Date: 6/23/2001 – Time Unknown
Location: The Hall of Youth – Cathedral of Mirrors
Perspective: Kaiser Everhart
I stood before the final mirror in our path.
It was taller than the others, its surface not black, but a deep, bruised purple that seemed to pulse like a slow-beating heart.
Amelia was still trembling behind me. 01 stood to the side, his expression neutral, waiting to see if the "anomaly" would break.
I stepped closer. My reflection didn't appear immediately. Instead, the glass dissolved into a scene that felt uncomfortable.
The "Lure" was subtle.
In the mirror, I saw a version of myself—perhaps five years older—walking through a field of tall, golden grass. The sun was setting, casting everything in a soft, honeyed glow. I saw a figure in the distance.
It looked like Cartethyia. She was waving, her raven hair catching the light. She looked happy.
It was a beautiful lie.
I know how this works.The Void doesn't give gifts.
It prepares the bait.
As the "future" me reached for her hand, the sun didn't just set—it died. The golden grass turned into jagged, black needles. The figure of my mother melted, her face stretching into a vertical slit as a row of needle-like teeth erupted from her neck.
The monster didn't just attack; it colonized the space. It was a mass of slick, obsidian flesh and clicking joints. It lunged. In the reflection, I felt the impact.
The trial's sensory link snapped shut.
My real-world shoulder screamed in agony. I felt the hot, wet slide of teeth tearing through my shoulder. I heard the sound of my own bone snapping—a dry, sickening pop that echoed inside my skull.
I was the feast.
I watched as the creature pinned me down, its multiple eyes blinking in rhythmic hunger. It began to eat me alive. It started with my torso, pulling strips of muscle away with a methodical, jerky precision.
The pain…
But then, the monster stopped. It didn't finish the meal. It leaned in, its breath smelling of sulfur and rot, and whispered a name I didn't recognize. Then, it dragged my mangled, still-breathing body toward a hole in the earth.
The perspective shifted. I was looking up from the bottom of a narrow, rectangular pit.
The sky was a thin strip of violet. Then, a shovel-full of heavy, wet dirt hit my face.
The weight was immediate. The dirt filled my nose. It coated my tongue. I tried to cough, but the soil shoved its way down my throat, clogging my windpipe. Another shovel-full. Then another.
I watched my own eyes in the mirror—wide, panicked, and filled with the reflection of the shovel. The light grew smaller. The strip of violet sky vanished.
Clang.
The sound of the shovel hitting the earth above me was muffled, but I felt the vibration in my teeth.
Darkness. Absolute and heavy.
Buried alive by smiling faces.
I could feel the worms. I could feel the cold dampness of the soil pressing against my open wounds. My lungs were screaming, expanding against a weight they couldn't move. My heart was frantic, beating against the ribcage of a corpse that wasn't dead yet.
The oxygen didn't run out all at once. It trickled away, second by agonizing second. I felt my brain begin to flicker.
I'm going to perish.
The real-world me was gasping for air, my hands clawing at my own chest as the phantom weight of the earth crushed my ribs. I felt the cold soil in my throat.
I felt the absolute loneliness of the deep.
I looked at the mirror. Through the dirt, the "future" me was still staring back. He wasn't fighting anymore. He was just... waiting.
"Kaiser!" Amelia's voice was a distant, muffled echo.
I didn't punch the mirror.
I reached out and pressed my bloodied knuckles against the cold glass. I stared into the dark of that grave until the fear stopped being a sharp note and started being a dull reminder.
I see it.
I see the end.
I was buried alive.
But I will continue…
Date: 6/23/2001 – 4:35 AM
Location: Foundation Nursery – Unit 981
Perspective: Standard Narrator
The red emergency lights pulsed through the nursery corridors, turning the sterile white walls into a rhythmic, bleeding landscape.
Director Vance reached Unit 981, his coat billowing behind him. He didn't need to check the monitors to know the situation was critical; the sound of raw, human grief was enough.
