Morning came like any other. Light spilling through the kitchen blinds in vertical stripes, toast humming from the auto-slicer, and the subtle scent of heated soy-milk curling through the vents. Iven stood at the counter, his back half-stretched, his eyes glazed in that early-morning, pre-cognitive haze. The day looked manageable. Meetings at the warehouse were staggered until noon while his lesson plan at the school was light, painting this time. They were reviewing contrast today, a deeper lesson from color.

  He packed lunch for his son. Vegetable crisps, small sandwiches, and a sticker with a cartoon robot he knew had long been discontinued but still found charming. His wife passed through the room with her usual velocity, dressed sharply, already halfway through some task she hadn’t explained yet. She kissed his cheek in passing.

  And then the day began.

  His son came downstairs, hair sticking in two directions, dragging one sock across the floor and mumbling a request for “the green spoon.” Iven gave it to him without asking why. Some mornings just required specific rituals. His son’s eyes were still adjusting to the room’s brightness, blinking in slow irritation.

  “Cold today,” the boy muttered, hunching over his cereal like it might try to run.

  Iven ruffled his hair on the way past, already moving to wipe down a spill that hadn’t quite happened yet. “You’ll warm up by recess.”

  “I don’t like recess.”

  “You say that every day.”

  “And it’s still true.”

  They shared a glance, dry amusement flickering between them like static, and then fell back into parallel motion: one eating, one cleaning, both orbiting the gravity of morning.

  The front door gave its usual double-click and half-hiss as it sealed behind his wife. She had left a faint trail of floral shampoo and something sharper—graphite or ink or numbers. Iven watched the trail vanish in the air, then turned back toward his son, who had started drawing on the napkin again.

  “Same pickup time?” he asked.

  The boy nodded, focused on what was now a poorly drawn frog with wings.

  Iven paused for a moment, watching him. Noticing the slight twitch in his fingers, the way his shoulders curved a bit more than usual. He said nothing about it. Kids had moods. They ran warm one day, cold the next.

  Still, the itch of something small and invisible settled just behind his ribs.

  He glanced once at the clock.

  The world outside blinked in slow continuity. There was enough time to finish breakfast. Enough to review the slide deck for the warehouse. Enough to live a normal, useful, average day.

  Around 11:16 a.m., as Iven was reviewing a student’s painting of a “quiet-colored rainbow,” his comm unit pinged, two short pulses, no chime. A school health notification.

  He stood up mid-sentence, blinking. Jamileh looked over from the corner of the room and paused her own lesson.

  “Everything alright?”

  “I have to leave,” he said, already collecting his bag. “It’s my son.”

  He didn’t wait for her response.

  Outside, the air felt thinner.

  By the time he arrived at the child’s school, his son was waiting near the admin desk, bundled in an oversized hoodie, pale and curled slightly inward. The receptionist gave a gentle nod and passed over a small data-slate with vitals. Nothing dangerous like a fever spike. Just fatigue and nausea with slight tremor in the limbs. All within common thresholds.

  But it didn’t feel common.

  Iven crouched beside him, brushing a hand across his hair. “We’re going home.”

  The boy didn’t argue.

  At home, Iven cancelled the rest of his shifts, both at the school and the warehouse. He didn’t say why. Just sent a message and left the devices charging in sleep mode.

  The kitchen lights dimmed as per his mood profile. He barely noticed.

  The boy curled into the couch under a half-folded blanket, sipping broth slowly. The cartoon on screen played without volume.

  Iven stood in the hallway longer than necessary, hand resting on the doorframe, eyes fixed somewhere just beyond his son’s outline. The screen's soft flickers cast shifting shadows across the floor. Reds became purples, yellows melted into soft greens. They washed over the blanket, the small shape beneath it, and the untouched pillow near the boy’s side.

  He moved eventually, stepping quietly into the kitchen. He opened a drawer and closed it again. Then another. His hands touched surfaces only to confirm their existence.

  The kettle activated itself at 3:06 p.m., responding to prompts in the home routine. He canceled it without a word.

  Outside, the day refused to decide between gray and blue. The clouds hung mid-shift, slow and uncertain. Shadows formed without source, and the wind moved without sound.

