The alarm shrieked at 5:00 a.m. sharp.
Damon Korz's hand slammed down on it like he was trying to kill a mosquito with a sledgehammer. The digital display dimmed under his palm, its red glow vanishing back into the void. Silence returned, but it wasn't peace. Not in this apartment. Not in this city.
He stayed in bed for a moment, staring at the ceiling, wondering if he could somehow will the next eight hours into nonexistence. The thought passed quickly. It always did. Lying still for too long only gave his brain time to start its familiar spiral: You're wasting time. You're already behind. You should've been up earlier.
He sat up, spine cracking as he moved. His muscles were tight, not from strain but from neglect. He wasn't out of shape—he had the lean build of someone who used to work out and now just paced aggressively. The only real exercise he got anymore came from tension.
His eyes met the mirror across the room. The reflection blinked half a second too late.
Just tired. Probably.
At twenty-three, Damon felt like a man already deep into the decline. Not physically—his health metrics were fine. But emotionally, mentally... spiritually? He wasn't sure he even had that last part. If he did, it was probably backlogged in some folder on his hard drive labeled "deal with later."
The apartment was one-room minimalism. Bed, desk, mini-fridge, kitchenette, no décor. The most personal item was a half-dead bonsai tree on the windowsill. He watered it out of obligation, not hope.
Outside, the city never stopped buzzing. The apartment overlooked Holloway District, a place that had tried to gentrify itself and stalled halfway. Neon signs clashed with broken brick. Cafés sat next to pawn shops and bail bonds offices. The skyline loomed in the distance like a threat wrapped in chrome.
Damon got ready in silence. Black shirt, black slacks, black coffee. No wasted motion. He wasn't stylish, but he was sharp—clean lines, ironed cuffs, no distractions. His toothbrush vibrated with the same rhythm as his thoughts: fast, mechanical, just enough to meet the requirement.
His phone buzzed once—calendar notification:
"Staff Review: 10:00 a.m. (don't screw it up)"
He'd added the last part himself.
At 5:47 a.m., he sat down at his workstation. Two curved monitors glared back at him. The room's dim light reflected off their surfaces like twin eyes. He cracked his knuckles and took a breath before logging in.
The sticky note was still there.
Control yourself or be controlled.
He didn't believe it anymore, but he left it up like a superstition.
Ozmec Systems wasn't glamorous, but it paid well enough. Logistics and data flow—Damon optimized things. Supply chains, resource allocations, scheduling rotas. He made other people's jobs easier and his own life emptier.
It was safe. Clean. Predictable.
Until it wasn't.
The first anomaly appeared at 6:12 a.m., tucked between a file transfer queue and a data scrub script. A file that shouldn't exist:
DOMINIONACCESS.EXE
No sender. No directory trail. Just... there.
He frowned, clicked the properties tab.
Created: 6:11 a.m.
Modified: 6:11 a.m.
Size: 0 KB
Security: Unverified.
He hovered his mouse over the file. His hand shook.
It wasn't just the file. It was everything lately. The glitches. The gaps. Last Thursday he swore he had a full conversation with his coworker Layna about a missing shipment. She'd looked confused the next day and claimed it never happened. Two weeks ago, he woke up with a strange sigil drawn in condensation on his window. He hadn't remembered drawing it. But he recognized it. Somewhere deep down.
And the dreams.
Last night had been the worst yet. A hallway—long, shifting, lined with doors. Each door had a mirror instead of a handle, and behind every one, he saw himself—but not quite. Versions of him that screamed silently, clawed at the glass, or worse… smiled.
He didn't talk about any of it. What would he say? That he felt like reality had a scratch in the vinyl? That his life, already painfully artificial, had started glitching?
His fingers moved on their own, tapping the mouse. The file opened.
Instant blackout. Both screens went dark.
Then a flicker. A blink. Pale white text began spilling across the monitors—characters that looked like they belonged in a dead language, too angular to be Roman, too structured to be random. Occasionally, they shifted into English long enough to form a sentence before reverting:
"Dominion Candidate #10892 Detected."
"Root Alignment: Ambition."
"Construct initializing…"
He didn't breathe. He couldn't.
Then, through the speakers—just barely—a whisper:
"You've waited long enough, Damon."
