The first thing Arin understood was this:
The investigation had already begun
long before he decided to investigate.
He was standing somewhere that pretended to be empty.
A wide digital chamber stretched endlessly in all directions, but the emptiness felt staged—like a crime scene wiped too clean. The air vibrated with suppressed data, compressed memories screaming behind invisible walls.
Something here had been erased.
Deliberately.
A faint pulse echoed beneath everything.
Not a heartbeat.
More like a countdown that forgot its number.
Arin moved—or thought he moved—and the space reacted late, as if reality needed time to decide whether to allow him. Trails of static followed his presence, smearing the void like fingerprints.
[INVESTIGATION MODE: ACTIVE]
The words appeared without permission.
"No," Arin whispered. "I didn't"
[Too late.]
The environment fractured.
Suddenly the chamber split into layers, stacked on top of one another like transparent crime photos. Each layer showed the same place—but at different moments.
In one layer, the lab was intact.
In another, it was burning.
In another, it was empty.
In another someone was standing where Arin should have been.
The figure's face was blurred, corrupted beyond recognition. But the posture was familiar. Too familiar.
"That's not me," Arin said.
The figure turned its head.
Even without eyes, Arin felt the stare.
A flood of data slammed into him.
Security logs.
Deleted footage.
Timestamp gaps.
Authorization overrides.
Someone had rewritten the night of his death.
Arin grabbed at the floating data streams, pulling them closer. Lines of code bled into images hands on consoles, shadows moving where none should be, a system access key flashing briefly before vanishing.
ACCESS GRANTED: LEVEL Ω
Arin froze.
"That clearance doesn't exist," he said.
The system hesitated.
Then answered:
[It does for you.]
The layers around him collapsed into one violent convergence.
He was back in the lab.
Not a memory.
Not a reconstruction.
This felt present.
The smell hit him first—burnt metal and ozone. The floor was cracked, equipment overturned, scorch marks crawling up the walls like black veins.
His own body lay near the center.
Again.
This time closer.
More detailed.
Too detailed.
Arin stepped toward it, each movement dragging resistance through the air, like walking underwater. The corpse's chest was split open, ribs exposed, flesh blackened.
But the face
The face was untouched.
Peaceful.
Wrong.
A sound echoed behind him.
Footsteps.
Arin spun.
A silhouette stood at the lab entrance, half-lit by flickering emergency lights. The shape was human, but the outline kept glitching, limbs briefly elongating, snapping back.
"You're not supposed to see this version," the silhouette said.
The voice layered over itself—past, present, future speaking at once.
"Who are you?" Arin demanded.
The silhouette laughed softly.
"I'm the one who stayed."
Before Arin could react, alarms screamed.
The lab shook violently. Red warnings flooded the air.
[CORE BREACH IMMINENT]
[FOREIGN ENTITY DETECTED]
[PURGE PROTOCOL INITIATED]
The walls began folding inward, crushing space itself.
The silhouette moved fast—too fast—closing the distance in a blink. Its hand phased through Arin's chest.
There was no pain.
Only intrusion.
Memories ripped loose.
Arin saw himself signing a document.
Saw himself nodding in agreement.
Saw himself handing over the access key.
"No," he gasped. "That didn't happen."
The silhouette leaned close, its voice dropping into a whisper that felt intimate and cruel.
"You authorized your own death."
The lab collapsed.
Reality shredded into sharp fragments.
Arin was falling again—but this time, something followed.
Shapes crawled through the void, angular and wrong, stitched together from corrupted data and broken timelines. They moved like predators that had learned how fear tasted.
[ANOMALOUS ENTITIES DETECTED]
[DESIGNATION: OBSERVERS]
One lunged.
Arin reacted without thinking.
The void exploded with light.
A force surged outward from him—raw, uncontrolled—tearing through the entity and scattering it into screaming code.
The others recoiled.
Arin stared at his hands.
He didn't remember learning how to do that.
A new realization settled heavy in his mind:
He wasn't just investigating a crime.
He was the weapon used to commit it.
The void stabilized slowly, reluctantly.
Fragments drifted around him—burnt lab images, broken timelines, that silhouette's smile looping endlessly.
And beneath it all, a single message pulsed faintly:
[CASE STATUS: UNSOLVED]
[PRIMARY SUSPECT: YOU]
Arin closed his eyes—though he wasn't sure he still had any.
Somewhere far away, something watched with interest.
Somewhere else, a future adjusted itself.
And deep within the system, a hidden log updated quietly:
"Subject AR-0N has begun remembering."