The door of air sealed shut behind the creature, but not before they caught a final glimpse of what lay beyond it—rows of what looked like humans... skinned, hanging upside down, eyes wired open and smiling, their expressions fixed as though they'd seen something too holy or too horrific to forget.
Then silence. As if the building itself flinched.
Maya dropped to her knees, heaving. Kiran staggered to a wall, whispering incoherently.
Dev, pale, still holding the torn paper with Elias's dream-code, stepped toward the now-active console and inserted the slip into a rusted input slot that looked like a blend of metal and marrow.
> "This code…" he muttered. "This isn't a sequence. It's a… direction. It's telling us where each divergence began. Four divergences. Four timelines. Four Elias."
Elias coughed. Something dark, almost like ink, spilled from his mouth.
> "What happens when they meet?" he asked.
Dev hesitated.
> "They're not supposed to. That's what the Omega Loop was designed to stop. When divergent versions of a conscious experiment overlap, the result is neural implosion—a total collapse of identity. And then... the parasite awakens fully."
> "The parasite?" Maya asked.
> "The being that made the mirror-face," Dev whispered. "It's not a ghost. It's a fractured conscious anomaly. The failed attempt to digitize and contain human souls created it. It lives in error… in broken code... and it feeds on recognition."
They looked toward Elias.
> "That's why it's hunting you," Dev added. "You're the link. You were the original echo they tried to preserve."
Kiran broke the moment with a scream, pointing to the ground.
The concrete pulsed—wet. Not with blood, but something worse. Conscious fluid. A mix of liquified bone, memories, and black moss, bubbling like it was thinking.
Then... a voice.
> "I A M T H E F I R S T"
It didn't come from the console or any speaker. It came from under their skin—each of them heard it from their own veins, as if their blood had remembered something forbidden.
Elias grabbed his head, falling to the floor, screaming as another vision ruptured through him.
---
🔪 Vision: 2041, The Lab That Shouldn't Exist 🔪
He was walking.
No.
Dragged.
His eyes weren't his. He saw from someone else's view — a man in a lab coat, stepping into the lower level of the facility. The walls here weren't metal anymore. They were organic—breathing, veined like muscle tissue.
Pods.
Hundreds.
Each holding a version of him—some half-formed, some decaying. Some laughing with mouths wide open but no eyes. One clawed at the glass, screaming his name backwards.
> "S A I L E"
He passed one pod and saw himself… wearing the same coat he wore when he first had the dream. Except… this version had wires in his mouth. And he was smiling too wide.
> "Wake up," it whispered.
"Make them read."
"Make them bleed."
---
Elias woke, gasping, grabbing at his chest.
> "I… I saw them. The other versions. One escaped the system. One was trapped in the mirror. One... is in this room."
Kiran backed away, eyes wild.
> "What do you mean one is in this room?"
Dev didn't respond.
Instead, he turned to the console. The screen now displayed a terminal prompt.
Ω—INITIATE DIVERGENCE UNIFICATION? [Y/N]
> "We could try to force the timelines to merge," Dev said. "Risk everything. But it might give us a way out. Or…"
> "Or?" Maya asked.
> "Or we erase the project by corrupting the primary source—Elias. That's what the original team wanted. But it would mean killing the original fragment completely."
Elias stood, trembling.
> "I… don't want to die. But I don't want this to keep spreading either."
Suddenly, screaming echoed through the halls.
Pod #1 was activating.
A body inside… writhing. Its flesh peeled back as if being edited mid-sentence. Glitches danced across its face — flickering through different versions of Elias, laughing, crying, stitched together with spine-wire.
Kiran screamed.
> "TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!"
Dev rushed forward, typing furiously. Blood spilled from the keyboard. It wasn't ink. It was… teeth.
> "It's trying to awaken! The body has no soul—it's looking for the nearest host!"
Elias clutched his chest again.
> "It's coming for me."
Maya did the only thing she could.
She grabbed a rusted metal rod and plunged it through the console, electrocuting the pod system. It screamed. The creature sizzled, and the air was filled with the smell of burnt soul—an odor that made their eyes weep black tears.
Pod #1 exploded.
Chunks of mirror and flesh rained down.
Silence.
Then, from behind the console, a disk tray opened. Inside lay a bone fragment carved with a pattern.
A QR code.
Made from fingernail.
---
> "What… is that?" Maya whispered.
> "The next lock," Dev replied, hollowly. "To be deciphered."
They all
looked toward the reader again.
It blinked once.
READERS BOUND: 2
You shouldn't have kept reading.
But you did.
And now you're indexed too.
---
TO BE CONTINUED…