The metallic door to my cell slid open with a hiss that reverberated down the empty corridor. A gust of cold air swept in, and I hesitated for a moment, lingering in the doorway. The familiar dread was worse today, gnawing at the edges of my thoughts.
As I stepped out, I caught sight of the Nexilith standing beside the door—its human disguise always unsettling. Its "skin" was almost too perfect, like a mannequin that had learned to move but not to live. Without eyes or a mouth, it stood motionless, yet I could feel it watching me. The Nexiliths didn't need human senses to observe us; we were their prey in a cage, a cage they had constructed with invisible bars. My mind flashed to the recurring dream—static, voices, bright lights—and then it was gone, replaced by the cold reality of Simulation City.
I fell in line with the others, trudging through the corridors in silence. The only sounds were the soft shuffle of footsteps, the hiss of machinery in the walls, and the faint hum I could never quite place. I glanced at the others—Marcus, tall and broad-shouldered, his face set in a grim line; and Lila, her smooth dark skin gleaming under the artificial light, her amber eyes always searching, always seeing more than the rest of us. She was smaller than most, but there was a quiet, restrained power in her wiry frame.
My head ached as we neared the entrance to Simulation City. Something about today felt different. Wrong. My skin crawled with a sense of being watched, more so than usual. The Nexiliths' presence was noticable, though they remained unseen, lingering in the air like a whisper too faint to hear but impossible to ignore. They were always there, somewhere just out of sight.
When the doors to the city opened, the world beyond was revealed in all its eerie, clinical perfection. Simulation City wasn't just a place, it was a trap, a construct so flawless it felt unnatural. The streets were paved with polished stone, the buildings gleamed like they had never known dirt or decay, and the air was thick with a sterile, suffocating clarity. Everything looked wrong.
We stepped into the square, and my stomach churned. It was the people, the way they moved, not like humans, but like wind-up dolls on an endless loop. A woman at a nearby café wiped the same table over and over, her movements mechanical. A man flipped through a newspaper, his face expressionless, eyes vacant, before resetting his position to start all over again. His fingers twitched unnaturally, like a marionette pulled by invisible strings. The same motion. Every few seconds. Over and over.
"Eva," Lila's voice was low, barely a whisper. I turned to her, following her gaze toward the horizon. "Look."
I squinted. At first, I thought it was just a trick of the light. But then I saw it—a faint ripple, like the fabric of the city was tearing at the edges. The skyline flickered, distorting and bending before snapping back into place. A cold shiver crawled down my spine.
"It's happening more," I muttered, swallowing hard.
Lila nodded, her jaw tight.
We had seen glitches before—minor inconsistencies, odd repetitions—but today, the cracks were deeper. Wider. The city was fragile, its perfect illusion struggling to hold together. The Nexiliths were losing control. I could feel it, a tremor in the air, a tension tightening like a wire about to snap.
Marcus brushed past me, his face set in a scowl. "It's a distraction," he muttered. "Don't trust it."
I nodded but couldn't shake the feeling that something more was happening beneath the surface. My head throbbed as if the glitch itself were trying to claw its way into my brain, burrowing in.
As we moved deeper into the city, I glanced up at the sky. It was a flawless blue, but there was no sun. There was never a sun. Just light—everywhere and nowhere at once. And yet, for a moment, I thought I saw something—a shadow darting across the sky. A glitch?
My heart raced. I looked around, but no one else seemed to notice. Except Lila. Her sharp eyes darted to mine, her brow furrowed.
"Did you see it?" she whispered.
I nodded. But what had I seen? My mind was racing, my thoughts spiraling. How much of this was real?
The Nexiliths' control over us was never absolute, not in the way they wanted. The dreams, the static, the voices—I knew there was something more, but every time I tried to grasp it, it slipped away, like trying to hold onto a shadow.
As we passed a towering skyscraper, I caught my reflection in its glass surface. But it wasn't just me. Standing behind me, reflected in the same glass, was another figure. Another me. The reflection didn't mimic my movements; it stood perfectly still, staring back at me with eyes that were wrong—dark, empty voids where my eyes should have been.
