u/vakii__

For twenty five years as Director of Criminal Intelligence, I interrogated killers, cartel bosses, and monsters who ate their kids. I thought I knew the bottom of hell. But the hell I knew was loud. It screamed, threw tantrums, justified sins, and cried.

But the kid sitting across from me was absolute, bone crushing silence.

He has no name on record. No fingerprints, no birth certificate, not even blurry CCTV footage. The files called him Entity Zero. When he spoke, he asked me to call him Lucian.

He looked like an anemic student. Pale, thin blonde hair, wearing a cheap plain shirt. He was chained to the iron desk in the interrogation room, unbothered.

Two days ago, my squad breached a psychiatric facility. What we found was a slaughterhouse defying logic. Three hundred patients, doctors, and guards wiped each other out. They tore each others throats out with bare hands, glass, and pencils. Zero survivors.

Except Lucian.

We found him on a bench in the blood soaked courtyard, reading a paperback. Not a drop of blood on his shirt.

I slammed my hands on the table, getting in his face. "What hallucinogenic gas did you pump into the vents? How do you make three hundred sane people butcher each other while you sit and watch?!"

Lucian slowly raised his empty eyes. No malice, no sadistic joy. Just a freezing void. He smiled genuinely and spoke with a soft voice.

"Drugs are a cheap trick for the weak. I used nothing physical. We just had a chat. Five minutes of conversation with every doctor and guard. That is all it took."

I scoffed, feeling the heat of anger. "Bullshit. You cannot talk a normal person into a massacre by shooting the breeze."

He tilted his head, talking as if explaining math to a toddler.

"Humans are incredibly fragile machines, Elaric. You do not need to push them off the cliff. You politely convince them falling is the only way to fly. Every human hides a secret shame, buried grudge, or crippling inferiority complex. I find that rusted screw in their heads and give it a slight turn. I hand them the moral high ground to do what they secretly wanted. After that, the machine eats itself alive begging for salvation."

My jaw clenched. "You are a sick psycho. But right now, you are chained to a desk in a black site. You are not God. You are a ghost we bagged, and I will put a needle in your arm."

His smile widened. It looked like genuine pity.

"Did you really bag me? Let us trace the invisible threads, Director Elaric. Twelve years ago, you were a detective about to get fired. Then, an anonymous leak exposed your boss, sliding you into his chair. Four years ago, the only politician threatening your department was found hanging from his fan. Last year, the cartel boss who put a hit on your girl was sold out and caught a bullet. You think that was dumb luck? Cosmic justice?"

My lungs stopped working. Ice water dripped down my spine. Only I knew those details.

Lucian leaned in, chains rattling against the table.

"Who mailed those files? Who whispered in that politicians ear that a scandal would ruin his daughters, and a noose was the most honorable way out? Who bought that cartel underboss a beer and convinced him he was born to wear the crown?"

He looked dead into my soul.

"I have no army. I have no cash. I do not even have a name for your little folders. I never show my face. But I engineered your entire reality. You sit on that high horse thinking you have free will, thinking you are a self made legend, but you are just a pet project I threw together. I built you from scratch, step by step, to see if I could craft a mythical hero. Now I want a front row seat to see how that hero breaks when he realizes he is nothing but a wooden puppet, and I hold the strings."

I lost it. I unholstered my gun and shoved the barrel between his eyes. My hand was shaking like a leaf. "You are full of shit! I built my own life! I will blow your sick brains out right now and end this!"

He did not blink. He just looked at the barrel with profound tenderness.

"You can pull the trigger. But before you do, ask yourself: Why have the two armed guards outside that door not checked the viewing window for the last half hour? And why has your wife's phone gone straight to voicemail since this morning?"

I swallowed hard. It tasted like razor blades.

"I had a brief chat with your guards. One is drowning in gambling debt, the other found out his kid has leukemia. I promised them absolute chaos. As for your wife, I bumped into her yesterday. She feels like a burden, that her depression is dragging you down. I gently explained how swallowing sleeping pills would be the ultimate act of true love."

The gun slipped from my fingers, hitting the floor. I collapsed, paralyzed by dread.

Lucian stood up. The heavy cuffs slid off his wrists. He had quietly dislocated his thumbs without flinching.

He opened the door. My elite guards stood there crying, rifles aimed at my chest.

"I am just a mirror reflecting your ugly souls. I am leaving to build another world."

He faded away like a true ghost. I was left trapped crying, realizing we were just numbers in a math equation solved by a monster with a very gentle smile.

Neth , He’s sitting at his usual spot in the coffee shop, holding a cup of tea, staring blankly at his phone. It’s 11:58 AM. To anyone walking by, it’s just a normal Tuesday.

But inside his head... there’s only heavy, suffocating dread. He’s completely numb, staring at the clock because he knows exactly what’s coming in two minutes. Down to the very second.

At 12:00 PM, the sky turns a blinding, cold white. The air burns up in a fraction of a second. No warnings, no dramatic music. Just absolute silence, and then everyone is gone.

And none of this matters, because humanity died out billions of years ago.

Eons after Earth became a dead rock, cold-blooded entities called "The Archivists" found it. They didn’t care about humans; they just wanted to catalog history. So they booted up a perfect simulation of Earth’s final hour—every atom, nerve cell, and desperate thought.

But they left the program running on an endless, cold loop. Every time the world ends, it boots right back up, forcing everyone to live that final hour over and over. For eternity.

Everyone else dies without knowing anything. They’re the lucky ones. But neth got screwed by a tiny server glitch in their system. His consciousness started saving its progress.

Now, he carries the weight of billions of lifetimes of this exact same day. Billions of times he's watched the guy next to him drop his keys. Billions of times he's felt his skin melt off. He knows the exact taste of the fire, and it's coming back around.

The simulation forces his body to act out history exactly how it happened. He's completely paralyzed inside his own skin. Inside his head, his mind is drowning, screaming for just an ounce of control—just to spill the coffee or blink out of turn.

But his body won't listen. He’s just a helpless passenger locked behind his own eyes, watching himself fake-smile and make pointless small talk like a dead puppet.

It’s 11:59 AM now.

Neth's body looks across the table, chuckles, and says, "Yeah, totally, let's catch the game later." Inside, his soul is broken, clawing at a wall that isn't there, begging the universe to delete his file or let him slip into total darkness. But no one is listening. The Archivists aren't even watching. The program just runs in deep space.

12:00 PM hits.

The white light rips through everything. The pain hits him like a truck, raw and heavy, stretching out like a century in his mind.

And then...

His eyes snap open. It's 8:00 AM. The alarm is buzzing. His body gets out of bed with that same hollow, automated smile, ready to drag himself through the nightmare all over again