The mirrored corridor twisted.
Not in shape, but in purpose.
Each step I took echoed differently. The rhythm of my boots on the floor stayed the same, but the sound bounced back warped, delayed, reshaped—like the space was trying to guess who I was based on the noise I made.
Patch walked beside me in silence. Her tail low. Her posture tight.
No light source cast our shadows.
There were no shadows to cast.
The walls were the only source of illumination now, glowing faintly as they reflected my movements. My face rippled every few seconds. One pane showed me younger. Another, older. One had no reflection at all. Another showed just my outline, but with empty eyes.
"I do not like this place," Patch murmured.
"Neither do I."
At the end of the corridor, the chamber widened.
It wasn't a lab. Not a shrine. It was… a theatre.
Tiered walls. A raised central platform. And lenses.
At least nine of them.
Each was mounted on rotating arms above the stage, swivelling slowly, with irises that pulsed like pupils reacting to movement. As I stepped onto the platform, two lenses adjusted instantly, turning toward me.
I stopped mid-stride.
Patch snarled—a low, guttural sound.
A console flickered into view.
Not a pedestal. A control panel.
And above it:
[PUZZLE NODE 4/4: OBSERVER'S EYE]
[RECONSTRUCT SYSTEM MEMORY THREAD]
[SELECT CORRECT VIEWPOINT TO COMPLETE RECORD]
[CODE SEGMENT: LOCKED]
[TIME REMAINING: 07:53]
[WARNING: WATCHER PRESENCE ACTIVE]
"Watcher," I breathed. "Not just interest."
"Yes," Patch confirmed. "We are inside its lens."
I stepped toward the panel. The screen resolved into nine video feeds, each one from a different perspective.
One showed the garage, seconds before the integration.
Another: the kitchen, empty and wrong.
A third showed my back, from the corridor we'd just walked.
And one feed in the centre? Blank.
Dead.
But beneath it:
[RECONSTRUCTION PENDING // IDENTITY UNKNOWN]
I understood.
The puzzle was me.
The system didn't know who I was or what I'd become.
And now it was asking me to recreate the moment it lost me.
Patch whispered, "You must give it an answer."
I stared into the empty feed.
Then said, "Then it's time to give it one it won't forget."
The console feeds refreshed.
I counted them again: nine total. Eight active, flickering with jittery visual data. One empty, blank, waiting. The system wasn't asking for passive observation. It wanted a reconstruction. A thread link. A story.
And I was the story it couldn't finish.
I stepped closer to the console, wiped my blood-slick palm on my hoodie out of habit, then stopped short.
One of the feeds—the third in the top row—showed the living room from that final night. My friends crowded on the couch. Lily perched cross-legged with her Switch. Lou standing in the doorway, arms crossed, wearing that amused expression she always had when pretending not to enjoy herself.
I leaned in.
The footage was off.
It wasn't a memory. It was a simulated thread rendering. The system was replaying events, trying to rebuild them from partial logs and corrupted triggers. My seat was empty. The game wasn't loaded. The Switch screen showed pure static.
Patch observed from the base of the dais, her biomech plating humming quietly as she watched the lens arms rotate. Her voice was softer than usual. "These are echoes. Falsified logic branches."
"Guesses," I said. "It's guessing at what I was."
"No," she replied. "It's trying to decide what you are."
I let that settle in the silence.
Then I touched the console.
The first feed maximised. Full screen. The garage. But not from my view—this came from behind one of the storage shelves. I remembered the angle. I'd installed a motion light there years ago. It never worked right. The shelf flickered into view, but it wasn't cluttered with tools anymore—it was lined with empty controller cases, stacked neatly in rows.
My heart skipped.
There was no reason for the system to invent that.
Which meant it had seen it.
I minimised the feed.
Feed five: the kitchen, seen from beneath the table.
Lou's feet. Kids' chairs. The tail end of a dropped sandwich being eaten by a cat I never remembered owning.
I moved on.
The next feed showed an overhead view of a bedroom—but not the family's. Mine. Long before all this. A flat I hadn't lived in since my late teens. The bed unmade. The screen showed a boot sequence for an emulator running a title I'd forgotten even existed.
That one made me pause.
"I think…" I murmured, "…it's pulling from more than just that night."
Patch's voice sharpened. "You are losing data containment."
I shook my head. "No—I'm seeing how it stores memory. Everything's recursive. It's folding unrelated events into the simulation because it doesn't understand what's critical."
"Then define it," she said.
I stared at the central black square.
And said, "Watch this."
I spread my fingers across the console surface. The feeds pulsed in their sockets, each one a slice of possibility. None of them were real. Not fully. But all of them were pieces of me. Not because they happened—but because they could have.
