Chapter 1: Fragments of a Forgotten Name
My last name used to be Halden. I don't use it here—no one would recognize it, not in this world. But I like to keep it tucked in the back of my head, like a bookmark from a story that no longer belongs to me. A quiet echo from the past, a whispered syllable lost to time.
Two years and three months.
That's how long it's been since I woke up in this version of Earth—if you can even call it that. The sky's the same shade of gray-blue that blanketed my old hometown every October. The rain still hisses against the windowpanes with that same hollow rhythm. Coffee still burns the tongue if you're too impatient. The texture of the world is familiar, almost insultingly so.
And yet... nothing here feels like it belongs. Not to me. Not to anyone. Not even the silence.
Right now, I sit slouched in the back row of a literature class in Blackwell Academy, a private school perched on the edge of a mid-sized city that might as well be an uncanny replica of somewhere I once knew. The classroom is lined with faux-oak bookshelves filled with sanitized titles, clean and unthreatening. The teacher drones on about narrative unity and harmonious conclusions, while chalk scratches over the board like whispers in a tunnel.
I stare at my half-scribbled notebook—more empty than filled—and wonder what exactly I'm doing here.
Re-learning a world that almost looks like mine. Pretending I belong. Acting like this school uniform fits me better than the memories I still dream about at night.
If I'm going to stay here… then what? What am I even supposed to do in a world that remembers nothing I remember?
At first glance, this place looks identical to the Earth I knew. The same countries, the same continents. The same names on the map: London, Tokyo, New York—cities built on the bones of history. But the bones are wrong. They've been rearranged.
The cracks show if you know where to look.
Ask someone here about World War I, and they tilt their head like a curious bird. "You mean the European Collapse?" they ask, as if it had always been called that. World War II? "The Atlas Reunification." No mention of the Holocaust. No Hiroshima. No Hitler. No Nuremberg Trials.
The war existed, but it played out like a fever dream.
Their history books still mention Churchill, but he was a writer, not a Prime Minister. Roosevelt led a transcontinental energy initiative, not a wartime coalition. Lenin? Assassinated before he penned a single word of revolutionary doctrine. Instead, Russia fractured into a loose federation of eco-states governed by something called the "Green Doctrine."
It's like a puzzle where all the pieces fit, but the picture is wrong.
And it's not just history. Tiny linguistic glitches trip me up. They don't say "Wi-Fi." They say "EchoNet." Nobody uses Google—it's "Nimbus." When I asked about Einstein, a classmate blinked and said, "Who?"
I wanted to scream.
Science progressed. Society functions. But everything feels off-script, like the playwright changed the lines just before curtain call.
Some things are better, to be fair. Clean energy is abundant. Cities shimmer with solar towers and floating walkways. Traffic accidents are virtually nonexistent. There's no nuclear arms race, no Cold War. Climate change is under control.
But the world feels lobotomized. Sanitized. Deprived of pain and depth.
Maybe that's why everyone's eyes seem a little bit duller. Like they've never truly grieved. Like they've never truly felt anything.
I remember the first time I noticed it. It was in music class. We were listening to the top EchoTunes chart for the week. It was filled with upbeat, chirpy songs with lyrics about sunlight, peace, and cooperative community gardening.
No Nirvana. No Johnny Cash. No Amy Winehouse. No soul.
No cracks in the voice. No vulnerability. The closest thing I found to emotional expression was a song called "Rainlight," and even that felt like an algorithm wrote it after a mindfulness seminar.
Movies exist here too. Big-budget spectacles with flawless CGI, colorful romances, and animated fantasies. But they're sterile. Predictable. Happy endings only. No Inception. No Fight Club. No Black Swan. No Kubrick. No Nolan. No David Lynch. No horror.
Not even psychological discomfort.
They removed fear from fiction like it's a disease.
Games were another disappointment. I remember the thrill of Bioshock's moral dilemmas. The bleak realism of The Last of Us. The haunting beauty of Silent Hill.
Here? The graphics are better, sure—some rival the best ray-traced visuals I ever saw. But the stories are vapid. I played a popular RPG where the worst thing that could happen was your digital flower bed getting too much sunlight and your character feeling mildly disappointed.
There are no tragic arcs. No betrayals. No losses that matter.
Their books? Don't get me started.
I've visited the school library dozens of times. Rows upon rows of titles—but none of them are Kafka. No Orwell. No Dostoevsky. No Sylvia Plath. No Toni Morrison. No stories of madness, guilt, corruption, despair.
All the literature ends with smiles and wedding bells.
Everything feels like it's been declawed. Censored, but not by a state. Not overtly. More like a shared cultural forgetting. A collective amnesia that scrubbed away the dark.
There are no stand-up comedians who mock the establishment. No late-night satire. No protest music. No rebellion. Just polite applause.
If you ask someone what their favorite story is, they usually shrug and say, "I like the one where the dog finds its way home."
The creativity here is frictionless. Rounded at the edges. No pain. No conflict. No stakes.
What scared me most was how content everyone seemed. As if they'd never noticed what was missing. As if they'd never had the capacity to imagine pain, fear, rage, or lust.
And that's when I realized: This world doesn't just lack darkness.
It fears it.
---
It came to me in the cafeteria. I was stirring a cup of something they call "cocoafizz"—sweet, warm, and unnaturally frothy—when I heard a girl humming a tune. It was light and airy, like every other song here.
And something inside me snapped.
I miss screams in music. I miss the jagged poetry of broken hearts. I miss movies that left me shaking, games that made me question my choices, books that looked into the void and didn't blink.
I don't just miss them—I need them. Because they were real. They were honest.
That's when the idea planted itself in my mind like a seed breaking through frost.
What if I could bring it back? Not back—here.
What if I could write those stories again? What if I could compose those songs, direct those scenes, create that art this world has never known? They say this world has no hunger for that kind of pain.
Then maybe I'll be the one to make them starve for it.
And if this place is too quiet, too sanitized, too safe…
Then I'll give it something to fear.