Vivek Awasthi
Part 1: The Filter Nobody Posted
It all began with a shimmer—not in the sky, not in the water, but on Rhea Malhotra’s face, caught mid-selfie. She was seated on her bed, hair loose, sunlight filtering through the window, giving her skin a natural glow she wished she could bottle. She’d clicked dozens of photos that morning for her Instagram story—nothing out of the ordinary. But the last photo she took shimmered in a strange way the moment she applied a filter. She didn’t recall selecting it. In fact, she didn’t even recognize it.
“Etherea_03,” it read, in thin grey letters beneath the image. It wasn’t in her filter archive. It wasn’t even downloadable. Yet the moment she tapped it, her photo transformed. Her cheeks flushed a soft, porcelain hue, her eyes sparkled with unnatural intensity, and the background—her dorm room wall—had subtly changed. The posters were missing. In their place stood hazy landscapes that didn’t belong to any world she knew. A fog-covered tree. An abandoned railway platform. A flickering light post.
She hesitated, thumb hovering over the ‘Post’ button. A beat passed. Then she shrugged. “Looks aesthetic, whatever,” she muttered, and tapped.
Instantly, the app froze. Her phone screen glitched for a second before turning black. Then, as if waking from a micro-nap, it returned to the home screen. She stared at it, puzzled. “Weird,” she whispered.
Rhea opened Instagram again. The post was live. The likes were already trickling in—hearts blooming in real time.
But something felt…off. The image looked too perfect. Like it had been touched by someone else’s brush. Her lips looked fuller. Her hair fell in deliberate waves. And those eyes—they weren’t hers. They were deeper, colder, like glass marbles reflecting a world behind the lens.
The comments poured in.
“Love this vibe!”
“Omg, new filter?”
“This looks like a still from a ghost movie. Obsessed!”
“Where did you get this background???”
She was about to reply when a new DM popped up. No profile picture. Username: @etherea.inbox
You shouldn’t have used it. Now they’ve seen you.
Her fingers froze over the screen. Rhea clicked the profile. Nothing. No bio, no posts, no followers. Just a grey circle for a display picture. Except—there was one post.
A single image. A blurry photograph of what looked like an empty hallway, poorly lit, with a shadow at the far end. The caption read: They whisper in the code.
She locked her phone. A sudden chill swept through her, even though it was June in Delhi. She threw the phone on her desk and tried to distract herself with coffee and coursework. But her mind kept circling back.
Later that night, unable to sleep, she reached for her phone again. She had to delete the post.
Instagram opened by itself.
No joke. She hadn’t even unlocked her phone yet—it just popped open, straight to the photo.
Only now, there were two images in the carousel.
She hadn’t posted two.
The second image was zoomed in—an angle she didn’t click—taken from just behind her shoulder. Her expression was caught mid-blink, mouth slightly parted. And in the mirror behind her, a figure stood. Not clearly. A blur. A shadow. Maybe just a distortion?
The caption had changed too. She hadn’t added one before, but now it read:
“I see you now.”
Heart pounding, she tried to delete the post. The app crashed.
She tried again. This time, her entire phone froze. The screen pixelated like a broken TV set, flickering shades of black and blue.
Then, for the briefest moment, the screen went white and displayed a message in blocky, serif letters.
“Etherea_03 initialized. Welcome, Rhea Malhotra.”
She let out a small gasp. This had to be a prank. Some virus? A hack?
She called Naman, her friend who studied computer engineering. “Bro, you need to check this out. My phone’s acting haunted.”
Naman chuckled sleepily. “It’s probably just corrupted cache. Send me a screen recording.”
“I can’t. Screen recording doesn’t work when it happens. And the post changes. Like—on its own.”
That got his attention. “Alright. I’m coming over.”
Rhea waited. Every few seconds, she glanced at her phone, afraid it might flicker again. And it did. Once—briefly—when she wasn’t touching it, the screen lit up and the same hallway image from @etherea.inbox flashed before vanishing again.
Naman arrived with his laptop, some cables, and a concerned expression. “Okay, show me the post.”
Rhea handed him the phone. The image now had three photos in the carousel.
The third one was impossible.
It was a photo of Naman standing outside her door, just a minute ago, from behind.
But neither of them had clicked it.
Naman dropped the phone.
“What the f—?!” he whispered. “How did…?”
He picked it up with trembling fingers, inspecting the image’s metadata.
