The digital clock's red digits still flickered in the oppressive darkness of Itth's room. 2:22 AM. Again.
But this time… Itth wasn't startled. There was no sharp intake of breath, no sudden jolt of adrenaline. Instead, he simply sat there, his gaze fixed on the glowing numbers, a strange sense of calm settling over him. It was as if he was trying to grasp at something intangible, something that continued to slip through the sieve of his memory, an elusive thought just beyond his reach. He stared, unblinking, into the red glow, willing the missing pieces to reassemble.
He reached for his notebook, the one he had meticulously filled with his strange dreams, his fragmented notes, his growing fear. He opened it to the last page he remembered writing on, the page where he had recorded the chilling details of his encounter on the subway, the elusive name 'Ray', the numbers that haunted his waking and sleeping hours.
It was blank.
The crisp white paper stared back at him, devoid of any markings. No hasty scribbles, no underlined phrases, no frantic diagrams. A chilling void where his recent thoughts should have been.
"...Where did it go?" Itth whispered, the sound barely audible in the quiet room. His voice was raspy, laced with a growing dread.
The page he had written on yesterday—gone. The page where he had scrawled the name 'Ray'—also gone. Even the page where he had jotted down the sequence of numbers: 1212, 1122, 0333—utterly erased, wiped clean as if they had never existed.
All that remained was the pristine blankness of the paper, and on the notebook's cover, written in bold, unerasable red ink, a stark label:
"PROPERTY OF SIM-01: ITTH."
A cold certainty began to bloom in Itth's chest. This wasn't just a dream, or a lapse in memory. This was something far more insidious, something actively working against him, methodically dismantling the very fabric of his personal history. The numbers on the cover felt like a brand, a permanent mark of ownership that solidified his growing suspicion: he was a subject, a simulation, a mere entry in a system's ledger.
[Morning
The next morning, the air still heavy with the lingering scent of rain, Itth stood before the bathroom mirror. The fluorescent light hummed, casting a pale, clinical glow over his reflection. He stared intently at his own face, a disquieting sense of foreignness creeping over him.
Something was subtly, undeniably off.
His features, while undeniably his own, seemed… different from yesterday. It was a subtle alteration, almost like a faint, imperceptible blur filter had been applied, a soft focus that he hadn't consciously noticed. His eyes, usually sharp and clear, seemed to hold a newfound haziness, as if a thin veil had descended over his perception. He traced the outline of his jawline, the curve of his brow, trying to pinpoint the elusive change. It was frustrating, like trying to remember a word that was right on the tip of his tongue.
He lightly tapped his forehead against the cool glass, the soft thud echoing in the small room. "Don't overthink it..." he murmured, trying to reassure himself. "You just didn't get enough sleep, that's all."
But his heart refused to believe the placating words. Beneath the surface, a primal scream was building, a silent, frantic shout from deep within his subconscious: he had forgotten something crucial. Something vital had been excised, leaving a raw, aching void in its place. The feeling was akin to losing a limb, a part of himself that was no longer there, yet whose phantom presence still throbbed with an unbearable emptiness. The reflection in the mirror seemed to mock him, a familiar stranger staring back, holding secrets he couldn't grasp.
[Subway – Grey Line]
The subway train, usually a place of quiet contemplation for Itth, was unusually crowded today. The morning rush hour hummed with the low murmur of conversations and the shuffling of feet. Today, it was nothing like the eerily empty carriage of yesterday. He stood, swaying gently with the movement of the train, his hand gripping a cold overhead bar.
A small girl, perhaps no older than eight or nine, dressed in a crisp primary school uniform, stood directly in front of him. Her small frame reached just above his waist, her head tilted back as she gazed up at him. Her eyes, wide and unnervingly perceptive, fixed on his face, unblinking. Itth felt an odd prickle of unease under her intense scrutiny. Children rarely paid him such direct attention.
Then, her voice, soft as a breath, barely audible above the train's rumble, reached his ears.
"Brother… you've been deleted, haven't you?"
The words, though whispered, reverberated in Itth's mind with startling clarity, as if someone had turned up a microphone, amplifying them directly into his thoughts. They pierced through the ambient noise, silencing everything else.
"I… I beg your pardon?" he stammered, his brow furrowing in confusion. The child's statement was nonsensical, yet terrifyingly precise.
"They're deleting your memories, brother," she continued, her voice still impossibly soft, yet imbued with a wisdom far beyond her years. Her gaze remained unwavering, holding his, conveying an urgent message that transcended their brief encounter.
"Don't forget him, Ray…"
Ray?
Itth's heart lurched, a sudden, sharp jolt that stole his breath. The name, whispered by a stranger, resonated with an unfamiliar familiarity, striking a chord deep within him.
Who was Ray? The name felt significant, weighty, yet it hung tantalizingly just out of his grasp, like a word he should know but couldn't recall. A flicker of yesterday's subway encounter, the man with silver hair, flashed across his mind, a fragmented image, quickly fading.
Just as he struggled to process the child's cryptic warning, the automated voice of the subway system chimed, cutting through the carriage's muffled sounds.
"Next Station: NULL. Repeat: NULL."
No station name? What did 'NULL' mean? A system error? A void? The absence of something that should be there? The word echoed the emptiness he felt in his mind, the missing pieces of his notebook.
