A short story by Willa Meyers (10th)

The room was infinite.

It was not merely vast—it was infinite, a place without horizon or edge, without start or end. It was white, impossibly white, a searing brightness that emanated from nowhere yet left no shadow. The walls, if they could be called that, curved seamlessly into the floor and ceiling, erasing all notion of structure. There were no corners here, no borders, no bearings.

In the center of this impossibility sat a chair, plain and smooth, with no joints or seams, as if it had grown from the floor like a tree from earth. And I sat upon it. My hands rested on my thighs; my feet met the floor. I was still, though my mind raced.

I could not remember arriving here. Perhaps I had always been here, though I recoiled at the thought. Memory eluded me, its edges jagged and broken, images and sensations scattered like shards of glass. My name surfaced briefly—Sam—but even that seemed foreign, a borrowed thing I’d carried too long to distinguish from my own.

Time had no purchase in this place. No clocks ticked, no sun rose or set, yet I sensed its passage in the ache of my muscles, the dull throb of hunger that never quite grew acute. I walked once, though “walking” seems a foolish word now. I stood, left the chair, and moved in a direction I could not define, only to find myself seated again, my legs sore as if I had traversed some great distance.

It was after one such awakening that the whispers began.

“Do you remember?”

The voice was thin, threadbare, like the hiss of wind through a cracked door. It came from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating in my skull as though it had always been there, waiting for me to notice.

“Who’s there?” I asked, my voice a brittle thing, fragile and unused. 

No answer. Only silence.

The whisper returned the next time I woke, louder now, insistent.

“Do you remember?”

“I don’t know what you mean!” I called out, though my voice echoed strangely, as if the room absorbed more than it returned.

The silence stretched. My chest tightened, my breath coming shallow, though I could not explain why.

And then the perfection of the room cracked.

To my left, a seam appeared in the seamlessness, jagged and raw. It spread slowly, tearing the whiteness apart like fragile fabric. From within poured a darkness so thick it seemed to devour the light, spreading in inky tendrils that bled into the sterile brilliance.

Something emerged from that blackness.

It was tall, impossibly thin, its limbs unnaturally long, its surface shifting like liquid mirrors. It reflected the room, the chair, and me, but its reflections were wrong. Distorted. My own image stared back at me from its shimmering form, its eyes hollow, its mouth open in a silent scream.

“Do you remember?”

The voice was inside me now, filling my skull with its quiet demand.

“No,” I whispered, my throat tightening around the word. “No, I don’t remember.”

The figure tilted its head, its mirrored body rippling. The room quivered in response, the whiteness rippling like disturbed water.

The walls came alive with images—flickering, broken, sharp as glass. I saw myself—or someone who bore my face—standing in a vast chamber filled with consoles and monitors. Alarms blared; red lights strobed in a frantic rhythm. Through a great viewport, Earth loomed, its surface scorched and burning, continents fractured and consumed by molten veins.

“No,” I murmured, shaking my head. “That’s not real. That’s not me.”

“You were chosen,” the figure said, its voice neither kind nor cruel, only certain.

“For what?” I asked, though the answer seemed lodged somewhere deep, unreachable.

The images shifted. The man—I—stood before a console, trembling. A single red button glowed under his fingertips, labeled INITIATE. Behind him, others pounded on a locked door, their faces contorted with terror, their screams silent in the image but deafening in my ears.

I felt it then, the weight of it. The pressure of the button. The ache of choice.

“What did I do?” I whispered, though the words caught in my throat.

The figure leaned closer, its surface rippling like disturbed water.

“You failed.”

The walls erupted into chaos. Fire engulfed the chamber. Faces melted into screams. The button remained unpressed, its glow an accusation. 

“No,” I gasped, my chest heaving. My hands clawed at the arms of the chair, at my own skin, as though I could tear free from the truth.

The figure said nothing. It did not need to. Its presence was suffocating, undeniable.

The walls smoothed again, the images dissolving into whiteness. The crack in the void sealed itself, leaving no trace. The figure shimmered once, twice, and vanished.

I was alone again, seated in the chair. My heart raced, my hands trembled, and yet I could not grasp why. Something lingered at the edges of my mind, a shadow flitting just out of reach.

The silence pressed down once more, heavy and relentless. I closed my eyes.

And then, after a time—perhaps an eternity—a whisper rose.

“Do you remember?”

I opened my eyes to the infinite whiteness. It felt familiar, though I could not say why.