I blinked. My reflection was gone.
I whipped around, my heart pounding, but the plaza behind me was just as it had been before—cold, sterile, and populated by the hollow, mindless people going through their motions. The man with the newspaper flipped a page, adjusted his jacket, then flipped the page again. The woman by the café continued wiping down her table, her movements unnervingly smooth and precise, like clockwork.
Had I really seen that—my own reflection standing still, out of sync with me? Watching me? Mocking me?
Before I could make sense of it, a low hum filled the air, familiar and invasive. The sound of the Nexiliths tuning in to us, focusing their attention. It wasn't a sound, not really—it was something I felt, pressing into my mind like an electric current. All of us froze, our bodies stiff as if held in place by invisible strings.
And then the voice came, emotionless and mechanical, but somehow speaking directly into my thoughts.
"Subjects, today you will participate in an observational phase. Your interaction with the Simulated Beings will be analyzed. Cooperation will advance our understanding of your species' social dynamics. Resistance will inhibit progress and delay your tasks."
The voice always lacked warmth, lacked any human quality. Though the Nexiliths had studied us for millennia, they still couldn't grasp the complexity of human emotions. Their attempts at communication were clinical, like the dull voice of a machine following a script. But there was no malice. They weren't tormentors, they were scientists. The discomfort we felt was merely a byproduct of their process.
Lila, standing next to me, whispered under her breath, "They're studying how we interact with their simulations. It's another test."
"Yeah," I muttered, the realization sending a chill down my spine.
The task today wasn't about breaking us. It was about learning. Everything the Nexiliths did had a purpose, even if we couldn't always see it clearly. We weren't just captives. We were subjects in an experiment as old as time itself, and Simulation City was their laboratory.
The crackling hum faded, and the tension in the air lifted slightly. The others, all of us human subjects, began moving again, shuffling in the direction of our assigned zones, guided by the invisible hand of our alien observers. Each of us would be placed in different areas of the city today, set to interact with the Simulated Beings—the "people" who populated this fake world.
My steps felt heavier than usual as I followed the path that led me to a nearby office building—another one of Simulation City's pristine, soulless structures. Lila was close by, her amber eyes sharp as ever, always watching, always thinking. Marcus, a few paces ahead of me, didn't look back. His broad shoulders seemed tense, like he was bracing for whatever the Nexiliths had planned for us.
I took a deep breath and entered the building.
Inside, the air was cool, sterile. Rows of identical desks were lined up in a perfect grid, each one manned by one of the Simulated Beings. They sat in stiff chairs, tapping on keyboards, flipping through papers, their movements precise, monotonous. Their faces were smooth, neutral, and completely devoid of life. They were perfect replicas of humanity—but replicas, nonetheless. This was the task today: work with these simulations, interact with them, and let the Nexiliths observe how we handled cooperation with non-humans.
"Why do they keep doing this?" I muttered as I approached my assigned desk. A Simulated Being, an impeccably dressed woman with an unnaturally even expression, looked up at me as I neared. Her eyes, though human-like, were glassy, as if she wasn't really seeing me.
"Because they want to understand why we behave the way we do," Lila whispered back, her voice low. "We've always been unpredictable to them. They're looking for patterns in our social dynamics—communication, cooperation, conflict. The other Earths don't have this level of variability. We're unique in that way."
I nodded, trying to steady myself. The Nexiliths weren't torturing us for pleasure. This was all data to them. They wanted to know why humans—why people from Earth 927—were so different from the inhabitants of the other Earths. The Simulated Beings were part of that study—a way to test how we navigated interactions with beings that looked human but weren't. To see if we would treat them like people or see them for what they were—soulless constructs.
The woman across from me slid a form across the desk. "Please complete the following document," she said in a perfectly neutral voice.