The lights dimmed.
His phone rebooted itself on the desk.
The half-dead bonsai tree on the windowsill snapped in half without warning.
And just like that, everything returned to normal.
File gone. Desktop clean. No trace of anything.
Damon stood slowly. He backed away from the desk. A primal instinct told him to run. But another part—the part that hadn't felt anything in months—whispered:
Finally.
The silence afterward was not silence at all. It was thick and vibrating, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.
Damon stared at the screen. Blank. Harmless. His own reflection hovered faintly in the black glass, warped by the slight curvature of the monitor—he looked paler than he remembered. Thinner. Tired, yes, but something else.
Empty.
He checked the file directory again. Nothing. No recent changes. No system logs. Not even a trace of the program in memory. He ran a deep scan, diagnostics, file history—clean.
The only evidence anything had happened was the broken bonsai on the windowsill. The thin trunk had snapped as if twisted by invisible hands. Damon approached it slowly, crouching down to inspect the split. It was jagged. Not natural. No rot, no dryness. The break was fresh. Alive.
He stood up and grabbed his coat.
The air in the apartment suddenly felt too thin, like it was being rationed.
The hallway outside was still gray with morning hush. Concrete walls. Fluorescent lights. Water stains. Smelled faintly of bleach and loneliness. He descended three floors by foot. The elevator made him feel trapped on good days. Today wasn't one of them.
He stepped out onto Holloway Street just after 6:30 a.m.
The city was waking up, and yet… it didn't feel the same.
The neon signs pulsed slower. Streetlights blinked as though confused about their own timing. Pedestrians moved in predictable patterns—almost too predictable. Damon paused at the corner, staring at a man in a business suit waiting for the walk signal.
The man was murmuring something. Lips moving rhythmically.
Damon watched. Watched closely.
The words never changed. Not even once.
"Tick, tick, turn the key, lock it up and bury me… Tick, tick, turn the key..."
Damon turned away.
He walked faster.
Two blocks later, he ducked into a corner café he rarely visited, Blackroot Roasters. The air smelled of burnt espresso and cheap leather. Familiar. Safe. Mostly.
The barista, a stocky guy with a tattoo of a triangle inside a circle under one eye, didn't even greet him—just nodded like he'd been expecting him. Damon ordered black coffee, sat at a corner booth, and pulled out his tablet to pretend like he was working.
Instead, he opened a notepad and typed:
Dominion. Candidate. Ambition. Root. 10892.
The words looked absurd, meaningless on a screen. He leaned back, rubbing his face with both hands.
What the hell is happening to me?
He'd gone his whole life repressing the irrational. His father had drilled it into him: control your urges, control your reactions, and you'll win. Emotion is inefficiency. Wanting is weakness.
And yet the moment the voice whispered his name, some part of him—something ancient and neglected—had stirred. Something that didn't care for reason.
He took a long sip of bitter coffee.
Then he felt it.
Something shifted in the air beside him, like a sudden change in barometric pressure. The buzz of conversation around the café dulled. People blurred. Literally. Their outlines shimmered, like heat waves above asphalt.
Damon turned his head slowly.
One booth over sat a woman. Pale. Early thirties. Dark green blazer. No coffee. No food. Just sitting, hands folded on the table. Watching him.
Her eyes were slate-gray. Expression unreadable. She hadn't been there a moment ago.
"Damon Korz," she said quietly. Her voice was crisp, deliberate, and not quite natural.
He froze. "Do I know you?"
"Not yet. But you will."
He stared at her. "Did you send the file?"
She tilted her head. "You're still thinking in terms of data. This isn't code. This is recognition."
"I'm sorry—who are you?"
"You've already met me. In the hallway. Door seventeen. You didn't look inside."
His throat tightened.
The café flickered. The lighting dimmed, surged, then steadied. No one else seemed to notice.
He stood. "I don't know what this is. But I'm not—"
"You're Candidate 10892. Root alignment: Ambition. That means you're not allowed to walk away."
Her voice didn't rise, but the pressure in the room did. Damon's vision rippled at the edges. His heart hammered against his ribs, not in fear but… memory. Like he had heard all this before. Like this scene was being reloaded from a cache he'd never seen.
"Go home," she said, standing as well. "It's starting."
