Before you are three doors

  One leads to freedom

  One leads to a loop—you’ll start again, remembering nothing

  One leads to the truth. But the truth, once seen, can never be unseen.”

  RULES

  You may ask only one question to help you choose.You will not receive a direct answer from none other than yourself.Choose wisely. The wrong door doesn’t kill you. It just brings you back here.As always play well enough, and you can leave.”

  “So… Subject 0018—what question will you ask your own mind to find the truth?”

  Three doors. One truth. One lie. One memory he buried with reason.

  He hears his own heartbeat, not in his chest—but in the walls.

  He speaks slowly.

  “If I can only ask one question… and the doors can’t answer, only my mind can…”

  He steps forward, his voice tightening.

  “Then my question is—Which memory still hurts the most?”

  Silence stretches. Then—images flicker.

  His mother at the dinner table, smiling thinly, the glow of a wine glass beside her.

  His father, coat still on, hunched at his desk—tie tight.A window, open. Curtains flailing. The sound of wind and..

  He opens his eyes. He walks to the door on the left.Just before touching the handle, he mutters:

  “Pain is real. Even when nothing else is.”

  It started with silence.

  Stolen story; please report.

  A silence that dripped from the corners of memory, staining everything it touched.

  Upon opening the door the scene shifts and there sat Subject 0018 motionless in the chair. The walls were the same blinding white, infinite. But his mind had begun to fracture in ways he couldn’t control. The voice hadn’t returned since the last question. No puzzles. No riddles. Just stillness. “Did I chose wrong” he said to himself.

  As he held his head in his hands thinking if he did or didn’t do what was right.

  A smell.

  Not of antiseptic or metal or the damp cold of confinement—but cologne. Faint but Familiar. The kind his father used to wear.

  The chair beneath him dissolved, and the walls fell away like paper under fire. Suddenly he was small again. Eight , maybe Nine. He was sitting on a high-backed leather chair, spinning slowly. The office was too big for him—dark wood shelves, glass cabinets filled with gadgets he wasn’t allowed to touch, and against the back wall: a sealed door with a silver biometric scanner.

  The White Room.

  He remembered asking about it.

  “What’s in there, Dad?”

  His father chuckled,

  “Just a lab, bud. You wouldn’t like it just boring grown-up stuff.”

  But the door had burned itself into his brain. And now, older, restrained in a new version of that very room, the pieces began to slide into place.

  His father had promised to be home by 7. They were supposed to have dinner together—just him and Mom. She wore lipstick that night, a deep red shade she only used on anniversaries. Her fingers tapped the table nervously every time she glanced at the clock.

  7 turned into 8. Then 9.

  By 10:03, she stopped pretending. She didn’t say a word. Just stood, grabbed her keys, and left.

  Subject 0018 remembered falling asleep on the couch with the TV playing quietly. He woke up hours later to the sound of the front door creaking open. His mother stood there, soaked in sweat despite the night chill, eyes empty, hands shaking.

  She didn’t speak.

  Just walked to the bedroom and locked the door behind her. It wasn’t until days later that he noticed something had changed in her. She smiled less. Ate less. Drank more. When he asked about Dad, she said he was on a work trip. That he’d be back soon.

  But her eyes couldn’t lie.

  Subject 0018 remembered knocking on her door one morning and hearing quiet sobbing behind it. He pretended he didn’t.

  Weeks passed. Her excuses became thinner. Her eyes darker. He’d wake up to find half-empty bottles in the sink, pill containers stacked like dominos along the edge of the bathtub.

  One afternoon, he came home from school to find her unconscious—floating in lukewarm water. Her skin pale. Her lips blue.The scene stayed with him like a scar etched across the inside of his skull.Hospital walls. Beeping monitors. White sheets that reminded him too much of somewhere else.

  A doctor with tired eyes pulled him aside.

  “She’s alive… but barely.” He stated

  Subject 0018 sat there, stiff and quiet.

  “The pills she took target the thalamic nerves. The dosage was too high—far too high. The signal pathways to her brain have been overwhelmed.” The doctor added

  “…What does that mean?” Subject 0018 asked.

  The doctor hesitated. “She’s brain-dead.”

  His stomach turned.

  “I also need to tell you something else. About your father.”

  And just like that, the world cracked.

  “He’s not on a work trip,” the doctor said gently. “He’s… gone. We found him three weeks ago. In his office. He’d taken his own life. Your mother is the one who discovered him. She asked us not to tell you yet.”

  The floor seemed to fall from under him.