flicked down to my shirt. Her lips parted
like she was about to ask something, then stopped herself instead.
She pointed to a small cluster of chairs by the entrance.
You can sit and wait there if you like. I sat.
The seat creaked beneath me, and the smell of industrial
carpet and disinfectant hit my nose. I rested my arms
on my knees and tried to quiet my breathing. My
head ached from how hard I've been clenching my jaw.
The woman at the desk glanced at me again, then
stood and stepped closer, her voice lower. Sorry to bother you,
but what is that on your shirt? I looked down.
The red stains were still smeared across the front, and
sleeves thicker near the bottom. I'd forgotten all about it,
Peter Sauce, I muttered, heard a delivery incident. It's nothing,
She nodded, unsure. I leaned back and rubbed my eyes.
My thoughts spun without direction. What was the point of
all of this, why were these copies even targeting my
family specifically? And more importantly, when was I going to
see my own copy? I was so deep in my
train of thought that I hadn't noticed the flood of
parents and children that had spilled into the front lobby.
I got up in a trance, looking around while tiptoeing
trying to find the two. Then I saw them, my
mom guiding my sister by the hand. They were headed
for the exit, her purse over one shoulder. I had
to try calling out to them, Mom, I shouted. It
didn't seem like they heard me, but I couldn't quite
tell because I was interrupted by a hand landing on
my shoulder. You're right, man. I turned to see a
security guard standing next to me, I scanning me from
head to toe. I haked my arm free. I'm fine,
I just need to talk to them. They didn't hear me.
The guard opened his mouth, probably about to suggest I
calmed down. Wait was signed something. I didn't give him
the chance. I stormed out the front door. The car
had already started moving. I sprinted across the lock, jumped
into mine, and cranked the ignition. My tires screeched against
the wet road as I pulled out and began tailing them.
They pulled into the driveway and parked. I stayed on
the opposite side of the street, ducked low behind my
steering wheel. My mom stepped out and my sister followed.
The front door opened, and my dad appeared in his
work uniform. I was on the cusper, losing my mind.
Every time I tried rationalizing what was happening, I got
hit with another slap in the face. He smiled, walked
down the steps, wrapped my mom in a brief hug,
kissed the forehead, and knelt and patted the dog barreling
out behind them. They all walked inside together, the door
shut behind them. I stared at the house with my
hands frozen. At ten and two. I had seen them,
all of them but me. The sun had begun to dip.
By the time the front door opened again. I had
been watching for hours, parked down the street, barely blinking.
My legs were sore from sitting. My stomach had long
since given up asking for food. They all stepped out
of the house together. My mom locked the door behind her,
dropped the keys into a purse, and got into the car.
They pulled away without a glance behind them. I waited
until they turned the corner. Then I stepped out of
my car. I passed the front door and rounded the house,
stepping over weeds and bits of rotted mulch. My hand
trembled as I reached for the back door. I tried
twisting the handle, but it was locked. I stepped back,
scanned the area, found a rock near the edge of
the fence, and hefted it with both hands. My breath
was fast. I raised it and smashed it through the
back window. Glass scattered across the linonium. I cleared the
sharp edges of my forearm, climbed in, and landed with
a thud in the kitchen. The moment I landed, I
heard a growl. She stood at the end of the hallway,
ears pulled tight, tail still, her front paw lifted an
inch off the floor, her body stiff. Hey, I whispered,
it's me. You remember me, right? She growled louder, hackles raised.
It's me, girl, it's me. The dog lunged forward, barking
with a snarl that echoed down the hallway. I barely
managed to raise my arm before she collided with me,
her teeth snapping at my forearm. I twisted and shoved
with all my weight, throwing her sideways into the wall.
She yelped as she hit the ground hard. She didn't
move after that, but I checked her chest, still breathing.
I pushed into the living room and tried to steady
my breathing. I moved through the house room by room,
turning over drawers, peeling open photo albums, and flipping through paperwork.
The diplomas were on the wall. Their wedding photo sat
crooked on the dresser. I opened my sister's closet. Her
clothes were exactly I remembered them. I checked the drawings
taped to a wall in my parents' room. I rifled
through the drawers one by one until I hit the
one near the bottom. It stuck a little when I
pulled it, swollen from humidity. I yagged harder. A stack
of old tax documents and re seats spilled forward. Beneath them.
