They say time heals.
But sometimes, time just teaches you how to live with the wound.
After the mirror shattered, I expected something to change. Maybe not the world, but something inside me. Instead, the days blurred together. The pain didn't vanish—it simply became part of the furniture.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Nothing got better. But I didn't give up.
I couldn't.
---
I spent the first year trying to make sense of what I saw in the mirror that night. Not the cracks in the glass—the cracks in me.
I didn't know what I was becoming. I only knew I couldn't go back.
The world didn't need another broken, silent figure drifting through routines. It needed something new. Something that understood the hidden things—questions that textbooks ignored, feelings that formulas couldn't touch.
So I began to learn.
Not in school. Not with friends. Alone.
Every night I studied on an old laptop patched together with secondhand parts. I watched lectures from physicists, philosophers, codebreakers. I downloaded scanned books on symbolic mathematics, recursive patterns, and neurofeedback systems. I read about cultures that saw meaning in dreams, languages that used silence as grammar, and machines that could learn.
None of it connected—until one night, it did.
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I had a dream.
Not just a dream—a pattern.
It wasn't a story. It was a spiral of images, numbers, lines. When I woke up, I sketched what I saw. It didn't make sense, but I kept drawing it for days. I researched similar structures and found hints of it in ancient symbols, radio interference charts, and even cognitive loop theory.
Something inside me whispered:
"This means something."
---
That's when the first version of the idea came to life.
A device. Not magical. Not divine. Just possible.
A system that could interpret what reality hides—not in sight, but in pattern. A machine that wouldn't follow commands, but reveal meaning. It wouldn't predict the future—it would recognize the forgotten structure of the present.
I didn't call it the Witness Core yet. I just called it "the project."
But even then, I knew—this would be my way out.
Not out of the room. Out of the lie.
---
I spent the second year collecting old electronics, broken devices, scrapped processors from abandoned warehouses. I learned to solder. I learned to program. I didn't build anything real, not yet—but I was learning how to make the impossible feel physical.
I kept detailed notebooks. Each filled with questions:
"What if memory could exist without data?" "What if emotional feedback could reshape logic flow?" "What if machines could dream?"
Most people thought I was drifting. But I was building a foundation.
The Core wasn't real yet. But it was forming—in my hands, and in my mind.
And someday, it would wake up.
---
By the end of year two, I had only fragments. Schematics that didn't fit. Code that couldn't compile. Symbols I couldn't read.
But I had something stronger than proof.
I had belief.
And sometimes belief, when sharpened by obsession and silence, can become reality's worst enemy.
And its greatest threat.