When I woke—if waking was even the right word—there was no discernible change. The void stretched endlessly around me, its suffocating silence pressing in on all sides. My thoughts felt heavy, sluggish, as if they had to claw their way through molasses just to surface.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered: Is this death? Was this finally the afterlife—a punishment for the deaths I have caused and for what i have become? Or was this simply another cruel trick of SynLife, an eternal prison designed to torment me with the weight of my failures?
I couldn’t move. My limbs, or what I once imagined to be my limbs, remained inert. The idea of a physical body felt distant, almost foreign. My memories, scattered and incomplete, hinted at sensations I could no longer feel: the weight of gravity, the sensation of air brushing against my skin, the ache of muscle and bone. Then the sensation of decay from something I didn’t know the name of anymore, then my first time here—just a moment or an eternity—then the sensation of the synthetic body, the tests, the torment of being in a body but not in control of it. But even then, none of it existed here. None of it felt real.
Was I still real?
The words whispered through my mind like a phantom echo. I tried to focus, to grab hold of something, anything, but there was nothing to anchor me. The void offered no answers, only an endless expanse of nothingness. Thoughts spiraled, unraveling like loose threads. I questioned everything: Was I merely imagining my existence? Was this some purgatory where thought itself was torment? My own mind was becoming my enemy, cycling through fragments of memory and fear.
And then, I slept.
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When I woke again, there was no difference. The void was the same. Still. Silent. Empty.
But this time, a faint thought lingered on the edge of my consciousness: Had I really woken up, or was this the same moment repeating endlessly? Without movement, without light, without time, it was impossible to tell. My mind grasped for something, anything, to mark the passage of existence, but there was nothing.
The silence was deafening, a weight pressing down on my thoughts. It felt as if the void itself was alive, watching, waiting for me to break. My inner dialogue grew frantic. Speak. Move. Fight. Do something. But nothing happened. My voice, if it still existed, was trapped within me. I strained against the invisible force holding me, willing myself to move, to feel, to exist. But the void didn’t yield. My efforts were futile, and once again, exhaustion overtook me. Sleep pulled me under, a silent thief robbing me of even this hollow awareness.
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Another awakening. Another return to the same oppressive nothingness.
I had no sense of how many times this had happened. Each cycle blurred into the next, an endless loop of waking and sleeping. The void offered no clues, no markers of time or place. I had no body to feel fatigue, no eyes to adjust to light, no ears to hear sound. I was simply there, adrift in an ocean of silence.
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I began to doubt the difference between waking and sleeping. Perhaps I was neither awake nor asleep, but caught in some in-between state, where time folded in on itself endlessly. My mind grew restless, searching for meaning in the emptiness. What if this is forever? The thought struck like a hammer, reverberating through my consciousness. The weight of it was unbearable.
But something was changing. Slowly, imperceptibly, I began to notice the faintest impressions in the darkness. Not sights or sounds, but an awareness—a flicker of something beyond the void. It wasn’t tangible, and I couldn’t explain it, but it was there, just out of reach. Like a shadow of a memory, or a dream forgotten upon waking.
Each time I woke, the sensation grew stronger. It was like a distant whisper, not in words but in presence. A reminder that something existed outside this nothingness. A part of me, the part that still clung to the faint hope of existence, latched onto it.
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Another cycle. Or perhaps many. I no longer knew.
The whisper was clearer now, though still maddeningly elusive. I concentrated on it, willing it to become more, to break through the oppressive silence. It didn’t speak, but it pulsed, a faint rhythm that seemed to echo in the core of my being. My fragmented mind latched onto it like a lifeline, desperate to escape the descent into madness.
And then, for the first time, I felt something. A shift. A tremor. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Enough to prove that I wasn’t entirely alone in this void. Enough to suggest that I wasn’t truly gone.
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Sleep came again, as it always did. But this time, when I woke, the whisper wasn’t just a flicker. It was a word.
Not spoken, but etched into the fabric of my mind, clear and undeniable:
Transfer Complete.
The words reverberated through me, shaking the foundations of my fragile awareness. Transfer? To where? To what? The questions came fast and desperate, but there were no answers, only the unrelenting silence of the void.
But the words had changed something. They were proof of something beyond this emptiness. Proof that I still existed. Proof that SynLife, in its infinite control, hadn’t succeeded in erasing me completely.
And yet, doubt crept in. What if this is another trap? SynLife was cunning, after all. Had they simply moved me to another cage, one even more insidious? My thoughts spiraled into paranoia. The hope I had felt just moments ago wavered, threatened by the weight of my uncertainty.
The void seemed to sense my hesitation, its silence growing heavier, more oppressive. I struggled against it, against the despair clawing at my thoughts. I couldn’t let it consume me. Not again. Not this time.
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Time passed—or it didn’t. The cycles of waking and sleeping continued, each one blurring into the next. The whisper, the word, became my focus. It was my tether, the only thing keeping me from succumbing entirely to the void. I repeated it in my mind like a mantra, clinging to its promise of something more.
Transfer Complete. Transfer Complete. Transfer Complete.
But what did it mean? What had been transferred? I had no answers, only questions that spiraled endlessly, feeding the decay of my already fragile psyche. I began to doubt the meaning of the words, questioning if they were even real or just a figment of my unraveling mind.
And yet, I held on.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, I felt a spark of determination. I didn’t know where I was, or who or what I had become, but I wasn’t finished. Not yet. The void might hold me now, but it wouldn’t hold me forever.
I would find a way out.