Chapter 4: Welcome, Mairn

The jet bridge stretched endlessly ahead, its walls closing in with each step. Marin's legs moved with the mechanical precision he'd learned during the compliance protocol, but inside, his mind raced with exhaustion and barely contained terror. The twelve remaining passengers moved in perfect formation around him, their footsteps creating an unsettling rhythm that echoed off the curved walls.

When they finally emerged into the terminal, Marin nearly stumbled from the sensory assault. The fluorescent lights were wrong—too bright, casting shadows that fell in impossible directions. The ceiling stretched impossibly high, disappearing into darkness that seemed to move and writhe. Gate numbers flickered and changed as he watched: C7 became C12 became CX7, the letters rearranging themselves in configurations that made his eyes water.

The other passengers dispersed immediately, walking toward exits that appeared as they approached them. Marin found himself alone in the vast space, his footsteps echoing strangely in the artificial quiet. Every surface gleamed with an antiseptic perfection that reminded him of hospitals and morgues.

He pulled out his phone, desperate for any connection to his real world, but the screen showed no signal bars. Instead, where the carrier name should have been, it simply read: WELCOME TO NWE YORK - CONNECTIVITY OPTIMIZED.

That's when he saw the figure waiting by the information board.

Tall, familiar, holding a handmade sign—Julian. Relief flooded through Marin's system like a drug. After the nightmare of the flight, seeing his best friend felt like waking up from the worst dream of his life. Julian's messy brown hair caught the terminal's strange lighting, and his trademark crooked smile was exactly as Marin remembered.

"Julian!" The name escaped his lips before he could stop himself, his voice cracking with emotion he'd been suppressing for hours.

But Julian didn't react to his name. He stood perfectly still, that smile frozen in place, holding his sign with mechanical precision. As Marin got closer, the relief curdling in his stomach, he could read what was written on the cardboard in Julian's familiar handwriting:

WLECOME TO NWE YORK, MAIRN

The misspellings hit Marin like physical blows. Not just "Nwe York" again, but his own name—"Mairn" instead of "Marin." Julian had written his name thousands of times over their years of friendship. Birthday cards, school notes, text messages that autocorrect had mangled but Julian had never bothered to fix because Marin always understood anyway.

Julian would never get his name wrong.

"Hey, buddy!" Julian's voice was exactly right—the same tone, the same slight rasp from too many late nights gaming together. But the words came out just a fraction too late, as if there had been a processing delay between seeing Marin and remembering to respond. "How was the flight?"

Marin stopped three feet away, studying his friend's face. The features were perfect—every freckle, every scar from childhood accidents they'd shared. But Julian's brown eyes, which usually held warmth and mischief and genuine care, were flat and glassy. They looked at Marin but somehow through him, as if focusing on something slightly to his left.

"The flight was..." Marin's throat closed up. How could he explain the compliance protocol, the deletions, the nightmare of watching people cease to exist? How could he tell this thing wearing his best friend's face that he'd learned to hollow out his humanity just to survive?

"Fine," he finished weakly. "It was fine."

"That's great!" Julian's enthusiasm was perfect in every way except for the complete absence of genuine emotion behind it. "I'm so excited to show you around the city. College is going to be amazing!"

The words were exactly what Julian would say, delivered in Julian's voice with Julian's mannerisms. But they felt rehearsed, like lines from a script this thing had memorized but didn't understand.

"Julian," Marin said carefully, testing, "remember that time in eighth grade when you broke your arm trying to impress Sarah Martinez?"

Julian's smile never wavered. "Of course! Good times, buddy. Come on, let's get your luggage."

But there had been no Sarah Martinez in their eighth grade class. Marin had made up the name, the incident, everything. The real Julian would have laughed and called him an idiot for confusing him with someone else. This Julian had simply agreed, filling in the blank with generic enthusiasm.

They walked toward the baggage claim, Julian maintaining a perfect three-foot distance as if invisible barriers kept him in position. His movements were too fluid, too coordinated. When they passed other travelers—all of whom moved with that same mechanical precision Marin had learned to mimic—Julian nodded at each one with identical timing.

"So tell me about your roommate," Marin said, another test. They'd been assigned to share a dorm room, something they'd both been excited about when they'd gotten their housing assignments months ago.

"My roommate?" Julian's processing delay was longer this time, almost two full seconds. "Oh, you mean our shared living space. Yes, it's very nice. You'll love it."

Julian had never used phrases like "shared living space." He would have said "our room" or "the dorm" or made some joke about finally being able to leave dirty socks everywhere without his mom yelling at him.

The baggage carousel was empty, its black belt moving in endless circles. No luggage appeared, though other passengers stood around it with the same patient stillness Marin had seen on the plane. They waited with their hands folded, staring at the moving belt as if hypnotized.

"Where are the bags?" Marin asked.

