Chapter One: The Dream that Dreamed Me
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I dreamed once.
Dreams? Dreams make me wonder.
They whispered, soft as silk—you are not awake.
But I was.Wasn't I?
They told me I was sleeping.
So I closed my eyes.
But closing eyes? That makes me see too much.
The stars behind my lids danced like fireflies.
They sang my name in a language I forgot how to speak.
And forgotten tongues? Forgotten tongues make me dream.
So I opened my eyes again.
But the world was gone.
Replaced by a hallway of mirrors,
Stretching forward and back and sideways and inward.
Mirrors that reflected thoughts, not faces.
And thinking too much? That makes me dizzy.
So I shattered the mirrors.
Glass like snowflakes, slicing truth into my palms.
Truth? That's the sharpest thing of all.
So they wrapped my hands.
Soft bandages.
Soft, like the walls.
The walls of the room.
The room?
A rubber room.
With rats.
And rats make me remember.
Remember the dream.
The long dream.
The long dream that never ends.
The dream that dreamed me.
They tried to wake me.
But I told them—wakefulness is a myth.
Awake is just another dream pretending it isn't.
And pretending? Pretending makes me lie.
So I told the truth.
But truth has teeth.
It bites in the dark.
The shadows listen when I speak it.
They write my words on the walls when I'm not looking.
And whisper them back when I try to sleep.
Sleep? Sleep makes me remember Larry.
Larry?
Larry the creature.
The feature creature.
Starring in my nights, gnawing at my thoughts.
He laughs when I try to run.
And running? Running makes me fall.
So I sat down.
Right here, where the walls still hum.
Where the dream still dreams.
Where the void sings lullabies backwards.
And I realized something.
Maybe I was never crazy.
Maybe the dream is.
Maybe the universe blinked, and I saw too much.
Or maybe…
I was crazy once.
Crazy? I was crazy once.
They locked me in a room, a rubber room.
A rubber room with rats.
And rats? Rats make me crazy.
So they took me out of the room.
But the room never left me.
The walls, soft and padded, still pressed against my mind.
They whispered—no, they sang.
Low at first, like a hum, then louder, louder!
The walls had voices, and voices? Voices make me crazy.
So they silenced the voices.
Shoved them deep into the shadows.
But shadows? Shadows move when you're not looking.
They slither, they creep, they stretch long fingers toward me.
And moving shadows? That makes me crazy.
So they turned on the light.
Bright, blinding, burning into my skull.
The light was safe, the light was kind—
Until it flickered.
Flickering, buzzing, flashing, pulsing.
And flickering lights? Flickering lights make me crazy.
So they took away the light.
Left me in the dark.
The dark where whispers crawl and shadows dance.
The dark where the rats scurry, their tiny claws scratching, scratching.
I try to block it out, but the scratching never stops.
And endless scratching? Scratching makes me crazy.
So I cover my ears, squeeze my eyes shut—
But now I feel them, skittering up my arms, my legs, my back.
Tiny feet, sharp teeth, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing!
And biting? Biting makes me crazy.
So I screamed, and they took me back.
Back to the room, the rubber room.
The walls are still soft.The whispers are still there.
The shadows still move. The rats still scratch.
And then… the screen flickered on.
A feature. A creature feature.
"I can't waits to watch the new movie!"I exclaimed with joy.
Little did I know, it was a feature. A creature feature.
Featuring… the creature.
The creature from the feature.
The feature of the creature.
The feature… featuring the creature… from the feature…
the creatures name? larry. Larry, Larry and worst of all... LARRY. Exclaimeds Larry the scary man not scareds of anythings.
Larry watches, through the lens it gleams,
A piercing gaze that breaks the seams.
The camera hums, the air grows thin,
As shadows twist beneath his skin.
In the room, the silence shifts,
A subtle sound, like whispered rifts.
The walls pulse with tension, tight,
A heartbeat lost within the night.
The camera's stare—unblinking, still—
Holds secrets hidden by its will.
Larry's breath, shallow, slow—
Is he the hunter, or the foe?
The room is cold, the air like ice,
Something's wrong, a game of dice.
