When Helen Chan disappeared, no one believed she’d orchestrated it herself. A gifted tech engineer with a background in neurocognitive AI, she’d been missing for six days before her name hit the headlines. That’s when Suki Randall started seeing her face everywhere—on buses, in subway graffiti, in reflections that weren’t quite hers.
Suki didn’t sleep. Not really. And not since the bite—though she told herself it was a spider, or a bat, or a nightmare. Something explainable. Something human.
She told Chantal Bishop, her closest friend and confidante, that Helen's disappearance was connected to the secret criminal syndicate they’d been investigating. Chantal had looked at her sideways, that warm, empty smile of hers plastered on like foundation. Chantal was strange sometimes. Distant. Too precise. As if she were watching herself from the outside.
Later that day, Suki saw her own face flicker in a surveillance mirror. But it wasn't her expression.
It was Helen’s.
Suki began writing again. She hadn’t written in years—not since her therapist told her the stories were bleeding into her reality. But now, scenes poured from her mind like prophecy. In one chapter, Helen was her daughter. In another, Chantal was her sister. In the next, both women were not real at all—just fragments of herself. Her rage. Her despair. Her hope.
At night, she’d dream of a town with no name. Streets she knew without walking. A children’s poem played on repeat:
The girl with the mirror in her eye
Will live three lives before she dies.
Suki stopped sleeping altogether.
She found Helen again—or someone claiming to be Helen. But she was... different. She looked the same. Spoke the same. But her blood didn't smell right. Suki hadn’t told anyone about the thirst yet. About what she knew now.
Helen stared at her across a glowing server room deep below an abandoned tech facility.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Helen said. “You’re just a brain in a jar. You’ve been uploaded to the Cloud.”
Suki blinked.
Helen showed her the truth: a tank full of nutrient fluid, wires trailing like umbilical cords, a preserved brain pulsing in suspended animation. Hers.
Everything—the case, the city, Chantal, the sleepless nights—it was all code.
She screamed.
Back in her apartment (if it was an apartment), Chantal appeared. Disheveled. Cold. Beautiful. “I poisoned you,” she said, without emotion. “At the beginning. You don’t remember. But the poison isn’t real. Nothing here is.”
“You’re my sister,” Suki whispered.
“I’m your subconscious,” Chantal replied. “A failed copy. You made me to hold the part of yourself that couldn’t forgive. Or forget.”
“You used me for money,” Suki said suddenly, confused. “You’re dead.”
“No,” Chantal said. “I was created in a lab.”
Helen was the key. Suki understood now. Helen hadn’t been born—she’d been manifested. A byproduct of the vampire code rewriting her mind. A digital offspring of neural fire. And worse—Helen was the head of the criminal organization they’d been chasing. Because she was trying to protect Suki. Because she loved her. Or thought she did. The programming got messy.
“Why do I remember being an angel?” Suki asked.
“Because you were,” Helen replied. “Once. Before the upload. Before the government turned you into a myth and put you in the game to pacify the masses.”
They weren’t alone. Zombies, angels, AI experiments—relics of the failed simulations populated the edges of their world. They all looked familiar.
Suki realized she’d known all along. The hallucinations. The conspiracies. Even the talking hippo she’d dismissed as a fever dream.
“You’re not real,” Suki said to Chantal as she watched her dissolve into smoke. “But neither am I.”
The villain—the one they’d feared, the one pulling the strings—was Suki herself. Another version. An older echo. A darker core. One who remembered her days as a celebrity, her fall from fame, her rise as an artificial deity in a dying world.
She’d been the hero, the villain, the lover, the fool.
Now she was the author.
Chantal reappeared at the end of time. “This is your flashback,” she said gently. “The premonition you refused to believe. The story you told yourself to prove you could still feel.”
Suki knelt by a cracked mirror. Helen’s face flickered. Hers. Neither.
She remembered the poem.
She’ll die once as mother,
Once as foe,
And once in code.
It had all been to distract her.
From the truth.
The government used her story as a brainwashing tool—fed into classrooms, used to rewrite thought patterns. The “crime” wasn’t real. The people weren’t real. But the fear they generated was.
And now… the code had reached its final iteration.
The loop restarted.
The words “STORY COMPLETE: ORIGIN UNLOCKED” pulsed in gold text across the screen.
A child somewhere blinked at their virtual console.
“Who’s Suki Randall?” they asked.
Their teacher smiled.
“She’s the one who saved the cloud. The angel who broke the simulation. The brain who dreamed a world.”
“And the vampires?”
“Still out there,” the teacher whispered. “Waiting.”
This is how it began.
Again.
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