Chapter 14 - The Edge of Reality

The safehouse had been quiet for nearly an hour. Too quiet. The team sat in a circle, recalibrating their understanding of the situation. The transmission's final words—They see what you see. Don't trust the patterns.—rattled in Elise's mind. What did it mean? Were their actions being predicted? Or worse—were they unknowingly part of a controlled experiment?

Then, something changed.

The air itself seemed to shift. The cold, musty underground shelter suddenly smelled of burnt metal. A static charge filled the space, raising the hairs on their arms. Mark clutched his rifle tighter, eyes darting across the room. Aaron opened his mouth to speak, but the words never came. Instead, the world around them flickered like a malfunctioning video feed.

For a fraction of a second, everything went dark. And when the lights returned, so did the impossible.

They were no longer in the safehouse.

Elise gasped. They were standing on a bustling city street, the kind that hadn't existed for decades. Neon signs buzzed overhead, advertising corporations that had long since collapsed. Cars rolled by, their drivers unaware of the armed figures who had just appeared in the middle of the street. But the most chilling detail? It wasn't just any city.

It was a perfect replica of New York—circa 2051. The year of the first recorded Prometheus experiment.

"What the hell—" Nadia clutched her head. "This isn't real. It can't be."

Aaron knelt, pressing his hand against the ground. It felt solid. Concrete, not a hologram. "If this is an illusion, it's the most advanced one I've ever seen."

Mark turned in a slow circle, scanning the buildings, the streets, the people. They looked real. They felt real. Yet something about their movements was... off. Too synchronized, too rehearsed. He locked eyes with a man in a business suit. The stranger's smile froze for a second too long before he turned away, continuing on his path.

Elise's mind reeled. "This isn't just a simulation. It's a reconstruction. Someone—or something—is showing us this for a reason."

"Or trapping us in it," Nadia muttered.

A new voice rang out, cutting through the manufactured city noise.

"You are not supposed to be here."

The team whirled. A woman stood at the corner of the street, dressed in a crisp white suit. Her face was eerily symmetrical, her expression placid. Her presence felt unnatural, like she was an actor waiting for her cue.

Elise took a step forward. "Where is here?"

The woman blinked, once, as if processing the question. Then she tilted her head. "You are in the Archive. This is not your reality."

Aaron tensed. "Archive? What does that mean?"

The woman's gaze flickered to him, as if assessing his importance. "It means you have seen too much. The equation must be balanced."

The moment the words left her lips, the cityscape breathed.

Buildings rippled like water. The street undulated beneath them. The pedestrians began to glitch, their forms warping in and out of focus. The entire environment shuddered, struggling to maintain coherence.

"RUN!" Elise shouted.

They sprinted down the street, dodging collapsing storefronts and flickering traffic. The Archive was breaking. Whatever was holding this illusion together was failing, or worse—it was changing.

They turned a corner and emerged into a vast, featureless void. No buildings. No sky. Just an infinite plane of white stretching in all directions. The city was gone. Everything was gone.

Except for them.

And the woman in white, now standing before them once more, untouched by the chaos.

"You should not have come here," she said again. But this time, there was something new in her tone.

Fear.

Elise steadied herself. "We didn't come here. We were brought here. By whatever is pulling the strings."

The woman nodded slowly. "Yes. And now you must decide whether you want to remember."

Aaron clenched his fists. "Remember what?"

The woman's expression softened. "The truth."

The void flickered.

And suddenly, they were back.

The safehouse.

No neon streets. No impossible cities. Just the cold, damp underground bunker they had been in moments before.

Except… had it been moments?

Mark checked his watch. Two hours had passed.

Nadia shivered. "That wasn't a dream, was it?"

Elise looked at her shaking hands, remembering the feeling of the pavement under her feet, the rush of adrenaline as the Archive collapsed. No, it wasn't a dream.

Aaron looked around, his eyes landing on the console. The message from before was still there:

YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES WATCHING.

And beneath it, a new line of text had appeared.

NOW YOU KNOW WHY.