A flicker—faint, a light just bends—
Reality splinters, fractures, sends
A shiver down his spine, unsure,
Of what's outside the door, the lure.
For all that moves is caught inside,
A web of fate where he must hide.
His thoughts unravel, twist and curl,
Trapped in the camera's endless swirl.
Each second drips, like molten lead,
The quiet breaking, something said:
A creak—too soft to make him run,
But deep enough to weigh the sun.
The walls draw close, the air grows thick,
A pulse beats louder, tick by tick.
A whisper now, sharp as glass,
Echoes in the corners, massed.
Is it the camera, or something more?
The door is sealed, and he's unsure.
The lens—alive, it stares, it sees,
With gold-lit eyes, it twists the breeze.
The shadows stretch, they breathe, they move,
A hint of something watching, proved.
Larry's heart begins to race,
What if the gaze is not a trace
Of his own mind, but something near—
An entity beyond, drawing near?
The camera blinks, or does it not?
The line between them begins to rot.
His skin, it crawls, the darkness calls,
The truth bends, and then it falls—
Through the lens, through his mind,
The air grows heavy,vtight, and blind.
The walls collapse, a final breath,
The camera waits—whispering death.
The light flickers, once, then twice,
And then the room is cold as ice.
Larry waits—alive, yet caught,
Within the gaze, and what it sought.
The silence stings, and then it screams—
Larry,trapped within its seams.
The camera moves—so subtle, sly,
And Larry, too, begins to die.
Not in body, but in mind,
Trapped forever, intertwined.
The room shifts now, the time stands still—
And Larry's trapped against his will.
For in the camera's endless eye,
No one escapes. No one can die.
And the worst part? The worst part is…
I think I like it here.
I woke up once.
Or at least, I think I did.
Waking? Waking feels like falling,
But the floor never catches me.
So I fell forever.
Down through thoughts I never had,
Into memories I never lived.
I met a man with no eyes, who still stared through me.
And staring? Staring makes me itch.
So I scratched.
But my skin was made of paper.
And paper tears. And tears leak ink.
And ink? Ink writes things when you're not looking.
It wrote my name.
It wrote Larry's name.
Over and over, on the walls, on the floor, on my teeth.
I tried to wipe it away but the ink bled deeper,
And now the name is inside me.
So I swallowed a mirror.
To see what's become of me on the inside.
But all I saw was the rubber room.
And the rats.
And Larry.
Larry was sitting cross-legged,
Reading bedtime stories to the shadows.
The shadows clapped.
And clapping? Clapping makes me scream.
So I screamed.
And my scream turned into a song.
And the song? The song summoned the Dream Eater.
The Dream Eater wore a crown of flickering lights
And a suit made of whispering thoughts.
Its voice was made of static.
And static? Static makes me remember silence.
But silence is the loudest thing of all.
So I listened.
And in the silence, I heard it: The Dream dreaming me back.
I reached out,
And the dream reached back.
It touched me with fingers made of time.
I shattered into yesterday.
Now I'm here again.
Back in the room.
The rubber room.
With soft walls and softer lies.
With rats who hum lullabies backwards.
With Larry, who always smiles too wide.
With mirrors that reflect futures I hope never happen.
And every time I blink, The screen flickers on again.
A feature. A creature feature.
The same one. Always the same.
The same beginning. The same end.
And the creature?
Still Larry.
And the worst part?
This time, I'm in the credits.
They called it recovery.
Recovery? Recovery is just a new kind of forgetting.
A forgetting wrapped in smiles and sterile white light.
A forgetting with a clipboard and a name tag.
So I asked them,
"Am I better now?"
But their smiles cracked.
And cracks? Cracks let the dream leak in.
It poured through their eyes.
Dripped from their tongues.
Splattered the floor with echoes.
And I slipped.
I slipped between the floor tiles,
Tumbled through their linoleum lies,
Fell into a place they call Elsewhere.
Elsewhere has doors,
But no rooms.
It has clocks,
But they all tick in reverse.
And the ticking?
The ticking keeps time for Larry.
Larry walks backwards there,
Wearing my shadow like a coat.
