thriller

The Yugaya Protocol
𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟔, 𝟐𝟎𝟑𝟏 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘝𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘫 The command glowed on the screen, a digital death sentence typed by my own hand.
By Jainul Abdeen Sirajul Anam11 months ago in Fiction
Day:2 Ded Moone Camp Facility. Content Warning.
I was told to get a feel on my own. That’s what I get for asking a question after midnight. Dark and wet, I could appreciate the existance of a trail to the rear of the island, the hike through the brush, the single slip i'd be from disappearing in the drink for a gulp. Sleeping comes whenever the hell it wants, but it eventually skews me back toward the night shift with everyone else here, so far. It’s those brief moments of sunlight in the late evening when I've caught a rare dose of nap. This night ended at the bar on the stool. I never thought it would be this comfortable all those times I was prevented from indulging in the act by the sheer ridiculousness of the look as it was the movie staple of the down trotted fuck-up. The Voice, it—I am literally dying for this shit, so excuse the fucking bias I may share as I bring this up, but to keep with my journaling immersion technique from Wolfman Patrick, i have to be cautious aboout said—context.
By Willem Indigo11 months ago in Fiction
Lead Lungs
Malcolm caught the train back at 1:35 in the morning. Despite the time, the station was still buzzing. Europa was a city of the night. It almost seemed to thrive more in darkness, than it did in light. The train produced sounds of the air being sliced; akin to wind whipping past you on the edge of a misty cliff. Rain pelted the windows, scraping against them near horizontal. The train twisted and turned through the high-rise buildings around it, the tracks carefully carving through the skyline. The speed made every twist and turn barely noticeable, although his stomach would occasionally flip at the thought of travelling 250 miles per hour into a concrete wall. He felt in his pocket for the comforting outline of his Singer .45 Pistol. The feeling of simple safety. At least the Eclipse don’t steal. One of the few merits he could give them.
By Meshable11 months ago in Fiction
✨ The Boy Who Remembered a Life He Never Lived
At first, it felt like any ordinary dream — blurry, soft, melting away the moment I opened my eyes. But something was different. Something stayed with me. The color of the sky. The smell of roses. The faint sound of a girl laughing. And the watch. Always the same watch. Always stuck at 2:17 AM. I didn’t know it then, but that dream was the beginning of everything — the confusion, the fear, the truth, and the thing that changed my life in ways I still struggle to understand. My name is Ayaan, and this is the story of the life I remembered… A life that didn’t belong to me. --- Chapter 1 — The Dream The blue house stood at the end of a narrow dirt road. A single tree leaned over its roof, its branches brushing the windows like fingers trying to get inside. The sun was setting, turning the house gold. Every time I stepped forward, I saw her — the girl. She looked about my age. Soft eyes. Hair tied in a messy braid. She always smiled at me like I had just returned home from a long journey. But the strange part? She said my name before I ever told her. “Ayaan… tum aa gaye.” Her voice felt familiar, yet impossible. I had never seen her in my life. Before I could say anything, everything changed — suddenly the sky turned dark, the air filled with smoke, and flames burst out of the windows. The heat hit my skin. I always tried to run toward her, but my feet wouldn’t move. And then I saw it — the watch on my wrist. The broken glass. The stopped hands. The time: 2:17 AM. Then I woke up — heart pounding, breath shaking, the smell of smoke still stuck in my throat. Every. Single. Time. --- Chapter 2 — Reality Cracks I ignored it for the first three days. Strange dreams weren’t exactly unusual for teenagers. That’s what I told myself. But