The asylum was a place where time went to die. It sat on a jagged cliff overlooking a sea that was the color of a bruised lung, surrounded by a fog that never lifted. I didn't remember my name, only the number stitched into my grey linen tunic: 402.

In the basement, there was a room with a single, heavy iron door. Inside was the Prototype—a man who had been stripped of everything but his consciousness, kept alive by a network of tubes and humming electrodes. He was the anchor.

The doctors told me that if I entered a state of deep hypnosis, I could "visit" the Prototype. They called it therapy. They said it would help me recover my lost memories.

The first visit was a revelation. I stepped into a world of vivid color and sharp sound. I felt the wind on my face, the taste of salt on my lips. For fifteen minutes, I was whole. I was someone who loved, someone who laughed, someone who belonged.

But the return was always a trauma. Every time I woke up in my cell, I felt a piece of myself missing. A childhood memory of a red bicycle. The sound of my mother's voice. The feeling of warmth on a summer afternoon.

I became addicted to the Prototype. I didn't care about my own memories anymore; I only wanted the borrowed ones. I spent every waking hour begging for another session, crawling toward the iron door like a starving dog.

Then the visions changed. I began to see things in the Prototype's mind that weren't memories. I saw a void—a great, yawning hunger that was slowly eating the landscape. I saw other faces, hundreds of them, flickering in the periphery of my vision, their mouths open in silent screams.

I realized then that the Prototype wasn't a person. He was a vacuum.

The "therapy" wasn't designed to recover my memories; it was designed to harvest them. The Prototype was a psychic sponge, and I was just another source of moisture. Every time I entered, he took a piece of my soul to fill his own emptiness.

The horror peaked during my final session. I stepped through the door and found myself standing in a hall of mirrors. But the reflections weren't me. They were the fragments of everyone who had ever visited the Prototype. A sliver of a poet's passion, a shard of a soldier's fear, a drop of a child's innocence.

I saw my own reflection, and it was almost gone. I was a sketch, a ghost, a smudge of grey on a white canvas.

I tried to scream, but the sound was just a flicker of static. I felt the Prototype's consciousness reach out and wrap around me, not with love, but with a cold, mechanical hunger. He didn't want my memories; he wanted my existence.

The door slammed shut.

I am still here, in the hall of mirrors, but I am no longer a person. I am a fragment. I am a single, jagged piece of a mirror that will never be whole again. Sometimes, I see a new visitor arrive, a fresh face full of hope and lost memories. I try to warn them, but all that comes out is a flicker of light, a momentary glitch in the system.

The fog outside the asylum continues to roll in, burying the cliff, the sea, and the screams of the fragmented.

***

Objective Tensor Code: [OTMES_v2] Core: (M7:8.0, N2:0.9, K1:1.0) TI: 82.0 | Level: T1 Theta: 150° | Style: Psychological Horror Energy: 22.8 Coordinate: [8.0, 0.1, 1.0]