Wrapped in a hand towel was a revolver. I unwrapped
it and turned it in my hands. The chamber was empty.
I had come here and prepared if I was about
to meet a group of skin walkers and monsters. I
realized then that I needed a way to defend myself
at the very least. I kept searching, and eventually I
found a box of rounds beneath a row of passports
and family records. I loaded the cylinder, clicking each bullet
into place. I sat on the couch and stared at
the hallway where the dog lay. I just wanted to
end it. I wanted someone to tell me why this
was happening. It was dark by the time their headlights
swept across the wall of the living room. I turned
every light off. I sat in silence, revolver of resting
in my lap, heart steady. Now I had been waiting
so long that the silence had begun to settle around
me like furniture. The car door slam shut, The front
door unlocked, swung open, and they entered together, chatting about
something casual. Then they saw the dog. The laughter stopped.
My mom dropped her purse. They ran forward, crouching down,
reaching for her. My sister gasped and pressed herself against
the wall. That's when I stepped forward from the hallway.
They turned as one. I lifted the revolver and cocked
it they froze. My dad raised his hands slowly. My
mom didn't move. My sister stared at me with her
eyes wide and wet. I didn't blink. Who are you?
We all asked at the same time. I didn't answer,
and they didn't either. I waved the gun around. I
asked the questions. I corrected my posture. Why are you
copying my family? Still nothing? I saw you all here,
I said. I delivered that stupid Peter here and saw
my little sister and my entire family in this home.
But I saw them my family back home, lying in bed.
So who are you people? Why is there no copy
of me? Am I not good enough? My voice cracked
at the end, but I saw led it back. You're
not them. My dad started to speak something low and
even don't I said, don't start acting now. I reached
into my coat pocket and pulled out the roll of
duct tape i'd brought from the kitchen draw. I tossed
it across the room. I bounced once, then stopped near
my dad's foot. Start tying all of you arms, legs.
Don't test me. My sister started crying. My mom didn't
move until my dad knelt and began wrapping a wrist,
uttering that everything was going to be fine, that they'd
do what I said. He walked quickly, quietly, barely looking up.
He bound her ankles next, then moved to my sister,
who flinched with every motion. I tied my father's wrists myself.
You're coming with me, I said, We're going to see
the real ones, the originals. My dad looked up at me,
confusion twisting into fear. I'm going to get my answers.
I marched them outside. The street was empty. I had
them walk in a line, slow and careful. My finger
never left the trigger. I opened the door of the
car and shoved them into the back seat, one at
a time. My sister sat in the middle, wedged between them.
Their faces were tight with panic. My dad tried whispering
something to her. I told him to shut up. I
got behind the wheel and started the engine. I drove
toward my house. My fingers tightened and the wheel with
every mile. My throat was dry and the weight of
the revolver pressed against my thigh. I kept my eyes
flickering between the road and the mirror. We pulled into
the driveway. My hands were shaking on the wheel slick
with sweat, even though the night air had turned cold.
I left the engine running and stepped out first, keeping
the revolver low but steady. Out, I said, voice dry,
come on, let's go. The dad shuffled out of the
car slowly. His hands were dill taped, arms held away
from his sides, like he thought any movement might set
me off. He looked at the house for a second,
then at me. Look, he said, trying to meet my eyes.
Please just think about this. You don't have to do
any of this. This is a mistake. You're confused. I
can tell. I didn't say anything. He kept going, breath
picking up. You said, we are copies, doppelgangers. What if
that's not what this is? What if you just mix
something up? We walked toward the front steps. I was
right behind him. Ah, he stuttered, if I'm a copy?
What's my name? I stopped walking. The question buzzed in
my head, dull and ugly. I should be easy, I'd
said it a thousand times. I opened my mouth. Your
name is? He defensively raised his arms, awaiting an answer.
I raised the gun again. Shut up, just shut up,
you're about to meet them. I led him down, the hallway.
Every light in the house was off. I didn't bother
with the switches. I just I wanted to get this
over with. They're in there, I said, the real ones
you'll see, and when you do, I want to hear
you say it. I want you to admit you're a copy.
He didn't speak. I reached for the mass the bedroom
door and pushed it open with the barrel of the gun.