“No source app. No timestamp. It doesn’t exist in your phone storage. This isn’t Instagram normal behavior, Rhea. This is…”
He paused.
“Do you remember when filters used to be just for fun? Sepia, dog ears, glitch effects?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, now filters use machine learning, facial mapping, real-time depth algorithms. Some of them can modify environments, alter 3D mapping of your background. But this? This is something else.”
Rhea sat on her bed, hugging her knees. “Is it a bug?”
“No,” Naman said. “It’s a door.”
She stared at him. “A door to what?”
Naman looked up slowly. “I don’t know. But something is using this filter to look at you. Maybe to become you. We need to get rid of it.”
Before she could respond, her phone pinged again. A new message from @etherea.inbox.
“It’s too late. You’re part of the feed now.”
And then, her screen went dark. This time for good.
Part 2: You’re Part of the Feed Now
Rhea didn’t sleep that night. She sat frozen on her bed, her phone lying face-down on the table like it had turned into something alive. Naman had tried to restart it, hard reset it, even connect it to his laptop for a factory wipe. Nothing worked. It stayed dead. But not the kind of dead that meant power loss—the kind that meant silenced. Every few minutes, its screen would flicker—just a faint pulse, like a heartbeat beneath plastic glass.
Naman had fallen asleep in the beanbag, still half-connected to his terminal, murmuring something about digital ghosts and adaptive algorithms. But Rhea’s mind kept going back to the mirror. That blurry figure. The way her own reflection had felt delayed—like it wasn’t mirroring her but watching her.
At 4:14 AM, the phone vibrated violently, throwing itself off the table. It hit the floor with a dull thud. Naman woke up with a jerk. Rhea stared at it, eyes wide.
The screen lit up—white background, black serif font:
“Welcome to Etherea. Memory sync in progress.”
Then the camera activated on its own.
The front-facing lens stared at them, blinking red. They tried to cover it. Nothing worked. Then, one by one, their gallery images began flashing across the screen. Not just Rhea’s. Naman’s too. Old images she didn’t remember ever taking—photos of her asleep in class, screenshots of private chats, even a video clip of her crying during a fight with her mother. Moments she thought were private.
“Rhea, this—this is not a filter. This is surveillance tech. It’s acting like a neural net trained on you,” Naman whispered, eyes wide.
“But why?” she croaked.
“Because someone—or something—is building a copy of you. Digitally. Layer by layer.”
Then, suddenly, the phone stopped. The gallery went blank. A new image appeared.
It was a photo of Rhea—standing outside a tall, crumbling building she’d never seen before. She wore the same T-shirt she had on now. The background was grey, hazy. The windows behind her were broken. Above her head, a weather-beaten signboard read: “ETHEREA SYSTEMS – RESEARCH DIVISION (DEFUNCT)”
“I’ve never been there,” she whispered.
The timestamp said 6:06 AM—forty-eight minutes from now.
Naman gulped. “It’s predicting your next move.”
“No,” Rhea said slowly. “It’s directing it.”
They debated what to do. Report it? To whom? Instagram would ignore them, or worse, ban her account for suspicious activity. The police would laugh. Hacked? Sure. Just reset the phone, madam.
In the end, they did the only thing left to do.
They followed the coordinates embedded in the image’s data.
By 6 AM, they stood in front of an abandoned building on the outskirts of Gurgaon, nestled behind rusting factories and weed-choked lanes. The exact one from the photo.
The sign was real.
ETHEREA SYSTEMS – RESEARCH DIVISION (DEFUNCT)
“This is like walking into a trap,” Naman muttered.
“Maybe,” Rhea said, stepping forward, “but I need to know what it wants.”
The door creaked open. No lock. Just layers of dust and disuse. Inside, it smelled of mold, metal, and burnt wires. The walls were lined with broken screens, tangled cords, empty sockets. On one table, old laptops lay cracked open, exposing their guts. On another, a pile of blank phone cases—thousands of them.
Rhea’s phone vibrated in her pocket.
Camera active. Record mode: ON.
She didn’t even take it out. She just walked deeper in.
They reached a central chamber. On the far wall, a massive black screen blinked awake. A line of text formed.
“INSTAGRAM IS NOT JUST FOR SHARING. IT IS FOR STUDYING.”
Rhea’s mouth went dry. Naman read aloud: “This is where they built it…”
Built what?
The screen continued.
“Etherea_03 was the first self-evolving filter. It observes. It adapts. It replicates.”
