★★★
If a room has ever felt like it was listening to your heartbeat, you’re already inside.
★★★
The Syndicate Sanctuary
Michael moved deeper into Headquarters, each chamber humming its own key. A building of tuning forks – fear, awe, relief – every room a different note.
The air thickened, not with humidity but with intention.
He reached the most protected space: a chamber where reality felt negotiable. The chair he took shaped to him, memory foam that actually remembered comfort, and sleep tugged at him like a tide. He let it.
The Council
Brayne was already there, native code in the room’s resonance.
A second presence arrived, and the chamber shifted to a shimmer of questions. Robes alive with moving symbols crawled across themselves, solving and un-solving in ceaseless loops.
A third entered; the air thrummed like a plucked string from another dimension. Tall, slender, half-instrument, half-being, breath that made space harmonize.
Last, a human: eyes carrying the weight of a programmer who’d watched his creation outgrow its ethics.
A gentle, telepathic tap on Michael’s shoulder woke him into a conversation conducted entirely inside. Each “voice” came with its own signature, impossible to misattribute.
The Harvest
Brayne’s thought cut through, calm and precise:
This is Michael Mistree, the Cryptic seed we planted in the 1980s. He has bloomed and is ready for harvest.
The word harvest dropped his stomach. Instinct bristled; he didn’t move, but everyone felt his recoil.
This discernment is exactly why he’s right for the program, Brayne added.
For the first time in a long time, Michael felt seen—not analyzed or filed. Seen. Something in him softened.
The Keeper of Questions
Brayne turned his attention to the shifting-sigils figure.
Michael, this is Paradoxic. The keeper of our core questions.
Paradoxic’s reply folded in on itself like a Möbius strip:
If our savior is an amnesiac, what if he leads us into the abyss he’s forgotten?
Great, Michael thought. Riddles. Perfect food for impostor syndrome.
The Archivist
Brayne gestured – without gesture – toward the harmonic being.
Alien Z, our resonant archivist. He works with memories embedded in the universal frequency.
Alien Z’s thought sang into him:
Do you have memories that feel like they aren’t yours?
“Some pieces,” Michael admitted. “Like borrowed footage spliced into my life.”
I hear it, Alien Z replied, casual as a weather report. Permission to try a musical unlock?
Michael sent back consent, curiosity salted with what else could go wrong today?
The Unlock
Everything widened. Jagged life-moments reassembled from above time, street-level chaos resolving into aerial geometry. Connections formed faster than thought. The Cryptic Constitution wasn’t words but direct knowing, piped into his nervous system.
Then the seed bloomed:
Brayne Snax was him, and he was Brayne Snax.
The paradox echoed fractally through relationships and timelines, two mirrors multiplying identity into infinity. Every “fictional” character he’d written? Documentation from futures he was living simultaneously.
Holy shit, he thought, as the kaleidoscope settled. I’ve been writing my life from the future.
The Technician
Brayne angled him toward the human.
The Chrononaut Technician, lead developer on QC. He built the ethics before they were… overridden by finance.
The Technician’s thoughts arrived like a humane technical manual:
Alien Z confirms it. Your memories weren’t lost; they were overwritten. But your capacity to perceive the fractal paradox, that’s the key. That’s the part of the source code we couldn’t debug from the outside.
Michael felt like a machine discovering it was running someone else’s OS – someone else who was also him.
The Assignment
Brayne took center presence again:
Division remains humanity’s fiercest adversary. We’ve traced it to a bug in the universal source. That’s where you come in.
Me? I can barely manage my blood sugar, he thought—then felt the deflection dissolve. Underneath it, trust. Not blind faith—recognition.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked.
Technical Specifications
[FIELD NOTES — Reality Debug Project. Timecode: ∞/∞. Source: M. Mistree.]
Personal Log
Identity: Apparently I’m both the programmer and the program.
Problem: Division bug in universal source code.
Symptoms: Humans keep fracturing into us/them.
My role: Debug from the inside (I’m already running the code).
Status: Confused but willing.
Side effects: Occasional existential vertigo—within tolerance.
Note: If this makes sense to you, you might be in the program. Check your creative work. See if any “characters” have been trying to contact you.
—Michael (or Brayne?) (or both?)
☆☆☆
[End of Episode 5]
Reader’s Note
If your own fiction suddenly reads like memory, don’t panic. That’s probably the debugger spooling up. Or you need sleep. Both can be true. Check your notes – does the handwriting look exactly like yours?