The woman watched intently, though I doubted she understood what she was seeing. She was a reflection of humanity, but without any true awareness. Still, the Nexiliths would be analyzing every interaction, breaking down our behavior into patterns they could study.
The form in front of me was blank. Rows of empty lines. Meaningless. There was no point in filling it out properly; the Nexiliths wouldn't care about the content, only the act of cooperation.
Without thinking, I began to write:
Why don't skeletons fight each other?
I paused for a moment, glancing at the Simulated Being across from me. She stared back, unblinking, her perfect, glassy eyes tracking the movement of my hand as I continued:
Because they don't have the guts.
I smirked, the absurdity of it bringing the smallest ounce of relief to the knot of tension that had been winding tighter in my chest. But I wasn't done. If they wanted to study me, they were going to get something worth studying.
Line after line, I scrawled the same joke, over and over:
Why don't skeletons fight each other? Because they don't have the guts. Why don't skeletons fight each other? Because they don't have the guts.
It became almost meditative, each repetition loosening the grip of anxiety and fear, if only for a moment. I glanced at the Simulated Being again, half-expecting her to blink or react in some way. But she remained as she was, staring blankly at the paper, her expression as neutral and empty as ever.
I kept going, filling every line on the page with the joke, my handwriting growing sloppier with each stroke. There was something oddly satisfying about it, like I was pushing back, in some small, ridiculous way, against the absurdity of the task.
But then, just as I finished another line, something shifted.
The air in the room grew heavy, thick with the low hum of the Nexiliths' presence. I felt it immediately, like a static charge creeping up my spine. I looked up, and my stomach lurched.
The woman's face was gone.
Her features had vanished, as though they had never been there. In place of her once neutral expression was a smooth, blank surface—no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Just a featureless, empty oval where her face should have been.
I froze, the pen slipping from my hand and clattering onto the desk.
A chill crept over me. I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry, my pulse pounding in my ears. I could feel the gaze of the Nexiliths, even without the woman's eyes. Watching. Always watching.
The silence was broken by a voice—not from the woman, but from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It vibrated in the air, cold and detached, devoid of any emotion.
"Human 940, cooperation is essential to the progress of this study."
The Nexiliths. Their voice cut through the room, flat and final.
"Deviations from the designated task impede our ability to gather accurate data."
I stared at the faceless Simulated Being, my heart still racing. It was a heavy reminder that none of this was real. The joke, the small act of rebellion—it meant nothing to them. The Nexiliths didn't understand humor. They didn't care about the rebellion we tried to make in their system. To them, everything was data—everything was a calculation.
The woman's faceless head tilted slightly, like she was waiting for me to comply, though her expressionless visage made it even more unsettling.
"Human 940, proceed."
The weight of the command pressed against me, and I picked up the pen again, my hand trembling. My little joke was over. Whatever humor I'd tried to inject into this moment had evaporated in the face of their cold, unrelenting scrutiny.
I looked at the paper, the pages now filled with the joke written over and over. My small act of rebellion—pointless, really, but it had been mine.
I scribbled a quick signature at the bottom, my hand moving automatically, feeling the Nexiliths' invisible gaze burning into me. The Simulated Being collected the paper, sliding it across the desk without a word, her blank face staring through me.
The Nexiliths were always watching. They didn't care about how we coped or how we resisted in small ways. All they cared about was what we could teach them, what patterns of behavior they could analyze and use. Every joke, every quiet act of defiance, they cataloged it all, even when it seemed to have no impact on the grander scheme.
The faceless woman turned away, returning to her station like nothing had happened, and the room felt colder than it had before.
The Nexiliths weren't torturers. They didn't get satisfaction from watching us squirm. They were cold, calculating beings, here to study us. And every joke, every mistake, every break in the routine—we were just another anomaly for them to dissect.
Lila worked beside me, quietly observing the Simulated Being she had been assigned. I could tell by the hard look in her eyes that she hated this—hated being forced to engage with these empty shells. But she understood the bigger picture. This was about survival. If we resisted too strongly, we risked being singled out. If we played along, we could learn something—about the Nexiliths, about their experiments, and maybe about how to escape this place.