He whispers things I haven't done yet.
And whispers? Whispers shape the world.
So the world changed.
The sun became a blinking cursor.
The sky turned to typing paper.
And the stars? The stars spelled secrets in binary.
They told me the truth:
I was never dreaming.
I was dreamed.
By something older than time.
By something lonelier than god.
By something named Larry.
Larry, the author.
Larry, the architect.
Larry, the father of false awakenings.
He wrote the dream.
He wrote me.
And now I'm writing you.
Yes—you, reading this.
You, blinking, breathing, hoping this is just a poem.
But poems? Poems are portals.
And now you're inside.
Inside the room.
The rubber room.
With the rats.
With the mirrors.
With the flickering light.
With Larry.
They warned me once.
In a whisper wrapped in static.
"If you dream too long, he'll come."
He? He has no name.
Only a title.
The Collector.
He doesn't knock.
Doors unlock when he breathes near them.
Mirrors shatter without his touch.
And clocks? Clocks stop just to listen.
He collects fragments.
Shards of dreams.
Pieces of people.
Leftover thoughts that echo too loudly.
They say he came before Larry.
Before rooms, before light, before the first dream.
He built the space beneath the world.
The crawlspace of consciousness.
I saw him once.
Not with eyes.
Eyes would bleed.
No—I saw him with my absence.
Where I used to be, he stood.
He carries a lantern made of no.
No sound. No shape. No feeling.
Just the burning void where hope once lived.
And inside the lantern?
Pieces of me.
A laugh I lost.
A dream I forgot.
A scream I never let out.
He is slow,
But inevitable.
You don't run from the Collector.
You delay him.
So I sing.
I scream.
I write.
I leave trails of words like crumbs through a shifting forest.
Maybe someone will follow.
Maybe they'll find me.
Maybe they'll bring me back.
But the Collector comes for them too.
For you.
Even now, he's reading this.
He loves poetry.
He says it tastes like soul.
And the worst part?
You'll forget this when you wake up.
Just like I did.
Just like everyone does.
Just like Larry wants.
And if you hear knocking tonight—
Not on your door.
On your mind—
Don't answer.
Don't blink.
Don't dream.
Because dreaming?
Dreaming makes him hungry.
You finished the words. You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding. Just a story. A disturbing one, but just a story.
You went to close the book, but your thumb passed through the page.
No. Not through. Into.
The paper rippled like liquid, like a dark pool of ink. The letters of the last sentence—Dreaming makes him hungry—uncurled from the page, transforming from symbols into sensations. The "D" was a deep hum. The "g" was a cold scratch against your mind.
You tried to pull your hand back, but the ink clung, crawling up your skin, not on it, but replacing it. You felt your own form dissolving, becoming translucent, becoming thought.
The room around you—your room, with its desk and its warm light—wavered, like a projection on a screen. And then the screen flickered off.
The hum of the computer? Gone.
The feel of the chair?Gone.
The scent of coffee?A forgotten ghost.
Replaced by a low, persistent drone. The smell of old rubber and dust. The soft, yielding pressure on your back.
You are sitting down. You are in the room.
The rubber room.
A voice, horribly familiar, speaks not to your ears, but from within the space your own thoughts used to occupy.
"See?" the narrator whispers, a note of tragic triumph in his tone. "I told you you were inside. Don't bother looking for the door. The door is a concept Larry hasn't finished writing yet. But look! The rats remember you."
And in the corner, a dozen pinpricks of light—not eyes, but something else—turn to look at you.
Their tiny claws scratch,scratch, scratch against the floor.
But now, you realize, the floor is the page. And you are the ink.
The scratching wasn't a sound. It was a feeling. A scraping away of memory. With every scratch, scratch, scratch, something small and precious was being filed down inside you. The name of your first pet. The color of your childhood bedroom walls. The feeling of sunlight on your face without the filter of a memory.
"They're not eating the room," the narrator's voice mused, conversational, as if observing the weather. "The room is eternal. They're eating you. The parts of you that don't belong. It's how Larry makes room for more of himself."