Inside the room, Cartethyia was on her knees by the bed. She was clutching Kaiser's small, limp hand against her cheek, her raven hair a tangled curtain over her face.
"K-Kaiser... please," she sobbed, her voice a fractured rasp. "W-wake up... baby, please just... h-hah... open your eyes..."
"Step back, Cartethyia," Vance commanded. His voice was cold, but there was a sharp edge of tension in it that hadn't been there an hour ago.
"Wake him up!" she screamed, spinning around to face him. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face streaked with tears.
"You did this! You put them in that... that s-slumber! He's in p-pain, Director! I can feel it... he's shaking... he's f-fading!"
"I cannot wake him," Vance said, his gaze fixed on the biometric display. "None of them are under our control anymore. The synchronization has bypassed the Foundation's safety protocols. They are in a deep coma."
He looked out into the hallway. Through the transparent glass of the neighboring units, the scene was the same. Rows of children, the elite "future" of the empire, were thrashing in their sleep.
"Most have already awakened," Vance muttered, more to himself than to her. "Of the 98, 75 have flatlined. Their brains simply... couldn't handle it. I expected 981 to be among the first to wake..."
"He is... resilient."
Cartethyia didn't listen. She lunged forward, scooped Kaiser's tiny body into her arms, and began to run toward the exit. She didn't care about the protocols.
She only saw her son dying… unable to breathe.
As they passed the other cells, the world-building of the Foundation's cruelty was on full display. Each nursery was a 4x4 meter cube of reinforced glass, equipped with life-support feeds that looked like umbilical cords made of steel.
Vance followed her, his mind racing.
000001 is stable. His heart rate is the lowest of the survivors. But 981... his neural activity is off the charts. One of the machines failed to track what he was witnessing… as if his heart stopped beating.
"Stop!" Cartethyia shrieked, skidding to a halt in the middle of the corridor.
Vance turned. "What is—"
He stopped. The words died in his throat.
Cartethyia was staring down at Kaiser's face. The boy's eyes were still closed, but thick, dark crimson tracks were leaking from beneath his eyelids. They weren't standard tears.
Tears of blood.
"He's c-crying..." Cartethyia whispered, her voice trembling with a new, deeper terror. "Director... he's crying b-blood..."
Vance stepped forward, his silver eyes wide behind his glasses. This is impossible. The neural load shouldn't manifest physically unless the consciousness is being... rewritten.
Location: The Hall of MirrorsPerspective: Kaiser Everhart (Interior Life)
In the void, time had no meaning.
A few feet away, 000001 and Amelia were watching me.
"000829," 01 said, addressing Amelia by her designation.
He didn't look at her; his focus was entirely on the space where my mirror had stood.
"Analyze the anomaly. The trial rules state that a participant must destroy every future but one. The 'Ending' is the conclusion of the test."
Amelia's emerald eyes were sharp, scanning the area with her photographic precision. "I see it, 000001. His mirror didn't end like ours. It didn't reach a definitive conclusion…"
"Why is it still continuing…?"
" He didn't choose a future. He stayed in the one where he died."
"Logic dictates the trial should have ended for him," 01 reasoned, his voice a steady, cold hum. "If a subject dies in the reflection, they cease to exist in the Hall. But he is still standing there. Why hasn't he chosen a path?"
Amelia stepped closer, her breath catching. She looked at the floor, then back at the dark, empty space where I had been buried in the glass.
"Look," she whispered, pointing at the heap of the glass.
"The dirt. In the reflection... it's moving."
01's eyes narrowed. He stepped forward, his analytical mind processing the impossible data.
In the ghostly remains of the mirror, the mound of earth over my "dead" body was shifting. A small, bloodied hand was beginning to push through the heavy, wet soil.