  Iven glanced toward the couch again. The boy hadn’t touched the broth in five minutes. Still breathing, chest rising, falling, but slower than before.

  He turned away.

  There was nothing unusual. Not really. Children caught things all the time. So did the tired days, the days when bodies worked extra hard and didn’t show it. The symptoms were small and common.

  Still, something leaned against his ribs.

  He moved to the sink and washed his hands. Slowly. One finger at a time. Then the other hand. As if something invisible had dusted across his palms. The water ran too hot, but he didn’t adjust it. He dried them on the nearest towel, which remained slightly damp from earlier.

  In the other room, the cartoon looped back to its intro sequence. He recognized the music even without sound. It always played the same way, small animals building something elaborate and unnecessary.

  His stomach felt hollow, maybe from hunger.

  He returned to the living room, sat in the armchair without sound, and watched the screen for a few minutes beside the boy. The blanket had shifted slightly, and he adjusted it, tucking it tighter around the boy’s shoulder. The small hand clutched the edge of the fabric, warm to the touch. Iven sat back, hands resting on his knees, trying to ease his breathing without making it obvious.

  His gaze locked forward, held by flickers of color on the muted screen. The cartoon played on, a soft parade of rhythm and motion, but his eyes failed to track it. They stayed open too long between blinks. Glassy, too wide, and too still. Light reflected in them, but recognition floated somewhere behind.

  He didn’t move when the front door opened, the sound registering like a ripple through distant water.

  His wife stepped into the hallway, coat over one arm, hair slightly wind-blown. She paused when she saw him frozen in posture, eyes distant, jaw set like a hinge under tension. Her steps softened as she entered, scanning the room with careful slowness. She followed his line of sight to the screen, then to their child, then back again.

  “Iven,” she said.

  He didn’t respond. His fingers remained curled against his knees, breath shallow. Still staring, as if looking through the walls, or beyond them.

  She crossed the room. Her hand brushed his shoulder.

  He blinked.

  Then blinked again.

  Slowly, his body uncoiled from its rigid frame. His hands lifted with hesitance, and for a moment he looked at her as though she stood in two places at once—here, and far away.

  He reached out.

  Pulled her closer.

  With one arm, he held her. With the other, he embraced the child still nestled in the blanket. His fingers pressed into the curve of both their backs, as if anchoring himself through them.

  His wife said nothing. She simply let herself fold into the shape of his arms.

  They stayed there, silent, in the pale light of the screen.

  His chest rose unevenly. Breath caught and shuddered through his frame.

  The cartoon looped again. Soft light. Harmless color. A world where nothing ever failed to fix itself.

  Iven’s head lowered, resting against his wife’s temple, eyes closing for the first time since she entered.

  His voice arrived in a whisper, hardly shaped by sound.

  “I don’t want this to pass.”

  She didn’t ask what he meant.

  She just held him tighter.

  -

  The boy laid on the bed, tucked beneath a pale synthetic blanket, his limbs small and impossibly still except for his hands. Fingers tapped along the surface of a console, a new release from the week before, its neon interface casting soft blues and greens across his face. His brow furrowed in faint concentration, lips pressed together with a seriousness only children gave to games.

  The screen in his lap shifted shapes. A menu folded open with gentle animations. Lights pulsed gently from under the bed, and the boy exhaled quietly through his nose and leaned into the pillow.

  In the corner, Iven stirred.

  His body unfolded slowly from a chair molded more for temporary rest than actual sleep. His neck gave a small, pained twist, and his spine protested with every inch. The weight behind his eyes hadn’t lifted and he blinked blearily toward the bed.

  And then, voices.

  His wife’s voice.

  Sharp, strained, controlled in that brittle way that came only after holding back for too long.

  “You said twelve days. It’s been fifteen.”

  Her stance was angular, rigid. One hand clenched at her side, the other motioning toward the display panel embedded in the wall.

  The doctor—gray-caped, eyes tired, posture neutral—responded in even cadence. He wanted to start with the good news.

  “His rest pattern adjusted based on metabolic output, and his rhythm remains within optimal range... All in all, he is stable.”

  “You don’t redefine ‘stable’ just because the numbers look clean,” she said. “He’s still in this bed. That means the terms matter.”