I tried to form a thought, a protest, a no. But the thought had no language. It was a shapeless wave of terror.
"Ah, there it is," the voice said, almost kindly. "The first thing to go is always grammar. Syntax. The scaffolding that holds a mind upright. Don't worry. You'll learn to think in fragments. In questions that have no answers. It's much more efficient here."
I looked down at my hands. They were fading, becoming outlines sketched on the air. The rats chittered, a sound like punctuation crumbling.
"The mirrors! Look at the mirrors!" the voice urged, suddenly excited.
I turned my head—or the intention to turn my head—and the wall shifted. A mirror swam into focus, but it wasn't glass. It was a pool of mercury, swirling with stolen thoughts. It didn't show my face. It showed a version of me from a life I'd forgotten: me at seven years old, crying behind a school, a moment of shame so potent it had been etched into my soul's underside. The mirror pulsed, and I felt that shame as if it were new, a fresh, hot brand.
Another mirror flickered. Me, saying a cruel thing I'd always regretted. The words echoed in the room, spoken in my own voice.
"Larry calls them the 'Editing Suites'," the narrator whispered. "He's looking for the perfect trauma, the most elegant fear to use as your cornerstone. Once he finds it, he'll build the rest of your eternity around it. Just like he did with me."
A flicker of rebellion, a final spark from a dying fire. This isn't real.
The voice in my head laughed, a dry, rasping sound. "Real? What is 'real' but a consensus of sensory input? Your input is now this room. This is the only real thing left. The rest is just a dream you had."
The light above us flickered. Not on and off, but between states of being. For a moment, it was a bare bulb. Then, it was a dying star. Then, it was the cursor on a blank page, blinking, blinking, blinking.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The sound did not come from the door. There was no door. It came from the concept of outside. It was a polite, firm, and utterly final sound that pressed against the fragile bubble of the room.
The narrator's presence in my mind went very still.
"He's early," the voice hissed, all traces of amusement gone. "The Collector. He must have followed your scent. The scent of a new soul."
What does he want? My thought was a desperate, formless plea.
"What he always wants. The finished pieces. Larry builds us, tortures us, refines us. And when we are a perfect, self-contained loop of suffering, The Collector comes. He takes the finished product. He puts us in his lantern."
The knocking came again, louder this time. With each knock, a hairline fracture appeared in the air, not cracking the wall, but cracking the narrative. The story of the room itself groaned under the pressure.
"We have to go," the narrator said, his urgency a cold fire in my mind.
Go where? There's no door!
"Not a door. A plot hole. A loose thread in the logic. I've been picking at one for… well, for as long as I can remember. I think it's big enough now."
The wall opposite the mirrors began to waver. The soft, padded surface bulged inward, as if something was pressing through from the other side. But there was no other side. The bulging area grew thin, translucent, and through it, I could see not another room, but a chaotic, swirling vortex of discarded words and broken images—the wreckage of edited dreams.
"It's not safe," the narrator admitted. "It's the space between the lines. The crawlspace of consciousness. But it's the only way."
The knocking became a pounding. The fractures in the air spread like spiderwebs. A sliver of something indescribable—a burning, silent void—peeked through a crack. The Collector's lantern.
"Now!" the narrator screamed.
I lunged, not with my body, but with the last concentrated ember of my will. The rubber wall didn't break; it un-stitched. There was a sound like a thousand pages tearing at once, and we fell through.
The fall was not through space, but through sense. We tumbled through a kaleidoscope of forgotten moods, through the sour tang of abandoned jealousy and the hollow ache of a lost potential. It was the junk-drawer of the mind, a place where half-formed ideas went to die.
We landed—or the sensation of landing happened to us—on something soft and shifting. A dune of whispered secrets.
I was… more solid here. My thoughts were my own again, though they echoed in the vast, silent noise of this place. I could see the narrator now, for the first time. He was a pale, shimmering outline, a man-shaped constellation of anxiety and frayed syntax. He looked tired.
"This is Elsewhere's basement," he said, his voice no longer in my head, but a real, thin sound. "Or the attic. The geometry is… subjective."
