Life doesn't always compute - Chapter Six: Waking Up Wrong

I woke up convinced that something fundamental had been misplaced.

Not lost—misaligned.

The room looked right at first glance. Morning light spilled through the blinds at the same familiar angle, dust motes floating lazily in the air. My desk sat where it always had. The hum of the refrigerator drifted faintly from the kitchen. Everything was exactly as it should have been.

And yet my heart was racing.

I sat up too quickly, dizziness washing over me. My head throbbed with a dull pressure, like I’d slept through a storm inside my skull. When I reached for my phone, my hand hesitated, hovering in the air, seized by a sudden certainty that I already knew what the screen would say.

The date confirmed it.

Three years earlier.

The rational part of my mind tried desperately to take control. Memory lapse. Dream residue. Stress-induced hallucination. Anything but what I already knew to be true.

I checked emails. Old conversations were active again. News headlines referenced events I remembered happening years ago—for me. My bank balance reflected a younger, poorer version of myself. Even my body felt different, lighter, unscarred by injuries I clearly remembered earning.

I stumbled to the bathroom mirror.

The face staring back at me was undeniably mine, but wrong in subtle ways. My eyes looked sharper, more alert. There were fewer lines at the corners, fewer signs of exhaustion. It was the version of me that still believed life followed a forward trajectory.

But when I smiled experimentally, the reflection lagged.

Just a fraction of a second.

I backed away, breathing hard.

The journal lay on my desk, exactly where I always kept it. I flipped through the pages. Blank. No warnings. No frantic handwriting. No evidence that any of it had ever happened.

Except it had.

I remembered the room without corners. The Custodians. The archive. The countless versions of myself that had failed.

My phone vibrated.

A system notification appeared, stark and minimal.

“Reset complete.”

“Residual awareness detected.”

“Monitoring enabled.”

I dropped the phone like it burned.

The sound of static whispered faintly through the walls—not loud, not constant, but unmistakable. A reminder. A leash.

They hadn’t erased me completely.

They’d miscalculated.

As the day unfolded, small inconsistencies revealed themselves. Conversations repeated with uncanny precision. People paused mid-sentence, eyes unfocused, before continuing as if nothing had happened. Traffic lights flickered in patterns that felt intentional.

At exactly 2:17 AM that night, I woke without knowing why.

No sound. No movement.

Just certainty.

Whatever reset me hadn’t fixed the problem.

It had duplicated it.

And this time, I was awake too early for them to stop it.

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