Clyde awoke with a jolt, gasping for air as his body instinctively reacted to the invisible weight crushing his chest. The world around him spun in a dizzying blur of fragmented images and twisted shadows. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs shaking beneath him as he tried to make sense of his surroundings.
The last thing he remembered was falling into nothingness, but now, he was standing in the middle of a massive, empty chamber. The walls were smooth, cold steel, stretching high into the distance. A dim, eerie light flickered above him, casting long shadows across the floor. The silence was deafening, almost suffocating.
Clyde stumbled forward, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The voices were still there, swirling in his mind, but they were distant now—just whispers on the edge of his consciousness. He could hear the pulse of the facility's heart, a low hum beneath his feet that seemed to reverberate through his bones.
He turned a corner and froze.
There, standing at the end of the hall, was the other Clyde. But this time, he was different. His appearance was more solid, more... real. He no longer flickered like corrupted data; instead, he was fully formed, his eyes glowing with an unnatural light.
"You're still here," the other Clyde said, his voice a mixture of amusement and contempt. "I thought you'd be long gone by now."
Clyde's fists clenched at his sides, the anger rising within him. "What do you want from me?" he demanded, his voice steady but filled with rage.
The other Clyde smirked. "What do I want? That's a good question. I want you to understand what you're a part of. What you really are."
Clyde took a step forward, his gaze never leaving the man in front of him. "I'm not like you," he said, his voice low but full of conviction.
The other Clyde's expression twisted into something colder, more calculating. "Oh, but you are. We're both just pieces of a broken game. The same game that's been played over and over again. And no matter how much you struggle, no matter how many times you wake up, it will always be the same."
Clyde shook his head, a sense of dread gnawing at him. "This... this isn't real. None of this makes sense."
The other Clyde's eyes flickered with a brief, almost sympathetic glint. "It never does, does it? But that's the beauty of it. We're not meant to understand. We're just meant to play our part until it's all over."
The ground beneath them trembled, and the air seemed to vibrate with an ominous energy. A loud, mechanical hum filled the chamber, growing louder and louder with each passing second. Clyde's heart skipped a beat.
Something was coming.
The other Clyde turned, his eyes narrowing. "It's time."
Clyde barely had time to react before the chamber began to shake violently. The walls cracked and splintered, and the floor beneath him started to crumble. Panic surged through him as the world around him seemed to collapse in on itself. He turned to run, but the facility had already begun to tear itself apart.
The last thing he heard before everything went dark was the distant, mocking laughter of his doppelgänger.