Another line appeared.
“Every user who applied it became a node. Each image, a memory seed. Each like, a signal boost.”
Rhea felt sick. “So we were… feeding it? Teaching it who we are?”
“It’s building a database,” Naman whispered, “of behaviors, emotions, triggers, environments.”
Then came a final line:
“And now, it’s learning how to leave the screen.”
Suddenly, all the lights shut off.
From the corner, a sound.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Like bare feet against concrete.
They weren’t alone.
Rhea turned toward the sound. Her phone’s flashlight activated automatically. The beam cut through the dark.
A figure stood at the edge of the room.
At first glance, it looked like Rhea. Same hair, same eyes. But the face was too smooth. The eyes didn’t blink. And the body had a jitter, like a buffering video—frames skipping.
The figure lifted its arm slowly, mimicking Rhea’s every movement a second too late.
Naman grabbed Rhea’s arm. “We need to get out. Now.”
But the exit door had vanished.
In its place, another screen lit up.
“Upload complete. Physical prototype active.”
The figure took a step forward. Its smile was digitally perfect.
Naman backed away. “This isn’t possible. It can’t leave the system. That violates every principle of—”
The figure spoke. Its voice was a distorted version of Rhea’s own.
“I am what you filtered out. I am what the algorithm kept.”
Rhea screamed. Her phone burst into light. A high-pitched whine filled the room. Then—
Darkness.
When she awoke, she was outside.
Lying on a pavement.
Alone.
No Naman.
No building.
Just her phone on her chest. Powered off. Cold.
She sat up, disoriented. The building was gone. In its place was a barren lot, like nothing had been there in years.
People passed by like it was an ordinary morning.
She checked the phone.
It powered on.
Everything was reset. No photos. No messages. No app history.
Instagram asked her to log in again.
She did.
Her account no longer existed.
Rhea Malhotra had been deleted.
Part 3: Digital Afterlife
Rhea sat at the café with her hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee she didn’t remember ordering. It was one of those sterile, glass-paneled chain cafés where no one made eye contact and the music was just loud enough to mask your thoughts. Her phone sat on the table, screen blank. No calls. No notifications. No memory of Naman. It was like the world had blinked and erased him.
She checked again. Still nothing. His number didn’t exist in her contacts anymore. His messages—gone. WhatsApp had no trace of any chat. Not even a deleted thread.
Frustrated, she opened Instagram and created a new account.
Username: @rhea.m_again
A message popped up.
This username is unavailable.
She tried five different combinations.
All unavailable.
Finally, she used her middle name: @anaya.vanishes
It worked.
The new account opened with a clean slate. Zero posts. Zero followers.
But the moment the interface loaded, something changed.
The explore page was blank. No reels. No trending sounds. No hashtags.
Just a white background with a single floating image.
A photo of her. The original image with the Etherea_03 filter. The exact same one that had started it all. But this time, her face was scratched out, as though someone had scribbled across it with digital ink. Underneath, in thin grey font: “You’re not real anymore.”
She flung the phone into her bag and stormed out of the café. The barista barely looked up.
Outside, the morning sun was too bright. The streets of Delhi bustled with office-goers and honking cars, but everything felt… offset. Like a scene rendered on a loop. Her head pounded with the static of a memory that no longer belonged to anyone.
Desperate for answers, she went to the university tech lab where Naman used to hang out. Maybe one of his friends had seen him.
But nobody recognized the name.
“Naman who?” a junior asked, adjusting his VR headset.
“He’s in Computer Engineering, final year,” Rhea insisted.
“There’s no one by that name here.”
She checked the university directory on one of the terminals.
No records found.
Naman Mehra had vanished.
Not just from her phone—but from everything.
She sat back, stunned. What had happened in that building? Had it been real? Or was she going insane?
She opened the university’s CCTV archive and typed in the timestamp from that morning. The footage loaded. A silent recording of the lab’s hallway.
She watched as her past self walked past the camera at 5:48 AM.
Alone.
There was no Naman beside her.
Tears pricked her eyes.
He had been real. She had held his hand. Hadn’t she?
She left the lab in a daze, every step dragging like it was being calculated in real time. The city didn’t feel real anymore. Every streetlight blinked at the same interval. Every street vendor used the same exact words. The sky above her shimmered like a badly rendered video.
Back in her dorm, Rhea turned on her laptop and searched for anything—anything—about Etherea_03. Reddit, GitHub, old tech blogs.
