Life doesn't always compute - Chapter Four: The Others Who Didn’t Stay Forgotten

I needed proof that I wasn’t alone.

The journal hinted at “them,” but it also implied others—iterations, corrections, resets. If this had happened before, then someone else might remember fragments too. Someone else might have noticed the cracks.

I searched online using vague phrases: missing time static walls cameras in ceiling. Most results were useless—paranoia forums, sleep disorder articles, ARG discussions. But buried in a comment thread on an abandoned message board, I found something that made my blood run cold.

“If you’re hearing static at night, stop looking. It means you were chosen.”

The post was twelve years old.

The user never posted again.

I messaged every account in the thread that still existed. Most bounced back. One reply came through an hour later.

“They let you remember a little, didn’t they?”

We moved the conversation to an encrypted chat app. The person called themselves Marrow. They said they’d experienced the same thing—files appearing, recordings they didn’t remember making, waking up at the same time every night.

“2:17,” they typed. “That’s when they synchronize.”

Marrow believed the watchers weren’t human. Or rather, not only human. They described them as archivists—entities that catalogued consciousness the way we catalogue data. Individual minds were unstable. Memories decayed. So they learned to preserve us by pruning awareness.

“Think of it like version control,” Marrow wrote. “Every time you notice too much, they roll you back.”

I asked why.

The reply took longer this time.

“Because something is coming,” they finally said. “And they need us predictable.”

Marrow tried to resist. They said they’d ripped open their walls, destroyed devices, stayed awake for days. The more they fought, the more aggressive the corrections became.

“People disappear,” they wrote. “Not dead. Just… archived.”

They sent me a file.

A video.

didn’t want to open it. I already knew I would.

The footage showed a small room, white and featureless. A man sat in a chair, restraints on his wrists. Cameras surrounded him, dozens of them, blinking red in unison.

The man looked at the camera and screamed—not in fear, but rage.

“They’re lying!” he shouted. “We’re not backups—we’re templates!”

The video glitched. Static tore through the image. When it cleared, the chair was empty.

Marrow’s final message arrived seconds later.

“They’re here.”

Their account went offline.

So did the forum.

That night, the static was deafening. The walls seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting. I felt pressure behind my eyes, a squeezing sensation, like my thoughts were being compressed.

A voice filled the room—not spoken, but transmitted directly into my head.

“You have exceeded your curiosity threshold.”

“Final correction required.”

I screamed until my throat bled.

Somewhere deep inside me, another version of myself screamed back.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model