Chapter 1
The enclosed porch was pitch-black and heavy at 4 a.m., save for the steady glow of my phone screen.
Outside the windows, the darkness didn't just feel empty; it felt enshrouded, a suffocating void that swallowed the house so completely you couldn't pick out a single star. I sat huddled on the loveseat, wrapped in a soft blanket to shield myself from the chill creeping through the walls. I was wide awake, the insomnia settling deep under my skin like a parasite making itself right at home.
I stared up at the dark ceiling and let out a dry breath. "And how long are you hanging out tonight?" I asked sarcastically into the empty air. Insomnia never answered back, but it always stayed for another round.
Nearly everything on my phone was locked into dark mode except for my med tracking app. When I opened it to the Today view for Saturday, October 17, the interface blasted through with a blinding, sterile glare. Squinting, I looked at the active timeline. It was a blank landscape of hollow, unchecked circles. Even at 4 a.m., the system felt trapped out of sync, frozen while the hours quietly bled forward.
I didn't bother toggling back to Friday. The previous screens were just monotonous, unyielding walls of blue checkmarks cut straight through the calendar. Total compliance. Yet, looking over the rim of my glasses into the heavy darkness beyond, the bitter reality settled in. Days of perfect compliance hadn't changed a thing. The systemic inflammation didn't care about historical records.
To see the full scope of the failures, I tapped the "My Meds" icon on the bottom nav bar to pull up the master directory. Pushing past the active prescriptions, I scrolled down to the lower half of the page where the Paused section lived, collapsed under its own header archive. Most people delete a med once it fails them, but I left them there, frozen in a greyed-out digital graveyard.
My finger rolled past the names slowly. It was a meticulous history of everything that had torn up my stomach, failed my nervous system, or left me too groggy to think.
Keeping this app, alongside the master text notes and calendar files I logged for myself, made me feel like some damn medical condition Pokémon collector, accumulating labels, warnings, and failed experiments… the actual answers remained entirely out of reach.
I reached up to touch my face as a faint vibration started beneath my skin, a mild, residual tic left behind by an old motility drug I had stopped years ago. The doctors said the lingering twitches were harmless, just a phantom echo on the circuit. Tonight, the throb was patient, constant, and entirely indifferent to the labels behind the screen.
Staring at the glass reflection, my finger drifted over the screen. I tapped the Paused graveyard one more time.
The greyed-out list was empty!
Every single name, warning, and record of my failed history had been wiped clean from the directory.
Before I could process the blankness, the app began to violently glitch. Static vertical lines tore down the interface, splitting the text apart as bands of inverted, distorted colors bled across the lists. The screen shuddered under the digital distortion before freezing entirely.
Over the ruined master directory, a new biometric overlay materialized, a sharp, high-contrast text box running a live, real-time data scroll of my vitals. It felt less like a glitch and more like a precise calibration systematically mapping the exact electrical frequencies of my nervous system.
My breath hitched. I tried to swipe back, to close the app, but a sudden, violent jolt of static heat surged through the casing. I snatched my hand back with a sharp gasp. The phone slipped from my fingers and tumbled into my lap, its display violently flashing as the interface locked into a high-contrast split screen. The erratic, spiking lines of my biometric vitals ran directly above a massive countdown clock ticking down to zero, syncing perfectly with the internal rhythm of my racing pulse.
Beneath the countdown, a final text line typed itself out slowly, answering the sarcastic question I had thrown into the empty air hours ago.
Forever.
I looked up, away from the screen and toward the dark glass of the window.
The screen threw a sterile bright white glare upward from my lap, cutting through the glass pane into the void outside.
In that sudden illumination, the reflection vanished. In its place stood a silhouette pressing itself flat against the outer glass, caught in the upward beam.
It wasn't just standing there; it was looking through me, studying me with an awful, patient hunger.
Before I could move, its fingers began to tap a rhythmic, perfectly synchronized beat against the pane.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
As it tapped, the featureless darkness of its head drifted down into the phone's upward wash of light, its mouth splitting open into a wide, impossibly slow smile.
The clock struck zero.
In that exact heartbeat, the perspective violently flipped. My vision was suddenly trapped behind the glass screen, looking up from the flat, restricted angle of the front-facing camera. Hovering directly above the display in the sterile white glare, I was forced to look up at my own physical face.
The eyes slowly blinked, the color in the irises fading nto a dull, hollow grey. Then, that muscle tic in my jaw violently jerked one last time, forcing my stolen physical lips to split open into a wide, impossibly slow smile right down into the camera lens.
It knew I was in here. After years of watching me accumulate nothing but failures, the interface flashed a final, mocking status update:
100% sync. 100% success.
It stared straight into the lens, giving a knowing, tight smile that openly mocked every failure I had ever logged, permanently sealing my consciousness, compressed and archived beneath the glass.
After smiling to the camera, the wallet style phone case closes, leaving me in the dark.