It creaked. The air inside was thicker warm, as my
family was still in there sleeping. I stepped in first
and flipped the light switch, and then I stopped breathing.
The sheets were stained, dark red splotches soaked through the
fabric and crusted around the edges. The man behind me
led out a soft, hoarse sound. Why, he said, voice breaking,
Why are you showing me this? I looked at him.
I didn't speak. I raised the gun and shot him
once in the chest. He dropped to his knees, gasping.
Then I stepped forward, placed the barrel against his head,
and fired again. His body fell sideways under the carpet.
I stood there for a while still. There was noise
in my ears and fan word above us. I didn't
say anything. I just turned around and walked back toward
the door. The rain had returned by the time I
stepped back outside. It drifted over the street in soft sheets,
thin and consistent, slipping into the collar of my shirt.
As I crossed the yard, the sidewalk glistened beneath the
street light, puddles gathering in the same uneven cracks that
had always been there. I walked toward the car with
the revolver down at my side. My mum sat rigid,
mouth sealed beneath the tape, eyes locked on the door
of the house. The sister sat next to her, shoulders trembling,
hands pinned in a lap with the tape still tied
across a wrist. The faces were red from crying. They
had seen the flashes through the window. They knew I
stood there for a moment. No one said anything. I
opened the driver's side door and looked at them. My
mum's eyes flicked to mine. Her head shook slightly. Just
once I raised the gun and fired. The bullet struck
her just beneath the left eye. Her head jerked back
and smag the seat with a dull thud. Blood sprayed
the inside of the window and rolled in slow streaks
down the side of her cheek. My sister screamed against
the tape. She writhed sideways, twisting as far as the
restraints let her move. Her knees kicked at the dashboard.
She tried to turn away. I walked around the car.
Her eyes met mine through the side window. I opened
the passenger. She tried to speak, her voice caught behind
the lays of tape and panic. I raised the gun
again and fired twice into her chest. Her body slammed
back against the seat, then folded sideways. The screams stopped.
Blood soaked through a shirt, soaking into the sea blower.
One of her arms dropped looser, the elbow limp over
the edge of the cushion. I stood there, staring at
the mess for a long time. My arm trembled beneath
the weight of the gun. I let it drop to
my side and stepped back from the car, breathing through
my mouth. The rain hadn't let up. I turned and
walked back inside. My shoes left a trail across the
tiles in the entryway. The copper smell inside it had
grown stronger. It crawled into my nose, into my throat,
and settled there, I sat down on the couch. The
revolver clacked as I placed it on the table in
front of me. I leaned back and stared at the wall.
My hands rested in my lap. I could still feel
the recall in my fingers. Minutes passed, maybe more, and
then far off I heard sirens. They were coming. I
looked at the revolver again. One shot left. I'm not
saying the money made it worth it, but it did
keep me faed. The kind of job I had, hell,
the kind of place we worked was the sort of
thing you didn't exactly talk about at family gatherings. I
never brought it up with my brother when he called,
didn't post about it, didn't take photos. I wasn't even
allowed to keep a journal, not a real one anyway,
only the pocket logs they issued, the kind where every
page was marked confidential in bright red. And even then
we weren't supposed to write anything more detailed than shift
notes and tool sign outs. But if you're the type
who's ever stared down the barrel of a second eviction
notice or wondered if that noise in the ceiling meant
you couldn't afford the exterminator again, you'll understand why I
took the job. I got the call through someone who
knew someone, a guy had done contract rigging work with
out in Arizona. He didn't tell me what the job was,
just that it paid triple and they needed people who
could keep their heads down. The phone call was short.
I didn't even give a formal yes, just silence, long
enough for him to say, all right, I'll pass that on.
Two days later, I got a message on my old
work email that was still connected to my phone. I
hadn't used it in years. There was no subject line,
no sender list, just a set of coordinates, the time,
and instructions to bring id and steal toe boots. It
felt off every part of it, but I was behind
on rent and the other job I'd lined up fell through.
I told myself it was probably some private sector contract gig,
maybe security or survey work. Nothing legal, just quiet. I
drove five hours to a truck stop in the middle
of nowhere, an unmarked van already waiting. The driver didn't
say a word, just pointed to the back like he'd
done it a hundred times before, and I climbed in.