I selected four feeds and rearranged them on the console. Not chronologically. Thematically.
Feed one: the garage, the moment before.
Feed three: the family room, the false Switch screen.
Feed five: the emulator boot screen from a younger life.
Feed eight: a hospital waiting room—empty but for an IV pump with no patient.
That last one hadn't been there a minute ago.
I dragged it into position anyway.
The blank central feed flickered.
[RECONSTRUCTION PATH DETECTED // RESOLUTION INCOMPLETE]
Patch stepped closer. "You're writing a thread," she said.
I didn't look up. "Not writing. Splicing."
I added two more feeds.
One from a hallway I didn't recognise, but somehow knew. One from the debug room, barely rendered, the console half-formed, like watching from within a memory that hadn't finished compiling.
The blank feed shimmered harder now, fuzzing at the corners.
The text updated:
[SYNTHETIC THREAD REBUILD IN PROGRESS]
[SOURCE: NULLPOINTER // OVERRIDE INHERITANCE? Y/N]
The question didn't scare me.
What scared me was that it asked.
Patch kept her gaze on the rotating camera arms overhead. They'd stopped moving. Locked in place. Watching. Not sweeping. Not recording.
Just watching.
"This is working," I whispered. "It's letting me define the feed."
I glanced at the timer.
[TIME REMAINING: 06:44]
Not enough.
But maybe enough.
The last three feeds weren't easy to touch.
One showed Lily's bedroom, the nightlight pulsing unnaturally. I almost looked away until I saw a detail that didn't belong: the gamepad from the living room, half-dissolved, floating mid-air.
Another showed Lou in the kitchen, unmoving. Her eyes were white. Her mouth twitched open and closed in a loop, silently mouthing something I couldn't hear.
The last feed showed nothing but me.
Now.
From behind.
I looked up and turned.
Nothing.
No camera. No watcher.
Just Patch.
"I'm done playing fair," I said.
And reached toward the blank feed again.
The console shuddered under my palm.
The blank feed pulsed.
For a second—less—it almost looked like it would accept the spliced sequence without complaint. Then the UI began to distort. One of the feeds inverted its colour profile. Another began to loop a frame that hadn't occurred yet—me reaching forward in a second that hadn't passed.
The system was stalling.
Patch stepped forward, her voice firmer now. "Thread instability climbing. Integrity breach imminent."
"Let it climb."
My eyes locked onto the central black feed.
And I said aloud, "Yes. Inherit the override."
The console didn't beep.
It recoiled. The display folded inward. Two feeds vanished. One reappeared in their place—a twisted angle showing the original living room, now corrupted. Shadows hung from the ceiling like wires. The floor was tiled with controller fragments.
The text updated again:
[THREAD INHERITANCE ACKNOWLEDGED]
[SYNTHETIC MEMORY REGISTERED: dev_null]
[NODE 4/4 COMPLETE]
[CODE SEGMENT: _XaE7]
[FINAL SEQUENCE LOCKED]
Then a second line appeared, glitching, reforming—like a hand trying to sign a death certificate with a knife:
[UNKNOWN OVERRIDE INVOKED // PERMISSION CONFLICT]
[OBSERVER ENTITY // MONITOR_03-A // ENGAGING TRACE PROTOCOL]
Patch's ears flattened. "It is not watching anymore," she said. "It is coming."
I didn't panic.
Instead, I reached into my hoodie pocket and pulled out the controller.
My hand was trembling.
I stared at it.
And said, "One chance."
The lights dimmed.
A deep rumble shivered through the floor.
One of the camera arms detached, uncoiling downward like a snake made of steel and black glass. It didn't aim at me. It opened, its lens blooming into an iris of razored metal.
[TRACE PROTOCOL STARTED]
[LOCKED OBJECT DETECTED: NULLPOINTER]
[CODE KEY REQUIRED: ___]
The blank filled itself with a cursor.
Waiting.
It blinked, now accompanied by a low system tone—steady and rising, like a heartbeat approaching tachycardia.
[CODE KEY REQUIRED: ___]
[TRACE PROTOCOL ACTIVE]
[MONITOR ENTITY: 03-A // RANGE: 25M]
[TIME REMAINING: 00:37]
The massive iris above tilted—just slightly. Watching. Anticipating.
Something behind the walls pulsed with its own rhythm—measured footsteps that didn't touch the floor. Reality warped with each compression of presence.
The Monitor was no longer a camera.
It was here.
Patch's eyes flicked to the side hallway. "Movement," she said flatly.
"I know," I breathed. "Almost there."
The console feeds flickered.
I raised the controller. My hands were slick with sweat, cracked at the knuckles from dried blood. My pulse matched the countdown beat-for-beat.