"He was buried alive," 01 stated, his voice devoid of emotion but heavy with a sudden, dark realization. "His injuries were fatal. His lungs were filled with earth. By every law of biology and causality, that version of him is dead."
He looked at me—the real me—standing in the liquid shadow of the cathedral, my eyes bleeding.
"Why does his mirror self persist to live?" 01 asked.
"What kind of monster refuses to die even after the story has ended?"
…
At first, I waited
In the reflection, my lungs were stagnant chambers of silt and stagnant air. I felt the transition from panic to a hollow, ringing silence. My heart had reached its limit; the beating slowed, then stuttered, then stopped.
I was waiting for the door to open. I was waiting for Cartethyia's voice to break through the soil. I was waiting for the Foundation to come save me.
I was waiting for a future that did not exist.
The weight of the earth was absolute.
I was a child, buried in the dark, and I had died.
But I want to see tomorrow.
To see tomorrow is not a gift. It is my right. If I am dead, I cannot observe the next sequence. If I cannot observe, the universe ceases to be relevant to me.
I felt my hand move. It wasn't my hand, but the hand of the Kaiser in the glass—the one who was supposed to be a corpse.
The dirt was packed tight. I pushed. My muscles, currently being eaten by the monster in the reflection, shouldn't have functioned. But logic is secondary to the "Mind" the objective is survival.
I jammed my fingers into the cold, wet soil, dragging the earth behind me to create a pocket of space. It was slow. It was torturous. Every inch was a battle against gravity and the suffocating pressure of the grave.
I shoved the soil into the space my body had occupied, inching upward through the crushing mass.
I learned then: nobody is coming to save me.
Not the instructors.
Not Cartethyia.
The only one capable of deciding my future…
I broke the surface.
In the reflection, a mangled, dirt-stained version of myself clawed its way out of the black earth. It stood under a violet sky, a silhouette of ruins.
Location: The Cathedral Floor
Amelia was paralyzed. She watched my physical form—the real me—standing before the salt-heap of the mirror. My eyes remained open, but I had stopped blinking. Two thick, dark rivulets of blood began to track down my cheeks, staining my shirt.
"000001..." she whispered, her voice trembling. "His eyes. He's... he's still in there."
01 didn't move. He was staring at the space where the mirror had been. He saw the ghostly hand of the reflection reaching out, pressing against the invisible barrier between the "ending" and our reality.
"He's rewriting the future," 01 said. His voice was a flat, clinical observation, but there was a new intensity in his gaze.
"The mirror is supposed to conclude at the death. It is a finalized fiction. But he is forcing the fiction to continue after 'The End' has been written."
Suddenly, the space in front of me began to fail.
The air didn't ripple; it glitched. The dark purple light of the mirror turned into a blinding, white static. High-frequency noise—the sound of reality's essence being torn—screeched through the cathedral.
Within the static, a figure appeared. It wasn't the child me, nor the mangled version from the grave. It was a tall, older silhouette.
A black figure of a man with eyes that glowed with a cold, blue precision.
The figure raised a hand. With a sound like a thunderclap, the glass of the invisible mirror shattered in half. The shards didn't fall; they dissolved into the void.
The reality of the burial was gone.
I exhaled. The pressure in my chest vanished.
Amelia lunged forward. She wrapped her arms around me, her head buried in my shoulder. I could feel her heart hammering against my ribs.
"Kaiser! Are you... are you back? Please tell me you're okay," she stammered, her voice a mix of relief and lingering trauma.
I looked over her shoulder at 01. He was staring at the blood on my face, his mind clearly trying to reconcile how a "talentless" designation had just broken a conceptual trial.
"How?" 01 asked. "You were dead in every possible timeline. You didn't reject the ending. You just... kept going."
I reached up and wiped the blood from my cheek with the back of my hand. I looked at the dark smear on my skin.
"My will to survive was instinct, not logic," I said.
I gently pulled Amelia away, steadying her. She was still pale, her emerald eyes searching mine for any sign of the "dead" Kaiser.