Because desperate people do strange things when the numbers finally
stopped working in their favor. We drove for what felt
like ours. The windows were blacked out, and my phone
was taken and sealed in a lead lined pouch, the
kind you could only release with a strong magnet. Nobody spoke,
and when the van finally stopped, we were at a
small private airfield, bare concrete, a single floodlight, and a
plane waiting on the tarmac, too small to be commercial.
The plane wasn't marked, just a featureless charter, yet inside
were half a dozen other guys, spaced out like strangers
at a funeral. The windows were frosted over. The only
thing they served was water in sealed bags like ivy fluid.
When we landed, it was dark again, and I was
left disoriented. Everything felt wrong in a way I couldn't
quite name. My body knew I'd crossed too many time
zones or altitudes or both, but no one ever told
us where we were. The air outside was thin and sharp,
and the men who met us wore plain gray jackets
and carried clipboards. They handed us gear bags at the
staging facility and told us strip out everything we came
in with, clothes, wallets, and anything from the outside, with
the exception of our boots. Our ideas were stuck facing
the outside so they could easily identify the owners, and
they stuffed it all into a heavy plastic bin that
was wheeled away without a word. They handed us jumpsuits
and blank eyed ee badges. All I know was that
it was up high somewhere. It was not quite mountain
range level, but definitely past the tree line. The air
was thin and cold enough that your nostrils cracked and burned.
You couldn't see anything outside the fence but gray sky
rock and snow smooth hills that never changed no matter
how long you stared. I don't think it was on
any map. I say that because I've looked, God knows
I've locked. The sides itself looked like a prison complex,
everything built from prefab concrete and modular steel, bright orange
floodlights on timers that ran like clockwork, a mess hall,
four DRN buildings, a machine shop, and the shaft are
itself a series of structures built into the slope, like
a scar that hadn't healed right. They couldn't shake the
feeling that there was a small chance this was a trick,
and I was never getting that money they promised. They
called it the dig despite it being a mine. Our
job was to keep it operational. Cruise rotated in and
out every lunar cycle for exactly twenty eight days. We
didn't work by month. Instead, we worked by the moon.
What we were digging for wasn't exactly clear, not to me. Officially.
We cleared debris, stabilized support columns, and tested gas levels.
The actual excavation was handled by remote systems. Deeper down.
All we ever saw were containers being brought up and
loaded into sealed trucks. The guys unloading them more radiation gear.
We won't given any, told we didn't need it. The
only rule that mattered, they told us during induction was this,
No one goes below level seven. They made this clear.
There was no reason to go past there, not even
to retrieve a lost tool or follow a cable run.
Even if people called for help. We were told to
ignore it. If you detect unauthorized comms from restricted levels,
log and escalate, do not engage. The safety officer told
us during the briefing. That was the only time the
room went quiet. At first, it all felt strangely normal. Sure,
the job wasn't typical, but for me it was easy work.
The only thing that bothered me was that my sleep
didn't feel RESTful, like my brain didn't have time to relax.
Our schedule was simple, wake up at six a m. Eat,
do safety checks, grab tools, and work. We spent eight
hours down in the dark, with only the hum of
light and the grumble of machines for company. Most of
the dig was reinforced with old concrete and steel. Everything
beyond level three had that pressure cooked look, with walls
bowed in places and support beams rusted but still technically intact.
There was dust in the air that never settled, so
we wore respirators, but the air still tasted like blood
and chalk. By level five, the stone changed. You could
feel it under your boots. Everything sounded different too. Your
steps didn't echo the same way. It was like the
walls swallowed sound. People talked less the deeper we went,
probably from the thinner oxygen. Level six had the worst
of it. The air got warmer, tighter in the chest.
Even the lights struggled down there. The bulbs glowed dimmer,
always flickering. Some of the guys swore they saw things
in the far corners of the shaft, just shadows, probably
tricks on their tired eyes. But occasionally someone would shine
a light into the dark and claim it bounced off
something reflective, like cat eyes, and you could always hear
something beneath your feet. It didn't sound mechanical. He was slower, heavier,
something more like a breath or a pulse. Sorenson didn't
say much his first week, but one day, when we
were cleaning an old spill by the lockers on six,
he paused mid scrape, just staring at the floor for
a while. Then he said, almost to himself, I think
my dreams know more about this place than I do.