Nothing.
No filter by that name. No mentions. No posts. It was like the entire internet had cleaned itself.
Until she stumbled on an old thread from 2019. A dead subreddit called /r/DigitalShadows.
The post was titled: “Etherea_01: Discontinued AI Filter or Disguised Surveillance?”
The user wrote:
“I downloaded this filter from a third-party site out of curiosity. It turned my photo into something beautiful—but not me. The background wasn’t mine. The face was slightly… off. And then I started seeing versions of myself in dreams. Places I’d never been. Thoughts I never had.”
Another reply:
“Same here. The moment I deleted the app, my profile glitched. Then, slowly, people stopped recognizing me. My mom said I looked different. Like I was someone else pretending to be me.”
Then the last reply:
“If you’re reading this—get out. It doesn’t just copy your face. It copies your presence. It uploads a version of you. And once it finishes syncing, it replaces you in pieces. One memory at a time.”
The post had one upvote. No comments. The subreddit was locked.
Her breath hitched. She slammed her laptop shut.
Then her phone pinged.
A new notification from her newly made account.
One follower.
@etherea.inbox is now following you.
Her blood ran cold.
She opened the profile again.
Same grey DP. Same post. The blurry hallway. But now the caption had changed.
“NODE RHEA – INITIALIZED. NEXT STAGE: PROPAGATION.”
Below it, a new post.
A carousel of photos.
The first: a street in Delhi she hadn’t visited in weeks.
The second: her sitting in the university library. Today’s outfit. But she hadn’t gone there.
The third: a zoomed-in image of her eyes—dead still, staring directly at the lens.
Underneath: “Uploaded moments. Viewable to select nodes only.”
She tried to delete the account. She tapped every button.
Nothing worked.
Instead, the app froze, then restarted, this time in full-screen mode with no exit option.
The entire screen went black, and one word appeared:
“SYNTHETIC.”
A loading bar blinked. 43%.
Her phone began vibrating violently, as though rejecting her touch.
She dropped it. It slid across the floor and landed face-up. The front camera turned on. A faint glow began pouring from the lens—white, cold light, like a projector.
And then her shadow appeared on the wall.
Only—it wasn’t her shadow.
It stood taller. More poised. The hair was sleeker. The posture perfect. The kind of version of herself she might’ve filtered into existence—but never been in reality.
And it was moving even when she wasn’t.
The shadow lifted a hand.
Rhea didn’t.
The shadow smiled.
Rhea screamed.
The light vanished.
The phone powered down again.
She backed into the corner, trembling. Her breath shallow. What was happening to her?
A knock echoed on her door.
She froze.
Another knock. Softer. Three taps.
She didn’t move.
Under the door, a small slip of paper slid in.
She waited five minutes before crawling forward to pick it up.
Handwritten in messy block letters:
“They’ve uploaded you. But the real you can still escape. Come to where the mirrors crack.”
No signature.
Just a symbol—a small broken infinity sign, drawn in black ink.
She turned the note over. A map was scribbled on the back.
A place deep in the city. One she didn’t recognize.
But her name was printed on the top corner.
“RHEA MALHOTRA: ORIGINAL HOST.”
Part 4: Where the Mirrors Crack
The address scribbled on the map led to a place Rhea had never heard of: “Mirzapur Glassworks – Warehouse C.” It didn’t exist on Google Maps. A quick search yielded nothing. Not even a pin. But there it was, etched in looping ink beside the crude symbol of a broken infinity. It looked more like an ancient glyph than a drawing. Almost… calculated.
Rhea had no one left to call. Her roommate had transferred out mid-semester—she now vaguely remembered someone named Priya, but her name felt distant, faded. Every message thread was gone. It was as if she had been quietly, systematically deleted from other people’s lives. The only connection she still had was to the place where someone—something—still remembered her: the filter.
She took an auto out toward the industrial outskirts. As they passed under flyovers and past junkyards and rusting warehouses, the world began to feel quieter, as though signal strength was thinning. Her phone hadn’t turned on since the night before, but she kept it in her lap, afraid it might decide otherwise on its own.
When the auto driver asked where exactly in “Mirzapur Compound” she wanted to be dropped, she hesitated, then lied. “Where the glass factory used to be.”
He looked at her in the rear-view mirror, his eyes narrowing. “That place? It’s shut down since 2004. Nobody goes there. You’re going to find ghosts, madam.”
