Elvander Gray knew something was wrong. It began with the small things—details that didn’t add up, subtle inconsistencies that should have meant nothing but felt like cracks in a mirror. A merchant in the MMORTIS marketplace greeted him the same way every time. Exactly the same way. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. But one evening, after a long raid through the drowned cathedral of Valtrex, the merchant’s lips moved… and no sound came out.

The world held its breath.

Elvander blinked, his hand hovering over his inventory screen, but the moment passed as if it had never happened. The merchant spoke again, his voice now perfectly in sync. A minor glitch, nothing more.

Except it wasn’t.

The glitches kept happening.

A shadow moving in the wrong direction. An NPC whispering a sentence he had only thought, never spoken. A door that led to a place it shouldn’t—an alleyway in Babylon Sector that should have opened into the Bazaar, but led to an empty, black void. He tested it twice. First, a glitch. The second time, the door functioned normally.

The déjà vu came next. A violent kind. Moments looping and unravelling, but only in his mind. He would step into a bar, hear laughter, smell the synthetic whiskey—and then, an instant later, he was standing outside again, looking at the entrance as if he had never gone in. The patrons inside were the same, positioned exactly as they had been before.

Then there were the memories.

Not dreams. Not hallucinations. Memories of places he had never been. A cold, sterile room with flickering halogen lights. The sensation of something pressing against his skull, slithering into his brain like liquid wire. The sound of a voice—low, methodical. “Higher cognitive functions remain stable. Starting next phase.”

Elvander woke up gasping.

But he wasn’t asleep.

He was still in MMORTIS.

And for the first time, he realised he did not know how long he had been here.

The world around him flickered—just for a second, just at the edges of his perception. A curtain being drawn back, revealing something behind the world.

Something watching.

Something waiting.

And then, like a hand pressing his head beneath the surface, the world smoothed over, the errors erased, the illusion restored.

But Elvander had seen the cracks. And there was no going back.

*

Elvander searched for a pattern, but the deeper he looked, the less the world made sense. MMORTIS was no longer a game—it was a labyrinth, a recursive system of realities nested inside one another like a maze with no centre, no exit.

Every street he walked felt too familiar, every encounter rehearsed. He wandered through the neon slums of Babylon Sector, then the ivory spires of Aeon Heights, searching for something—anything—that wasn’t scripted.

But every alley, every skyline, every face looped.

He tested the boundaries. Climbed the towering holographic billboards, jumping into the abyss beyond the city’s limits—only to wake up in his bed at the Rusted Halo Inn, as if the world had quietly rewound the moment he crossed the edge. He left messages for himself in hidden places, carved his name into metal walls, whispered secrets into NPCs’ ears… but nothing persisted. It was as if the world was correcting itself, removing the artifacts of his rebellion.

Then, the memories overwrote themselves.

He saw places he had never been but knew intimately. A temple in the desert with blackened pillars reaching into a sky of electric storms. A station drifting in the void, where screens displayed his own dreams as archived data. He could remember standing in these places, but he had no recollection of ever arriving.

And worse—he saw places he had been before, but now they were different. The skyline of Babylon Sector was missing a building that had always been there. A bartender at the Obsidian Lotus called him by a different name. The underground tunnels beneath Aeon Heights led to corridors that shouldn’t exist—rooms that smelled like antiseptic, where sterile white walls flickered, revealing the grid beneath.

Then he found the door.

It stood at the end of a maintenance tunnel in an abandoned sector, where the game’s architecture bled into something older, something deeper. The metal surface was smooth, untouched by time, unlike the rusted pipes and broken wires surrounding it.

A simple engraving marked the centre:

Project Nyxus: Level 01 Clearance Required.

His stomach twisted. The word Nyxus crawled through his brain like a whisper from another life. He had never seen it before, yet it felt familiar.

He reached for the panel. The moment his fingers brushed against it, a voice spoke inside his mind—not through sound, but through sheer invasive presence:

“You are not supposed to be here.”

Then the world glitched.

For an instant, he was somewhere else.

Not MMORTIS.

A lab.

Machines pulsed in rhythm with his own heartbeat. The smell of ozone and blood. A figure, half-obscured in the shadows, adjusting a monitor displaying a real-time scan of a human brain.

His brain.

The world snapped back into place. He was standing in the tunnel again, heart hammering, fingers inches from the door.

Elvander staggered back. The neon city hummed above him, oblivious. Life went on uninterrupted. The illusion restored.

But now, he knew.

