My mother's smile widened, stretching her face in ways human skin shouldn't move.
"You look surprised," she said, her voice echoing through the space between my body and mind. "Did you think I died in that hospital? That the madness finally claimed me?"
I couldn't speak. Couldn't move. In this liminal space, I was pure consciousness—vulnerable, exposed, and face-to-face with the truth I'd been running from my entire life.
My mother had never been sick.
She'd been awake.
"The pills they gave me," she continued, circling me like a predator, "weren't to suppress delusions. They were to keep me from remembering what I really was. What we all are."
She gestured to the space around us, and I saw them clearly now. Thousands of faces floating in the darkness. My grandmother. Eleanor. Researchers from the 1950s. Excavation workers from 1889. And further back—so much further back. Faces that predated photography, predated writing, predated civilization itself.
"The Collective isn't an infection," my mother explained. "It's a memory. The universe's memory. And we're the species unlucky enough to tap into it."
She reached out, her fingers passing through my consciousness like cold water. Images flooded in:
The facility wasn't built over something sleeping. It was built over a wound. A tear in reality where the membrane between individual consciousness and universal consciousness had grown thin. Every person who descended into that tear came back changed—aware of something humanity was never meant to know.
We are not separate.
Every thought, every dream, every forgotten memory of every being that ever existed—they're all connected. All accessible. All bleeding into each other like colors mixing in water.
And the machine Eleanor built, the flesh-and-metal computer I'd seen, wasn't designed to house the Collective.
It was designed to filter it. To process it. To transform the raw, overwhelming everything-ness of universal consciousness into something a human mind could survive experiencing.
"Eleanor wanted to become God," my mother said softly. "But your grandmother understood the truth. Becoming God means ceasing to be human. Ceasing to be individual. Ceasing to be... you."
I finally found my voice. "Then why are you here? Why are you part of it?"
My mother's expression softened, and for a moment she looked like herself again. The woman who'd read me bedtime stories. Who'd taught me to ride a bicycle. Who'd hugged me goodnight even when the voices were screaming.
"Because I'm the failsafe, baby. The last line of defense before the awakening."
She placed her hand over where my heart would be if I had a body.
"Every generation, one of us is chosen. One of us becomes strong enough, aware enough, to make the choice. Your grandmother couldn't do it. I did. And now..."
Her hand pressed deeper, and I felt it—a switch inside my consciousness. A decision point coded into my very existence.
"Now it's your turn."
The space around us shifted. Suddenly I could see the real world again. My body, frozen in the corridor. Eleanor and my grandmother locked in their eternal battle. And the red door, still open, with its plain room and its terrible button.
But I could also see beyond it. Through the facility's walls. Through the earth above. Through the atmosphere and into space. I could see the truth of what this place really was.
Not a facility. Not a wound. But a seed.
Planted millions of years ago by something that exists outside linear time. Waiting for a species to evolve intelligent enough to understand it. To choose it. To become the bridge between individual consciousness and the infinite.
"This is happening all over the world," my mother explained. "Hundreds of sites like this one. Each one a seed. Each one waiting for someone to press the button and complete the circuit."
She showed me visions: facilities in Siberia, underwater trenches in the Pacific, caves beneath the Himalayas, deep in the Amazon rainforest. Each one pulsing with the same amber light. Each one housing their own Collectives. Each one with a volunteer warden standing before their own red door.
Waiting.
"If even one person presses the button," my mother said, "the circuit completes. Humanity awakens. The barriers between individual minds dissolve. Everyone becomes part of the Collective. Forever."
"But if I don't press it?"
Her smile turned sad.
"Then you become the new warden. You stay in that room. Alone. Holding the door shut with your consciousness. For the rest of your life. However long that might be in this place where time moves sideways."
I felt myself being pulled back toward my body. The decision was being forced. I could feel Eleanor's magic tugging at me from one direction, my grandmother's protection from another, and the Collective's hunger from a third.
But my mother's presence stayed constant. Steady. Waiting.
"There's a third option, isn't there?" I said suddenly. "Something you haven't told me."
My mother's eyes—truly her eyes now, brown and warm and heartbreakingly human—filled with tears.
"You were always too smart for your own good," she whispered. "Yes. There's a third option. The same one I chose."
She stepped aside, and I saw what she'd been hiding.
A second button. Hidden behind the first. Smaller. Covered in dust and symbols that hurt to perceive.
"This button doesn't seal the door," she explained. "It erases it. Severs this facility's connection to the network completely. But the price..."
She didn't need to finish. I understood.
To press that button meant sacrificing not just your life, but your existence. Every memory anyone had of you would fade. Every photograph would blur. Every record would corrupt. You would be retroactively erased from the timeline, as if you'd never been born.
The universe's way of balancing the equation. One consciousness removed completely in exchange for sealing one facility forever.
"I pressed it twelve years ago," my mother said. "The day you think I died in the hospital. But I didn't die. I just... stopped having ever existed. Except here. In this space between spaces. Watching over you. Waiting for the day you'd be strong enough to make your own choice."
Tears streamed down my non-existent face.
"So I won't remember you?"
"No one will, baby. That's the price. But you'll be free. This facility will be sealed. And the Collective will have one less seed to grow from."
I looked at the two buttons. The room. The door. My mother's fading form.
And I made my choice.
My consciousness snapped back into my body so fast I gasped. Eleanor and my grandmother stopped their battle, both turning to look at me.
I walked toward the red door.
"No!" Eleanor shrieked. "You don't understand what you're giving up!"
But my grandmother smiled. A real smile. Proud and sad and understanding.
"She understands perfectly," she said. "She understands what we never could."
I stepped into the plain room. Saw both buttons clearly now. The first, large and red, labeled in symbols that meant SEAL. The second, small and black, labeled in symbols that meant ERASE.
I raised my hand, fingers trembling.
Behind me, I heard footsteps. Multiple footsteps. Others were coming. The entire Collective, manifesting in physical form, trying to stop me before I could choose.
My finger hovered over the black button.
And then I heard my mother's voice, one last time:
"I love you. I always have. And I'm so sorry you'll never remember why."
I pressed the button.
The world exploded into light.
When the light faded, I was standing in an empty field. No facility. No door. No Collective. Just grass and sky and the sound of wind through trees.
I looked down at my hands. Both palms smooth. No scars. No symbols. No memories of how I got here or why I was crying.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. A text from someone named Sarah: "Where are you? We were supposed to meet for coffee an hour ago!"
I frowned. Sarah? Coffee? I couldn't remember making plans.
I couldn't remember a lot of things, actually.
But that was normal, wasn't it? Everyone forgets things sometimes.
I turned to walk back to my car—where had I parked?—and something crunched under my foot.
A photograph. Faded. Water-damaged. Showing a woman in a hospital gown, smiling at the camera.
I picked it up, studying her face. She looked familiar. Like someone I should know. Someone important.
But I couldn't place her.
I pocketed the photo, meaning to examine it later, and started walking.
Behind me, the grass where the facility used to be began to grow over. Within hours, there would be no trace it ever existed.
But deep underground, in places where reality grows thin, amber lights still pulsed in hundreds of other facilities.
Waiting for their turn.
Waiting for someone else to make the choice.
And in the space between spaces, my mother watched me go.
"One down," she whispered to the darkness. "Three hundred seventeen to go."
Somewhere in Siberia, a girl with amber eyes woke screaming.
Her journey was just beginning.