(Author: This gift doesn't necessarily mean something from my immediate circle, but it's simply a gift for you all.)
Hawkins Laboratory.
The fluorescent lights on the ceiling began to flicker erratically, blinking like tired eyes on the verge of going out. The hum they produced was not constant—it rose and fell in an irregular, jagged rhythm, a high-pitched sound that seeped into the bones and made nerves tense involuntarily. The air in the laboratory felt heavy, charged with static electricity and something else… an invisible pressure that made even breathing difficult.
Behind the reinforced glass, Dr. Martin Brenner remained absolutely still.
His hands were firmly clasped behind his back, fingers interlaced with military precision. His face showed no panic, no surprise—only a calculated rigidity, a focused and hungry gaze, like that of someone finally watching a theory take shape before his eyes. This was not fear. It was restrained expectation. Anticipation.
Inside the sensory deprivation tank, submerged in saltwater, the child known as Eleven writhed.
Her small body arched and twisted as if trying to escape something that could not be seen. Her eyes were opened wider than natural, pupils dilated, fixed on a point that did not exist. Bubbles escaped from her parted lips as her breathing became chaotic, irregular, almost impossible to follow. The screams she tried to release never fully emerged—they were swallowed by the water, by the thick metal of the tank, turning into muffled, distorted, desperate sounds.
It was not just childish panic.
It was something deeper. Older.
A raw, instinctive fear that came from a place where words did not exist. A terror that did not arise from the unknown… but from recognition. From what looked back.
And from the fact that it had also seen her.
Then, the sound came.
A sharp crack ran through the room—short, violent—like the sound of ice splitting under an impossible weight. For a brief second, there was absolute silence. Then, the wall behind the tank began to break.
But not in the usual way.
The cracks did not spread from top to bottom, nor did they obey the structural logic of concrete. They grew, branching like living roots, slithering across the gray surface at an unnatural speed. As they advanced, they began to glow. A pulsing red, wet, organic—like exposed veins beneath torn skin. Each pulse lit the laboratory in sickly hues, casting distorted shadows that seemed to move on their own.
Space itself seemed to protest.
Alarms went off almost simultaneously.
Red lights spun, sirens echoed in a piercing wail that blended with the hum of the lamps and Eleven's muffled screams. Chaos took hold instantly. Technicians panicked—clipboards slipped from trembling hands and shattered on the floor, chairs were shoved back violently, orders were shouted, but none of them were truly heard.
Some ran desperately to the control panels, pressing buttons without truly knowing what to do. Others simply fled, overcome by a primitive survival instinct that spoke louder than any training, any protocol, any scientific oath.
In the middle of all this…
Brenner did not move.
His eyes remained fixed on the tank, then on the cracks, then on the red glow as it intensified. A faint reflection of the pulsing light passed across the lenses of his glasses. He breathed calmly, almost in reverence. As if standing before something sacred. Or inevitable.
And then, at that exact moment—when the concrete no longer seemed solid, when the air vibrated as if it were being torn apart—a door between two dimensions was opened.
...
There was no ground.
No sky.
No horizon.
There was only a sea.
An impossible ocean, too vast to be measured, too deep to be understood. It did not reflect light—it absorbed it, distorted it, returned it fractured into tones that should not coexist. All colors were there, layered, fused, denied. Iridescences collided and dissolved into liquid masses that seemed to argue among themselves over what form to take. Reality, there, was not stable. It hesitated.
The waves obeyed no rhythm. They rose and collapsed in on themselves, folding at angles that made the eyes ache, as if trying to follow physical laws that were never written—or were deliberately forgotten. There was no wind, yet the sea moved. There was no defined gravity, yet the liquid masses still fell.
The air—if it could be called air—vibrated.
Not with sound, exactly. With intention.
Voices whispered from everywhere and nowhere. Layered currents of murmurs that did not come from mouths or throats, but from invisible fissures in existence itself. Some words carried meaning, heavy and cutting. Others were merely interesting—curious, seductive, dangerous. Fragmented. Incomplete. Disturbing.
They were not speaking to someone.
They were speaking through whoever dared to listen.
It was as if every thought there were merely an echo of something greater, older—something that used the human mind as a means of propagation. A channel. A convenient flaw.