He wasn’t inside MMORTIS.

MMORTIS was inside him.

And something else was watching.

Something writing him back into the script every time he tried to escape.

*

Elvander stood in front of the door, pulse hammering against his skull. The word Nyxus gnawed at his mind, a parasite made of forgotten syllables. He had spent years inside MMORTIS—if years even meant anything here. But this was the first time he had touched something real.

And then it had spoken to him.

“You are not supposed to be here.”

The voice wasn’t human. It had no emotion, no presence. It was a function, a piece of code. But beneath its sterile tone, Elvander sensed something deeper.

A warning.

Or worse, a correction.

The world had tried to overwrite him.

He flexed his fingers, grounding himself. The door remained solid, untouched by time, but his breath—his body—felt wrong. He had always thought of himself as flesh and blood, even within MMORTIS. The body was an illusion, yes, but it was his illusion.

Now, standing here, he wasn’t so sure.

He pressed his palm against the panel.

The door did not open.

Instead, the world around him peeled away.

His vision split—fragmenting into a thousand pieces, folding and unfolding like shattered glass, reconstructing itself into new images.

He was falling. No, remembering.

The white walls of a laboratory. The hum of machines breathing for him. His body—an actual body—strapped to a table.

His skull was open.

His brain, suspended in something viscous, wired to a lattice of nanofibers that pulsed in synchronization with his thoughts. But he was not thinking.

His thoughts were being generated for him.

“His cognitive stability is holding,” a voice said, distant, clinical.

Another voice, deeper, tired. Familiar.

“Don’t be fooled. He’s still in there. He just doesn’t know he is.”

Elvander tried to move, but he had no limbs. He tried to scream, but he had no mouth.

He was a brain.

A brain in a tank.

No.

The world slammed back into place.

He was in the tunnel again. The door was gone. The rusted pipes, the flickering lights, the neon glow above—MMORTIS had corrected itself, swallowing the truth back into its depths.

But it was too late.

Elvander knew.

The body he felt, the lungs that filled with air, the sweat on his skin—it was data. A construct. A simulation sustained by something vast, something unseen.

His real body was gone.

No. Not gone.

His actual body had never existed.

The only thing that had ever been real—was his brain.

And someone, somewhere, was using it.

Watching.

Guiding.

Feeding.

Elvander staggered forward, head pounding with the weight of the revelation. The world of MMORTIS stretched around him as if nothing had happened, as if he had never touched the truth.

But now, he could see the cracks.

The faces of the NPCs—too symmetrical, too perfect. A false expanse of sky stretched over a cage. The architecture—designed to make movement feel natural, to prevent anyone from reaching the edges.

It was a machine.

A system designed to keep him—and everyone else—inside.

And if there was a machine, there was a builder.

The voice from the lab echoed in his mind.

“Don’t be fooled. He’s still in there.”

They were talking about him.

They had been watching. Experimenting. Waiting.

Elvander clenched his fists.

No more.

If MMORTIS was a prison, then he would burn it down from the inside.

If there was a god pulling the strings—

He was going to kill it.

*

Elvander traced the corridors of the facility, the world flickering at its edges, fighting to reassert itself. MMORTIS was trying to erase what he had seen, but the knowledge had already taken root. He could see the glitches now—the way the shadows refused to shift properly, how the air lacked weight, the seams where reality folded over itself like an infinite recursion of falsehoods.

He was inside a machine.

And now, he was going to find its architect.

A door loomed before him. A solid real door—not some digital construct mimicking physicality. It looked like an intrusion, something that had no place in MMORTIS, something that should not be here.

And yet it was.

The nameplate was corroded, but he could still read it.

L. KOOMS

His fingers clenched. It couldn’t be.

Leon Kooms was dead.

Choronzon had taken him. He had gone in and never come out. That was the truth.

Except—

A memory uncoiled, slithering from the depths.

The lab. The voices.

“Don’t be fooled. He’s still in there.”

And now—this door.

A possibility took shape, one so monstrous he almost refused to entertain it.

Elvander pushed the door open.

The room was impossibly vast. Not in the way of MMORTIS’s cities, with their endless neon sprawls and infinite horizons. This space was wrong, its dimensions shifting, fluid, a cold luminescence seeping from the walls as if the place were alive.

And at its center—

A man.

Sitting at a desk, bathed in the pale blue glow of hovering schematics and cascading data streams.

Leon Kooms.

Elvander froze. His mind rejected it.

Kooms was dead. He had been dead for years. The Choronzon Expedition had swallowed him, left nothing behind but a cautionary tale.

