Arin wasn't the only one losing time anymore.
It began with the janitor, old Mr. Nick, who cleaned the neuroscience lab at night.
He stopped Arin one morning, eyes wide behind his glasses.
> "Sir, the clocks here… they keep repeating three minutes before sunrise."
"Three minutes?" Arin asked.
"Every day, same thing. I mop the floor, finish, look up—time's back where it was. Even my radio rewinds the same song."
Arin forced a smile, but his stomach twisted.
He checked the lab's security feed that evening—
at 05:57 a.m. the footage jumped backward exactly three minutes.
No splice. No error. Just… a fold.
---
By midweek, others noticed it too.
The data servers logged duplicate files labeled copy(3) without anyone creating them.
One intern swore she saw Arin walk past her in the hallway, but he'd been in the basement the whole time.
Reality was glitching, quietly, politely—
as if testing its boundaries before tearing them.
---
That night, Arin recorded an audio note.
> "Subject: Ripple effect. The Afterpulse is expanding beyond neural space—temporal anomalies affecting environment within thirty-meter radius. Possible linkage between my cardiac signature and localized time loops."
He paused the recording.
From the corridor, faint footsteps echoed.
He waited. The sound stopped.
Then, from behind him, the same steps replayed—
identical cadence, identical distance.
A loop.
He turned. Empty hallway.
---
The next morning, the janitor didn't show up.
When security checked the cameras, Nick was there—mopping—
then, at 02:57, the image blurred.
For three minutes, the feed went white.
When it returned, the mop was standing alone in the corridor.
No trace of Nick.
The guards thought it was a glitch.
Arin knew better.
He replayed the footage frame by frame until the distortion almost resolved—
and behind the light, he saw something tall, featureless, and still…
watching the exact camera he was using.
He slammed the laptop shut.
---
Arin wrote one final note on the whiteboard before leaving the lab:
> "The Borderline isn't a place. It's a contagion."
Then, in handwriting not his own, another line appeared beneath it:
> 02:57 — It's almost time.
---