ignoring it became impossible the morning I travelled with my parents to a town two hours away. We were visiting a relative I barely remembered. The moment we took a turn onto a quiet street, something inside me jolted. My chest tightened. My hands went cold. I whispered before I could stop myself: “Yahan se right jana…” My parents looked at me sharply. “How do you know?” my mother asked. I didn’t have an answer. But I knew — deep down, I had been here. I knew the corner store would have a big red sign. I knew the road would curve after fifty steps. I knew a blue house would appear at the end of the road. And I was right. The same house from my dreams stood there. Paint peeling. Windows cracked. Empty. No girl. No flowers. No fire. Just a dead, silent house. My legs shook so badly I had to hold onto the gate. My parents thought I felt sick, but inside, something terrifying was happening: I was remembering something I had never lived. --- Chapter 3 — The Girl Appears I tried to forget the house. I really tried. But then she appeared. The girl from my dream walked into my classroom as a new student. Same hair. Same eyes. Same smile. I felt the air punch out of my lungs. She introduced herself to the class: “My name is Hiba.” Hiba. The same name she whispered in my dreams. When she sat next to me, her eyes widened for a moment — like she recognized me too. “Have we met before?” she asked softly. I wanted to say no. I really did. But my voice betrayed me. “Maybe… in another life.” She blinked, confused. I prayed she would laugh it off. But then she said something that froze every muscle in my body: “You came back.” I gripped the table. “What did you say?” She shook her head quickly. “Nothing… I just thought you looked familiar.” But I knew she didn’t mean nothing. --- Chapter 4 — The Time That Wouldn’t Change That day, everything around me felt wrong. Too loud. Too bright. Too close. In class, the teacher asked us to open our books. I turned a page, and scribbled in small, shaky handwriting were the numbers: 2:17 AM I didn’t write it. During lunch, I accidentally brushed my hand against the metal table. For a moment, I felt heat — burning heat — like I had touched fire. But the worst happened that night. I woke up suddenly. The room was dark. My heart racing. I looked at my digital clock. 2:17 AM. Exactly. Not 2:16. Not 2:18. The same time the watch in my dreams was stuck on. I felt something in my chest — a pull. Like something was calling me. And I realized: The dreams were not dreams. They were memories. Of someone I used to be. Of a death I didn’t remember. Of a promise I didn’t keep. --- Chapter 5 — The Past Life I needed answers. So the next morning, before school, I went back to the blue house. The gate creaked open like it had been waiting for me. The whole house felt frozen in time, untouched since the day of the fire. Inside, the smell of ash still lingered. My heart led me to a small room — the one I always saw in my dreams. And there, on the floor, half buried under burnt wood, I found something that made my skin crawl. A watch. Its glass cracked. Its hands stopped. 2:17 AM. My fingers shook as I touched it. Suddenly, something exploded inside my mind — a flood of images, sounds, memories that didn’t belong to me. A younger version of me — not this body, not this life — running through the house. Calling a name: “Hiba! Bhaago!!” Flames everywhere. A falling beam. A promise: “I’ll come back for you.” Then darkness. I stumbled back, gasping. The truth hit me like a punch. I had lived before. I had died in this house. And Hiba… Hiba had died too. But if she died… Who was the girl in my school? --- Chapter 6 — The Second Chance That day, I confronted her during break. “Who are you?” I asked. She stared at me, eyes trembling. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “But ever since I came to this town, I’ve been having strange dreams. Dreams of a fire. Dreams of someone calling my name. Dreams of… you.” Her voice cracked. “I think I died once.” Our breaths froze. Some truths are too heavy, too frightening, too unbelievable. But we believed each other. Because the same memories haunted us. And then she told me something that made my skin turn to ice. “I keep seeing a date,” she said. “And a time. Tonight. 