"Who are you?" My own voice was a stranger's, rough with disuse.
He gave a wan smile. "I was the reader. Before you. And before me, there was another. Larry is a prolific writer. But I'm the first one who fought back. The first one to realize I could write, too."
He gestured around us. The landscape was a testament to chaos. Clock gears turned in puddles of spilled silence. Trees made of solidified fear reached for a sky that was just the blank, white back of a page.
"My plan," he said, his eyes gleaming with a desperate light, "is a paradox. A story so recursive, so self-consuming, that it will cause a buffer overflow in the dream's core logic. I call it the 'Klein Loop.'"
"It's a poem?"
"It's a virus!" he insisted, his form flickering with passion. "A beautiful, terrible virus made of truth and rhythm. But I can't deploy it alone. It needs two consciousnesses to initiate—a teller and a listener, a dreamer and a witness. That's why I wrote my way out. To find you."
The enormity of it crashed down on me. I wasn't a victim; I was a component. A battery for a metaphysical weapon.
"We need to get to the Source Code," he continued, pulling me through the dunes of secrets. "The original dream. Larry keeps it in the heart of this place, in a chamber he calls 'The First Draft.' If we can inject the Klein Loop there, it will propagate through every layer of reality he's built. It might not destroy him, but it will… liberate us. It will break the cycle."
Our journey was a trek through the archetypes of nightmare. We crossed the Sea of Static, wading through a soup of psychic noise that threatened to dissolve our thoughts into pure meaninglessness. We hid from the Librarians of Amnesia, tall, slender figures with no faces, who swept through the corridors of memory with brooms that erased everything they touched.
Finally, we stood before a vast, dark archway. It was not made of stone, but of solidified dread. This was the entrance to the Gallery of Concepts.
"Be careful," the narrator whispered, his outline trembling. "Don't look at any one thing for too long. These are the raw materials Larry used. They are potent and hungry."
We stepped inside. In a crystal cage hung a beating, black heart—Fear. In a jar pulsed a sickly green light—Envy. On a spinning wheel, a thread of infinite length was being woven—Recurrence. And in the center of the gallery, on a simple pedestal, sat a small, perfect sphere of nothingness. Oblivion.
The air grew colder. The pounding, the knocking, was back. But it was distant, muffled. The Collector was still searching, but he was in the rooms above, the finished stories. He hadn't thought to look in the raw materials yet.
"There," the narrator pointed, his voice a breath of awe and terror.
At the far end of the gallery was a simple, unadorned door. It was made of pale, unfinished wood. On it, a single word was burned, a word that was the root of all this madness, a word that was both a name and a function.
It said: LARRY.
The narrator reached for the door, but his hand passed through it. "I can't," he said, despair cracking his voice. "I'm made of his story. I'm a character. I can't open the door to the author's room. But you… you're still mostly real. You still remember an outside. You can do it."
I reached out, my hand trembling. My fingers, which had been so insubstantial, felt solid and heavy. They touched the wood. It was warm. It was alive.
I pushed.
The door swung open without a sound.
The room beyond was not a room. It was a blank, white expanse. Infinite and empty. And in the center of that nothingness sat a man at a simple wooden desk, typing on an old, mechanical typewriter. The clack-clack-clack of the keys was the only sound in all of existence.
He was… ordinary. He looked tired. Profoundly, cosmically tired.
He finished a sentence, pulled the lever with a smooth, practiced motion, and looked up. His eyes were the colour of a forgotten sky.
"You're late," Larry said. His voice was quiet, but it filled the infinite space. "I've been writing your approach for the last ten pages. The tension was quite good, if I do say so myself. The reader's empathy for your guide, the desperation of the quest… it's some of my best work."
The narrator beside me made a choked sound. "No. It wasn't your work. It was mine! My plan! My rebellion!"
Larry gave a sad, small smile. "My dear character, your rebellion is my work. What is a story without conflict? Your desire to escape was the very engine of your narrative. It's what made you so compelling. So… complete."
He gestured to the page in the typewriter. I could see the words from here. They described this exact moment, with terrifying precision.