They showed me tunnel systems I haven't been in, but
when I get there, I recognize them what I asked,
But he went back to scraping the floor like he
hadn't heard me. There was something off about him that day,
more than usual. He'd been getting stranger all week. I
heard other workers whisper things when they thought no one
was listening, Stuff that didn't make sense, like the mine
wasn't built here, it was reopened. One guy, Thompson, swore
he saw markings in the stone that didn't match any
of our tools. I couldn't help but find the whole
thing ridiculous. Being stuck in artificial life for eight hours
a day clearly impacted these guys, and I wasn't about
to let that happen to me. And through it all,
Level seven just waited. The first time I saw the
door up close was during my rotation on safety checks.
Level six was on my route, and one of the
daily tasks was to confirm the seal integrity on the
Level seven door. Every shift, someone had to take the
elevator down, scan the world lines with the handheld thermal unit,
and log the readings manually. The door to Level seven
was solid steel, welded in three places, painted yellow and
black like a wasp's nest. No keypad, no lock, just
a placard restricted do not open. I marked it off
my checklist and realized I was holding my breath the
entire time, as if something on the other side might
hear me, and I swear I heard some one whisper
from the other side, but I never told any one
how to fear of admitting I was catching whatever mental
bug the other guys seemed to have. Sorenson disappeared on
day nineteen, but we didn't realize straight away. We got
used the guy's crashing early or skipping mess to sleep
off of my grain. Nobody kept track of any one
unless they were your tool body for the shift. But
when we lined up for checking the next morning, he
didn't show. Someone joked that he'd finally quit, and maybe
he'd hiked out in the night. We all knew he'd
been unraveling little things. At first. He stand too close
to the wall, as if listening for something. He started
skipping mess and keeping food in his bunk as if
he didn't trust the kitchen. Once I found him standing
in the equipment hallway, just staring at the rust stains
on the floor. I remember he said they reminded him
of a pattern, but he couldn't remember from where, maybe
his dreams. Once again, he'd never expand on what he
was saying. He started keeping a journal in his pocket.
Log I caught glimpses of sketches of spiral like shapes
and some teeth as well. One page had a date
circle three times with the words do not follow, underlie
and hard enough to tear the paper. He'd been stationed
near the freight elevator on six and said he kept
hearing voices over the intercom even though no one was broadcasting,
said the signal was from seven. They said they pulled
security footage to the check, but they never shared it
with us. However, word got around. One night he bypassed
the maintenance override and forced the service lift down. He'd
taken a breathing tank, a work light, and one of
the old crowbars. That was it. He went down alone
when everyone was sleeping. When we woke up and got
to work, I noticed the lights across the lower levels
started flickering in rhythm in a slow timed pulse four
seconds on four, off, over and over. The morning after that,
Sorenson's name was gone from the manifest. The side supervisor
wouldn't let anyone descend below five for the next two days.
Safety concerns, they said, structure review. There was no mention
of him in the bunk records. His gear locker was empty.
Even his plate and cup from the mess were missing,
like he'd never been there at all. That's when it
really started to go wrong. On day twenty two, Wyatt
took the emergency ladder between four and five after the
main lift locked up again. It was the second time
that week. He was furious, muttering about how the maintenance
crew should be fired, and decided not to wait. He
slipped thirty feet and cracked two ribs on the landing.
Said the rungs were slick with something, but when we
checked they were spotless, like they'd been scrubbed. One day
twenty three, Briggs had a seizure in the mess hall,
full tonic cronic. He bit through his tongue, blood everywhere,
and he took six guys to hold him down. He
didn't remember it afterward, but he kept asking where the
lights had gone. The lights were still on. Not long
after that, a soft rattling started in the ventilation system.
Constant like metal beads rolling around inside the duct work
kept some of us up at night. We asked maintenance
to check it out. They sent a guy. He climbed
into the crawl space, came back down an hour later
and said there was nothing there. Wouldn't meet our eyes
when he said it. By day twenty four, our radio
stopped working reliably. We'd hear our own voices looping back
on a delay. Sometimes they came back distorted. Sometimes they
said things we hadn't said. Someone asked to leave early
and was denied. They said there wasn't transport scheduled until
the next cycle, and breaking protocol would void its payment.