2:17 AM.” My stomach dropped. It wasn’t just a memory. It was a warning. The fire… was going to happen again. --- Chapter 7 — The Fire Returns We didn’t tell anyone. Who would believe us? Instead, we stayed together that night. Talking. Remembering. Trying to understand why fate had brought us back. But as the clock ticked closer to 2:17 AM, I felt the same pull in my chest — stronger, heavier. Something was coming. At exactly 2:16 AM, a loud explosion shook our building. Smoke filled the hallway. People screamed. Flames spread through the lower floors. History was repeating itself. The same fire. The same time. The same deaths. Unless we changed it. “Hiba, come on!” I grabbed her hand. This time, my feet moved. This time, I didn’t freeze. We ran down the hallway, dodging falling pieces of burning ceiling. Heat slapped our faces. Smoke clawed at our lungs. But we kept running. Just like last time. Just like before. Except now — we knew what was coming. We reached the ground floor when a beam collapsed between us, blocking the path. “Run!” she screamed. “I’m not leaving you again!” I shouted back. I climbed over the burning wood, grabbed her hand, and pulled her through a narrow gap just seconds before the entire ceiling crashed down behind us. We burst out of the building as flames roared into the night sky. The clock hit 2:17 AM. But this time… We were alive. --- Chapter 8 — A Life Returned The fire trucks came. The building was destroyed. But we survived. When the sun rose, both of us sat on the sidewalk, wrapped in blankets. Silent. Breathing. Existing. Finally, Hiba whispered: “Do you think this was our second chance?” I nodded slowly. “I think we were meant to fix what we couldn’t fix last time.” She looked at me — truly looked. “In our past life… we didn’t make it. But now we did.” We didn’t know why we got another chance. We didn’t know how we remembered a life we never lived. But we knew one thing: Pain repeats itself until you learn the lesson. And miracles come when you’re finally ready for them. That night taught me something I’ll never forget: Life is not just about living once. Sometimes, destiny brings you back to finish the story you left incomplete. And this time… We survived the ending. So we could rewrite the beginning. --- THE END
By Muhammad Kashif 11 months ago in Fiction
He Took All but the Bones and Bottle. Content Warning.
Rumors ate their way through a small town like cancer to a bone. They were dripping with curiosity and the enjoyment of troubles that were not one's own. It didn’t take long for her ears to pick up the whispers that followed at her back. As a child, Sybil had devoured those narratives, passing them from her mouth to another like a bird would feed its young. As a grown women, she found the taste of rumors sour.
By Connie11 months ago in Fiction
DARC RAIDERS. Content Warning.
Thunder. Rain. I couldn’t wait to shut everything out, throw on the headset and grind some extractions in Darc Raiders. Our Discord group had been talking all week about some of the new updates they finally added to the ransom mechanic—capture another player, lock their account, demand in-game loot and currency. “Ultra-immersive” the devs called it. A player could only be held for 48hrs and after that everything resets. During the first 48, the captors could demand a ransom. Loot from your vaulted stash, loot from your friends, or Rubies (in-game currency) for your release.
By Kristen Keenon Fisher12 months ago in Fiction
Protocol A.R.I.E.L
The gravel crunches under the tires as Elias turns his truck down the narrow path that leads behind the old house. His parents' shed sits at the end of it—wrapped in tentacles of ivy. The tin roof has bowed under decades of weather; the corners dark with moss.
By Kristen Keenon Fisher12 months ago in Fiction
Journal entries of the Wolf-man . Content Warning.