And with that, she turned and walked out through the café door—which closed behind her without making a sound.
Damon stared after her, knuckles white around his coffee cup.
This wasn't burnout. It wasn't stress. He wasn't breaking.
He was being pulled into something—and he didn't know whether to run or dive in.
The apartment door was ajar.
Damon hadn't left it that way.
He stepped in carefully, eyes narrowed, the quiet around him deeper than before. It wasn't silence—it was the absence of presence. Like the air had been vacuumed clean of meaning.
Nothing looked disturbed. And yet, everything felt wrong.
The light above his desk flickered once. The monitors were off. The broken bonsai remained shattered on the sill, its roots exposed like tendons beneath skin.
He closed the door behind him and locked it.
Then he saw it.
A mirror, leaning against the far wall. Tall. Frameless. He didn't own one like that.
Its surface was dull, like water waiting for movement. As he stepped closer, it seemed to ripple—faintly, then violently, then still again. The reflection it gave back wasn't right. The room was there, yes. So was he.
But his reflection was smiling.
He wasn't.
Damon reached toward it.
The mirror flared.
A blast of light swallowed the apartment, and the floor buckled under him. He fell forward—not onto hardwood, but into cold, mist-covered stone.
He landed hard.
When the light faded, he was no longer in his apartment.
He stood in a corridor. Long. Endless. Built from seamless slabs of black stone. A ceiling arched high overhead, and on either side stretched rows of doors—tall, identical, numbered in cold silver. There were no knobs, only mirrored panels where the handles should be.
The only sound was the echo of his own shallow breathing.
He stepped forward slowly. Numbers passed.
Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
The mirrors warped his reflection. Sometimes older. Sometimes younger. Sometimes monstrous.
Then—
Seventeen.
His hand trembled as he reached for it.
"Damon."
The voice came from behind him.
He turned.
No one.
He turned back—and the mirror door had opened on its own.
A room lay inside, but not one he could understand. It wasn't a space—it was a feeling, forced into architecture. Walls folded inward and outward at once. Objects existed halfway between thoughts. In the center stood… himself.
But this version of Damon had eyes like obsidian glass, and wore a suit woven from shadows. When he smiled, it showed too many teeth.
"Welcome to your Dominion," the double said.
Damon stepped inside.
"What is this?" he asked. "A dream?"
The mirror-Damon tilted his head. "No. It's your inheritance."
He walked a slow circle around Damon, hands behind his back. "Ambition is a blade. It cuts forward or turns inward. Most let it rot in their gut. But you—" he leaned in, voice soft, "—you feed it."
"I didn't ask for any of this."
"You didn't have to." He gestured toward a massive black door at the back of the mirrored chamber. Seven locks glowed across its frame, each pulsing with a different hue. "You're here now. And now, we test."
Damon took a step back. "Test what?"
"Whether you command your drive—or it commands you."
The room vanished.
Suddenly, Damon stood in a conference room—his conference room, from Ozmec. Harsh LED lighting. Plastic chairs. Polished table. His coworkers were seated, all of them silent. Layna, Mr. Dargus, the finance guy whose name he never bothered to learn.
They all stared at him.
"You're failing," said Mr. Dargus, tapping his tablet. "Your output is down."
"You miss meetings," Layna added.
"You're slowing us down," someone else murmured.
Damon opened his mouth, but no words came out.
"You'll never get promoted," Dargus said flatly. "You'll die here. Doing grunt work for people half as smart as you."
The room twisted—melting at the edges. Their faces blurred.
"You'll die meaningless," Dargus repeated, his voice echoing now. "You'll die ordinary."
"No," Damon said. His voice cracked.
"Yes," whispered Layna, her eyes solid black. "Because you chose it."
They stood. Shadows poured from their eyes and mouths, their forms dissolving into inky wraiths.
Damon stumbled backward. The conference table split down the middle. A chasm opened beneath his feet.
He fell.
And landed in his apartment.
Back in his chair. Gasping. Sweating. The mirror was gone. The bonsai still broken. But now—etched into the wall above his monitors—was a single glowing symbol:
A stylized crown made of seven thorns.
Beneath it: "Dominion: Ambition – Trial 1 Complete."
And his reflection in the black monitor was smiling again.
This time… so was he.