Beyond the Threshold
Her thoughts unravelled—who was she, really, in all of this? A Validator, yes, but the lines between observer and participant were beginning to blur. As dizziness crept in everytime she tried to think, she finally stopped resisting. Maybe letting it all unfold was safer than grasping at answers that refused to reveal themselves. If she wandered deeper into the heart of this place, maybe—just maybe—she’d find a clue.
Once again, the haunting notes of the piano beckoned. Primrose followed them down the corridor, cautious yet drawn in. The melody weaved through the silence like a forgotten lullaby. But before she could take another step, the ground beneath her cracked sharply. The floor gave way, swallowing her into the void.
Surprised, she screamed before landed with a soft thud, with darkness folding over her like a blanket. Slowly, her eyes and ears adjusted—one with darkness, and one with a low mechanical hum that vibrated through the air. Upon squinting her eyes, she realised that it was a room that she fell into. The room she had entered was dim, lit only by the pale glow of monitors scattered across the walls. The bluish hue cast long shadows, flickering with each unstable current.
Among those monitors, a single computer remained logged in, its screen idle and the cursor blinking. Taped to the monitor was a worn sticky note, its ink hurried and fading:
“Digital twins are the innovation backbone of the future.”
A chill prickled her spine. The words echoed the jargon she had studied during orientation, but this—this was older, rawer, as if it were the seed of something not yet meant to bloom. Her thoughts returned to the question she had tried to suppress: Who am I, and what am I doing here?
As she continued to investigate it further, she decided to delve deeper by looking into the computer. She scanned each one, her fingers are trembling, until a particular file name on a terminal caught her eye: CSG 2023.
Clicking into it, her pulse quickened. A single corrupted document sat at the top, blinking with a red warning. When she opened it, just four words appeared on the screen—jagged, fragmented, and final:
“None of this should exist.”
Her breath caught in her throat. This wasn’t 2023, it is far beyond that. And if this message had been embedded in a system and still running up until now... So, how long exactly had they been hiding it?
Before she could think further, the lights from those computers flickered violently. Then came the distortion. Every screen around her hissed to life, vomiting lines of corrupted data. Her name flashed. Her face, too—distorted, warped, as if pulled from a mirror and twisted. The overhead hum rose into a metallic screech.
It was terrifying. And yet... she couldn’t look away.
But it wasn’t the noise or chaos that held her. Across the room, a figure flickered into existence. A hologram—barely stable, its form glitching in and out of recognition. At first, she thought it was a digital twin. The frame mirrored her posture. The gaze was unmistakably her own. Yet as she focused, then she realised that its features began to shift.
They weren’t all hers.
The cheekbones became sharper—then softer. The jaw flickered between versions. Eyes changed colour; the face reassembled itself every few seconds. It was her. But not entirely. Not here. Not from her very own realm. She was looking at different versions of herself—iterations that had never been recorded, never existed before.
Am I staring at who I could’ve been? Or who I still might become?
As she took a cautious step forward, trying to understand, a voice emerged from the static. Distorted but unmistakably directed at her.
“You weren’t just a member.”
“You helped build the system.”
The words struck deeper than she expected. Her breath hitched—not from fear, but recognition. Something within her stirred, like a memory half-remembered, or a truth deliberately forgotten.
Then came the unmistakable sound of chess pieces scattering, again. She can’t help but to wonder from where those sounds coming from. Suddenly, the floor trembled. Light bent sharply at the edges of the room. A heartbeat later, she was pulled backwards by an invisible force—shoved out of the collapsing chamber just before the darkness swallowed it whole.
Sprawled on the cold floor, breathless, she blinked up at the ceiling. The puzzle was only getting larger. And somewhere between the collapsing code, the melodies that guided her, and the echoes of her own identity fracturing across timelines—something was beginning to make sense.
Chess and piano.
Black and white.
Good and bad.
Life and its mirrored twin.
If none of these should exist in the first place… then what part of me ever did?
