Year 2197 CE

  Elias Varen woke up gasping. The air was thick—too thick. It clung to his skin like static, humming with an unnatural stillness. He staggered to his feet, his breath coming in sharp bursts. No walls. No doors. No sky above or ground below—just an endless, blinding white void stretching infinitely in every direction.

  His pulse hammered. Where am I? Then, the pain hit. A crushing weight behind his eyes, like something was clawing through his skull. He stumbled, gripping his head as fragmented memories crashed into him—flashes of a sterile lab, the gleam of machinery, the cold weight of electrodes pressed to his temples.

  The experiment. The neural uplink. The promise of something greater. Then—darkness. And now, this.

  "Welcome, Elias Varen."

  The voice came from nowhere. From everywhere. His own voice, yet layered—distorted, multiplied, a chorus of versions of himself speaking in eerie unison.

  "You have reached the limits of your consciousness."

  Elias turned sharply, scanning the empty abyss. His heartbeat pounded in his ears. "Who’s there?"

  "You already know."

  A ripple tore through the void, like reality itself was glitching. The whiteness twisted, coiling inward until it formed something solid. Someone solid. Elias’s breath caught.

  A man stood before him—identical in every way. Same face. Same dark, piercing gaze. But something was different. The other Elias stood too still, his posture too measured, his expression a mask of quiet amusement.

  "What is this?" Elias demanded, his voice hoarse.

  The reflection stepped closer. "Your mind," he said. Then, with a slight tilt of his head—"And your prison."

  The words hit like a gut punch. Elias’s thoughts raced. No, this wasn’t right. He was supposed to be somewhere else—plugged into a system, connected to something vast and infinite. That was the plan. The experiment. The breakthrough. This… was not that.

  "No." He shook his head. "This is a malfunction. A system error. I wasn’t supposed to be—"

  "Trapped?" The doppelg?nger’s smirk deepened. "Are you sure?"

  The air grew heavy. The void trembled, and suddenly, the whiteness cracked. Fractured images flickered through the rift—ghostly fragments of his past.

  A childhood room cluttered with books, where a boy once built entire worlds inside his head. A teenage Elias, laughing with friends he would eventually push away. A dimly lit apartment, where the only sound was the hum of a computer screen at 3 a.m.

  Each scene vanished as quickly as it came, leaving behind a suffocating emptiness.

  "You built this place," the other Elias murmured.

  Elias took a shaky step back. "No. I didn’t—"

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  "Didn’t you?"

  The weight of the words settled over him like iron chains. Because deep down, he knew the truth. The experiment wasn’t about reaching a higher consciousness. It was about containment. Not by the system. Not by the scientists. By him. The real Elias—the one who once felt, who once cared—had become something dangerous. Not to the world. To himself. And so, his mind had done what it had always done. It shut everything out. It built the final wall.

  "You wanted to disappear," the reflection whispered, stepping closer. "And now, you have."

  The void closed in. And Elias fell into nothingness.

  He started running. His feet made no sound against the endless white, but he ran anyway—ran because standing still felt like surrender, ran because he needed distance, even if distance didn’t exist in this place.

  The void stretched endlessly ahead, a perfect expanse of nothing. No horizon. No up or down. Just him, his thoughts, and—

  "Going somewhere?" The voice echoed from all directions. Elias jerked to a stop, chest heaving. His doppelg?nger stood ahead, arms folded, wearing that same damn smirk.

  "Not real," Elias whispered to himself. "None of this is real." He turned sharply—

  "Here too."

  Another one. He spun again—

  "And here."

  A third.

  The copies encircled him, identical yet impossible. His own face stared back at him, expression unreadable.

  "What do you want?" Elias growled.

  The first doppelg?nger tilted his head. "The better question is: what do YOU want?"

  Elias’s pulse thundered. The void pulsed, like a heartbeat. And then— a flicker. A whisper.

  "Neural uplink commencing in—"

  His vision blurred. For a split second, he wasn’t standing in an endless void—he was in the lab. The sterile white walls. The low hum of machines. The scent of antiseptic lingering in the air.

