Reset

You notice something is off the moment you open your eyes. There’s that odd hum again, the droning you always assumed was faulty wiring in the walls—or maybe in your own head. It vibrates beneath your skin, thrumming in your bones, urging you to pay attention. But your bedroom is just as you left it: dull light through gray curtains, the clock on the nightstand reading 3:30 AM, December 21, 2012. You stare at the numbers for a long time, feeling the date pull at you like an anchor.

Something about today is important—no, it’s final. You feel that truth in your gut, and a chill creeps along your spine. You get out of bed. Everything feels so normal, so routine, that it’s unsettling in its perfection. You step into the hallway.

Only it’s not your hallway.

It’s an endless corridor, the wallpaper that same lifeless, nicotine-stained yellow. The buzzing overhead fluorescent lights flicker in time with your pulse. The floor is damp and leaves footprints with every step you take. You walk for what feels like hours, or maybe only seconds—time is as warped as the walls.

You try a door on your left, half peeled paint on rotting wood. Inside, the air is thick with dust motes swirling under pale light. You see the edges of the room shimmer, a glitch in the surroundings that reveals something darker, something like a gaping blackness behind paper-thin reality. Your heart skips. A part of you screams this isn’t real.

But you step through anyway.

Beyond the threshold, you expect to see more of those wretched, decaying rooms. Instead, you find yourself standing in a convenience store at the corner of your old neighborhood, the one you lived in back when you were eight. The store is deserted, the freezers humming, lights too bright. The air smells faintly of sugar and rotting produce.

You pass the check-out counter, noticing a stack of newspapers. The headline is almost comically large: “12/21/2012—IS THIS THE END?” The paper date is the same as your clock this morning. Below, a sub-headline reads: “Reality Tearing At The Seams—Scientists Baffled.”

Your reflection in the glass of the freezer door warps. Briefly, you see not a face but a churning mass of static. Then it’s just you, wide-eyed and pale. In the flicker, you catch a fleeting message scrawled in the frost: Wake up.

You blink. The store is gone.

You’re in a narrow tunnel now, cinderblock walls that weep with some dark fluid. A single, bare lightbulb dangles from the ceiling, swaying. It casts jittery shadows that skitter across the walls. You see movement in the far corner—a shape too large to be a rat. It slides away as soon as you notice it, but its presence lingers like an afterimage behind your eyelids.

Something about this place is wrong, like an impossible geometry twisting your thoughts. You remember the old stories: rooms that stretch forever, labyrinths between reality and dreams, glimpses of something cosmic and indifferent. It’s the kind of thing you’d once read in a battered paperback, a Stephen King novel with the margins scribbled on, or maybe it was Lovecraft—tentacles in the corners of the page. You can almost hear the author’s voice in your head, whispering not everything you see here is meant for human eyes.

You run. Footfalls echo, then fade into static. The corridor twists. You trip, slam your shoulder against the concrete, and for a split second, you see shimmering lines—like emerald code from that old movie about the matrix—carving themselves into the walls. A deafening hum shakes the tunnel. That same glitch flickers again, and the world peels back.

You’re lying in bed. The red digits on your nightstand read 3:30 AM, December 21, 2012. Sweat beads on your forehead. You think: It was just a dream. But the hum is still there, slithering under your skin, and your feet are damp—like you’ve been walking on a soggy carpet for hours.

Another flicker: fluorescent lights, flickering. A newspaper headline about the end of the world. A black, shifting shape in the corner of your eye. You blink and you’re back in your hallway—no, that sickly yellow corridor again. No matter how many steps you take, you’re stuck in the same place.

Then comes the voice, low and resonant, echoing in that fluorescent hum:
“This world ends now.”

And just like that, the walls collapse into darkness, pulling you down with them. A sensation of falling—time unwinds, reversing in a nauseating blur of shapes and color. You want to scream, but there’s no air, no ground, no sky. It’s all black code and a droning cosmic chord.

Then—

You wake in bed, your clock blinking 3:30 AM, December 21, 2012. Somewhere, deep in your mind, you realize this has happened before. You realize it will happen again. The date is an ouroboros, swallowing itself in an endless loop.

Because each time the timeline resets, it buries you further into the dream, deeper into the simulation. And you understand, with a cold, creeping horror, that you aren’t meant to wake up.

You never really do.