Part 4

The realization clung to Damien like a second skin, damp and suffocating. He tried to claw his way back to reality—attending lectures himself, forcing smiles at classmates, struggling through assignments without the figure's help. But the world he'd abandoned had moved on without him.

"Hey Damien, ready for the group hike this weekend?" A classmate clapped his shoulder during break.

Damien froze. Hiking? When had he ever agreed to—

"Last month's team-building was epic!" Another student chimed in. "That cliff you climbed? Legendary!"

His throat tightened. The figure had been living a parallel life, weaving memories he couldn't access. That night, he begged it to attend the hike.

At 3 AM, surrounded by textbooks glowing like funeral candles, Damien slammed his laptop shut. Calculus symbols swam before his eyes—a foreign language he'd forgotten how to read. Outside the library window, the figure strolled past with a coffee, waving at giggling classmates. Flawless. Effortless.

On exam day, Damien lurked outside the lecture hall. Through the door's narrow window, he watched the figure glide through the test, its pen dancing across the paper. His own hands shook, clutching a cheat sheet smeared with nervous sweat. When a proctor approached, he fled to the bathroom, retching into a toilet stained with someone else's vomit.

The figure found him curled in the bathtub that night, still wearing his vomit-stained shirt. "Why torture yourself?" it asked, peeling a rotting banana—the only food left in the fridge. Blackened fruit flesh oozed over its spotless fingers.

"Because I need to be real!" Damien's scream echoed off mold-speckled tiles. "Not some... some puppet!"

"Puppet?" The figure's laugh was the sound of pages tearing. It leaned closer, its breath smelling of photocopier toner. "You're the one who tied the strings."

A notification chimed. Damien's transcript blinked on his phone—straight A's from exams he never took. Below it, a new message from Aria: Can't wait for our weekend trip!

He stared at the glowing screen until his eyes burned. When he finally looked up, the figure was gone. Only a paper-thin sliver of his reflection remained in the fogged mirror, flickering like a dying TV signal.

The day of the date arrived, and Damien stood at the campus gate, his palms slick with sweat. When Aria appeared, radiant in a sundress that caught the autumn light, his throat tightened. She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.

"You seem… off today," she said, tilting her head. "Everything okay?"

Damien forced a laugh that came out as a strangled cough. "Yeah, just… tired."

They walked side by side, the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot doing little to mask the awkward silence. Then Aria said, "So, what did you think of Andrei's latest paper? I've been dying to hear your take."

Damien's stomach dropped. Andrei? Paper? He racked his brain, but the name meant nothing. "Uh, yeah, it was… interesting," he stammered, his voice cracking.

Aria's brow furrowed. "Interesting? That's all? Last time you went on this whole rant about his methodology." She laughed, but it sounded hollow. "Did you hit your head or something?"

Damien's face burned. He mumbled something about being distracted, but the words tasted like ash. Every sentence from Aria's lips was a reminder of how little he knew about the life the figure had built—a life that was supposed to be his.

By the time they reached her dorm, Damien was a wreck. His shirt clung to his back, damp with sweat, and his hands trembled at his sides. As Aria turned to say goodbye, she paused, studying him with an intensity that made his skin crawl.

"You're different today," she said slowly. "It's like… you're not even the same person."

Damien's heart hammered against his ribs. "I—I don't know what you mean," he choked out before bolting, his shoes slapping against the pavement in a frantic rhythm.

Back in his apartment, he slammed the door shut and leaned against it, gasping for air. The figure sat on the desk, its paper form eerily still. Damien's gaze fell on it, and a surge of anger boiled up from the pit of his stomach.

"This is your fault!" he snarled, snatching the figure off the desk. His fingers tightened around its fragile body, the edges digging into his palms. "If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be… wouldn't be…"

But the words died in his throat. He couldn't finish the sentence because he knew the truth: without the figure, he was nothing. A hollow shell. A ghost in his own life.

His grip loosened, and the figure slipped from his hands, landing softly on the desk. It tilted its head, its ink-drawn eyes glinting with something almost… pity.

"You needed me," it said, its voice a whisper of rustling paper. "You still do."