"Bags?" Julian looked genuinely confused for a moment, the first real expression Marin had seen cross his face. Then the smile snapped back into place. "Oh, don't worry about that. Everything you need will be provided. Come on, let's go to our place."

They walked through the terminal's maze-like corridors, past shops that displayed perfect merchandise in windows that reflected nothing. The few other people they passed moved with purpose but never seemed to actually arrive anywhere. They simply walked, turned corners, and walked some more in an endless loop of meaningless motion.

Julian filled the silence with chatter that sounded exactly like their usual conversations but felt hollow somehow. He talked about classes that had generic names like "General Studies" and "Basic Concepts." He mentioned professors with titles but no names. Everything was familiar enough to seem normal but vague enough to mean nothing.

They exited through doors that opened onto a city street, and Marin's breath caught in his throat.

It was New York. Or it was something pretending to be New York with almost perfect accuracy. The buildings were the right height, the right style. The streets were laid out correctly. Even the sounds were right—traffic, distant sirens, the general hum of urban life.

But the details were wrong in ways that made Marin's pattern-recognition disorder scream warnings. The street signs were slightly off, showing combinations of numbers and letters that didn't follow Manhattan's grid system. The cars moved with too much precision, maintaining exact distances and speeds. The pedestrians walked in subtle patterns, their movements coordinated like a choreographed dance.

And the shadows. God, the shadows fell upward in some places, creating dark patches on building walls that should have been in sunlight.

"Great city, right?" Julian said, his voice carrying that same empty enthusiasm. "You're going to love it here, Mairn."

There it was again—his name, wrong. Marin felt something crack inside his chest, a grief so profound it threatened to overwhelm his carefully maintained emotional control. This thing might have Julian's face, Julian's voice, even Julian's memories in some corrupted form. But his friend was gone, replaced by a puppet that couldn't even pronounce his name correctly.

They walked several blocks to a building that looked like every other apartment building in the city—brick facade, fire escapes, narrow windows. Julian produced a key from his pocket with the same fluid motion he'd used for everything else.

"Home sweet home," he said, leading Marin up three flights of stairs to apartment 4B.

The apartment was perfect. Too perfect. It looked exactly like the kind of place two college freshmen might share—small but clean, furnished with items that were nice enough to seem realistic but generic enough to have come from a catalog. There was a couch, a small kitchen table, two bedrooms with identical furniture.

And on the living room wall, in a simple black frame, was a photograph.

Marin's knees nearly gave out when he saw it.

It was a picture of him and Julian from last summer, taken at the lake where they'd spent countless afternoons swimming and talking about their plans for college. They were both grinning at the camera, arms slung around each other's shoulders in the easy camaraderie of lifelong friendship.

But Marin's face in the photograph was wrong.

His expression was too blank, too vacant. His eyes had the same glassy quality as Julian's, the same empty stare as the passengers on the plane. His smile was painted on, artificial, devoid of any genuine emotion.

In the photograph, Marin looked exactly like one of them.

"Great picture, right?" Julian said from behind him, close enough that Marin could feel breath that was neither warm nor cool against his neck. "That was such a fun day. You look so happy."

But Marin remembered that day clearly. He remembered being genuinely happy, laughing until his sides hurt, feeling the sun on his face and the freedom of summer stretching ahead. The person in this photograph wasn't him—it was some hollow version, some preview of what he was supposed to become.

He turned to face Julian, who was standing too close, still smiling that perfect, empty smile.

"When was this taken?" Marin asked, though he already knew the answer would be another lie.

"Last summer, of course! Right before we both got our acceptance letters. Such a great memory."

But they'd gotten their acceptance letters in April, months before that lake trip. Another detail the Julian-thing had gotten wrong.

"I'm tired," Marin said, his voice barely steady. "I think I need to rest."

"Of course! Your room is right through there. Everything you need is already set up. Sweet dreams, Mairn."

Marin walked toward the bedroom Julian had indicated, feeling those glassy eyes tracking his movement. At the doorway, he turned back one more time, hoping against hope to see some flicker of his real friend in that familiar face.

But Julian just stood there, motionless, still smiling, like a mannequin waiting for the next customer to activate its pre-recorded responses.

As Marin closed the bedroom door behind him, one terrible thought echoed in his mind: if they could replace Julian so perfectly, if they could create a photograph showing him already assimilated into their reality, then maybe he was already too late.

Maybe the Marin Cross who had boarded that flight in JFK was as gone as his best friend, and what remained was just another puppet learning to dance to the tune of "Nwe York."

The compliance protocol had been just the beginning. Now came the real test: living in a world designed to slowly, subtly erase everything that made him human, until he became another perfect, empty smile in another perfect, meaningless photograph.

Outside his window, the city hummed with its artificial life, and somewhere in that maze of wrong shadows and impossible geometry, the real horror was just getting started.