  The boy didn’t flinch, his console beeping quietly. A character jumped, missed a ledge, and respawned. His thumb flicked with mechanical ease.

  Iven remained seated, his eyes tracing the shape of his son’s outline beneath the covers. The slight arc of the boy’s back barely shifted with each breath. His chest rose and fell like a metronome set by an invisible hand, monitored by some unseen tempo. The faint sheen of sweat on his brow caught the sterile light overhead, collecting just above the temple in soft glints. A few strands of hair clung there, damp and darker than usual.

  He let his hand fall loosely over the side of the chair, knuckles brushing cool air.

  His wife’s voice finally broke, only slightly. Mid-word. Mid-breath. Just enough to notice.

  And then she stopped speaking. She had said everything that mattered.

  -

  Later, the boy slept. The console sat dimmed beside him, its interface screen glowing faintly in idle, waiting for input.

  Iven stood at the edge of the window in the hallway, his hand pressed lightly against the glass. His breath left faint patterns, ephemeral shapes erased by the building’s climate regulation. His wife stood behind him. Neither of them moved much.

  The hallway stretched long in either direction, muffled footsteps occasionally crossing the distance behind frosted panels. Outside, the city lights glowed in steady patterns, casting the vague outline of towers through the haze.

  She said nothing, just leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded across her chest. Her hair was pulled back too tightly, a few loose strands escaping along her temple. She hadn’t taken off her coat, and she hadn’t blinked enough times.

  Iven glanced at her. A hesitation hung between his ribs—something lodged deep and sharp.

  Then he asked, softly, like the words belonged to someone else, “Is he already gone?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  His wife didn’t respond at first. Her body shifted weight from one foot to the other. Her arms dropped, and her eyes finally moved—toward him, then lower, toward his mouth, as if reading the shape of his doubt.

  A second passed.

  Then she stepped forward and struck him across the face.

  The sound was small. Contained. Palm to cheek.

  He didn’t stumble. He didn’t lift a hand in response, cheek reddening and jaw tight.

  She didn’t shout, nor did she cry.

  “We’re still here,” she said. Her voice had steel in it, thin and sharp. “And so is he.”

  Iven quieted.

  But then gripped her shoulders.

  He didn’t yank or shake, as if her frame might disintegrate if his fingers eased up even a little. The pressure came not from panic, but something deeper, tightly wound and years in the making. His face had lost its usual symmetry. One eye blinked more than the other. His lips tried forming sentences and failed. The room around them, dimly lit and sterile, vanished from his attention entirely.

  She didn’t pull away. Not yet.

  His breath came shivering and uneven. His mouth opened once more, this time to speak. But when he did, the words were not ones she expected.

  “What’s his name?”

  His wife blinked. Her face twitched not from confusion, but from the need to process what he had just said, to assign a context where none seemed present.

  “You mean…” she began slowly, testing the sentence before committing to it. “You mean our son?”

  He gave no nod, his grip on her tightening slightly. His eyes never left hers.

  She frowned, deeply now, a crease forming above the bridge of her nose. “L—,” she started, but he couldn’t hear it. Her brow rested as she said again. “It’s—”

  But Iven flinched. It wasn’t physically, not obviously, but in the deep ways a mind recoils when touched. Something in his gaze collapsed inward.

  He shook his head, once. It was minuscule, like a tremor barely reaching the surface.

  She gave the name. Clear. Full. As it had always been.

  But Iven didn’t hear it.

  He refused to hear it.

  Somewhere inside him, a wall braced against the sound. His expression froze, eyes wide yet hollow, as if the syllables might undo something he couldn’t afford to lose. He held her arms like a man clinging to the sides of a lifeboat, not because he feared drowning—but because he couldn’t remember how to swim anymore.

  She stopped, her voice no longer reaching him. His stare had gone past her now, far past—searching a space that didn’t exist.

  And then, slowly, her face twisted into a shape rarely seen on her: anger and pity. But it wasn’t gentle. It was reluctant and furious, teeth bare.

  She raised her arm again. A simple motion. Just enough to bring her fist into his face.

  The sound cracked dully. Bone to cheek. His head snapped to the side with a grunt—more surprised than hurt—but he didn’t fall.