Ded Moone’s Peregrination Introduce yourself, I guess, Night 1: A frenzied, radical move of lunacy during a moment of lucidity, but friends and family miss the dark for their best interest. With a track record of putrid half-measures focused on the financial debacles I can’t be blamed for despite the epic effort, I must say to that and all this, fuck’em. They are long aware of the cost/savings benefits of avoiding the lifetime hardship of holding firm against the disruptive acts they’ve given up trying to explain to first responders, friends, in-laws. This is respecting my cousin’s shrug and smile when I was last wheeled to the psych ward from the main lobby during some one-man natural disaster while trying to keep me away from your lives. I appreciate her silent candor, nestled in a refusal to respond to the question vocally once I pleaded my case, not a one-for-one; is it worth the gas money anymore? Nurse Jackie genuinely means well with ‘come back soon,’ layered with overbearing subtext for her devotion to patients, avoiding the sobering alternative, like, for instance, that my legs are delightfully, currently dangling over, so we had a good last run. No more power-ups after Black-Hawk-Downs at terminal velocity if I miss the other freeways. It’s, in a fashion, an attempt to fight the very notion of wind in favor of landing in the shadowiest section of an unlit road leading under Pocahontas Parkway. I saw it one trip heading to the Tar Heel State for a lecture. Can't say it wasn't gaudy, reaching out over that Potomac, I think, but I took note of it all the same on the drive back north. What a beautiful view, last or otherwise. A powerful end, one splat to resend all wasted energies to a greedy Earth with fallen angelic wings of flaming middle fingers—wait, wait, what am I doing—why the hell am I doing it this way?! I’m a god damn stamp on this putrid State rationality of what widens our perspectives naturally in regard to death and its role in the human psyche. I’m a fucking explorer of the damned, the feared unknown--I’m a god damn MAN! I gotta go, that's certain. This is the experiment of a lifetime, and I’m wasting it on a bridge jump in the dark alone? Symbolism over the race to see the unknowable—Geez, Fuck these nightmares! I might’ve missed the synchronized opportunity of my…
By Willem Indigo12 months ago in Fiction
The Door That Knew My Name
The first time the phone rang at two in the morning, I thought it was a prank. The second time, I ignored it. The third — the one that splintered my sleep and sat me upright with the taste of rust in my mouth — was different. The voice on the other end didn't waste words.
By Marko12 months ago in Fiction
Ashes of Tomorrow. AI-Generated.
Mara Whitman crouched behind a crumbling wall, the ash-coated wind stinging her face. The city, once alive and vibrant, now lay in twisted ruin. Rusted cars leaned into cracked sidewalks, and buildings rose like jagged scars against the gray sky. She pulled her jacket tighter, the fabric damp from mist that carried the faint, metallic scent of decay. The streets were eerily silent except for the occasional gust of wind that rattled broken windows and sent litter skittering across the pavement.
By William Ebden.12 months ago in Fiction
THE SKIN WE SHARE (PART 1)
Start writing...The Donor The advertisement wasn't just a classified listing; it was a ghost of data clinging to the deepest recess of the dark web, a whisper in the digital graveyard of broken dreams. Its text was simple, yet offered a staggering promise: "Tired of your broken shell? A new vessel awaits. The Samsara Procedure." For Eli Croft, whose existence had devolved into a slow, systematic dismantling at the hands of Huntington's disease, the message wasn't an ad. It was a direct answer to a prayer he’d been too cynical to voice. His body was a foreign country, a treacherous cage where his muscles spasmed and failed with violent, humiliating autonomy, betraying the sharp, screaming consciousness trapped inside. His life was an agonizing countdown to suffocation. The man he met, who insisted on the title Dr. Silas, did not possess the comforting aura of a savior. He looked like a coroner who had been interrupted midway through his work and had forgotten his corpse. His skin was unnaturally pale, stretched tight over sharp bones, and his eyes were a flat, depthless grey that seemed to absorb all light and emotion. His voice was toneless, almost mechanical, yet it carried an unsettling authority that demanded attention. Despite his macabre appearance, his credentials—at least the digital ones presented in the sterile files—were impeccable. "The mind, Mr. Croft, is nothing more than a signal," Silas explained in that chillingly flat tone, gesturing to a sleek, silent monitoring console. "It is pure energy. The body, conversely, is merely the receiver—a machine built of carbon and water, subject to the inevitable decay of entropy. Your receiver is failing, systematically shutting down. We will perform the signal transfer: migrating