The Hum Beneath

Silen awoke to the echo of thunder.

He sat upright, sweat clinging to his neck, his breath sharp and shallow. The air around him shimmered faintly, as though heat or static distorted it. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was—or who he was.

Images flickered through his mind like broken film:
The obelisk collapsing. A woman’s voice calling his name. Maps spread out beneath candlelight. Blood on his hands.

He closed his eyes.

“Maren…” he whispered.

But her face wouldn’t come. Only fragments—a lantern, a road, the scent of rain. And then another flash, an image not his own:
Rows of machines humming in blue light. Endless code. His name on a screen.

QUERY: IDENTITY—SILEN

He stumbled to his feet. The world tilted. He could feel the hum beneath his boots—the same hum that had haunted his dreams since the fall. Every few seconds, the sound seemed to align with his heartbeat, like an invisible pulse syncing to his body.

He looked down at his hands. They flickered—flickered.
For a fraction of a second, his skin dissolved into static, replaced by streams of light. Then it was gone.

The realization struck him cold:
He wasn’t sure if he was remembering… or rebooting.

He staggered toward the edge of the ruins, where the wind carried ash and the distant smell of rain.
The world around him shimmered faintly again, and he saw two versions of it at once—the broken wasteland he knew, and another, intact and bright, overlaid like a reflection on glass.

Was this reality… or a copy?
Was he even real?

And somewhere, deep below the earth, in the heart of the humming server farm, the same text appeared again—no one to see it, no one to read it, but somehow meant for him:

SIMULATION LOOP 327 REINITIALIZING
SUBJECT: SILEN—ANOMALOUS CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED
BEGIN OBSERVATION

The lightning flared once more above the city, casting a second shadow of the obelisk—this one inverted, stretching down into the depths of the earth where the truth waited to be found.