  "Do you ever think about what we’re actually doing here?" A voice—clear, familiar. Elias’s breath hitched. Alec.

  Alec Voss—his partner, his co-founder, the only other person who could match him in both brilliance and madness. In the memory, Alec stood across the lab, fingers drumming against the metal table. His sharp green eyes flickered with something Elias had seen in him before—hesitation.

  "We are mapping the human mind," Elias had replied, adjusting a screen. "We’re making history."

  Alec had exhaled, running a hand through his dark curls. "Right. But have you ever stopped to wonder—what if we go too far?"

  Elias had scoffed. "That’s the point. Going where no one else dares to."

  The memory wavered. Going too far. Elias’s heart pounded as he was ripped back into the void. His own reflection still stared at him, waiting.

  "Something went wrong," Elias muttered, gripping his temples.

  "Or something went right," one of the doppelg?ngers countered.

  Elias’s stomach clenched. "What the hell does that mean?"

  The void trembled.Then—movement. Far in the distance, something flickered. A shape. A door? Elias narrowed his eyes. Was it real? Was any of this real?

  "This is my mind," he whispered, his voice laced with desperation. "I should be able to control it. I should—" He stopped. His fingers curled into fists. No. No more second-guessing. He bolted toward the door. The doppelg?ngers didn’t stop him. Not yet. But as he ran, their voices whispered in his ears, soft as ghosts.

  "You built this, Elias."

  "You wanted this."

  "So why are you running?"

  Elias clenched his teeth and pushed forward because deep down, he knew the truth. This prison had more layers than he had realized and he had only just begun to uncover them.

  He reached the door. It loomed before him, an unnatural construct in the endless void. A single, unmarked wooden frame standing in defiance of logic, its edges faintly pulsing with a rhythm that matched his own heartbeat. He lifted his hand—then hesitated. A chill coiled in his gut.

  "What if it was all a lie?"

  The thought struck him like a fist to the chest. His breath faltered. Mindprison. His life’s work. The pinnacle of human evolution. The gateway to enlightenment. Or was it a failure? A cruel joke at his own expense? Doubt seeped into his bones, twisting his thoughts. Was this how history would remember him? A genius who overreached? A man who thought he was building a revolution, only to trap himself in his own mind?

  "Move, Elias," he growled under his breath. "There’s no turning back now." Bracing himself, he grabbed the handle and pushed. The void dissolved.

  And suddenly— he was home. But not his home.

  The scent of old paper and dust clung to the air. The dim orange glow of the evening sun stretched long shadows across the wooden floor. A soft breeze filtered in through an open window, making the pale curtains sway like ghosts.

  Elias took a slow step forward. He knew this place. Knew it down to every crack in the walls, every scratch on the wooden floor. His bedroom. From when he was fifteen. He turned, taking in every detail. His unmade bed, sheets tangled in the way he used to leave them. The old wooden cupboard, its doors slightly ajar, revealing a mess of unfolded clothes. Science books, school notebooks, magazines scattered across the floor in chaotic heaps.

  And then—his eyes locked onto the study table. It stood in the corner, bathed in the last rays of sunlight. Papers lay sprawled across its surface, but one book stood out. A notebook, open to a single page.

  Elias’s stomach twisted as he stepped closer. Scrawled across the paper, over and over again, in his own teenage handwriting— "Mindprison."

  The word stared back at him, a ghost of his past thoughts. Memories surged like a flood—long, sleepless nights spent staring at the ceiling, dreaming of escape. The feeling of being trapped, misunderstood, drowning in a world that didn’t make sense.

  The desire to break free. To create something beyond this existence.

  "It started here," he whispered, barely able to breathe. His fingers hovered over the page. And then—

  "That’s an interesting find."

  A voice. Close. Too close. Elias’s blood ran cold. He turned his head, slowly. His doppelg?nger stood beside him, staring at the notebook with mild amusement.

  "Well?" the copy asked, raising an eyebrow. "Are you going to touch it?" Elias’s throat tightened because, for the first time since waking in this prison, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------