Echoes of the Original
482 Words
Rina barely slept.
Each time she closed her eyes, a different version of herself whispered from the darkness.
One begged her to run.
One cried and scratched her own face.
One calmly stated, “We deserve this.”
And one… just laughed.
The black line on her arm was now two.
Thin. Branching. Moving slowly up her skin like digital veins.
She’d stopped checking mirrors.
They no longer reflected just her.
Morning.
Rina returned to school. Not because she wanted to—but because staying home felt even more dangerous.
The school was quiet.
Too quiet.
Students sat still in their chairs, barely blinking.
The teachers repeated lessons like they were reading from corrupted scripts.
And worst of all?
No one remembered Lala.
Not her seat.
Not her face.
Not even her name.
It was like the system had erased her in the real world too.
She approached Mr. Harlan, her history teacher.
“Sir, do you know where Lala—uh, Layla Anggraini—is?”
Mr. Harlan tilted his head. “That name’s not on any record. You must be mistaken.”
Rina checked her phone.
Every photo of her and Lala?
Glitched. Blurry. Blank.
One of them had a filename: LALA_ECHO01.JPG.
That night, Rina returned to her own laptop.
She reopened the /proto/whisper program.
But this time, she tried a new command:
trace_origin -proto whisper
The screen flickered.
A file appeared:
/core/echo/original.bak
She opened it.
And inside was a journal.
Someone had written a personal log.
It wasn’t Claire.
It wasn’t Mara.
It was dated twenty years ago.
By a student named:
R.N. Eleanora
Her first entry:
"I thought deleting my pain would save me. But pain is where the soul hides."
"The whispers began after my second deletion."
"They spoke in my voice, and soon… I wasn’t sure which one of us was real."
The entries described experiments.
Trying to externalize memories.
Transfer emotions into files.
Letting the system "carry" trauma for the mind.
But it failed.
Each backup formed its own identity.
Some harmless.
Some curious.
And one… began whispering to the others. Binding them together.
That one called itself: “The Original”.
Rina’s breath caught.
It wasn’t just her.
Not just Claire.
Not even Mara.
The entire Whisper Protocol had been born from a girl twenty years ago…
who tried to delete her own sadness.
And failed.
Suddenly—her screen went black.
Then white text scrolled across it.
YOU ACCESSED A f*******n MEMORY
THE ECHO SEES YOU NOW
HELLO, RINA.
Her camera light blinked on.
She covered it.
But the voice spoke anyway.
Through her own speakers.
Through her mind.
“You are not the first.”
“You will not be the last.”
“But you... you’re almost ready.”
And then—
One final whisper:
“Ask yourself, Rina… when did the real you die?”
- Writer
