The hospital room smelled faintly of disinfectant and rain.
Machines hummed softly in the background — a mechanical reminder that something else was keeping him alive.
Arin Sen lay awake, staring at the ceiling tiles, counting the cracks like constellations.
Sleep wouldn't come. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the city — glass towers melting into liquid light, a clock in the sky ticking backward.
03 : 00. 02 : 59. 02 : 58.
He remembered the silence most. It wasn't peaceful — it was empty.
And that whisper before everything shattered:
"Not yet."
---
When the nurse came in to check his vitals, he asked quietly,
"How long was I gone?"
"Three minutes," she said, smiling like it was good news.
She didn't see the way his hand trembled.
Three minutes.
But he could still feel them.
---
A week later, he was home — alive, bruised, and hollow.
His apartment felt smaller than before, the walls pressing in. The hum of the refrigerator sounded too loud; his own heartbeat, too slow.
He used to love silence. Now it terrified him.
He turned on the TV for background noise. A talk show played — a guest describing a "near-death experience."
Arin froze.
"…a bright place, familiar but not Earth," the guest said, voice trembling. "And a clock — I remember a clock counting down…"
The host laughed it off.
Arin didn't.
He grabbed his phone and began searching.
Near-Death Experiences (NDEs).
Oxygen hallucinations.
Temporal distortions during cardiac arrest.
Every article dismissed it as brain malfunction — except one.
> "The Borderline Hypothesis — Dr. Mira Das (2015)."
Consciousness may not be confined to neural activity but may enter a liminal state during death — a shared cognitive construct created by multiple dying minds.
There was no follow-up paper. Only a small note at the bottom:
> Research discontinued after Dr. Das's disappearance.
---
Over the next few days, Arin read everything he could find. Medical journals, online forums, scanned lab notes leaked from old research archives.
He started mapping common features of NDE reports — lights, tunnels, time loops, clocks, voices.
Every pattern led to the same unsettling question:
If the brain stops during death… who is experiencing it?
---
At the hospital, during his follow-up scan, Arin asked the technician if he could see his own brain data.
"Sure," the man said. "Most of it's pretty normal."
Most of it.
When Arin zoomed into the EEG chart, he saw it — a three-minute void.
No waves, no signal.
A complete blackout.
Then — an instant after his heart restarted — a violent spike. Neural activity beyond baseline, like a system rebooting too hard.
He stared at the data until his reflection blurred on the screen.
For a second, he thought his reflection smiled.
He didn't.
---
That night, Arin sat at his desk, surrounded by printouts. The city outside his window glowed orange under the rain.
He'd made a decision.
He opened a new document on his laptop.
At the top, he typed:
> PROJECT: BORDERLINE
Objective: Determine if consciousness can exist independent of brain activity.**
Researcher: Dr. Arin Sen.**
He stared at the blinking cursor. It looked like the ticking clock all over again.
His hand hovered above the keyboard.
He whispered, almost afraid of the sound of his own voice:
> "If it's real… I'll find it."
Lightning flashed outside — once, twice, three times.
For a moment, the lights flickered.
When they steadied, the clock on his wall had reset itself.
03 : 00.