"They're measuring how we interact," Lila said, her voice barely above a whisper. "If we treat these things like people, or if we refuse. It's all data to them—understanding what makes us tick."
"They want to break it down to science," I muttered. "Human unpredictability."
The woman across from me handed me another blank form, her expression never changing. I took it, completing the task without a word. The Nexiliths didn't care how mundane or repetitive it was. They were watching something deeper—the choices we made under pressure, the ways we responded to a reality that wasn't quite real.
But as I signed the form and handed it back, something caught my attention. The Simulated Being's hand, as it reached for the paper, hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second, her movement faltered, her hand twitching unnaturally. The air around us seemed to hum for a moment, like the glitch in the sky I'd seen earlier. I tensed, waiting for something to happen, but then the simulation smoothed itself out. The woman continued her task as if nothing had changed.
Another glitch. Another crack in the perfect illusion.
I shot a glance at Lila, who had noticed too. Her eyes narrowed, and she gave me a slight nod. The city was breaking down, just as we had suspected. The Nexiliths' control wasn't as strong as they wanted us to believe.
"We need to keep playing along," Lila murmured. "But we're getting close. The more they push these tasks, the more the glitches show. There's a flaw in their design and…"
"If we can find it, we might have a way out," I finished for her.
But even as I said the words, a hint of doubt passed through me. What if there was no way out? What if this—Simulation City, the endless tasks, the experiments—was all there would ever be?
I glanced again at the Simulated Beings around me, their hollow eyes fixed on their tasks, their faces frozen in perfect, eerie calm. We were part of the Nexiliths' grand experiment, but there was something wrong with their design.
The glitches were getting worse. And when Simulation City finally broke, I wasn't sure if we would be ready for what came next.
It seemed absurd to be afraid of losing a place that wasn't real—a place that was built to confine and manipulate us—but the thought gnawed at me all the same. Simulation City, for all its artificiality, was the only constant we had left. Its sterile perfection, the empty streets, the hollow people repeating their tasks—it was all fake. I knew that. But it was also... predictable. There was a structure to it, a routine. A routine that, in a twisted way, had come to feel human.
Without it, what would be left?
I swallowed hard, my eyes drifting to the skyline outside the window. I could still feel the Nexiliths' presence in the air, even though the faceless Simulated Being had gone. Their gaze followed us everywhere. Their invisible strings pulled us through every task. And yet, in this sterile, artificial city, there was a strange comfort in knowing what to expect. The glitches in the system, the cracks in the illusion—they made it feel real, almost like a flawed version of the life we used to know.
The routines, as mindless and hollow as they were, gave us something to hold on to. A place where we could pretend, if only for a moment, that we were still part of something normal, something familiar.
What if everything outside this place was worse? What if there was no world beyond Simulation City? What if this was all there would ever be?
The idea of escaping, of getting out of this carefully constructed cage, had once been my only goal. I'd clung to it in the early days, driven by hope. But now, standing here in this office, surrounded by lifeless simulations and empty eyes, I realized something that unsettled me more than anything else: Simulation City was the only thing left that felt even remotely human.
The repetition, the rules, the tasks—all of it had become part of us. It was predictable in a way that made sense, even if that sense was a shallow one. The outside world, the real world—if it even existed anymore—was a mystery. And mysteries were far more dangerous than this place.
I didn't know what lay beyond the boundaries of this city, and that unknown was what truly frightened me. The glitches were proof that things were unraveling, yes. But what would it mean when the city finally collapsed? What if we left, only to discover that the world beyond was a nightmare worse than this manufactured reality?
I exhaled slowly, forcing myself to let go of the pen. It clattered onto the desk, the noise too loud in the oppressive silence. I could feel Lila's eyes on me, watching, waiting for a sign of what came next. But I had no answers.
What would happen if this last piece of predictability crumbled away?