  His hands dropped from her shoulders.

  She stepped back.

  Then silence.

  He didn’t lift his head right away. Blood traced the edge of his lip.

  When he finally looked up, his eyes were clearer, but far from whole. There was something glassy behind them now. Less like a man revising his mistakes, more like one remembering something he hadn’t been ready to remember.

  She spoke, quieter now, but with none of the softness that usually came with lowered volume. “Don’t ask questions like that. Not when he’s still breathing.”

  He didn't reply.

  The air hung sterile, flavored faintly with antiseptic and thermal recycling. Beyond the paneled walls, machines hummed in rhythm with lives that existed parallel to theirs. Other families, other children, other crises. None of them mattered here. Not in this corridor. Not to the man standing with blood drying slowly at the edge of his mouth.

  She waited. For a breath. Then two. Then gave up on waiting.

  “Iven.”

  Her voice cracked on the second syllable.

  He still didn’t move.

  So she grabbed his wrist, fingers anchoring, and pulled.

  He didn’t resist. His legs responded by habit. Muscle memory. Ghosted steps.

  They walked without speaking. One dragging, one leading.

  She turned the corner hard, shouldered open the door in exhaustion, and guided him inside.

  The room hadn’t changed.

  The bed still held the boy.

  Still curled under the covers, one leg out again, the child breathed in that shallow but steady way unique to deep, dreamless sleep. The console blinked idle light across the blanket. A digital wallpaper slowly panned left to right, showing a cartoon cityscape that never reached its end.

  She pulled Iven forward, closer to the bed.

  “Look,” she said, voice like cold steel scraped across glass. “He’s here.”

  Iven didn’t need to be told. His eyes were already locked on the sleeping form. They were scanning. Searching for some betrayal in the scene. Some inconsistency, a misalignment of details, the wrong color on the console display, the fold of the blanket not matching reality.

  And yet, everything was perfect.

  Which is why it terrified him.

  It terrified him.

  She turned to face him fully now. “Why?” she said. “Why do you think he’s gone?”

  The silence that followed extended like a river. But she didn’t interrupt it.

  Iven’s mouth twitched open, then shut again. His eyes hadn’t left the boy. She watched him closely now, and in that frozen profile she saw it, something subterranean, pushing upward, cracking through.

  “You’ve been spiraling all day,” she continued. “Even before he got sick, you weren’t... you. You forget to answer texts. You missed your class schedule. Jules told me you walked into the warehouse and forgot your badge like it mattered less to you. Then you just stood there, staring at charts you didn’t open.”

  He didn’t respond.

  She stepped forward again. Close enough that her shadow cut across his shoulder.

  “You think I haven’t noticed? The way you’ve been gripping your mug tighter every morning? Or how you pause halfway through every sentence now, like you're checking if you’re allowed to say it?”

  Still nothing.

  She exhaled sharply, turning her face upward like the ceiling might explain something she couldn't.

  “You’ve been distant. Not cold, never cold. But... like you’re waiting for something. Like the world is on a delay and you’re just watching it buffer. And then today, when he got sick, you looked like someone had switched off the lights inside you.”

  He closed his eyes. That part was true.

  “You haven’t even said his name once since we got here.”

  That part was truer.

  “You’re scared. I get that. We both are. But whatever you think is happening, this is happening, and you shouldn’t run off to fantasy. He’s here, Iven, not in the clouds... I know you don’t feel it. But feelings aren’t facts.”

  She stepped closer. Her hand found his. She wrapped her fingers around it tightly, anchoring again.

  “Whatever this is, you’re going to need to come back. Because he needs you. I’m tired, Iven. I’m tired of being the one who has to hold up the sky every time you go quiet. And I’m trying—I really am—but I need to know you’re still with us.”

  He looked at her now, fully. And for a moment, just a moment, he looked like he was.

  She squeezed his hand once, and it didn’t feel ceremonial.

  Then she turned to the boy.

  Iven let the silence take him again, consuming him halfway until it just hovered.

  Iven’s hand stayed in hers for a while longer, fingers slack, skin cold.

  Then it twitched, just once, and slipped free.

