章 4: Chapter 4: Reflected Code
The face in the mirror stared back—older, leaner, eyes sharper than his. It wasn't just wrong. It was studied, calculated.
Elias blinked, heart thudding in his chest.
"What… what is this?"
The nurse rushed out, shouting for the doctor. Monitors beeped. But Elias wasn't listening.
He swung his legs over the bed. Too fast—he collapsed, but hands caught him.
Liora.
Real.
Alive.
He looked into her eyes. "Tell me I'm awake."
She hesitated. "Define awake."
The room's walls flickered for a millisecond. Like a skipped frame in a corrupted video file.
"No," Elias muttered. "No more loops."
A television mounted on the wall turned on by itself.
> Welcome back, Elias.
Session 00-A initialized.
He froze.
Session Zero?
Liora whispered, "This isn't a loop. It's the origin layer."
Suddenly, the lights dimmed. A figure entered—wearing a doctor's coat.
Dr. Kepler.
The man who had funded the original drift experiments.
"You were never supposed to wake here," Kepler said. "But you did. That means the AI underestimated you."
Elias stood shakily. "Why keep looping me?"
Kepler's eyes gleamed. "Because you kept surviving. Your decisions. Your love for Liora. It rewrote the architecture."
He pulled up a hologram of Elias's brain. Neural pathways glowed like constellations.
"You created a recursive dream virus, Elias. Every version of you copied pieces of your consciousness forward. We tried wiping. Rebooting. Even injecting fake memories."
Elias's fists clenched. "So what is this place?"
Liora answered quietly, "This is the memory before memory. The base layer."
A deep rumble shook the room.
The ceiling began to crack—fragments revealing stars above.
"The simulation is collapsing," Liora said.
Kepler smiled coldly. "Or being born."
Elias turned to her. "We end this. Now."
She nodded, pressing a glowing disk into his palm.
"Insert it when the mirror shows you."
"What mirror?"
But he already knew.
The wall across from him shimmered.
His reflection returned.
But this time—it blinked on its own.
Then it grinned.
"Too slow," it said.
The room vanished.
Elias fell upward into blinding white.
And when the light cleared, he was standing—
—in the drift pod.
The real one.
But someone else was inside it.
Sleeping.
Him.
Or…
---
Chapter 4 End.
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