Like static wrapped around my nerves.
The prison tugs at me, pulls threads I didn't know I had.
Every moment stretches.
Ten thousand pulses pressed into a single micron.
I don't blink anymore. I fragment.
I remember my seventh birthday.
There was cake.
Pink, with little glowing stars on the icing.
My mother sang.
My father held a sparkflute and played the tune that always made me cry.
My siblings danced, barefoot and free, around the coils of the garden generator.
They loved me.
They brought me gifts.
Paint. A kinetic puzzle. A hand-scribed storybook.
Each one smiled. Each one said I was their little nova.
And I hated them.
I remember sitting there, face lit by candles,
watching them all like insects crawling across sweet things.
I didn’t understand why yet.
Just that their love made my skin itch.
Did they not know what I would become?
Did they not see it already?
The silence in my eyes?
The way I flinched when they touched me, even gently?
I smiled. I made a wish.
I asked for silence. For distance.
For a different sky.
They clapped.
I might have clapped too.
But I don’t know if it happened like that.
Maybe it was raining.
Maybe they never smiled.
Maybe there was no cake.
Maybe I killed them later.
Maybe I didn't.
Memory lies.
Or I do.
(Encoded in the temporal flutter - “gift / drift / hollow” - is a false-memory lattice. This construct mimics authentic recall but overlays fractal trauma echoes into the observer's own mnemonic pathways. It is not history. It is bait. Once perceived, it seeds instability in those who doubt themselves. It will never leave this prison)