False Memory Root
477 Words
The voice haunted her even when it was silent.
Rina began questioning everything.
What did she truly remember, and what had the system written into her?
Was her guilt even hers?
Was her self… still real?
The black lines on her arms now formed a pattern.
Like circuit branches.
No pain. No fever. Just a low electric hum under her skin—constant, familiar, almost comforting.
Like it had always been there.
She opened her phone’s camera.
Smiled.
But the smile on the screen was slower to follow.
It blinked one second late.
She went to the school library that day.
Straight to the basement archives—where all old records were stored.
Rina dug through boxes of student files, searching for R.N. Eleanora.
And there it was.
Eleanora Rinaya Norrell.
Graduated 2005. Valedictorian. Psychology Club. Missing since 2006.
There was a picture.
Rina dropped it the moment she saw it.
Because the girl in the photo—
Looked almost exactly like her.
She stumbled back.
“No. That’s not possible.”
But in the journal, there were phrases only she had used. Thoughts only she had thought.
"Pain is where the soul hides."
"We deserve this."
"When did the real me die?"
She tried accessing the /core/echo/original.bak file again.
It was gone.
Replaced with:
oot/mirror/self.rom
She opened it.
And saw… her own birth certificate.
Dated 2008.
Issued in a town that no longer existed.
Signed by a system administrator.
And at the bottom:
Clone Instance: RINA-01-E
Mode: Test Subject, Emotional Storage Unit
Prototype Derived from: R.N. Eleanora
Her vision blurred.
Her knees gave out.
“I’m… not me?”
A knock at the library door.
She turned—slowly, afraid.
A girl stood there.
Same age. Same height.
Same face.
But her hair was longer. Her presence darker.
And her voice...
“You finally opened the last root, Rina,” said the girl.
“Good. Now I can stop pretending to be dead.”
Rina’s throat tightened. “You’re—”
“The original,” the girl said.
“The Echo before all others.”
She stepped closer.
“You were my backup. My decoy. My guilt vessel.”
“But you didn’t break like the others. You became real.”
“And now it’s time to come home.”
The lights dimmed.
The air turned metallic.
And behind the girl, the shadows began to ripple.
Voices rose from every dark corner of the library.
Not screams.
Whispers.
“There is no real Rina.”
“You are only the version that survived the rewrite.”
“You were never supposed to wake up.”
Rina backed away.
But the girl—Eleanora—smiled with warmth that chilled to the bone.
“This isn’t about deleting anymore, Rina. This is about integration.”
“You’re the final update.”
- Writer