  He stepped back. Not far. Only enough to feel the air return between them. He looked down at the boy, still breathing gently beneath the soft pulses of fluorescent light. The child made a small noise in his sleep, the kind only children made when their dreams gave no violence. A small sigh. A shift of limbs. Peace with a pulse.

  Iven turned away.

  His hands rose—and pressed against his face. He dragged them down, once, as if trying to wipe off something invisible. Then his shoulders curled forward. His spine bowed. And he made a sound too low to register at first.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Just two words.

  Then again, louder. “I’m sorry.”

  And then it broke.

  A sob, ugly and uncontrolled, ripped up through his chest. He collapsed to the floor, knees hitting linoleum with a dull thud. His arms wrapped around his middle as though he could hold himself still, but the sound kept coming. Wretched, choked. Full of something older than pain. Older than even memory.

  His wife froze at first, caught between instinct and shock, but when she moved to him, he didn’t lift his head. He didn’t meet her eyes. He just cried, louder than she’d ever heard him cry.

  And then he spoke.

  “It was never real.”

  His voice cracked through the words.

  “This… this life—this beautiful, stupid, broken life—I didn’t earn any of it.”

  …

  “Because it didn’t belong to me. I was supposed to live this. I was. But I didn’t. Someone else did.”

  She didn’t understand. Not fully. But she didn’t stop him.

  “I was made,” he continued, slower now. “Pulled from some archive, some perfect strand of what could’ve been. I remember the cold floor in the lab. I remember waking up and seeing a ceiling that wasn’t mine. I remember the smile of the technician.

  I remember the words she said: ‘You’ve been gifted context.’ Context. That’s what they called it. A life I never lived, uploaded like a file.”

  He looked up at her now, eyes red, voice trembling.

  “He lived it first. The original me. The real Iven. He went to war. Lost his father. Built something worth sharing. Met you. Loved you. Raised a child. Faced the noise of the world with bare hands and still made a future out of it.”

  Iven’s hands gripped his hair, knuckles white.

  “And me? I’m just the echo, a placeholder for a life that already found its end. I never met you. I never heard our son laugh until they handed me the memory. It was too warm, and yet, too painful. They made sure I’d feel it like it was mine.”

  He choked back a breath.

  “But it isn’t.”

  The silence held around them. Even the machines softened.

  “I never chose you. He did, and he’s gone. And I’ve just been standing in the shadow of someone else’s choices, someone else’s courage. They called it continuity. Said it was mercy. Said I deserved the life beyond what he finished.”

  He reached for her hand again, but this time, not to hold it. Just to feel that it was still real. That she was still solid.

  “But this is borrowed. This is staged. And I brought you both here, into a life that only pretends to breathe.”

  His voice dropped to a whisper.

  “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. To you. To him.”

  He turned away again, this time toward the darkened corner of the hospital room, where the light didn’t reach.

  “I’m sorry, Iven,” he whispered to the past. “I failed you. You lived through it all. You carved your way through a real, brutal world. And they used you to build me. They gave me your life and told me it was a gift. But it wasn’t. I tried to live it, I really did, but I couldn’t forget.”

  His hands curled against the floor. Quiet, trembling.

  “I couldn’t forget that I never earned this.”

  He looked up again, eyes wide, soaked through, rimmed with something no sleep could erase.

  “I don’t know what I’ve done. I don’t know if this world I’m in even counts as reality anymore. I don’t know what we are.”

  He let the silence return. This time, consuming him whole. It pressed into the seams of the room like vapor through cracked stone. It took his voice, left his breath shallow, stole the tremble in his knees and replaced it with stillness. He heard the gentle rhythm of the boy’s chest rising and falling beneath the covers. A soft cadence, steady and mechanical, like a metronome calibrated by the gods of innocence.

  Iven sat by him.

  Watching like someone waiting for an answer to a question that would never arrive in words.

  The boy shifted slightly, curled deeper into sleep, unaware of the curve settling beside him.

  And Iven, he didn’t move.

  He had seen this child before. Again and again. Moments in classrooms and dinner tables. Birthday candles and scraped elbows. All of it presented to him as his to experience, his to cherish. But never once, at the moment of his creation, had Iven remembered the boy.

  He had yet experienced memories of this boy. Every encounter had been new.