He packed anyway and disappeared during the night. Nobody saw
him again. The rest of us stopped asking questions. I
started seeing shadows move where they shouldn't, first in the
elevator reflection, in the corners of the dorm showers. They
always disappeared when I turned to lock, and then there
was the door to level seven. Every morning, during safety
check on six, someone would swear the worlds looked thinner,
just a little like heat stress had started to pull
them apart from the inside. But none of us wanted
to be the one to measure. We didn't want to
get close enough to prove it. It happened on day
twenty six, midshift. We were down on level five clearing
out some half collapse support corridors. When the tremors started.
It didn't seem unusual at first. The place groaned all
the time, but then a chunk of ceiling came down
and took out our primary lift, an emergency ladder. One
second we were tagging a busted pipe. The next second,
alarms were blaring and the whole tunnel was filled with
dust and blinding us. We had five of us down there.
Emergency protocol radio to use the service access shaft by
the old pump station. He went around the main shaft
but was deeper and looped down through old maintenance corridors
before connecting back up above the only working one left,
which meant to go up. We had to go down first.
That meant passing near seven. I remember standing at the
base of the ladder and thinking how bad it had
been for them to root us through that level despite
the warnings, But the supervisors had radioed it, so he climbed.
We hit level six, out of breath and wired. Deeke
was coughing so hard I thought he'd pass out. Elson
kept looking down at the shaft like he was paranoid.
I couldn't help but think about my three remaining days. Then,
after all of this, it would be worth it. Then
we reached seven. The change was instant. The temperature spiked
like we'd stepped into a sealed room with no ventilation.
It clung to us, hot and humid, like a sauna,
but instead of wood, the air tasted of rot. It
hit the back of the throat and stayed there, and
breathing felt like inhaling through a soaked rag. Pressure built
in our ears and sweat started pooling inside the masks. Jeez,
it's like breathing soup, I muttered. Why is it so
hot down here, Deeke said, yanking at the strap of
his mask. It's supposed to get colder the teeper we go.
It's not just the heat, Elson said, something's off. The
air's thick. Then the lights behind us went individually, like
someone was following and flipping a switch as they came.
Deeke slamp started to cut out, flickering to the rhythm
of his footsteps. Nelson stopped climbing all together and just froze.
Do you hear that? He asked. I didn't want to,
but yeah. There were voices in the walls murmuring somewhere
deep in the rock. Gomez dropped his bag, trying to
reach for his emergency beacon. It tumbled down the shaft,
climbing off steel until the sound just stopped. We kept going.
At the next landing, we left the shaft and headed
down the corridor that led deeper into seven. Inside was
a chamber that felt almost alive. The walls weren't stone
so much as tissue, dense and wet looking, with a
surface that glistened, and in the lamp light, they flexed
in slow waves, like muscles of a throat mid swallow.
Every step squelched faintly, and the smell was worse than before.
Then we saw him curled near the wall. Was what
was left of Sorenson. He was dead, no question. His
body was slumped like it had been dropped, but the
chamber hadn't let him go. Something had fused him into
the floor. His back was half sunk into the wet surface,
skin stretched thin where it met the tissue, as if
the walls were slowly pulling him in. The film across
his body pulsed faintly. One eye was still open, dried
and glazed over, like a dead fish, while his jaw
hung slack in a way no living person could hold.
You could see where the veins are darkened, branching into
the floor like roots. The stench of raw meat left
out in the sun invaded through our respirators. Gomes whispered,
that's why they redid the world, geez Deeke muttered, voice
tight and higher than usual. He had one arm half
shielding his face like that would help. What the hell
is this? This is sick, Gomez gagged behind his respirator.
His voice was hollow. It feels like we're inside something's body.
Nobody corrected him. Elson was shaking. I remember how his
helmet light jitted across the walls, like he couldn't keep
his head still. We shouldn't be here, he kept whispering,
We're not supposed to see this. I didn't say a word.
I was trying not to breathe to get through it.
No way. I was cracking. With just a few days left,
the ground beneath us throbbed. Go Mis said something about
a lighter head. I didn't see anything at first, just
shadows stacked on shadows. But then something shifted, and I
caught the shape of another shaft, lined in rusted brackets
and half buried conduit. It looked like another access tunnel,
smaller than ours, stretching straight up. Is that the old vertical?
Deac asked, squinting, his voice cracked. He goes all the
way up right top side. I nodded. We all knew
the layout from the emergency map. One was a backup
escape route sealed decades ago. Supposedly useless, but there it was.