Because, deep down, none of us really knew what came before this life. Our memories of whatever existed before were vague, at best—fleeting glimpses of things that felt too distant to grasp. The Nexiliths had made sure of that. They'd left us with just enough—our names, fragments of our identities, scraps of knowledge about who we were—to make their experiments more valuable. They needed us to know enough to function, enough to react and interact with the simulated world they created, but nothing more.
Anything beyond what the Nexiliths allowed us to remember—our pasts, our homes, even the smallest details about our lives before this place—had been buried deep, locked away behind walls they had built in our minds. We could only hold on to the bits they decided to leave behind, because that made their studies more useful, more thorough.
The experiments had to be authentic.
So, we clung to the names we knew—Eva, Lila, Marcus. The few personal facts we could recall. But it was all orchestrated, controlled. Every part of us that felt real was carefully calculated to fit within their larger purpose.
And as much as I longed to escape, the thought of facing that deeper void—the truth of not knowing who I really was—frightened me more than I was willing to admit.
For now, all I could do was keep playing along, keep following the routine, even if I was scared of what would come next.
I didn't know how it happened exactly, but somewhere along the way, Lila and Marcus became the only constants in my life. Out of the hundreds of us that had been brought into this nightmare, they were the only two I trusted, the only ones who had been with me from the beginning.
It wasn't that I didn't care about the others, the nameless faces I saw in the hallways or during our tasks. Many of them had been moved—relocated to other parts of the city or to different sectors of the experiment, places unknown to us. Sometimes they would just disappear, and no one would ask questions. Questions didn't get answers here. So, eventually, you just stopped asking.
The people you grew familiar with were often taken away as if they'd never existed in the first place. Except for Lila and Marcus. They were always there.
I wondered if that was by design. Had the Nexiliths allowed me to stay close to them on purpose? Were they monitoring not just our individual behaviors, but our relationships too? Did they want to see how we'd bond, how we'd form alliances, or cling to what little humanity we had left?
It made sense. Isolation might have broken me a long time ago. Maybe they wanted to see how we behaved when we weren't completely alone. Or maybe, they were just waiting to see how far they could push us before we turned on each other.
I didn't know for sure. But I had to admit, without Lila and Marcus, I might have already lost whatever scraps of sanity I had left.
Lila was sharp—always thinking, always watching. Her amber eyes missed nothing, and I'd learned to trust her instincts. We didn't always agree on everything, but when it came to survival, I knew she had my back. She was the one who helped me see the patterns, the glitches in Simulation City, the cracks in the Nexiliths' control.
Marcus, on the other hand, was a wall. Solid, unyielding, but quiet. He didn't talk much, but when he did, you listened. He'd been a stabilizing force, someone who could keep us grounded when the world felt like it was slipping away. His anger was always there, simmering beneath the surface, but he controlled it in a way that I admired. We never spoke about it directly, but I knew he had seen things—been through things—before we ended up here. Things that had changed him, hardened him. That anger, though... it kept him alive. It kept all of us alive.
We had each other. And in a place where everything was controlled, where everything felt fake, that was enough. It had to be.
But still, I couldn't shake the feeling that the Nexiliths allowed it. They could have separated us long ago—moved us into different sectors, cut our ties, and forced us into isolation. Yet they hadn't. They kept us together. Whether that was part of their plan or a coincidence, I didn't know.
Were they testing our ability to form connections? Or testing how far we could rely on each other? Every bond we had, every moment we shared, could be part of their data, just another variable in the grand equation they were working on.
The thought made me uneasy.
I glanced over at Lila and Marcus. Lila was fiddling with something, her sharp eyes scanning the area, as usual. Marcus stood a few paces away, staring at nothing, lost in his thoughts. The two of them had become my only family in this strange place. Whether the Nexiliths wanted it that way or not, I couldn't imagine going through this without them. We'd shared too much, survived too much.
But that nagging thought remained: Did they allow this on purpose?
And if they did, what were they waiting for?