Clyde barely had time to react before the ground beneath him cracked wide open. The pit that formed below him seemed to stretch endlessly downward, filled with shifting fragments of corrupted data, like a living glitch threatening to devour everything in its path.
Instinctively, he stumbled backward, his heart pounding. But the building wasn't finished with him. The walls shook violently, the overhead lights flickering out one by one. A deep rumble echoed from somewhere below, as if the very foundation of the facility was crumbling.
He glanced up, the figures in lab coats now nowhere to be seen. Panic surged through him. Where did they go? Were they trying to trap him here?
"Get it together," he muttered under his breath, forcing himself to steady his nerves. The world felt as if it was breaking apart at the seams, but he couldn't let it swallow him whole.
The voice came again, a distant whisper at first, but growing louder with every passing second. It felt like it was all around him, inside him—distorting his thoughts.
"You cannot escape what you are. What we made you."
Clyde's head snapped up. The words… they didn't feel like they were just in his mind. No, they were being projected, forced into his reality. He looked around frantically, trying to find the source. But there was nothing.
The pit below him seemed to pulse, as if alive. Each flicker of light revealed more twisted data fragments in its depths—faces, images, memories that didn't belong to him, each one sinking into the darkness. Some of them were familiar—snippets of his old life, fragments of faces and places he recognized but couldn't fully grasp.
"You are a failure."
A sharp pain shot through his skull. He gasped, clutching his head as another vision flooded his mind. The sterile laboratory again. The glowing text on the screen. But now, the words were clearer, more pronounced:
"LEGACY REWRITE PROJECT: PHASE III - SUBJECT: CLYDE ERENHART."
The name echoed in his mind, and the weight of it settled heavily in his chest. He was the subject. The test. He wasn't the only one.
Suddenly, a figure appeared before him, stepping out of the shifting darkness like a ghost materializing from the void. The same man from before—the one who had warned him about the rewrite.
Clyde's breath hitched.
"You… What is this place? Why am I here?.