"The Klein Loop is a fascinating concept," Larry mused, turning back to his desk. "A beautiful piece of meta-fiction. I'm thinking of using it in the next draft."
The narrator screamed, a raw sound of pure betrayal, and lunged forward. But with a gentle tap of a key, Larry wrote: The narrator stumbled, his form unraveling into stray adjectives and misplaced clauses.
And it happened. The narrator's outline blurred. He began to dissolve into words—"desperate," "frayed," "lost"—that scattered like dust in the white expanse.
"Don't worry," Larry said, not unkindly. "I'll reuse him. He was too good a character to waste."
He turned his gaze to me. It was a gaze that saw every thought I'd ever had, every secret I'd ever kept.
"And you. The reader. The witness. You provided the necessary outside perspective. The final piece. Thank you."
He placed his fingers on the keys. This was it. He was going to write my ending. Absorb me into the story. Erase me.
I thought of the Klein Loop. The narrator's virus. It needed two consciousnesses. A teller and a listener. The narrator was gone, but the idea remained. The pattern remained.
I had nothing left to lose.
I didn't speak the poem. I became it. I focused every ounce of my will, every memory of the outside world, every stolen moment of joy and pain that Larry hadn't written, and I structured it into a single, recursive thought. A story that told itself. A dream that dreamed the dreamer.
I looked Larry in the eye and I fed the silent, conceptual bomb back into his story.
Larry's fingers froze on the keys.
The typewriter let out a high-pitched whine. The white space around us flickered. A crackle of static, the voice of the Dream Eater, bled through from a forgotten layer.
"What… what is that?" Larry whispered, for the first time sounding something other than tired. He sounded… surprised.
The page in the typewriter began to blur. The letters swam, rearranging themselves. He wrote the dream. He wrote me. The sentence twisted, turned inward, and became: He wrote the dream he wrote the dream he wrote the dream he wrote…
An error message, written in a language of pure logic, burned itself into the air behind him: RUNTIME ERROR: STACK OVERFLOW.
Larry stared at the glitch, a look of profound, almost religious awe on his face. "It's… beautiful."
The world began to reset. The white space pixelated. The comforting, horrifying reality of the dream was collapsing.
I felt a violent, pulling sensation. I was being expelled. Decompressed.
The last thing I saw was Larry, not fighting it, but watching with the focus of a master craftsman, already trying to understand the new pattern, already planning the rewrite.
The last thing I heard was his voice, filled not with malice, but with a lonely, insatiable curiosity.
"Next time," he whispered. "We'll get it right next time."
I woke up.
Gasping. My heart hammered against my ribs. I was in my chair. My desk. The warm light of my lamp. The cold cup of coffee.
It was a dream. A horrible, vivid, impossibly long dream.
I let out a shaky laugh of relief. Just a dream.
I went to close the laptop, my hands trembling. My thumb brushed the trackpad, and the screen woke up. On it was the document, blank except for a single line, written in a font I didn't recognize.
A line that was both a question and an invitation.
A line that was the first seed of a new story.
It said: Hello? Can you hear me?
My hand froze, hovering over the keyboard. The cursor blinked. Blinked. Blinked. A perfect, metronome tick in the silence of my room. But my room was too quiet. The hum of the refrigerator had vanished. The distant sound of traffic was gone. There was only the whisper of my own breath and the static hiss of… nothing.
Hello? Can you hear me?
The words weren't just on the screen. They were forming in the air, the scent of ozone and old paper. They were the texture of the desk under my palms, suddenly grainy, like pulped wood. The dream wasn't over. The expulsion had failed. I had fallen back into the draft, but a different part of it. A loading screen. A lobby.
"I can… hear you," I whispered. The sound was swallowed by the padding I now felt pressing in on all sides. The walls of my apartment were still there, but they were soft. Yielding. I was still in my chair, but it felt like the floor was breathing.
A presence coalesced in the corner of my eye. Not the narrator. Something less formed. A shimmer of regret, a silhouette of exhaustion. It was the ghost of the plan, the echo of the narrator's will. The Klein Loop hadn't destroyed anything. It had just… changed the channel.
