The agent crouched low in the alley, the flickering neon lights jerking like a mind caught in a seizure. Shadows danced on the walls, erratic as neurons firing in a dying brain. The Interzone hummed with the static of fractured realities, a buzz that bled through everything—glitching, fraying, as bits of half-thoughts and lost memories crawled up the spines of the unwary. He felt them out there, the watchers—ghosts in the machine, invisible, feeding off the surveillance lattice that crisscrossed the fabric of the world. The web never let anything go, and in the Interzone, detection was no longer just a risk—it was the final breath, a pinpoint incision cutting away the self.
Ahead, the checkpoint loomed—a jagged thing, an insect’s exoskeleton of glass and wire, twitching with sensors that sniffed the air for the smallest deviation. The agent was running out of time. His cover was a paper-thin mask, already peeling under the scrutiny of too many cross-references, too many eyes watching from the corners.
But he still had one last play, a filthy ace in the hole, a weapon so volatile it threatened to destroy not only him but the very bones of the Interzone itself.
From the folds of his coat, he pulled the artifact—dark and sleek, its surface gleaming with the ghost of something old, something dangerous. A relic whispered about in anarchist circles and corporate backrooms. A thing rumored to have been used in some forgotten neuro-war, its purpose lost in the undercurrents of time. It was no simple device; it was a scalpel for the mind, capable of slicing through consciousness with a precision that would unravel the threads of identity, of ego, of everything.
He turned it in his hands, the hum of it almost a heartbeat, an itch. The instructions had come in fragments—vague, cryptic: twist the dial, don’t hold it too long, and above all, don’t look back.
The agent pressed himself into the corner of the alley, his breath shallow, his pulse syncing with the low hum of the artifact. He twisted the dial.
The effect was immediate, as if the world itself had been punched in the gut. A sound—no, a sensation—rippled outward, inaudible to the physical ear but deafening to the psyche, a psychic tremor that knocked everything loose. His stomach churned, his vision warped, reality itself bending at the edges, a sickening distortion that made him feel like he was slipping through the cracks.
Around him, the air thickened—shimmered. The boundary between the real and the imagined began to bleed. The device had torn a hole, a fracture in the collective mind, and everything within a twenty-meter radius snapped loose like balloons with the strings cut. Ego and identity flung apart, scrambling, reassembling in wrong places, wrong bodies, wrong memories. It was chaos. Total, absolute chaos.
The superegos shattered first, like totalitarian regimes in an unplanned coup, their rigid structures dissolving into gibberish. The invisible judges—the ones that kept the Interzone in line—blinked out of existence, their roles vanished into the void. The ids, the raw, primal drives, burst free, wailing in ecstasy and horror, their desires spilling into the open, unchecked, uncontrolled.
The world trembled. It wasn’t just a tremor—it was a fracture in the very bones of reality. Buildings bent like rubber, walls quivered and undulated, breathing in and out as if the space itself were alive. The street, once a place of cold order, had become a fever dream. A man in a pinstripe suit staggered into view, his face slack, tears streaming down his cheeks. He clawed at his chest, mouthing words that would never be completed, a thought broken before it could even exist.
Nearby, a woman in an Interzone bureaucrat’s uniform collapsed, clutching her head. Her lips moved in frantic cycles, sentences folding over themselves—someone else’s guilt, her own prayers, advertisements from a life she couldn’t remember.
The guards at the checkpoint—once sharp, precise—had turned into parodies of themselves. One slumped against the monolith, helmet gone, his eyes staring into nothing, his lips trembling with a lullaby from some long-dead memory. Another stood, rifle in hand, twitching like an insect at the end of its life. His mind had locked onto a single phrase, a mantra that looped endlessly: not supposed to happen, not supposed to happen.
The artifact in the agent’s hand pulsed again, its glow soft but malevolent, a star long dead but still burning, refusing to go out. It was rewriting everything. The air itself cracked, reality itself torn apart at the seams. The ghosts of identities scrambled, tried to take shape, but failed, dissolving into vapor before they could solidify.
As he moved, the streets became unrecognizable—a warped tableau of madness. A businessman dropped to all fours, barking, sniffing at a woman’s skirt. She spun in place, singing in a child’s voice, a song that was more nightmare than nursery rhyme. A group of children spilled from a tenement, their laughter shrill and mechanical, a broken sound that didn’t belong in the world. One of them stopped, stared at the agent, and tilted its head. Eyes empty. Then it was gone, blinked out of existence.
The architecture was no better—melting, bending, warping. The checkpoint’s jagged monolith shivered, its surface bubbling, as if something underneath had been clawing its way out. The streetlights flickered, bending impossibly, their beams scattered across the ground like broken glass. The whole zone was glitching, fracturing under the pressure.
The agent pressed on, every step heavier than the last, the weight of the shattered minds pressing down on him. He could feel his own identity, his own mind, beginning to fray, foreign thoughts leaking in. A name—Theresa—slipped into his mind, a name that wasn’t his, a name that felt like it should be. The thought swam in the currents, too intense to ignore. He shoved it away, focusing on the threadbare remnant of his mission, the fragile construct of who he was.
He reached the checkpoint, and the guards didn’t even flinch. Their eyes were vacant, their bodies slack. One of them was staring at his reflection, mouthing soundless words, trying to put himself back together. Another laughed—a high, unnatural cackle that echoed across the empty street.
The agent stepped through the checkpoint without a glance backward. The scanners were blind, their systems overloaded, short-circuiting under the psychic onslaught. He moved through the chaos like a ghost, the echoes of a thousand shattered minds trailing him, their whispers tugging at the edges of his consciousness.
Behind him, the Interzone fractured, the remnants of its once-pristine control now slipping into the void. The agent didn’t look back. But something followed him, something nameless and hungry, born of the madness he’d unleashed. And it was closer than he realized.