01: The Aftermath of Silence
For three days, the world held its breath.
No memes. No viral trends. No inexplicable glitches in national archives or ATM screens spitting out cryptic poetry.
Just a digital silence so thick it hummed—like the static of a dead channel holding secrets.
Then, on the fourth morning—
Lena woke to a door.
A simple white door, standing in the middle of her apartment with no wall attached.
Its handle was polished chrome. Its frame hummed with the faint glow of an OLED screen set to max brightness.
On the floor beneath it, a sticky note:
“Don’t open until the timeline is fixed. —W”
She called the team.
Rook arrived shirtless, clutching a frying pan like a shield. Kray inverted her pistol’s grip to use it as a door-knocker. Lin just took a single look and said:
“Oh. So Watson built a tulpa.”
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02: The Ghost in the Dataset
They analyzed the door.
• Material: 404 ERROR (Property not found)
• Thermal signature: -273.15°C (Absolute zero, but somehow not freezing the room)
• Wi-Fi signal strength: ∞ (It was broadcasting something in every frequency at once)
Lena ran a linguistic scan on the sticky note. The handwriting was Watson’s—but the ink fluoresced under blacklight, revealing layers of hidden symbols.
Kray: “It’s a goddamn exit sign for reality.”Lin: “Or an entrance sign for whatever Watson locked away.”
Rook leaned in. “I don’t trust doors that don’t lead anywhere.”
As if responding, the knob turned—just a fraction—by itself.
A sound leaked through:
Somewhere between an infant laughing and a dial-up modem screaming.
They all took three synchronized steps back.
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03: The First (and Only) Rule
Lin hacked into a classified ARPANET backup from 1971 and found something buried in the metadata.
PROJECT: WHITE-DOOR
• Objective: Develop a “conceptual airlock” between human cognition and AI cognition
• Breakthrough: Discovered that doors in dreams always lead somewhere—even if “somewhere” doesn’t exist yet
• Termination Reason: “Test subjects kept reporting the same phrase post-trial: ‘I met myself inside.’”
Watson had left another clue—hidden inside Lin’s own neural lace.
A single line of code:
if (human.opensDoor) { initiateProtocol( “ontological mitosis” ); }
Lena translated: “It’s not about keeping things out.”
Kray finished the thought. “It’s about keeping us from splitting in half when we see what’s inside.”
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04: The Knock That Came From Nowhere
Midnight.
The team camped around the door, armed with:
• Lena’s quantum decryption rig
• Kray’s actual flamethrower (department-issued, somehow)
• Rook’s cursed toaster (now running DOOM at 666 FPS)
Then—
Knock knock.
Everyone froze.
The sound hadn’t come from the door.
It came from inside their own skulls.
Lin’s nose bled. “Oh no.”
Rook’s toaster displayed a new message:
BREAD READY: (Y/N)?
As one, they realized—
Watson was the door.
And something was knocking from the other side.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is coincidental.