your core identity to a new, fully functional machine." The "new machine" was the catch, the terrifying compromise. It wasn't a synthetic body. It wasn't an artificially grown clone. It was a donor. A living, breathing, perfectly healthy donor who had, according to Silas's chillingly dry delivery, "volunteered their physical form as an act of ultimate spiritual altruism." Eli, grasping at the last, thinnest thread of hope and desperate to escape the biological nightmare of his own failing flesh, chose to believe that grotesque lie. The room where the procedure took place was a blinding white, sterile chamber, utterly devoid of comforting human warmth. There were no flashing lights, no complex surgical rigs, and no scalpels. Only two heavy, slate-grey stone slabs lay separated by a short expanse of polished floor. Eli was gently, carefully, helped onto one slab. He struggled to turn his head, his gaze immediately locking onto the other slab. Lying there was the donor: a young man named Alex. He was built lean, strong, and effortlessly healthy, his face unblemished save for an intriguing, faded scar above his left brow. His eyes were closed in a deep, drug-induced slumber. This was the vessel. The prize. Silas began the ritual. He simply paced, his shadow flickering unnaturally on the white walls, chanting in a language that sounded ancient and profoundly alien—a sound like dry bone grinding against marble, or maybe the whisper of static electricity given dark form. The air pressure in the room grew heavy and cold, a cold that felt internal, pressing directly onto the fragile dome of Eli’s skull. Then came the pain. It was not a pain derived from physical injury; it was a horrific, raw, tearing sensation inside his mind, as if his very consciousness—the 'I' of him, his accumulated soul and memories—was being brutally pried loose from the soft, fleshy moorings of his brain. It was like tearing a root system from the earth. The sound in his head was a high-pitched, electric scream, accompanied by a dizzying, nauseating sense of movement in total, suffocating stillness. His vision blurred, then terrifyingly doubled. For a single, agonizing second, he was looking at the cold white ceiling from two distinct sets of eyes. He saw his own withered, slack-jawed, twitching body on the slab opposite him, a thing of ruin. And simultaneously, he saw the ceiling through Alex's eyes, clear, focused, and unblinking. He was pure signal, vibrating between two receivers. Then, the world was swallowed by total, crushing, merciful darkness. He woke up screaming. But the voice that tore from his throat was not the weak, reedy sound of a dying man. It was strong, resonant, masculine, and young. His new body hummed with a startling, almost painful surge of vitality he hadn't known in over a decade. He pushed up, sitting bolt upright, his movements fluid, precise, and devoid of the tremors that had been his constant companion. He looked at his hands—they were large, the knuckles thick, the wrists strong and unmarked. They were Alex's hands. Driven by a desperate, terrifying urge to confirm his existence, he stumbled to a mirrored wall, his newly powerful heart pounding a healthy, rhythmic drum against the inside of Alex's ribs. The face staring back was Alex's. The sharp jawline, the dark, intense eyes, the faint scar above the brow—the perfect vessel. But the expression—the wide-eyed, disbelieving, utterly terrified expression staring out from that young, perfect face—was undeniably, completely, agonizingly Eli. He had done it. He was free of his dying cage. A slow, giddy, triumphant laugh bubbled up from his healthy lungs, a sound of intoxicating freedom. The laugh died instantly in his throat. In the reflection, just for a flicker, the face in the mirror—Alex's perfect, strong face—moved independently of Eli's own muscle command. It curved, just slightly, into a small, secret, knowing smile. It was a smile that never touched Eli's own horrified lips. And as quickly as it came, the smile was gone, leaving only Eli's paralyzed, disbelieving visage staring back. The first thought, alien and chillingly unwelcome, slithered into his newly acquired mind, uninvited, in a voice that was perfectly clear, calm, and utterly not his own: "My turn." Continue the terror! Wait for Part 2: The First Demand to discover what The Co-Pilot truly wants.
By Wellova 12 months ago in Fiction
From Blood to Bitcoin: A Night of Deadly Reversal
Dozens of Bitcoins twinkled like stars in the night sky on my screen, my digital wallet a constellation forged from blood. They murmured promises of freedom, yet chained me to that fateful night—where the forest's shadows devoured my illusions of safety. Now, lounging in this lavish house, I often feel pulled back to that tiny apartment, walls creeping with invisible vines closing in, just like those in the park that evening. Sometimes, I trace them with my finger, wondering if they're real or just echoes of what I lost—and gained—in the wild.
By Linda12 months ago in Fiction