2063. The University of New Marseille.
The digital relic arrived without a sender. Just a cracked, dust-covered drive stuffed in a nondescript envelope with one word scrawled in dried ink across the casing:
"DON'T."
Cal Lomax, 23, doctoral candidate in Temporal Cognition and Cultural Drift, stared at it. The word should've stopped him. It didn't. What did was the metadata file inside:DARWISH_LECTURE_ARCHIVE // SPLICE.
That name. Professor Malik Darwish. The man who vanished mid-lecture in 2027, on-camera, while talking about recursive sentience and "time behaving like guilt." Vanished. Poof. Mid-sentence. All that was left was his coat and a half-drunk espresso.
Lomax clicked PLAY.
The first file stuttered into life.
[Lecture Recording #1: "The Hollow Lecture"]
Darwish (on screen):"Imagine, if you will, a disease not of the body, but of perception. One that nests in your awareness, and every time you try to recall your past… it rewrites a little more."
(pause)"Memory, my dear students, is not retrieval. It's editing. And some editors… have agendas."
The video flickered. Darwish's image glitched, freezing for one frame too long. His smile held. Too wide. The screen blurred and for a moment, there were two Darwishes, overlapping, each whispering:
"This is not the first time you've heard this."
Lomax jolted, hit pause. Audio distortion whined in the background. The video hadn't just buffered, it had looped.
And on the reflection in his laptop screen, his own head didn't move when he tilted.
Later that night.
Lomax wrote in his encrypted log:
I don't remember downloading the next file. But it's there. File name:
REFLECT.avi
He opened it.
Another lecture. But this time, Darwish stood in front of a chalkboard filled with circles and teeth.
"The mirror," Darwish whispered, "does not reflect light. It reflects possibility. Every time you look, you're checking if you're still real."
The timestamp on the recording: 2029.
But Darwish vanished in 2027.
Two Days Later.
The Dean's assistant found Lomax's office empty. No signs of forced entry. No luggage taken. Just a single sticky note on his desk:
"He was right. I saw myself blink before I blinked."
And a mirror, facing the chair where he once sat—was cracked top to bottom. On the inside of the glass, someone had scratched:
Do not trust your reflection.
Somewhere Else. Unknown Timeframe.
A figure in a coat walks a hallway lined with mirrors that breathe softly when no one speaks. His hands tremble as he clutches a cracked tablet.
Malik Darwish exhales. Eyes sunken. Days uncounted.
He mutters:
"The lecture never ends. I'm still giving it… somewhere."
Behind him, in the glass, a boy with Elias's eyes smiles.