Damien sank to the floor, his head in his hands. The figure was right. He was trapped, caught in a web of his own making. And the worst part was, he didn't know how to escape—or if he even wanted to.

When the seventh empty liquor bottle rolled under the bed, Damien fumbled for his vibrating phone amidst a pile of moldy pizza boxes. His advisor's name flashed on the screen like a needle piercing his eyeball. As he answered the call, he caught a glimpse of himself in the bedside mirror—his left cheek was flaking into tiny paper shreds.

In the Zoom meeting, his advisor's pixelated face loomed like a relief sculpture from the Spanish Inquisition. "Share your research model now."

Damien's cursor trembled over "Final_Draft.pptx." The file began deleting itself, the progress bar bleeding crimson like a slit artery. In the screen's reflection, the paper figure leaned against the doorframe, folding a rose out of his thesis paragraphs.

"Mr. Damien?" His advisor's knuckles rapped against the camera. "The neural network optimization algorithm you presented last week…"

Cold sweat dripped down his spine. He typed "Network lag" in the chat, but the send button morphed into a blood-red "PERJURY."

"The Academic Integrity Committee has initiated a plagiarism check," his advisor's voice dropped the room temperature by ten degrees. "We need your raw data."

Damien's gums tasted like paper pulp. "Of course, it's all my independent work…"

"Then explain this." The shared screen suddenly displayed a Dark Web forum post—timestamped 3:47 AM, user [PaperKing]: "Urgent: Need ghostwriter for quantum computing project."

The paper figure's laughter crackled through the speakers, mingling with the hum of a printer. Damien frantically clicked the close button, but the cursor transformed into an origami spider, crawling along the IP address toward his advisor's horrified face.

Damien collapsed into his ergonomic chair, the throne of countless gaming victories now feeling like an electric chair. His advisor's questions materialized as multiplying text on the screen:

WHOSE WORK?

WHOSE LIFE?

WHOSE SOUL?

The paper figure stepped behind him, its icy fingers (since when did it have fingers?) brushing his bleeding earlobe. "Need help answering?"

Its breath scattered paper shreds, one sticking to Damien's trembling lips—a fragment of the birthday card Aria had given him last year.

"Get away!" Damien smashed the camera. As the screen shattered, he saw his academic records burning in his advisor's office three hundred kilometers away. The ashes coalesced into the paper figure's grinning face in the monitor's blue glow.

A gurgling sound rose from the pipes beneath the floor. Tearing up the carpet, he found the cracks stuffed with crushed trophy fragments. The gilded shards of his national first prize were etched with the same date—the day the paper figure had first accepted the award on his behalf.

Damien spotted them at the school gate—the paper figure strolling arm-in-arm with Aria, her laughter tinkling like wind chimes. Its hand rested possessively on her shoulder, fingers tapered into razor-sharp edges.

Rage surged through Damien's veins. "I don't need you anymore!" he shouted, staggering toward them. "Stop pretending to be me!"

The figure turned, its inked eyes narrowing. Up close, Damien noticed unsettling details: its skin bore the faint gridlines of graph paper, and its breath smelled of photocopier toner.

"Who are you?" it asked, tilting its head at an unnatural angle.

Damien's blood ran cold. He grabbed the figure's arm, only to feel its texture shift beneath his fingers—from flesh to parchment. "I'm Damien! The real one!"

The figure chuckled, a sound like crumpling paper. "Then ask Aria. Ask anyone. Do they know you?"

Aria stared at Damien with vacant eyes. "Damien?" she repeated, as if testing a foreign word. "But... you're right here." She gestured to the figure, whose smile widened into a Cheshire grin.

Panicking, Damien fumbled for his phone. The screen flickered, then went blank. When it rebooted, his contacts were gone. His gallery contained only photos of the figure—at award ceremonies, with friends, even kissing Aria.

Desperate, he reached for a passerby. That's when he saw it: his hand had flattened into a paper cutout, the edges curling like singed parchment. The transformation spread—his arms, his torso, his legs—until he was weightless, adrift in a sea of static.

The last thing he heard before darkness consumed him was the figure's whisper: "This is the price of convenience."

[finish]