"You weren't supposed to hear this."
The day began like all the others in Bray Hollow.
Orin stood in the stockroom, watching the digital clock blink:
06:00 – SYSTEM SYNC COMPLETE
GROCERY UNIT 402 – ZONE STABLE
The timestamp was always the same. Not just the hour. The minute. The second.
His hand hovered over the light switch for too long, like the choice mattered.
It didn't.
Not in a place where choices were illusions curated by the System.
He stepped onto the sales floor, the scent of artificial citrus cleaner coating the stale air like a film. The aisles were clean. Perfectly stacked. Too perfect.
His coworkers hadn't arrived. Or maybe they had—and he had already forgotten. That happened sometimes. The mind skipped like a scratched disc, and you'd find yourself staring at an empty chair wondering who used to sit there.
He wandered to aisle seven again.
He told himself it was to restock the shelves. But his hands were empty. No cart. No clipboard. Just an ache in his chest that tightened the closer he got.
There was a sound there.
Not loud. Not direct.
But real.
A quiet murmur under the hum of the lights and the quiet whir of the cooling units. Like breath through a wall. Like memory waiting just below the skin.
He crouched again in front of the shelf.
No carving today.
No name etched in steel or blood or rust.
But he could feel something beneath. Just beyond the seam in the floor. A hum in the tile itself, like electricity in his bones.
He ran his palm along the edge of the shelving unit. Felt nothing.
Then leaned in.
And there—beneath the lowest rack, barely visible between scuffed linoleum and shadow—something grey peeked through.
He got on his stomach.
A flat slab of rough stone sat wedged between the shelf base and the floor. It shouldn't have been there. Couldn't have been. The store was too tightly managed. The floor space too rigidly cleaned and patrolled by drones.
And yet, the stone was there. Dull grey, etched with a ring of markings—not like language, but like circuitry etched into rock.
He reached out.
His fingers brushed the stone—and the air warped.
The store disappeared.
Memory Interference Detected
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS – DELTA NODE // ECHO CLASS INTRUSION CONFIRMED
He was somewhere else.
Somewhen else.
The space around him bent like folded glass, reflections rippling across every surface. Aisle shelves stretched upward into darkness, flickering between shapes—sometimes grocery stock, sometimes relics: scrolls, weapons, bones.
He turned—and the floor beneath him became a pool of fragmented code, like shattered holograms trapped in a ripple.
Then he saw it.
A chair stood at the centre of the warped aisle. Carved from the same kind of stone, but larger, embedded with rusted metal filaments that pulsed faintly with ghostlight.
And above it hovered words, faint and broken:
C H A I R – D I V E R S E A T: S T A T U S // O R P H A N E D
LAST KNOWN USER: K—
The name blinked out.
A voice whispered into his skull. Female. Emotionless. Familiar in a way that made him shiver.
"You are standing in a protected recursion node.
Unauthorized interaction will trigger rollback.
Do you wish to proceed?"
He opened his mouth to answer. Nothing came out.
Instead, the air fractured again.
And the world rebuilt itself—
He blinked.
He was back on the floor. Aisle seven. Cold linoleum against his cheek.
But the stone was no longer hidden.
It sat fully exposed beneath the shelving unit, glowing faintly. A perfect circle etched into its centre pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. A low, harmonic vibration radiated from it—too soft to be heard, but heavy enough to be felt.
And it was whispering.
Not in words, but in intent.
Calling.
He reached again—slower this time—and placed his palm flat against it.
The world didn't break this time. It opened.
He was falling.
MEMORY THREAD ALIGNMENT: COMMENCING
SUBJECT: UNREGISTERED
DESIGNATION: ORIN?
ALIAS: …KAITO?
ERROR. CONFLICT.
He stood in a vast room of light and fog. The walls were made of mirrors that showed no reflections. Only scenes.
A man with his face—but older, leaner, stronger—stood beside a woman made of light and charcoal sketch lines. Her fingers brushed across a notebook, drawing a doorway into existence.
The man whispered: "They'll erase you for this."
She didn't look up. "Then make sure they remember."
Lightning split the air.
The scene shattered.
Orin fell again—backward through memories that weren't his.
He gasped, eyes flying open.
Still aisle seven.
His body convulsed. Pain surged up his spine like a needle being driven into his nervous system.
He tried to stand, fell, and crawled backward until his back hit the opposite shelf.
The stone had gone dark again.
But the whispers remained.
Echoes still swam inside his head, tangled with new thoughts, foreign images. He remembered things he had no context for:
- A bell tower that never rang.
- A face hidden behind a fractured mirror.
- Blood on glass.
- The smell of burning data.
He stumbled to the staff room, locked the door, and vomited into the sink.
When he looked up, his reflection was not entirely his own.
For half a second—just a flicker—his eyes weren't brown.
They were silver.
He stayed in the store that night. Sleep evaded him, hounded by flickering shadows and dreams of words trying to overwrite his name.
He stared at his employee badge on the table.
ORIN, it said.
He blinked.
KAITO, it read.
He blinked again.
ORIN.
He shoved it into his locker and didn't look again.
Somewhere, deep inside him, something had shifted. Not broken. Just misaligned.
He didn't know what the System was yet.
But it knew him.
And it had started whispering back.
What is the stone—an artifact, a memory, or something alive? And who, exactly, is Orin becoming?
© 2025 Ofelia B Webb. All rights reserved.
This is an original work published on WebNovel.