The dry sound of a line being adjusted cut through that unreal vastness.
"Repeat that one more time…" The officer's voice was cold, trained, polished by years of command and secrecy. Even so, there was something there—a slight tremor, carefully contained. Not open fear, but something more dangerous: disbelief.
"You're saying the field was completely dry?"
"Yes." The answer came too quickly. Immediate. Rehearsed to exhaustion.
"No detectable reserves. Absolute zero. All sensors confirmed it. Deep drilling, seismic scanning, cross-analyses. Nothing."
A brief pause, almost imperceptible.
"And yet… something began to leak."
The silence on the other end of the line was not merely the absence of sound. It was weight. Pressure. As if the conversation itself were being watched.
"What leaked?"
There was hesitation now. Real. Audible.
"…Oil."
The word sounded wrong the instant it was spoken. As if it did not belong in that sentence. As if it had been forced there to fill a void that should not exist.
"Black. Thick." The tone lost its firmness for a moment. "But it didn't come from any geological reservoir. There was no built-up pressure, no tectonic fault, no structural explanation."
Another pause. A short, almost suffocated breath.
"It simply… existed."
On the other end, the officer took a deep breath before responding. When his voice returned, the absolute control was gone.
"Then why the hell did they build a research facility there?" The question exploded, charged with anger and something close to panic. "That is not an oil field. It never was."
"It wasn't an economic decision, sir." Now the hesitation was unmistakable, seeping into every syllable. "The data didn't justify it. The reports didn't recommend it. The models pointed to nothing."
A longer pause.
"It was… intuitive."
On the other end of the line, silence returned—heavier than before.
"Intuitive?"
"Several engineers reported the same dream even before construction began." The tone dropped, shedding any technical veneer and taking on something almost confessional, as if that information had never been meant for official records.
"A black sea. Completely still. No waves. No sky. No visible shore."
There was a short, heavy pause.
"And something… watching."
On the other end of the line, someone murmured an involuntary prayer, so quiet it nearly vanished into the static of the transmission. It wasn't directed at God—it was a reflex. An old, automatic gesture in the face of the incomprehensible.
"…My God…" The phrase came out broken, as if the air had run out halfway through it. "What did they find in the depths of the oil field…"
The voice cracked, and a second voice overlapped the first. Hoarse. Tense. Clearly shaken, like someone who had already crossed the limit of what they could rationalize.
"…This material…" There was a nervous clearing of the throat before continuing. "It doesn't react like oil. It doesn't behave like any known hydrocarbon. It follows no density, no viscosity, nothing."
An irregular breath.
"It moves when observed."
A burst of interference cut across the line, a prolonged hiss that distorted the recording for several seconds, as if something were trying to insert itself into the communication—or prevent it from continuing.
"…The doctor…" The voice returned, now lower, almost a forced whisper. "He tried to analyze the substance. Got too close. Thought it was a reflection of light, a surface illusion."
The breathing grew heavy, irregular.
"It climbed up his legs."
An abrupt pause.
"Against gravity."
Another pause.
"As if it were… curious."
The silence that followed was not broken by anyone. No orders. No questions. Only the distant sound of the open line and restrained breathing.
"And then—"
The sentence was cut off by a swallowed sob.
"…He didn't explode." The words came out in shock, stripped of any emotion except pure horror. "There was no chemical reaction. There was no combustion. There was no release of energy."
A dry swallow.
"He melted."
There was a low click, perhaps someone letting go of the receiver.
"He turned into a puddle of black oil right in front of me."
A dull, latent headache struck Tanner like a deep, blunt impact, coming not from outside, but from within. It was not an ordinary pain—it was a crushing pressure, as if something were trying to occupy too much space inside his mind. The black liquid of the sea recoiled from his body in that same instant, pulling away as if it had lost interest.
His strength abandoned him.
Tanner succumbed.
The word echoed within his consciousness like a final sentence. It was not thought—it was imposed. Etched. Sealed.
That…
How did he know this?
How could he know about the government, about Hawkins, about Brenner—how could he feel, with an absolute and unsettling certainty, that all of it was part of a single mechanism? There was no logic, no research, no deduction. Only the brutal conviction that all those pieces had always been connected.
The memories did not surface in a linear way.
