I did not wake up.
Waking up implies that I had been asleep.
But I wasn't.
Something ended… and something else began.
The first thing I noticed was the silence.
Not the absence of sound—
but the absence of meaning.
The world existed… but it did not make sense.
The ground beneath me flickered,
as if reality itself was struggling to remember what it was supposed to be.
Lines of something—
code, light, memory—
moved beneath the surface of everything.
I tried to move my hand.
It responded… but a second too late.
As if I wasn't controlling it directly.
As if something else was translating my intent.
Then I saw it.
A fracture in the air.
Not a crack.
A misalignment.
Like two versions of the same reality overlapping… and failing to agree.
I reached out.
The moment my fingers touched it—
The world broke.
Not shattered.
Rewritten.
And in that instant,
I understood something I was never meant to know:
This world…
was not real.
And neither was I.
For a moment,
I thought it would end there.
That whatever this was…
would simply consume me.
But it didn't.
Instead—
something changed.
A faint sound echoed through the broken space.
Not from around me…
but from within.
Like a system trying to initialize.
Fragments of light gathered in front of my eyes,
forming shapes that refused to stay still.
Symbols.
Lines.
Something like… an interface.
I couldn't read it.
But I understood it.
Not with my mind—
but with something deeper.
Something that did not belong to me.
Then the world shifted again.
The fracture expanded.
And from within it…
something moved.
Not a creature.
Not a person.
A presence.
Watching.
Waiting.
As if it had been there long before me…
and would remain long after I was gone.
I tried to step back.
My body obeyed—
but the space did not.
Distance no longer existed.
Direction had no meaning.
The closer I tried to get away…
the closer I became.
And then—
it noticed me.
The moment our awareness touched…
everything went silent.
Even the system.
Even the world.
And a single thought…
not mine—
echoed through the void:
"You were not supposed to see this."
And yet…
I had already seen too much.
The silence didn't last.
It never does.
Something beneath the surface of reality… reacted.
The space around me trembled,
as if my awareness itself had triggered something forbidden.
The fragments of light in front of me began to stabilize.
Slowly.
Reluctantly.
Like a system forced to acknowledge an error it could not erase.
Then—
a shape formed.
Not complete.
Not stable.
But present.
A frame.
A boundary.
Something that separated me…
from everything else.
And within it,
something began to take form.
Not a message.
Not a warning.
Something worse.
A recognition.
As if the system itself…
had finally noticed me.
And this time…
it was not going to let me go.