Before Itth could formulate another thought, before he could question the child further, she extended a small hand, pressing a tiny, folded piece of paper into his palm. Without another word, she turned and darted away, weaving through the crowded carriage, disappearing into the throng of passengers as if she were a ghost, an apparition sent to deliver a message and vanish.
Itth stood there, the small piece of paper clutched tightly in his hand. He slowly unfolded it. On the pristine white surface, a single sequence of numbers was written in a child's neat, careful script:
"9901-RAY"
He clenched the paper, crumpling it slightly in his tight grip. He didn't understand what the numbers meant, what their significance was, or how this child knew them. But the name "RAY" etched on the paper caused something profound to stir within his chest, a deep tremor that radiated through his entire being. It was an unfamiliar ache, a yearning for something lost, a powerful emotional resonance that defied logic or explanation. He felt a desperate need to understand, to remember, to grasp onto the elusive thread that connected him to this mysterious name. The digital glow of the train's announcement board seemed to mock him, its impersonal precision a stark contrast to the swirling chaos within his mind.
[That Night – A Peculiar Dream]
That night, Itth found himself not in his usual room, but in the dream's recurring setting: the stark, white mirror hall. Only this time, there were no shattered reflections, no distorted images. Just an endless expanse of pristine white, like an infinite digital canvas. There was no sound, no discernible passage of time, nothing but the stark reality of raw, pulsing numbers.
On the walls, streams of code began to appear, shifting and coalescing into urgent messages, like a system's command prompt running before his very eyes:
"SIM-01: MEMORY REBOOT IN 05:00" "DELETING: SUBJECT RAY"
The words burned into his vision, stark and horrifying. "Memory Reboot." "Deleting: Subject Ray." The cold, technical terms struck him with the force of a physical blow. Five minutes. Five minutes until a part of him, a part he was only just beginning to grasp, would be irrevocably erased.
"Wait…!" Itth cried out, his voice raw, desperate, echoing strangely in the silent, vast space. The sound reverberated, bouncing off the invisible walls, a lonely plea against an indifferent system. The pristine images on the wall began to shimmer, the entire dreamscape starting to vibrate with an unsettling intensity.
Suddenly, a hand emerged from the glowing white wall, as if materializing from the very code itself. It was long-fingered, slender, yet surprisingly strong. It grasped Itth's wrist, holding him firmly, gently, with a sense of possessiveness that was both startling and deeply comforting.
He looked up, following the arm to its owner.
The face… The long, dark hair that framed it… The deep, sorrowful eyes that seemed to hold the weight of an untold history.
Ray.
He was here. Real, tangible, even in this fragmented, digital dreamscape. His face was etched with a profound sadness, yet his grip on Itth's wrist was firm, grounding.
"You don't remember me anymore, do you?" Ray's voice was soft, laced with a heartbreaking resignation, yet it was the same voice that had whispered to Itth from the depths of his subconscious, the voice he had yearned to place.
"But I remember everything… every single second I spent with you."
A wave of overwhelming emotion washed over Itth. Tears streamed down his face, hot and uncontrollable, even though he didn't consciously understand why. A deep, agonizing sorrow twisted in his gut, a grief for something he couldn't fully recall, yet whose absence tore at his soul. He wanted to embrace this man, to cling to him, to sob into his shoulder, to shout out all the confusion and terror that had been building inside him. But his mouth was frozen, unable to form words, his throat constricted by the raw intensity of his emotions.
Ray's hand tightened on his wrist, a last comforting touch. His eyes, filled with an ancient, knowing sorrow, looked deeply into Itth's.
"Remember this, Itth…" Ray whispered, his voice beginning to fragment, like a digital transmission losing signal. "The system will delete me… but your feelings will remain." "Because love… it's embedded deeper than data."
As Ray spoke, the system's voice, cold and detached, boomed through the dream, echoing the inexorable march of fate. "DELETION COMPLETE."
Ray offered a small, bittersweet smile, tears glistening in his own eyes, even as his form began to slowly dissipate, to unravel. He transformed, not into dust, but into streams of glowing blue code, breaking apart like shimmering particles, fading into the infinite white. His eyes, fixed on Itth until the very last moment, conveyed a silent promise, an eternal connection that defied the system's brutal efficiency. The warmth of his hand lingered for a fleeting second, then was gone, leaving Itth gripping empty air, the echo of a profound loss vibrating through his very core.
[Itth Wakes Up]
Itth jolted awake, his body drenched in cold sweat, his breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps. The dream, so vivid, so heartbreakingly real, clung to him, its emotional residue thick and suffocating. He turned his head to look at his bedside table, a desperate hope clinging to him that it had all been a nightmare.
His notebook, the one with "PROPERTY OF SIM-01: ITTH" on the cover, was gone. Wiped clean from his reality, just like the memories.
His digital clock—it was no longer displaying 2:22 AM. The red numbers pulsed with a new, unsettling sequence:
3:33 AM.
A shift. A new baseline. Another piece of his familiar, predictable world had changed, confirming the system's invasive reach.
On his pillow, where his head had just rested, a small, folded piece of paper lay. His fingers trembled as he picked it up. The handwriting was not his own, yet he recognized it instantly, a part of him acknowledging the familiar loops and angles, a fragment of memory asserting itself against the relentless deletion.
"EXIT is in your heart, not the system. Remember me… even if it's just a fragment.
RAY"