The world didn't turn black. It turned red—a searing, pulsating crimson that throbbed in time with the heartbeat Rayan could feel fading in his chest. The silver blade protruding from his sternum felt strangely cold, an icy anchor pinning his soul to the hardwood floor of the office.
He stumbled back, his hands clutching at the air, before collapsing against the mahogany desk. His breath came in ragged, wet hitches. Each gasp tasted like copper and ozone.
"Why?" Rayan wheezed, looking up at the woman he had called 'Mother.'
The woman stood with the knife still in her hand, the silver surface now stained with his dark, visceral blood. Her silver-sphere eyes didn't reflect pity; they reflected a terrifying, clinical curiosity. She leaned over him, her floral dress smelling of lavender and formaldehyde.
"Oh, Rayan," she sighed, and for a moment, the voice was so tender it broke his heart. She reached out with her free hand and brushed a stray hair from his forehead. "A mother's job is to bring life into the world. But in Oakhaven, life is a currency. And we are very, very bankrupt."
She turned toward the man behind the desk—the Author. "Is he done? Can we harvest the Echo now?"
The man behind the desk finally leaned into the light. He wasn't an old man or a monster. He looked exactly like Rayan, but older, his hair white at the temples, his face etched with the kind of grief that ruins a man's soul. He didn't look at Rayan with hatred. He looked at him with the exhaustion of a gardener pulling a stubborn weed.
"Not yet," the Author said, his voice a gravelly echo of Rayan's own. "The emotional peak hasn't been reached. The narrative needs a sacrifice that feels... earned."
Rayan felt a surge of white-hot rage through the agony. He grabbed the edge of the desk, his fingernails digging into the expensive wood. "I am... not... a narrative," he spat, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
"You are a collection of memories I couldn't bear to keep," the Author replied, standing up. He walked around the desk, his movements fluid and ghostly. "Every time I lost someone I loved—my father in the library, your mother in the fire—I couldn't process the pain. So I wrote it away. I created Oakhaven as a digital purgatory, a place where I could dump my trauma and let it live out its own miserable life."
He knelt beside Rayan, looking into his eyes. "You, Rayan #104, were my best work. You were the most curious. The most resilient. You actually made it to the Archive. You even recognized our father."
Rayan's eyes filled with tears—not just from the pain, but from the realization that his entire existence, his childhood memories of the park, his first heartbreak, his career in Seattle—it was all just a 'data dump' for a man who was too cowardly to feel his own sorrow.
"My life... was real to me," Rayan whispered, a tear tracking through the blood on his cheek. "The cold mornings... the smell of the rain... I felt them."
"And that's why your death will be so beautiful," the woman said, stepping closer. She raised the knife again, the silver glinting. "The more real you feel, the more of the Author's pain you take with you when you delete."
The Author reached out and touched the rusted key still clutched in Rayan's dying grip. "The key isn't a seal, Rayan. It's an 'Enter' key. You brought it to the one place it was never supposed to go. The Source."
Suddenly, the laptop on the desk began to beep frantically. The screen flickered, showing a progress bar: TRANSFUSION: 88% COMPLETE.
Rayan realized then what was happening. He wasn't being murdered; he was being used as a hard drive. The Author was downloading his current, fresh grief into Rayan's dying mind so he could be free of it.
The woman raised the blade for the final strike. Rayan looked at her—the face of the woman who had tucked him into bed in his fabricated memories—and he didn't feel fear. He felt a profound, soul-shattering loneliness.
"Did you ever love me?" Rayan asked, his voice a mere thread. "In any of the 104 lives... did you ever just love me?"
The woman paused. The silver spheres of her eyes flickered for a fraction of a second, a glitch in her programming. A single, human tear escaped the corner of her silver eye.
"Every single time," she whispered.
Then, she plunged the knife down.
But Rayan didn't wait. With the last of his strength, he didn't block the knife. He jammed the rusted iron key—the 'Enter' key—straight into the USB port of the open laptop.
The office exploded into a cacophony of digital screams.
The walls of the office began to peel away like burning film. The Author let out a howl as his own memories began to backflow from the laptop into his own brain, uncurated and raw. The woman screamed as her body began to pixelate, turning into a cloud of binary code and lavender petals.
Rayan felt the floor vanish. He was falling again, but this time, he wasn't alone. The Author was falling with him, their hands locked in a desperate, violent grip.
"You've ruined it!" the Author screamed, his face contorting as twenty years of suppressed trauma hit him at once. "The system is crashing! Everything will be erased!"
"Good," Rayan choked out, a ghost of a smile on his bloody lips. "Then we die... together."
They slammed into a sea of golden liquid—the memory-gold from the bathroom. But it wasn't a tide anymore; it was a whirlpool, dragging everything down into the center of the Oakhaven map.
Rayan felt his consciousness fraying. His legs were gone. His arms were turning into ink. But in that final moment of dissolution, he saw a vision—not a programmed memory, but a real one. He saw a little boy standing in a field of real sunflowers, holding a woman's hand. The woman had blue eyes. Real, human, blue eyes.
The whirlpool tightened. The golden light turned into a blinding, silent white.
Rayan Miller closed his eyes.
Silence.
...
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Rayan's eyes snapped open.
He was lying on a cold, hard surface. The air was sterile. A fluorescent light flickered overhead. He tried to move, but his limbs felt heavy, unresponsive.
"Subject 104 is awake," a voice said. It was clinical, distant.
Rayan turned his head slowly. He wasn't in an office. He wasn't in Oakhaven. He was in a glass tank, submerged in a clear fluid. Across the room, dozens of other tanks lined the walls. Inside each one was a man who looked exactly like him.
A man in a white lab coat walked up to his tank. He looked at a tablet, then looked at Rayan with a bored expression.
"The narrative failed again," the scientist said into a headset. "He tried to delete the Author. Re-boot the 'Oakhaven' simulation and wipe his memory. We start again with Subject 105 in five minutes."
The scientist reached for a lever.
Rayan hammered his fist against the glass, his mouth opening in a silent scream as the clear fluid began to turn into a thick, black sedative. But as his vision started to fade, he felt something hard in his palm.
He looked down. Inside the tank, under the water, his hand was still clutched in a fist.
He opened it.
There, etched into the skin of his palm as if burned by a laser, were three words:
FIND THE ARCHIVIST.