I closed my eyes.
And spoke. Not to the system. Not to Patch.
To myself.
"Memory."
The image of Lily's block filled my mind. Not the corrupted one. The real one. The way it clicked between her fingers. How she would hoard the weird-shaped ones like treasure. It wasn't about toys. It was about meaning. What you choose to remember, even when the world forgets.
[00:32]
"Voice."
Lou's voice. Not just audio samples. Her. The jokes only I understood. The way she yelled across the house when the kettle boiled. The words she said before the system took her, lip-synced with shaking defiance. "Keep… them… safe…"
That wasn't data.
That was an anchor.
[00:29]
"Burden."
Chris's headset. The broken band. The promise I didn't keep. The apology never said. The objects I carried that weighed less than their meaning and more than I could hold.
What we carry makes us. Not strength. Regret.
[00:26]
"Sight."
The monitor. The eyes. The feeds that showed me from every angle except the one that mattered—my own. The system couldn't define me because it looked through logic.
I didn't live in logic.
I saw through it.
[00:23]
I opened my eyes.
The camera above extended further, hissing as it focused. A red dot painted my chest.
[LOCKED OBJECT: NULLPOINTER]
[OVERRIDE KEY: REQUIRED NOW]
I exhaled.
Then, with one hand, I entered the code:
[ _0xB4_Vx32_Df9R_XaE7 ]
The cursor blinked once.
[SUBMIT? Y/N]
I didn't hesitate.
"Yes."
The floor dropped.
The console snapped into light and disappeared.
The lens above retracted violently, the Monitor's approach slicing reality open in its wake. Systems blinked out like overloaded filaments.
[CODE ACCEPTED]
[ESCAPE SEQUENCE UNLOCKED]
[TRACE ABORTED]
[DEBUG ACCESS LOCATED]
[NULLPOINTER OVERRIDE GRANTED: TEMPORARY dev_null]
And then—
"You should not exist."
The voice didn't come from the system.
It came from behind the wall.
I turned—
But I was already falling.
The floor beneath me didn't shatter. It peeled—code first, then geometry, then even the idea of ground disappeared. For a fraction of a second, the platform became weightless, like the environment had given up pretending to follow the rules.
Patch lunged.
She collided with me mid-fall, slamming into my side with the full weight of her biomech frame. Her claws didn't gouge—she was careful. Always careful. But her grip was iron as she curled around me, protective, anchoring.
We dropped together into the void.
And as the simulation broke, the Monitor finally stepped through.
It wasn't a model.
It was a presence.
Tall. Humanoid in the vaguest sense. Limbs too long. Too narrow. Plated in segmented black that shimmered like obsidian oil. Its head was a smooth dome, faceless, except for a ring of static-light rotating where eyes might have been. The inner ring blinked once. Then again. Then split into three concentric circles—each scanning a different direction.
It didn't look down at us.
It looked through us.
As if scanning a blueprint it didn't remember drawing.
Its chest opened.
Not like a door. More like a pressure seal decompressing. Inside was a tangle of copper wire and twitching bone, organic matter stitched into tech. A low tone vibrated through the collapsing room as it raised one long-fingered hand and pointed.
Not to Patch.
Not to me.
To the place we had just left.
To the thread.
The system had redrawn itself in my image.
And the Monitor had seen it.
It took a single step forward.
And the floor ceased.
Code bled away. Logic lost cohesion.
I fell sideways through what felt like three environments at once: one moment, falling past dripping steel and frozen screenshots; the next, through raw hex code like flayed circuitry; the next, through memories.
I saw Lily's bedroom light flicker.
Lou's fingers twitching just before she mouthed my name.
Chris turning, half-integrated, reaching for something that wasn't there.
Patch growled—not from fear, but effort—her claws digging into my shoulder as she fought to keep me stable.
Her voice echoed in both ears.
"Brace."
And then—
Impact.
Not a crash.
A return.
The sensation of ground slammed back into my spine like a magnetic lock. My lungs emptied. I hit something solid—tile? Stone? Logic?—and rolled, still tangled in Patch's limbs.
The lighting was dim. Familiar.
Blue-green. Soft.
Too soft for Nullspace.
The debug room.
Not perfect. Not clean.
But real.
Patch uncurled from around me slowly, her systems humming, eyes flickering a moment before resolving into their crisp, blue hue.
From the console behind us, a line appeared:
[RETURN LINK ESTABLISHED]
[WELCOME BACK, NULLPOINTER]
I stared at the ceiling.
Sweating.
Bleeding.
Alive.
I whispered, "Holy shit."
Patch lay down beside me.
"You did it."
"No," I rasped. "We did."
Then the lights pulsed once.
And the door to Nullspace sealed shut.