Then the light shifted again. Whatever comfort that shaft offered
disappeared when I realized it wasn't just exposed. It was open, unsealed,
like it had been used recently, as when the skin
of my arms crawled. The heat pulsed again, thicker than before,
and the walls began to breathe slower, heavier. I felt sick,
like I was fighting a childhood fever. There was something
in the center of the chamber, massive and still carved
with ridges like the roof of a mouth, only wider
than anything should be. It didn't move, but I swear
it felt like it was waiting. I stepped closer to
get a look, and the thing in the center didn't move.
Behind me, someone whispered my name. I turned, but no
one else had moved. The light pulsed again, not a flash,
more like a deep rhythmic contraction. Everything flexed, The floor
dropped half an inch beneath my boots, and the film
rippled like it was breathing harder now. Deeke shouted something,
but his voice didn't carry right. It came out bent
and muffled, as if we were underwater. Nelson started backing
toward the exit, stumbling over his own boots. That was
when the tunnel behind us began to close in a
slow tightening. I don't know what made me move first,
maybe instinct, but I ran, leaving the others behind, pushing
through the thick air, and I didn't dare look back.
I threw myself into the old vertical, dragging with my
elbows behind me. The corridor dimmed, swallowed by that pulsing heat.
I remember the way the metal of the vent burned
against my palms, the way the air changed, less heat,
more cold, thinner again. I kept crawling, didn't think, just crawled.
When the tremors started again, I thought the whole shaft
would give, but it didn't. I kept climbing, hand over hand,
forcing myself up through the shaft. It wasn't built for
this kind of escape, too narrow and extremely old, but
I didn't care. I just needed to get above level seven. Eventually,
the tunnel curved and connected to a collapse service hall
at the back end of level six. I had to
crawl over the rubble that had caved in earlier. My
legs scraped against reebar and broken stone. Every movement felt
harsh in my body. That's when everything tilted. I felt
something shift in my head. When I woke up, I
was in the infirmary on Level one. The lights were
too bright and everything smelled like bleach. My throat was dry,
and someone had shaved part of my scalp for electrodes.
The medic didn't say much, just clipped a monitor to
my finger and asked if I felt nauseous. His tone
was practiced flat, like I was a routine checkup, as
if nothing unusual had happened. I asked, what happened to
the others. He said, I must be confused the service shaft,
I said, we took the one near the pump station,
as the supervisor said that was the way out. The
menic didn't even look up, just said there were no
orders given over the radio. That channel's been dead for days.
I didn't say anything after that, just let him finish
what he was doing. But I couldn't stop thinking about it.
The calm in the voice that told us which way
to go, the exact timing of the tremors, and the
fact that the radio hadn't crackled or cut out like
the others. How stupid we were to just follow the
commands without question. They said I'd been unconscious for five days,
long enough that they'd already processed my dismissal. I went
home like nothing had happened. I followed their itinerary, bordered
the plane, and tried not to think about what I'd seen.
I didn't remember going through the terminal. I barely remember
the flight. Everything between the infirmary and my front door
felt dull, like I was moving through underwater. The next day,
the deposit hit and I received double hazard pay. As
if that squared the books. I haven't slept through the
night since. The dreams are always the same, that soft,
flexing pressure of walls that breathe, the taste of metal
and sick in the back of my throat. Sometimes I'm
watching from above, other times I'm crawling. Since I returned,
I've been waking up to find dirt under my fingernails
and I didn't know how he got there. Then mudder
my slippers, and eventually there were callouses of my palms.
Turns out I'm digging back yard mostly. Then it was
the patch of dirt in the alley behind my apartment,
And at one point I woke up in a drainage
stitch places I shouldn't have been. I don't remember walking
out there, but I always wake up near a pit
with raw and blooded hands and dirt packed tight under
my nails. It was never the same hole. I called
the guy who got me the job to ask him
what the hell kind of thing he dragged me into
and whether he was digging too, But his voice on
the other end was flat confused. He didn't sound tired
or haunted like I was. Oh, I never gave him
your name, he said. I meant to. I dreover, pulled
up and everything, but I got distracted and forgot. The
job I was going to recommend was a Nevada warehouse gig,
graveyard shift, but good pay. I swear I never passed
it on.