The Inversion
Dr. Veyra Kalt’s hands trembled as she activated the device. The Chrono-Lattice, her magnum opus, hummed with a sound like static between dimensions. Its purpose? To reverse time by milliseconds—to prevent her sister’s car crash. But the machine sparked. Not with electricity. With light.
A wave of iridescent particles engulfed the lab. When the fog cleared, Veyra stood in the same room. Yet everything felt… wrong. The air smelled of burnt sugar. Her reflection in the screen displayed a grinning stranger: eyes golden, lips twisted into a smirk. “Welcome to my world,” the reflection purred.
“You’re a puppet in a story you refuse to read,” the stranger declared, her voice echoing like a skipped vinyl record.
Veyra’s hands flew to the Lattice’s controls. But the stranger mirrored her movements—only faster. When Veyra pulled the emergency shutdown lever, the stranger snapped it off with a flick of her wrist.
The Doppelgänger
“Who are you?” Veyra demanded.
The stranger leaned closer. “I’m you. The you who chose to ignore the cost of playing god.” She gestured to the Lattice, now pulsing crimson. “Every time you rewound time, you created a fracture. And I… emerged.”
Veyra’s mind reeled. She’d always dismissed her blackouts as migraines. The lab’s security footage? Erased. Her journal entries? Altered. The stranger’s name? Veyra Kalt.
“You’re not the hero,” the doppelgänger hissed. “You’re the ripple. The lie. The one who forgot she was written by someone else.”
The Fracture
The lab began to shudder. Equations peeled off the walls like wallpaper. Veyra clutched the Lattice’s core—a glowing orb now splitting into two.
“You trapped me in a loop,” the stranger laughed. “Now you’re the loop.”
As the orb fractured, Veyra glimpsed infinite realities: worlds where she drowned her sister, where she became the doppelgänger, where she never existed. Then darkness.
The Aftermath
Veyra awoke in her bed. No doppelgänger. No lab. But her hands bore twin scars: one fresh, one years old.
The Lattice sat on her desk—intact. Yet its screen displayed a single line: “ wingergt 0x10 1×10 0x01 1×00”.
A palindrome. A code. A mirror.
“What if I’m the reflection?” Veyra whispered.
Somewhere, a stranger smirked.
“Look closer,” the stranger’s voice echoed in her mind. “The mirror is the message.”
