Sleep had become optional.
Not because Arin didn't want it — because something else was using it first.
Every time he closed his eyes, he heard the sound:
tick... tick... tick...
Three slow beats. Then silence.
Then Mira's voice — whispering the same phrase, "Three minutes. Don't go past three."
He started recording his dreams. The first night, the tape captured nothing but static.
By the third, there was a faint heartbeat beneath the static — not his own.
---
Days blurred. He found himself losing track of hours again.
Once, he looked up from his desk and saw the clock showing 10:07 p.m.
He blinked — and it was 10:04.
Time, once again, looping backward.
He began marking the walls of his apartment — chalk lines for every hour he was awake, circles for every blackout.
By the fifth day, half the wall was covered.
He didn't remember drawing most of them.
---
At the lab, the team had started avoiding him. He overheard them whispering —
words like "trauma," "delirium," and "temporal hallucination."
He didn't care. They hadn't seen what he had.
In Mira's video logs, she'd mentioned something called the Afterpulse — a neurological echo that appears after brain death, sometimes manifesting as visual or auditory distortions.
But her data had been incomplete.
The recordings stopped right before her final test — the one labeled "Return."
That word had started following him everywhere.
On billboards.
In emails.
Even in random file names that changed overnight.
---
At 3:00 a.m., he woke to the sound of dripping water.
He stumbled toward the kitchen — but the sink was dry.
The sound was coming from the computer.
He turned on the monitor. The same three words glowed across a black screen:
> "You came back."
The cursor blinked once.
Then another message appeared.
> "Now we remember you."
He stepped back. His reflection in the monitor didn't move.
It just stared back — head slightly tilted, eyes unblinking.
For a moment, his pulse stopped.
Then the lights in the apartment flickered.
When they came back, the reflection was gone —
but in its place, three faint digits burned onto the screen's edge:
> 02:57
That night, Arin finally understood what Mira meant:
You don't just return from death.
You bring a piece of it back with you.
---