"I'm fine, Amelia," I said. "The ending was just a suggestion. We should continue moving. The light at the end of the hall hasn't waited for us."
I turned toward the white door. The blood on my face was already starting to dry, a dark reminder of the earth I had just climbed out of.
"Come on," I said.
We passed through the white scar of the door. There was no sensation of movement, only the sudden cessation of the mirrors' high-frequency screams.
The space on the other side was a vast, silent platform of translucent quartz. I stopped and looked back. The door had vanished. Around me, the survivors were scattered like debris after a storm.
I counted.
11.
Out of the 98 "Peak Talents" the Foundation had cultivated, only 11remained. The others were shells. Some sat with their heads between their knees, rocking rhythmically. Two were staring into the distance, their eyes locked open, refusing to blink as if the mirrors might return the moment they closed their lids.
They survived through adaptation.
They used their specific gifts to navigate the probability. They identified a thread in the fiction where they lived and they held onto it.
I looked at my own palm. It was still stained with the drying blood that had leaked from my eyes.
Why wasn't I able to choose?
The others had picked a path. I had been forced into an ending that was already finalized. I hadn't chosen a future; I had dismantled the very concept of a "dead" timeline.
Amelia stepped toward me, her footsteps light on the quartz. She looked at my face, her own expression a mix of awe and deep-seated fear.
"Kaiser," she whispered. "How did you do it? The mirror... it didn't give you an exit. It just showed you the grave."
"I don't know," I said. It was the truth. "I didn't see a door. I didn't see a choice. I just knew that being buried wasn't the end of my life."
"But the Void didn't erase you," she said, her voice rising in a rare flicker of confusion. "Every rule we were given stated that we had to choose or cease existing. You didn't choose. You stayed dead."
01 walked over, his eyes fixed on me with a predatory, cold curiosity.
"In every future we saw, we eventually perished," 01 said, side-eyeing the white space where the door had been.
"That is the nature of life. It has an ending. But your mirror was shattered. It didn't just show an ending; it tried to finalize you. And yet, the future changed at the brink of the dirt."
He leaned in, his voice dropping into a low, vibrating hum.
"The mirrors reflect ourselves. If your mirror self refused to die, it's because your soul refuses the concept of an ending."
"Tell me, 981... why do you wish to see tomorrow so badly?"
"I don't know…"
Survival isn't a "why." It is a "is."
Before 01 could respond, the platform beneath us groaned. The quartz began to dissolve into a fine, grey mist. The silence was shattered by the return of the Void's voice. It wasn't tectonic this time; it was a thousand overlapping whispers, a chorus of dark, ancient secrets.
"Anomalies... you have survived the weight of your own endings."
The whispers intensified, crawling into the back of my mind like insects.
You're special, they hissed. You are the threads. You are the chosen.
"The final trial is upon you. To watch over all of fiction and reality, one must be empty enough to hold them both. You must submit. You must offer your eternal loyalty to the Void and become its vessel."
"Abandon the self."
"Become The Singularity."
Suddenly, the platform snapped.
We weren't standing anymore. We were floating in an empty space of absolute nothingness. There was no floor, no up, no down. The other ten students drifted away, their forms becoming pale sparks in the distance.
I was alone in the dark.
Refused to accept my own ending...Rewriting my own future...
The realization began to crystalize in my mind. I looked at my hands, which were slowly turning translucent in the void-light.
What am I?
I am not an angel; I do not seek the light. I am a sinner, a thief of lives, but I am not the devil. I am standing at the door between reality and fiction. I am the observer who refused to be the subject.
I am not God's chosen.
I am not God's cursed.
I see it now...
I ceased to be human the moment I realized that "Human" is just another fiction we tell ourselves to feel safe in the dark.
I see everything that exists and doesn't.
"The Trial of Acceptance begins."
I closed my eyes and waited for the Void to try and take what belonged to me.