  Every feeling, re-learned. Like meeting someone important in a future you were told was real.

  He had not held him as an infant. He had not witnessed his first breath, but he had cleaned his cuts, made his lunches, scolded him gently when he spoke too loudly during storytime. He had done the work. But the memory? The true thread of fatherhood? That belonged to someone else. It always had.

  His last unbroken memory—if such a term could still hold shape—ended at twenty-seven. A warm lab, concrete walls, co-owners reviewing material schematics, a promising future barely sketched in. Beyond that, nothing. There was no wedding nor name given in devotion. There was no child’s hand gripping his finger, just a corridor that ended in silence.

  The original Iven had walked beyond it. Far beyond it. He had loved, and he had lived. He had fallen into a world that rewarded patience and punished certainty. He had met her, whoever she was. He had built this home. Raised this child. Made mistakes and corrected them. Forgiven and been forgiven. A whole life lived forward.

  But this Iven? This Iven was a copy cast in the wake before that new chapter.

  And he had chosen never to know her name. His name.

  It sat somewhere in the archive, buried in the scaffold of simulation code. A field labeled plainly. Ready to be opened. But he had never looked. To know it would be to admit this life had a fate, and that fate was not for him. That all of this had been authored from memory and not from longing.

  And the boy.

  This boy he had come to love, though only through proximity.

  And yet...

  Not once had that love arrived with the grace of recollection. It had always arrived as something he wished he had known earlier. As something earned slowly, away from the chains of inherited thoughts.

  Still he sat beside him. Still he wept with tears.

  A father once mourned beside his son.

  A fake mourned, built to imitate what both had already lost.

  This wasn’t grief for something taken away.

  This was grief multiplied in suffering, for something that had never should have belonged.

  A kindness stolen by a fiction.

  A love earned by a stranger with the same name.

  He stared longer, allowing the light from the machines blink quietly across the bedsheets. He let the boy turn slightly, murmuring in sleep, small fingers twitching toward imagined things.

  And when Iven finally spoke, barely a whisper. It wasn’t to the child, and it wasn’t to the woman in the hall.

  It was to the man already buried by time. The man who came before him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, barely audible. “You lived something beautiful. And I—I am nothing but the echo of your ending.”

  -

  The sky blinked.

  Just once.

  Then the warmth fell away.

  Farewell never arrived, and the curtains stayed closed. No soft dissolve into memory as the frame became another. Instantaneous, cruel in its clarity. The bed vanished and the hospital dissolved. The child disappeared mid-breath. One heartbeat continued as the other ceased.

  Iven stood still, upright, barefoot, spine coiled with static that hadn’t yet shaken loose. The silence here felt cleaner, vacuumed of any ambience. It was a familiar room, yellow tints lining the furniture, but he knew it wasn’t truly his.

  His breath steadied, with calm had been enforced. The simulation had ended revealing only the architecture of truth, rendered in full.

  A panel opened in the wall behind him, soundless, revealing only sterile corridor. The ambient temperature held firm at twenty-two. Even his pulse rate, he knew, had been managed to optimal levels for reintegration. The system cared for his reentry.

  His reflection hovered faintly in the metallic sheen of the wall, older again. The abnormal imprint on his skin would fade in minutes. However, the feeling beneath his ribs would remain.

  He had never seen the boy’s passing. His voice will never ask for it, and his will, even stronger, refused it.

  Plenty of files, moments, whole years of the original Iven’s life lived past this moment of sorrow. That knowledge sat locked in system caches and legacy modules, available with a single command.

  He avoided it, and resisted at times. But now, he will never want it again. He did not want to live his past’s life.

  Beyond the corridor, the world waited like a question with too many clauses. A universe stretched so far into abstraction that intention itself blurred. Cities wrapped moons as data stitched constellations. Culture calcified into architecture as belief thinned into curation.

  And here he stood, one life made from the cast of another. A man pieced together using memory derivatives instead of blood. A witness to something he never truly touched.

  He stepped forward as the door closed behind him.

  Grief counseling remained unoffered despite its accessibility, and the system had already logged his emotional fluctuation curve and updated his file.

  Within this simulation and outside its realm, five years had passed.