Chapter Six: Pages That Shouldn't Exist
Sameer sat on the curb, his chest heaving. His mind replayed the sight of that face—his father's features flickering like broken film, that hollow mouth spilling voices that didn't belong.
He buried his face in his hands.
"None of this makes sense… What's happening to me?"
The silence pressed in again. No cars, no footsteps, no sound but his own breathing. Even his music player had stopped working—its screen frozen, song title stuck.
He pulled out the folded newspaper from his bag. His hands trembled as he smoothed it open again.
The headline glared at him.
"PROJECT SAQUE – Light Phase Enters Final Stage."
The more he looked, the stranger it became.
The text beneath the headline shifted. Words blurred, then realigned, like ink rearranging itself.
Sameer blinked hard, rubbed his eyes—but when he looked again, the article had changed.
Now it read:
"Candidate #19: Subject stability declining. Must return to core."
Sameer's stomach dropped.
His eyes darted over the page, desperate, panicked. Lines of text crawled across the paper like insects, reforming into sentences he didn't want to read.
"Memory implants holding. Family simulation still effective."
"Recommend immediate retrieval."
He froze.
Family simulation…?
"No… No, no, no, no…" His voice cracked. He shook his head violently. "That's not true. My family is real. They're real!"
But the words burned into him. His father's broken face, the alley that vanished, the voices calling him Candidate Nineteen—everything was pointing to the same terrifying possibility.
That none of it was real.
Sameer tore the newspaper apart with shaking hands, scattering the pieces across the empty street. They fluttered for a moment… then dissolved into dust, vanishing into the air as if they had never existed.
Sameer stumbled backward, his throat dry.
"What the hell is happening to me…?"
And then, from somewhere distant—carried faintly through the still city air—came a voice.
A woman's voice.
"…Is someone… there?"
Sameer froze, his blood turning cold.
It wasn't distorted. It wasn't layered. It sounded… human.
Real.
For the first time since this nightmare began, he wasn't sure if he wanted to run toward it… or away from it.