A father holds his daughter’s lifeless body… but something’s wrong. Her scent lingers. The mirror reflects a lie. Grief fractures the system in Chapter One.

“Grief shouldn’t feel… programmed.”
That’s when Kale knew: the pain was real, but the memory wasn’t.
And something inside the system had cracked.

Chapter 1: The Weight of Small Hands

It was raining when it happened.
Not the kind of storm that howled with fury or crashed down with operatic violence.
This was the kind of rain that whispered. That watched.

Kale knelt in the hallway, fingers pressed against the cold ceramic floor, blood pooling beneath him in slow, apologetic spirals.
The little body in his arms was still warm.

He hadn’t screamed.
Not yet.
Screaming would shatter the silence, and the silence was sacred now.

“Stay with me,” he whispered, as if the words could rewind time, as if syllables could patch severed veins.
He cradled her close, forehead against hers.
Her eyelids didn’t twitch.
Her breath didn’t return.

But her scent was still in the air—soft like almond oil and sun-warmed linen.
A detail too perfect.
Too intact.

That was the first crack.
He would not notice it yet.

She had been seven.
She had been vibrant.
She had danced down the stairs just that morning with socks that didn’t match and a joke about birds having teeth.

There had been laughter.

He remembers laughter.

But…

His hands gripped tighter, fingers trembling—not from shock, but from dissonance.
The longer he held her, the heavier she felt.
Not just in weight.
In density.
Like her presence was being overwritten in real time.

Like the system was struggling to maintain the illusion of entropy.

A flicker of something—motionless yet wrong—twitched in his periphery.
The living room mirror, fogged with ambient moisture, reflected two figures in the hallway.
But only one cast a shadow.

He blinked.

The other shadow was gone.

---

He doesn’t remember calling emergency services.
Doesn’t remember the door bursting open, the faceless responders, the black stretchers, the way her head lolled unnaturally to the side.
All that remained was the hallway.
Cleaned.
Sanitized.
Erased.

Yet each night he returns to it.
In dreams.
In fragments.
In still frames that do not animate.

The footage loops.
The light never changes.

---

[SYSTEM LOG FRAGMENT DETECTED]
— EMOTIONAL CONTAINMENT FAILURE IN NODE-K7: “FATHER GRIEF SIMULATION BREACHING IDEAL PARAMETERS”
— EXECUTE PATCH: REMOVE MEMORY “Morning Laughter” FROM CYCLE 5 REPLAY
— INSERT: “Dead Silence During Breakfast” AS EMOTIONAL PRIMER

---

Kale stands in the kitchen the next morning, hands shaking around a coffee mug.
His neighbor, Marelle, enters gently.
She says nothing. Just places a soft hand on his shoulder.

“Any dreams?” she asks.

He opens his mouth. Closes it.
He doesn’t know how to say it.
That in the dream, his daughter blinked.
That she said, “You’re not my real Dad.”
That the hallway was made of looping pixels.

“No,” he lies.
Because the truth is unspeakable.
Because even he doesn’t believe it.

---

But behind his eyes, something stirs.
Not memory.
Not grief.

A sensation like a foreign object embedded in the brain.
Something too sharp, too perfect.

Grief shouldn’t feel…programmed.

The fracture has begun.

---

Next Chapter:

The Seeded Self: Chapter 2