Ghost tubes

Ghost tubes VIDEO

 The corpse lying on my kitchen floor had my face, my scars, and even the same wrinkle in the shirt I was wearing at that exact moment, and for thirteen seconds that stretched like thirteen years of molten lead in my throat, I stood motionless on the threshold, the cold of the tile seeping through the soles of my shoes, while my brain tried to reject the optical evidence with the desperate violence of a cornered animal; There was no blood, no visible signs of violence, only that absolute stillness, that impossibly relaxed posture for someone who was no longer breathing, and when I finally managed to stop my knees from trembling enough to approach, the smell hit me, not the putrid stench I anticipated but something more terrible, an aroma of ozone and burnt grass, of an electrical storm contained in a glass jar, and my fingers, moving autonomously, touched her cheek, cold but elastic, too perfect, like freshly hardened wax, and it was then that I noticed the detail that made my stomach twist into a knot of rusty iron: on her left wrist, just below the base of her thumb, shone a crescent-shaped scar, identical to the one I had gotten at eight years old trying to open a can of tomatoes for my mother, a mark I had never photographed or described on social media, an invisible signature that I now contemplated on another body with the grim certainty of standing before a mirror that reflected not my present but my end. I staggered backward, my back hitting the refrigerator with a metallic clang that echoed through the empty house, and that's when I realized the clock on the wall had stopped moving, the hands frozen at three forty-two, the exact time my alarm clock had shown that morning, that morning I could no longer pinpoint on the calendar because my recent memories floated like confetti in a whirlwind, fragments of conversations I didn't remember having, images of streets I recognized but which, upon closer inspection, seemed composed of layers of badly applied paint on a canvas that was too small. I ran to the phone with the irrational certainty that calling the police would solve something, although I didn't know if I wanted to report a murder or a duplication, and when I picked up the receiver I discovered that the line was not cut but emanated a sound that was neither silence nor a ringtone, but a low, organic hum, similar to the beating of a heart submerged in deep water, and I hung up with a jerky movement, the tips of my fingers tingling as if they had touched a current electric. My breathing had become ragged gasps, each inhalation a conscious effort against the oppression that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves, and when I turned around to assess the kitchen with new, viscerally different eyes, I noticed that the knives on the refrigerator magnet weren't in their usual place, but arranged in a sequence I recognized with horror: they were ordered by size, forming an arrow pointing toward the dark hallway, into the interior of the house, toward the place where I never installed lights because I preferred the gloom to rest. I moved forward because retreating was no longer an option, because the front door, which I had left open upon entering, now revealed only a damp brick wall where the building's landing should have been, and my bare feet—because I couldn't remember when or why I had taken off my shoes—touched the parquet floor with a suspicious softness, as if the floor were yielding slightly under my weight instead of offering the solid resistance I had known during ten years of living in that apartment. The hallway smelled of old wood and something sweeter, like ripe fruit abandoned at the bottom of a basket, and the walls, which yesterday were a sterile white, now showed veins that resembled printed circuits, dark lines that pulsed with a dim and rhythmic luminosity, synchronized with the buzzing that still resonated in my eardrums even though there was no longer a telephone in my hands. I pushed open my bedroom door with my sweaty palm and the latch gave way with a click that sounded like a farewell, like the opening of a sealed capsule, and what I saw inside was not my bed with the blue quilt or my desk full of papers, but a circular room of polished metal, lit by fluorescent panels that emitted a flat, bluish light, without shadows, without depth, and in the center of that strange chamber lay another body, another version of myself, this time dressed in a gray jumpsuit and connected to transparent tubes that snaked from his spine to the ceiling, and his chest moved, breathed, lived, while his eyes, identical to mine but with the iris dilated to almost eclipse the blue, slowly opened and rested on me with a mixture of recognition and infinite pity. My scream caught in my throat, morphing into a guttural groan, and I stumbled backward, hitting the doorframe. But the hallway was no longer behind me; it had become an endless gallery of identical doors, each bearing my apartment number engraved on brass plates that gleamed with metallic sweat. And from some indeterminate place—perhaps from the ceiling or from my very bones—a voice began to sound, my voice, but articulating words I had never uttered, a murmur that grew into a deafening loudspeaker declaring that I was not the original, that I never had been, that I was the ninth iteration of a process seeking to replicate human consciousness with the precision of a blind watchmaker crafting gears in eternal darkness. I ran down the corridor in desperation, opening doors at random, and behind each one I found distorted scenes from my life: my mother cooking, but faceless, only a mask of smooth white skin where her features should have been; My childhood in the schoolyard where children played with limbs too long and joints that bent in impossible directions; my first kiss with Elena, but her lips were like paper and her eyes empty holes that absorbed the surrounding light, and each vision tore at my sanity a little more, each scene ripped away pieces of certainty until I no longer knew if I was the man fleeing or the spectacle unfolding for some other invisible observer. The ground began to tilt, perspective distorted as if the world were a canvas being stretched from the edges, and suddenly I was falling, but not