False Origins

The room was silent.

Lena stood alone in the middle of the glass cube, staring at where the old man had been just moments ago. His voice still echoed in her mind like a leftover signal.

Seventeen versions.

One must survive.

The lights above her blinked, then dimmed. For a second, the glass walls vanished — not shattered, just blinked out like a glitch in a computer — and she found herself standing in a living room.

Her childhood living room.

Exactly as she remembered it. The green couch with the tear in the corner. The painting of a lake that always hung crooked. The faint ticking of the wall clock she used to fall asleep to.

But there was something off.

Too perfect.

The dust didn’t move. The clock hands didn’t tick. Her footsteps made no sound on the floor.

She walked toward the hallway. Her bedroom door was open.

Inside, someone sat on the bed.

It was her mother.

But she didn’t look up. She just sat there, perfectly still, staring at the wall.

Lena’s voice cracked.

“Mom?”

The woman turned her head slowly. Her face didn’t react like a person. It moved like it was being controlled.

Her lips parted.

“You were such a quiet child.”

Lena stepped closer.

“What is this? What’s happening to me?”

The woman smiled faintly, but her eyes didn’t match the expression.

“You weren’t always Lena.”

Lena backed up. Her heart was pounding so loud it sounded like thunder in her ears.

Behind her, a door creaked open by itself.

She turned toward it and found a narrow staircase leading downward — one that had never existed in the house she remembered.

She followed it.

The stairs led to a white hallway. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The floor felt soft under her feet, almost rubbery. The walls were covered in thick cables that pulsed faintly, like veins.

At the end of the hallway was a locked steel door with a biometric scanner.

She touched it.

The scanner blinked and turned green.

Click.

The door opened.

Inside was a control room filled with screens. But they weren’t security cameras.

They were memories.

Each screen showed a different moment from her life.

Her first day at school.

Falling off her bike.

Getting her job at the city archive.

But on one screen… she saw something she didn’t recognize.

A version of her sitting in a lab, reading aloud from a script. Men in lab coats watching through glass.

The voice on the speaker said:

“Now simulate confusion. Remember, we’re testing memory falloff delay.”

The Lena on the screen nodded and pretended to cry.

Pretended.

Then the feed paused.

Text appeared on the screen.

Subject Seventeen-A. Memory script alignment failed.

Status: Preparing reset.

Lena turned away from the screens, trembling.

None of it had been real.

Not her job. Not her parents. Not even the tears she thought were hers.

They had written it.

A sound came from behind her. Slow footsteps. She turned and saw the man from the tunnel again — the Nullman.

But this time… he was bleeding from both eyes.

He didn’t speak.

He handed her a mirror.

In it, her face flickered.

First, her current face.

Then… a different version.

Different hair. Different eyes. Different everything.

And then another version.

And another.

Until the glass was full of dozens of her, all staring back at her at once.

Lena dropped the mirror. It shattered.

But her reflection stayed, floating in the air like a glitch.

One of the reflections spoke.

“I remember.”

Lena looked up.

It wasn’t just memory they had taken.

It was identity.

They had copied her, rewritten her, rebooted her over and over again, each time with small changes.

Each time hoping she wouldn’t notice.

But now she had.

Now the memories were leaking back in.

And The Program couldn’t contain her much longer.

As alarms began to blare in the distance, Lena turned toward the exit door.

A final message appeared across the control room wall in flashing red:

You were not supposed to wake up.

⸻

Questions we need to know:

How many versions of Lena are still active?

Was the mother she knew just a character in a program?

What does The Program need her for and why are they afraid of her remembering?

Where are the real people in all this… or are there any?

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