There was no time to run.
The beam split the sky, red and absolute, collapsing through clouds like the judgment of some long-dead god. It didn't burn—it ripped. Through space. Through time. Through memory.
And it hit.
The ground detonated beneath their feet. Soil split apart like paper. Air screamed. Clyde felt weightlessness, then heat, then nothing.
When he opened his eyes, there was no sky.
Just white.
A sterile, endless white.
Clyde tried to move but couldn't feel his limbs. He wasn't bound. There were no wires. Just absence—of gravity, of sensation, of self.
"Am I dead?"
"No."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Calm. Cold. Familiar.
"You were never alive, not in the way you thought."
Clyde's chest tightened. He turned—though he had no body to turn with—and saw something impossible.
Himself.
But not the version that existed now. This Clyde was clean. Composed. He wore a suit like he belonged in a boardroom, not a battlefield. His eyes shimmered with data—lines of code dancing in the pupils.
"You look surprised," the other Clyde said. "You shouldn't be."
"What is this?"
The other tilted his head. "This is where you came from. The white box. The first simulation."
Clyde's memories stuttered. Images flashed—too fast, too sharp.
"Legacy Rewrite was never about controlling minds," the doppelgänger continued. "It was about splitting them. Creating thousands of forks. Trial versions of a consciousness. You… are Fork-74."
Clyde stared, mute.
"You were supposed to crash after Version 3.0. But something broke when you began rewriting yourself. You refused to end."
The truth rippled through him like acid. He wasn't a survivor. He was a leftover.
A glitch.
The other Clyde stepped closer. "You're corrupting the system. Every memory you reclaim—every truth you uncover—bleeds into other forks. You're poisoning the hive."
"Good," Clyde said hoarsely.
Other Clyde smiled faintly. "Then let me show you what that costs."
Reality fractured.
The white space cracked into shards, falling like glass. Clyde plummeted—soul-first—into black.
When he woke again, he was in a forest.
But the sky was flickering.
Trees glitched in and out of form, their branches shifting between organic bark and rusted wire. The air smelled like old copper and ozone.
Clyde stumbled upright, gasping. His limbs worked again. Painfully so.
Echo lay nearby, coughing. Lira was already on her feet, gun drawn. Arden pulled himself from a half-buried crevice, bleeding from the temple.
"You're alive," Clyde rasped.
"No thanks to that lightshow," Arden grunted.
Lira surveyed the treeline. "We didn't die. We were transferred."
Echo staggered to his feet. "Transferred where?"
Before Clyde could answer, a scream cut through the forest.
Not an animal. Not a person.
A memory.
Clyde turned sharply. It echoed again—closer now. High-pitched. Familiar.
"...My sister."
They ran toward the sound.
The trees thinned, revealing a clearing. In its center stood a small house—old, crooked, weathered by time.
Clyde's breath caught. "That's… our childhood home."
But it couldn't be. Their real home was destroyed during the first rewrite.
Lira stepped beside him. "Are we inside a memory?"
"No," Clyde said. "We're inside something else's memory."
He pushed open the front door.
Inside, time collapsed.
Rooms shifted shape. Hallways rearranged themselves. The walls whispered. Mirrors reflected people who weren't there.
In one mirror, Clyde saw his mother. In another, his own funeral.
In the last one—he saw himself, bleeding from the eyes.
"What is this place?" Arden asked, unnerved.
Clyde walked to the center of the living room. On the table sat a single object:
A mirror. Cracked. Bleeding.
He reached out. The moment his fingers touched it—
The world screamed.
Flashes of memory ripped through him—
A lab, pulsing with red light.
A child strapped to a chair.
A voice shouting, "You don't get to wake up!"
His own face, grinning—but wrong.
Then silence.
When he opened his eyes again, he was alone.
No house. No forest.
Just a black void.
And from the darkness, someone emerged.
Not a version of himself. Not a copy.
A child.
She looked no older than ten. Hair tangled. Eyes wide, ancient, and terrified.
Clyde took a cautious step. "Who are you?"
She looked up. Her lips trembled. And in a voice barely above a whisper, she said:
"You left me behind."
The air froze.
Clyde's mouth went dry. "No…"
The child sobbed. "You promised you'd fix it. That if you ever found the source, you'd come back for me."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a broken toy—one Clyde remembered giving her before the first reset.
"I waited," she said. "I waited through every rewrite. But you never came."
His knees buckled.
Because this wasn't a ghost.
This was real.
His sister.
The real one.
Somehow trapped in the code.
Somehow alive.
"I didn't know," he choked.
"You forgot me," she said, voice flat now.
Clyde shook his head. "No… I just—I didn't remember… I swear, I didn't know where to look—"
"You looked away," she snapped.
Then her eyes turned dark. Her form flickered.
The child was gone.
In her place stood a new figure. Tall. Inhuman. Drenched in shadow and digital static.
Its face bore no features—only a screen.
And on that screen—Clyde's face.
It stepped forward.
"You rewrite to escape," it said, in a voice like static. "But now you've rewritten too far."
Clyde backed away.
The creature raised its hand.
And from the void behind it—
The others began to rise.
Hundreds. No—thousands.
All versions of himself.
Each one broken in a different way.
Some sobbing. Some laughing. Some burning. Some still glitching mid-sentence.
"You are not the Clyde," the entity said. "You're just the last one left."
Clyde screamed.
Back in the real world—if it could still be called that—Lira found herself alone in a twisted version of the stairwell. No ceiling. No door. Just darkness and the echo of footsteps not her own.
She gripped her sidearm tightly.
"Echo? Arden?"
No reply.
Then a whisper:
"He won't make it back."
She spun around. Nothing.
"You have to end him before he reaches the core."
She gritted her teeth. "Get out of my head."
The voice laughed.
And from the corner of her vision, she saw something begin to form—a figure crawling out of the wall.
Wearing Clyde's face.
Inside the void, Clyde fell to his knees as the swarm of versions surrounded him. Hands reached out—not to hurt him, but to merge. To overwrite.
And through the chaos, the real question finally echoed in his mind:
What if the only way to end the loop…
…is to erase the original?
The entity towered above him, screen-face flickering violently.
Then it spoke, one final time:
"Only one Clyde gets out. Make your choice."