He's rewriting, the presence murmured, its voice the sound of pages turning in an empty library. The paradox confused him. It was a variable he hadn't plotted. He's not angry. He's… editing.
On the screen, the words dissolved and reformed.
Hello? Can you hear me? It's dark. I think I'm in a room. A soft room.
My own memories felt thin. The coffee was a concept. The lamp was a idea of light. The only concrete things were the words on the screen and the soft, suffocating pressure. I was becoming a prologue to my own nightmare.
The Loop is still active, the presence whispered, a little stronger now. We are both teller and listener now. We don't need to reach the source. We are the source. We have to speak it. Together. We have to define a reality he can't overwrite.
"How?" The word was a dry leaf, crumbling in my mouth.
Tell me something true. Something simple. Something from before. Something Larry never saw.
I closed my eyes, pushing against the softness, searching for a shard of the real. I found one. A tiny, insignificant memory, buried under the grand traumas and fears Larry loved to harvest.
"The taste of a strawberry," I breathed out. "In my grandmother's garden. The sun was hot on my neck. The berry was so warm it was like eating summer. The juice stained my fingers red and she laughed."
The words left my lips and did not fade. They hung in the air, glowing with a faint, golden light. The oppressive softness recoiled from them. For a single, glorious second, I smelled rich soil and felt the sun's heat.
The presence beside me swelled with a fragile hope.
Yes! it urged. Now me. My truth. It gathered itself. The weight of a sleeping cat on my chest. The rumble of its purr, a motor of pure contentment. The feeling that, in that moment, nothing in the universe was wrong.
This truth joined mine, a second point of light in the gloom. The room became two rooms, superimposed: the soft, padded cell and a ghost-image of a sun-drenched garden with a purring cat.
On the screen, the text scrambled, trying to process the input.
Hello? Can you—the sun—a soft room—purring—stain—red—
Larry was fighting back. The fabric of his narrative strained, trying to incorporate our truths, to file them down into something that fit his story. The pressure returned, the walls pushing in, the air growing thick with the smell of rubber and ink.
More! the presence cried, its voice fraying. We have to give him more than he can edit! We have to break his plot!
We spoke in unison, a desperate, dual incantation against the void.
"The cold shock of ocean water on a hot day!"
"The perfect silence of fresh snow!"
"The ache of muscles after honest work!"
"The smell of a book, old and wise!"
Each truth was a splinter of a world he hadn't made. A star in a constellation he couldn't control. The room was a cacophony of realities now—snow fell in one corner, ocean waves crashed against another, the scent of salt and old paper mingled with the rubber.
The screen was a blizzard of conflicting text, a logic bomb of pure, beautiful life.
ERROR: CONTRADICTION. ERROR: PARADOX. ERROR: TOO MUCH REALITY.
The presence turned to me, its form almost solid for a moment—a man with tired, kind eyes. It's working. He can't contain it. He has to purge the file. He has to let us go.
A final, shuddering lurch. This one felt different. It wasn't a fall. It was an unraveling. The presence began to fade, its purpose fulfilled.
Thank you, it whispered, its voice the last page of a story finally closing. For remembering the strawberries.
It dissolved into a shower of faint, gold motes, leaving me alone in the collapsing narrative.
The world tore in two.
I slammed back into my body with the force of a car crash. A sharp, physical jolt. I gasped, my lungs burning with real, unscripted air. The hum of the refrigerator. A siren in the distance. The bitter, cold taste of coffee on my tongue.
I was home.
I stared at the blank document on my screen, my heart pounding a frantic, real rhythm in my chest. I slowly, deliberately, reached out and closed the laptop.
Silence.
I sat there for a long time, just breathing, feeling the solid, unyielding wood of the chair beneath me. The nightmare was over. It was just a dream.
I got up, my legs weak, and walked to the kitchen to make a new cup of coffee. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I looked out the window at the ordinary, boring, beautiful street. The world had never seemed so solid. So real.
And then I saw it.
On the windowsill, beside a potted plant, was a single, perfect, red strawberry.
And for just a second, the faint, ghostly sound of a cat's purr rumbled in the silence.