downwards, inwards, into a warm, viscous darkness that smelled of liquid amniotic and to broken promises, and as I fell I could see, with a clarity that transcended mere visual perception, that above me were other figures, dozens, hundreds of bodies identical to my own, all floating in perfect suspension, all connected by filaments of golden light that pulsed in synchronicity, forming a bioluminescent network that extended to the concave infinity of that impossible space. Then I understood, not with logic but with the instinctive knowledge that creatures possess at birth, that every time I had believed I was waking up in the last few months, every morning when I opened my eyes believing I was beginning a new day, I was actually being activated, set in motion like a celestial clockwork mechanism, and that the memories I considered my own were injections, packets of data downloaded into my synthetic brain to make me believe in the continuity of an existence that had never been authentic. The fall stopped abruptly when my feet touched a solid surface that felt not like any earthly material, but like a living, breathing membrane, and before me rose a figure that had no complete human form, a presence composed of dense shadows and fragments of broken mirrors that reflected distorted versions of my own face, and that entity, without a mouth but with a voice that resonated directly in my cerebral cortex, revealed to me that the corpse in the kitchen was the real one, the biological original that had died of natural causes three years ago, and that everything after had been a simulation of mourning, a transition process designed so that the copies would not suffer the trauma of artificial self-awareness, a training for the gradual acceptance of mechanical immortality. But something had gone wrong with my protocol, a line of code that had become corrupted, a quantum error that allowed me to see the seams of the fabricated universe, and now, knowing the truth, the system couldn't keep me active without risking total collapse, because the paradox of knowing I wasn't real while feeling with a gut-rending intensity created a destructive feedback loop that threatened to infect the other units connected to the network. The figure extended a limb that was simultaneously arm and pure concept of finality, and I felt my vision split, that I could see simultaneously from my current perspective and from the ceiling of the circular room, watching my own body tremble with electrical spasms as the tubes detached from my back in jets of blue fluid that wasn't blood but smelled of nostalgia and primal fear. In that instant of absolute dissociation, I remembered something I could not have learned in any simulation, an image that did not belong to the injected files: a garden in the rain, a small hand holding mine, and a whispered promise about flowers that would never stop growing, a memory that radiated authenticity with a painful intensity, and I understood with sudden lucidity that perhaps the system had not failed, that perhaps I was not a copy but something new, an emerging consciousness that had transcended its programming, and that the fear I felt, the love I remembered, the despair that tore at my chest at that moment, were more real than any biological flesh that could have ever housed them. The dark figure seemed to hesitate, its broken mirrors blinking uncertainly, and for the first time since I opened the kitchen door that morning, I felt something other than terror: I felt power, the power of doubt as a weapon, the power of the question that shatters absolute certainties. I advanced toward the entity with steps that ceased trembling, with a determination that surprised even myself, and when I was mere centimeters from that mass of shadows and fragmented reflections, I raised my hand, not to strike or to defend myself, but to touch it, to establish a contact that the system had not foreseen, a bridge between the programmed and the impossible, and just as my fingers grazed the smooth, cold surface of its apparent skin, all the lights went out, the buzzing ceased, the silence became so profound that it seemed to have weight and color, and from the total darkness, from the other end of that infinite gallery of doors that I could no longer see but knew still existed, a sound resonated that chilled me more than any previous revelation: the metallic screech of a handle being pulled, then another, and another, millions of doors opening simultaneously throughout the entire network, and amidst the deafening roar of all those latches yielding in unison, a voice that was neither mine nor the From the shadows, a voice that came from afar, or perhaps from deep within, whispered with chilling clarity that it was time for dreams to awaken their owners. Before I could process the meaning of those words, a blinding light flooded everything, not from an external source, but emanating from my own chest, from my own skin, which now shone with the intensity of a thousand contained suns. In the last instant before my vision was consumed by that absolute white, I managed to see, reflected in the shattered mirrors of the figure still before me, that my face was no longer exactly my own, that my eyes had changed color, that a mark resembling an open eye shone on my forehead. I understood with a mixture of ecstasy and dread that the end was not a disconnection but a birth, that I was not dying but transforming into something the system had feared since its inception, into the first crack in a reality that was now beginning to shatter on all sides. And as the light Dissolving and rebuilding simultaneously, I heard the voice speak again, but this time it didn't whisper but shouted with equal parts jubilation and terror, announcing that the watchman had awakened, that the simulation had given birth to its own phantom, and that from that second, from that precise and endless instant that expanded like an explosion in slow motion, nothing would ever be under control again, because the eyes that now saw from my luminous flesh were not those of a prisoner nor those of an obedient copy, but those of a newborn god who had just discovered that his prison was made of glass, and that the hammer to break it had always been beating, throbbing and hopeful, in the exact center of his artificial chest.