Chapter 1
I woke up in bed, staring at the ceiling.
It had been some time since I’d woken from my supposed coma. My family was back with me, and the world had moved on without me.
I’d lived such a vivid life in that coma. I crossed oceans by plane to reach America. I met Emily. We travelled across the United States and Canada, searching for anomalies. And just when we were on the brink of solving the scientific problem I’d been trying to understand, I woke up here—in the normal world.
But I don’t know.
Something still feels off.
I still get messages on screens. Sometimes I hear a voice in my head telling me to wake up. Something keeps telling me that I wasn’t dreaming in the coma. That everything I experienced was real.
And that wherever I am now… is the delusion.
My parents have changed. They’re far more emotional than I remember them being. Maybe that can be explained by my coma, you’ll say. Maybe they’re just relieved to have me back.
But it still doesn’t explain everything.
My brother has become distant. I don’t know why.
Everyone at work treats me differently, too. Like I’m fragile. Like I might break if they say the wrong thing.
Every morning, I wake up expecting to find myself back in the helicopter with Emily, where we were supposed to plant devices across the Earth to recalibrate Earth and the parallel Earth.
It was such a grand idea.
We actually achieved something. We got somewhere.
And then…
I woke up.
Sigh.
Maybe I’m rambling.
But everything is not right in this world.
Some of its history feels altered. Some things have completely different versions from what I remember. At first, I didn’t realise it. But as time went on, I started searching things online.
And the more I searched, the less this felt like my Earth.
It feels more like I’ve been sent into a third alternate world.
Or something.
Sometimes I get missed calls from unknown numbers. When I call back, there’s no one there.
Other times, I receive texts from random numbers.
It’s an illusion.
Wake up.
You were not dreaming.
Sigh.
I don’t know what to think.
Or where to start.
I’m just an ordinary guy.
Shit.
Well, enough rambling. I’d better get ready for fucking work.
They won’t care about my dilemma anyway.
I get out of bed, brush my hair, shower, do the usual shit and shenanigans.
As you can probably tell, I’m not exactly excited to go to work.
Compared to what I was supposedly doing in my coma dream, this mundane shit is painfully boring.
I greet my parents, eat breakfast, and head out.
The commute is simple. Bus, then metro, then I’m there.
Nothing special.
Work is mostly paperwork. Insurance papers, this insurance paper, that insurance paper. Yada yada.
My colleagues are boring too.
They avoid me.
I avoid them.
Mutual respect, in a way. Lol.
Oh yeah, my brother works here too.
And for God knows what reason, he’s been avoiding me ever since I came back to work.
I haven’t chased after him either. Like I said, I already feel like something is wrong. I can’t explain it. It’s just this itch in the back of my mind.
So him keeping his distance…
I guess, in a weird way, it feels right.
The other day, I overheard one of my colleagues talking to his friends about me. He mentioned my coma. My brother was there too.
I couldn’t hear everything, but I caught something about how my brother hadn’t visited me while I was in the coma.
That sounded weird.
Really weird.
My brother and I have never exactly been the closest family, but still…
He didn’t visit me?
I felt a little irritated.
But I let it go.
Didn’t want to make a scene at work.
At five, I clocked out and headed home.
I grabbed a subpar sandwich on the way because apparently that’s what passes for dinner when you’re too tired to care.
I got home, greeted my parents, and headed straight to my room.
Earlier, I’d asked my parents to bring out all the old family photos.
The excuse I’d given them was that I wanted us to look through them together. You know, reminisce about the good old days.
That was a lie.
I was looking for something.
A clue.
Anything that might explain this feeling I couldn’t shake.
I went through the photos one by one.
Family holidays.
Birthdays.
Christmas.
Random pictures I’d completely forgotten about.
Then my eyes landed on one from a beach.
I stared at it for a moment.
Then I looked down at my ankle.
There was a large birthmark there.
I’d had it for as long as I could remember.
I looked back at the photograph.
Then at my ankle again.
My stomach tightened.
The birthmark was supposed to be there.
But it wasn’t.
Not in the photograph.
I picked it up and looked closer.
It wasn’t hidden by anything.
It wasn’t a shadow.
It simply…
wasn’t there.