They came in broken fragments, like old tapes played by a malfunctioning projector. Scenes overlapped, collided, blended together. Voices spoke out of sync, some whispering, others screaming, all at once.
Images manifested without order—white, sterile corridors, flickering fluorescent lights, children screaming underwater, soldiers running, symbols that belonged to no language.
Some of those images belonged to the future.
Others were so ancient that they should never have existed.
Nothing made sense.
And yet… everything felt true.
Because it was not merely memory.
It was something being remembered through him.
As if Tanner were not the origin of those memories, but only a temporary vessel. A medium. A point of contact.
As if the Sea of Chaos had never been discovered.
As if it had always been there.
Waiting.
Waiting to be recognized.
"Tanner Keene…"
The voice did not come from above.
Nor from below.
It came from everywhere at once.
It echoed from the depths of the black sea, but also resonated inside Tanner's skull, in the space between his thoughts, in the intervals between his heartbeats. It was a dense, heavy sound that did not vibrate only through the air—it vibrated through existence itself. Each syllable carried the weight of entire eras, as if spoken by something that had existed before the concept of time was ever defined.
There was no clear emotion in that voice.
No anger.No compassion.
Only certainty.
The sea stirred.
Not with waves—but with intention.
The oily surface began to warp slowly, forming concentric circles that spread outward yet never dissipated. Each ring remained visible, layered atop the others, like marks left by something touching reality again and again at the same point.
The sea did not react to the environment.
It reacted to Tanner.
"God Almighty;
Creator;
Maker;
The Omnipotent and Omniscient;
Lord of the Astral World"
Tanner tried to move.
He couldn't.
His body did not respond, because there, a body was an optional concept. He tried to force his arms, his legs, anything—but there was no resistance, no muscle, no ground to struggle against.
He tried to scream.
But his voice did not exist in that place.
Not because it had been taken from him—but because it had never been necessary there. Sound was an artifice of the material world. Here, intentions spoke louder than words.
The presence drew closer.
Not in distance.
It was as if something were descending through layer after layer of existence, replacing them. The closer it came, the more the world around him lost importance, definition, meaning. Colors faded, shapes dissolved, like a dream being forgotten at the very moment one wakes up.
The sea no longer seemed vast.
It seemed small.
Insignificant.
Then came the sentence.
Not as a threat.
Not as a warning.
But as absolute truth.
"Do not flee from your destiny, Tanner."
The words allowed no interpretation. There was no implied choice within them. Only the statement of something that had been decided long before he existed as an individual.
The sea opened.
—
BAAM!
Tanner woke abruptly, his entire body lurching forward as if he had been ripped from an invisible abyss. Air rushed violently into his lungs in uncontrolled gulps, burning his throat as if he had gone far too long without breathing. His heart hammered against his chest with absurd force, so loud he could hear it in his own ears, like a war drum on the verge of bursting.
Sweat streamed hot down the back of his neck and across his temples, soaking his shirt and sticking the fabric to his back. His hands trembled without any control, fingers opening and closing as if they still expected to feel the resistance of something that was no longer there.
The room was dark. Silent. Too small.
But something was wrong.
Something had changed.
The sensation came first—a subtle, deep displacement, as if he were occupying a space that did not fully belong to him. Then, without warning, the memory cut through his mind like a blade.
It did not come like a fading dream.
It came like a repressed truth, forcibly sealed away, finally breaking loose with violence.
Live.
Name.
Death.
Each one surfaced with its own weight, accompanied by emotions that did not fit that body. Guilt, fury, resignation, emptiness. Faces he should never have known… yet did. With disturbing clarity.
The laboratory.
Flickering fluorescent lights. Reinforced glass. Alarms. Muffled screams.
The black sea.
Still. Watchful. Alive.
The voice.
Ancient. Dense. Impossible to forget.
Tanner's lips moved on their own, before he even realized he was speaking. His throat was dry, his voice came out low, hoarse, heavy with disbelief.
"Shit…"
He brought a hand to his face, pressing his own skin, feeling the warmth, the texture, the pulse racing beneath his fingers. The body was too young. Too light. Too intact.
Too alive.
His eyes widened in the darkness, reflecting an understanding that allowed no return. The room no longer felt like a refuge. It felt like a temporary cell.
"I reincarnated."