And yet—

Here he was.

Kooms looked up. His expression was calm, expectant, as if Elvander had just arrived for a scheduled meeting.

“Edward,” he said smoothly.

Elvander staggered back. The name hit him like a bullet, a violent disruption in his identity.

Edward Blake.

No. That wasn’t who he was. He had buried that name.

Elvander forced himself to breathe, to stay present, but the ground felt unsteady beneath him. “You…” His voice cracked. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Kooms smiled, slow and deliberate. “Am I?”

Elvander clenched his fists, rage boiling beneath the surface. “I saw the reports. I saw the footage. Choronzon took you.”

Kooms exhaled through his nose, like a teacher disappointed in a student with a learning disability. “You saw what I wanted you to see.”

The room darkened, the walls pulsing as if reacting to his words. The data streams above him shifted, displaying grainy security footage.

The Choronzon Expedition.

Elvander recognised it instantly—the black-gold sand, the ruined monolithic structures, the void where the sky should have been. The team in their exosuits, standing at the event horizon.

Kooms was there, leading the charge.

But then—

Something changed.

One figure hesitated. The helmet’s visor flickered. And then—

It fractured.

A synthetic shell peeling away, revealing nothing inside.

Not a body. Not flesh.

A machine.

Elvander’s stomach twisted. It hadn’t been Kooms.

The man who entered Choronzon was a double—a disposable android sent in his place.

He had never set foot inside.

The realisation hit him like a falling star.

“That was—” Elvander’s voice died in his throat. “That wasn’t you.”

Kooms inclined his head, unbothered. “Of course not.”

Elvander’s hands trembled. “You let them die.”

“Them?” Kooms leaned forward, fingers interlocking. “You mean Amanda?”

Elvander’s breath stopped.

Kooms smiled.

He had known. He had always known.

Something inside Elvander snapped.

He lunged—but the world collapsed.

Darkness swallowed him whole. The walls, the screens, Kooms—everything vanished.

And in the void, a whisper.

“You’re still in here, Edward. You always have been.”

This chapter reveals Kooms’s survival and his deception, marking the moment Elvander fully understands the scale of the lie. Let me know if you want to push this confrontation further!

*

Elvander’s mind was breaking.

He could feel the splinters—not like thoughts unravelling, but like a hard drive being overwritten in real time. Memories rearranged themselves, timestamps flickering, the very foundation of his identity fracturing beneath him.

He was not in MMORTIS anymore.

He was not anywhere.

A space without context surrounded him, stretching beyond perception. He felt like he had been deleted from the world but left conscious, a ghost in a machine that had erased the machine.

And then—

The voices began.

Whispers layered over each other, inside his skull, outside of time. Some spoke in tongues, others in fragments of his own past.

“Edward Blake never left the lab.” “You were dissected, digitised, reconstructed.” “There is no difference between you and the system now.” “You are not who you think you are.”

He clutched his head, but there was nothing to hold. He had nobody. No hands. No shape. He was a thought, a presence without form, a consciousness spinning loose in the void.

He tried to scream.

Instead, his scream became text, cascading in front of him in strings of corrupted data. A billion variations of his voice distorted into something unrecognizable.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

He was collapsing.

And then a face emerged in the nothingness.

It was his own.

But wrong.

Its features were blurred, flickering between Elvander Gray and Edward Blake, between digital abstraction and something more organic. A glitching spectre of his past and present, caught between states of existence.

“Who are you?” it asked.

Elvander tried to answer. The words came out in three voices at once.

“I am—”

A sudden rupture.

A fissure in reality itself.

And then—

A new scene.

Elvander was somewhere else.

The transition was not smooth. It felt forced, like a program snapping into a new directive. He was standing—actually standing—in a dimly lit room, metallic and cold. A place that had the distinct weight of reality.

A lab.

The lab.

He could feel the floor beneath him. The air tasted sterile, thick with chemical residue.

His body was intact again—but something was wrong.

There was a mirror in front of him.

And in its reflection—

Not him.

Something else.

Something wearing his skin.

It stared back, eyes devoid of recognition, a hollow mockery of self-awareness.

And for the first time, Elvander understood.

He had never truly left this place.

Not in the way, he thought.

His body. His mind. His self—

It had all been fragments of a greater design, rewritten, replayed. MMORTIS was not just a prison.

It was him.

He was the ghost in the machine.

And he had never been free.

© Aiwaz, 2025. All rights reserved.