Chapter 4: You're Already Here

Chapter 4: You're Already Here

Time itself was a wound, and Liam was forced to watch it bleed.

The timestamp on Camera 2 was now a full hour and fourteen minutes behind the others. An impossible, drifting anchor to a moment of failure that grew more distant with every passing second. Every time his eyes swept past it, the discrepancy was a fresh jolt to his system, a digital scar reminding him of his mistake. The words etched into the wall, YOU BLINKED, seemed to pulse faintly in his peripheral vision, a permanent accusation. He had stopped trying to find a logical explanation. Logic was a foreign language here. The only thing that mattered was survival, and the only path to survival was obedience.

He clung to the rules with the desperation of a drowning man clutching a piece of driftwood. He kept his gaze in constant motion, a frantic dance between the five screens, never lingering, never breaking the five-second rule for Camera 2’s lagging feed. He logged every non-event with painstaking precision. He ignored the phantom creaks and imagined whispers from the concrete behind him. He was a machine, an organic component of the facility’s grotesque apparatus. That was his desire: to be so perfect in his function that the system would have no choice but to leave him alone.

That hope shattered at 1:21 AM.

It happened on Camera 4. One moment, the feed was the same grainy, high-contrast monochrome as the others. The next, it wasn't. Color bled into the image, sudden and violent. It wasn’t the vibrant, natural color of the real world, but a sickly, oversaturated palette, like a miscalibrated television from a nightmare. The inmate’s gray jumpsuit was a putrid, washed-out blue. The concrete walls had a jaundiced yellow tint, and what looked like rust-colored stains bloomed in the corners of the cell.

Liam froze, his carefully constructed rhythm broken. This wasn't on the list. There was no rule for a sudden shift in the visual spectrum. Was this a new test? A malfunction? He instinctively reached for the console, his tech-support brain kicking in, wanting to check the diagnostics, to reboot the feed. But he stopped himself, his hand hovering over the keyboard. Tampering with the equipment was forbidden. He had to log it. That was the only safe action.

1:21 - Unscheduled chromatic shift on Camera 4 feed. No other anomalies.

As he typed, he kept his eyes on the inmate in the now-colored cell. The man, who had been sitting listlessly on his cot, slowly rose to his feet. He faced the camera directly, his expression as blank as the woman’s in Cell 2 had been. Liam’s stomach twisted into a cold knot. A new performance was beginning.

He watched, mesmerized by the sheer wrongness of the colorized world. He absently raised his right hand to rub his tired, burning eyes.

On the screen, the man in Cell 4 raised his left hand.

Liam’s hand stopped halfway to his face. He stared. The man’s hand remained aloft, a perfect mirror image of his own aborted gesture. A coincidence. It had to be. He slowly, deliberately, lowered his arm. The inmate lowered his.

No. No, it couldn't be.

His heart began to hammer a frantic, panicked rhythm against his ribs. This was a new level of violation. Rule 9 was a categorical lie. They didn’t just see him; they were him. He tested it again, a small, terrified movement. He reached out and tapped the cool metal edge of the console with his index finger. On the screen, the inmate in the sickly-colored cell tapped the air in front of him with the index finger of his left hand.

A wave of nausea and vertigo crashed over Liam. This wasn't just a prison. It was a two-way mirror, a twisted interface between his reality and theirs. The inmates weren't just prisoners to be watched; they were conduits, puppets dancing on strings he didn't know he was pulling. The note in the logbook flashed in his mind: Inmate 6’s introduction protocol failed. Was this an introduction?

The inmate on the screen took a slow step closer to the camera, his movements fluid, deliberate. His eyes, rendered in a faded, watery blue, locked onto Liam’s. He looked calm. Resigned. He looked, Liam realized with a jolt of horror, like he pitied him.

The inmate’s lips began to move. There was no sound, only the silent, deliberate articulation of three words. Liam leaned closer, his breath held tight in his chest, his world narrowing to that single, technicolor screen. He read the lips, the message forming in his mind with the cold, final clarity of a death sentence.

You’re. Already. Here.

Before the meaning of the words could fully detonate in his brain, a new sound cut through the silence of the room. It was a high-pitched electronic whine, followed by a sharp crackle of static electricity. It came from his right.

The sixth monitor, the dark, empty void at the end of the console, had just turned on.

For a horrifying second, it was filled with shrieking static, a visual roar of white noise. Liam’s head whipped towards it, his heart seizing. Then the static resolved into an image. It was a live feed, just as clear and stable as the others, but this one was in full, perfect color.

The camera was positioned high in a corner, looking down. It showed a concrete room. It showed a bank of five active surveillance monitors and one dark one. It showed the back of an ergonomic chair. It showed a man sitting in that chair, his dark, unkempt hair illuminated by the glow of the screens. It showed… him.

The feed was of the control room. The camera was somewhere behind him, watching him.

But that wasn't the worst part.

Standing directly behind his chair on the monitor, perfectly still, was another figure. It wore the same simple, gray uniform. It had the same slim build, the same dark hair. It was another version of him, standing silent and patient, its hands resting calmly on the back of the chair he was sitting in.

Liam’s blood turned to ice. He could feel nothing behind him. No breath. No body heat. No weight. The air was empty and cold. His own senses screamed that he was alone in the room.

But the sixth monitor told a different story. It showed the impossible. It showed the truth.

He didn’t dare turn around. He could only stare at the screen, at the silent doppelgänger standing guard over him, its face just out of the camera’s view. The inmate in Cell 4 had been right. He was already here. One of him was the observer. And the other, it seemed, was the observed.