The rain started without clouds.No warning, no thunder. No scent of soil. No gray overture.
Just soft vertical lines, falling in complete silence—like glass threads from a broken sky.
From her window, Lyra could see that no one had noticed.
The children still played. Drivers didn't slow. People passed beneath the cascade with umbrellas open, even though the rain never made contact. The drops fell through matter, phasing through roofs, trees, and bone.
And yet, it was all too real to her.
The sound of rain wasn't in her ears.
It was in her teeth. Her veins. Her recordings.
And it was starting again.
Back in her room, Lyra sat with her laptop open, mic plugged in, and the cassette recorder her father had left behind resting beside her.
She'd checked for updates.
The same file kept reappearing.
📁
REMEMBER_YOURSELVES.wav
This time, her cursor was gone. Her trackpad was unresponsive. The only thing she could do was tap the spacebar.
She did.
The screen flickered—then came a line of distorted text:
[Loading Visual Memory Layer 3]
Suddenly, her screen displayed an aerial image. Grainy. Surveillance-style. A single figure walking along a forest path.
She recognized the red hoodie.It was hers.
Then the image zoomed out.
There were three more hers—each walking different paths, in different weather. One in snow. One in heavy fog. One beneath that impossible, cloudless rain.
They didn't look up.
They just kept walking.
"You are all versions. But not all versions reach the door," the whisper came from her speakers, soft as a breath.
"Only one breaks the loop."
Her phone buzzed on the desk again.An unmarked number.
The message read:
"LOOK CLOSER. THERE'S CODE IN THE WATER."
She opened her camera app, focused on the window, and zoomed in.
And there it was.
Between the falling rain: symbols.
Glitch-like flickers of ancient glyphs, binary data, and some stranger—fractal structures that seemed to rewire themselves mid-frame.
And within the negative space…
Coordinates.
42.3743° N, 71.1167° W
She cross-referenced them.
The location: The Hollowridge Town Archive.A library.Abandoned since the fire of '09. Off the grid. No digital access. No new records.
But it is used to store radio logs. Transmission archives. Government tapes.
And her father once worked there—briefly. Before he vanished.
She left immediately.
The world felt like it was watching her walk.Not people—just… everything.
The shadows on the sidewalk bent against the sun. Streetlamps flickered in broad daylight. Cars passed her, but their license plates were blank.
Even her reflection in the shop windows lagged behind.
The air smelled like static.
At the Archive, the front doors were chained shut, but she remembered a broken rear vent from her childhood dare. She climbed through, brushing dust and ash off her sleeves, and landed softly in the dark.
The building sighed around her.
Silence inside was never total—it had presence. Memory. She could feel it pressing against her skin like underwater pressure.
Her flashlight cut through layers of dust suspended in still air.
At the far end of the hall, a flicker flickered.A light.Blue. Soft. Pulsing.
She followed it to the stairs marked:RESTRICTED - FLOOR B - EQUIPMENT STORAGE
Descending felt like walking into the bones of something ancient.
The blue light grew stronger.
Below, she found rows of vintage communication equipment coated in dust, but active. CRT monitors pulsed gently. Dials turned on their own. A reel-to-reel tape system spun in perfect rhythm with nothing loaded.
At the center stood a strange device—part antenna, part sculpture.
Wires ran into the floor, the ceiling, the walls.And it was humming. Quiet, but alive.
On the desk next to it: an old console microphone, like the one in her bedroom—but this one had a note beside it.
In her father's handwriting.
"Do not speak into the mic unless the code has spoken first."
She stepped back instinctively.
Suddenly, the tape system stopped spinning.
Then they clicked.
A new reel lowered automatically from the ceiling arm.
CLICK. WHIR.
It began to play.
"If this is Lyra… I'm sorry."
Her father's voice.
Older. Weaker.
"I tried to pull you out before you synced too deep. Before they found your frequency."
"But your mind doesn't operate like others'. You echo through time."
"I saw you yesterday in a photograph from 1953. You were wearing a red hoodie."
"There is no original you, Lyra. Not anymore. Just a pattern. A ghost repeating until it remembers who it was."
Then came a glitch in the audio—sharp static, like a scream filtered through zeroes and ones.
"You broke the firewall. They will find you."
The lights flickered. Then all power was cut.
Darkness swallowed the basement.
Only the antenna glowed faintly now—casting rings of light across the room like sonar.
And then her cassette recorder—quiet until now—clicked on by itself.
A new message began playing.
But not from her father.
From herself.
Older. More afraid.
"You must leave the building before the mirror arrives."
"Whatever you do… don't let her speak your name."
Lyra's skin turned to ice.
From above, she heard a sound. Soft at first. A dragging noise.
Something was coming down the stairs.
She didn't wait.
She grabbed her cassette recorder and ran.
The sound of dragging grew louder.
Whatever it was—it didn't run.
It glided.
Each step she took up the stairwell, it echoed beneath her like a delayed mimic.
At the top of the stairs, the blue light was gone.
Replaced by red.
Emergency lights?
No—there was no power.
The red came from a figure standing just beyond the threshold.
Tall. Thin. Face obscured by static. Eyes are glowing.
Her silhouette.
Her exact silhouette.
Except… smiling.
Not just any smile.
Her smile—frozen, mechanical, stretched too wide.
And then it opened its mouth.
Lyra clapped her hands over her ears.
"LY"
Too late.
She fell.
Not down the stairs.
Inward.
Like gravity reversed. Like the world pulled her into herself.
Flashes of every version of her blinked in and out.
One drowning.One burning.One staring up at the stars with eyes full of code.
Then, just as quickly—it stopped.
She was outside the Archive. On her knees in the grass.
No blood. No wounds. Just the cassette tape clutched tightly in her fist.
And her phone blinking in her backpack.
One new notification.
"Layer 5 was breached. Stability at 22%."
She stumbled home as the rain fell in sideways sheets—touching no one but her.
She reached her room and found a new file waiting on her screen.
Not created by her.
Not by her mic.
It had just... appeared.
🗂 FILE: DECODE_YOURSELF.zip
Inside were fragments.
Videos. Soundbites. Glitched text logs. Names she didn't know. Maps of places that didn't exist. Photos of her age she hadn't reached yet. Scars she didn't have. One of her missing an eye.
And one final message, with no audio. Just text.
"You don't need to escape the simulation."
"You need to remember how to reprogram it."
"But do it before Layer 7... or you won't be the one left behind."