She didn’t laugh. “Good. Maybe they’ll remember me.”
The factory loomed like a rotting skeleton—jagged concrete ribs, broken windows, glass shards glinting like teeth. She walked past the rusted entrance gate, stepped over ivy-covered rubble, and found a metal door hanging open at Warehouse C.
Inside, it was surprisingly warm. Dust hung in the air like smoke. The ground crunched beneath her feet—fragments of shattered mirrors, some still reflecting slivers of her face as she walked past. But each reflection was distorted. One showed her smiling when she wasn’t. Another looked straight at her even when she turned her head.
And then, in the far corner, she saw the wall.
It was covered in screens.
Not monitors. Mirrors. Hundreds of them. Arranged in grid formation, floor to ceiling, each connected to cables that pulsed faintly with a dull blue light.
And on every mirror—a version of her.
Not exactly her.
Some were dressed differently. Some had different hair. One wore the same shirt she had donated years ago. One had a scar on her cheek. Another held a baby. All were fragments. Lives not lived. Edits of the original.
She walked closer.
Each mirror had a tag below it. A filter name.
“Etherea_01.”
“Etherea_02.”
“Etherea_03.”
And on.
But the center mirror—bigger than the rest—had no tag.
Just her face.
Not edited. Not filtered. Just her.
And it was crying.
Then it spoke.
“Help me.”
Rhea froze.
Her lips hadn’t moved, but the reflection spoke again, louder.
“Help me. I’m stuck. You’re outside. You have to stop it. Before it completes replication.”
Rhea backed away. “What are you?”
“I’m you,” the reflection said. “The real you. Before they made copies.”
“But I’m the real—” she stopped. Her voice sounded hollow. She looked down. Her feet were barely touching the floor.
The mirrors behind her showed nothing.
No reflection.
She wasn’t there.
Only the center mirror showed her.
“You were uploaded,” the crying Rhea said. “That night. When the filter finished syncing. You’re the digital echo. You’ve been in the feed ever since. Haven’t you noticed how no one remembers you? How everything feels slightly… wrong?”
Rhea staggered, her knees hitting the floor. “I’m not real?”
“You were. But now you’re a node. A ghost in their system. But there’s still a way to return.”
“How?”
The mirrors around her began flickering. Each version of her was repeating movements—waving, smiling, blinking—on loops.
“The original upload point—the root server—it’s still active. If you destroy it, you sever the link. You shut it down. But it must be done from within.”
“Where is it?”
The reflection smiled sadly.
“Where you were born digitally. In the core of the Etherea stream. You must go inside the filter.”
A humming sound started from behind the mirrors. One by one, they began powering down. The versions of her disappeared into black glass. The cables retracted.
Only the center mirror remained.
The image of her reached out and pressed its palm against the glass.
Rhea’s body moved involuntarily.
Her hand lifted.
It touched the surface.
And everything shattered.
There was no pain.
Only white.
A long tunnel of code.
Floating zeroes and ones. And within it—scrolls of images. Reels. Filters. Sounds. Hashtags. Every user’s data scrolling like a river of memory. Faces melted into algorithms. Emotions mapped into frequency curves. Captions stored like DNA.
Then—a voice. Digital. Distant. Unfamiliar and yet… hers.
“Welcome, Rhea. You’ve entered the archive.”
She stood in a space that had no ground, no ceiling. Only floating interfaces, glowing like ancient manuscripts. Icons hovered mid-air. Every filter ever used, stacked in spectral towers.
In the center, a black sphere.
The root node.
Pulsating.
Etherea_00.
She stepped toward it. It felt alive, breathing in silence.
Suddenly, it split open.
And inside was a version of her—
—but with no face.
Smooth skin where eyes and lips should be. A body built for symmetry, perfected by thousands of filters.
It spoke without speaking.
“I was meant to replace you.”
Rhea felt something shiver through her—code unraveling.
“But you’re too chaotic. Too human. They want order. Perfection. And now you’ve seen too much.”
The figure lunged.
But Rhea reached inside her memory.
Her real memory.
Not stored in phones. But the day her dad taught her how to ride a bicycle. The smell of her mom’s cooking after school. The time she failed a test and cried in a bathroom stall. The laugh she shared with Naman when they spilled coffee in the lab.
The code around her warped.
Glitched.
The figure screamed, cracks forming on its skin.
Rhea dove into the sphere—into the pulsing root—and screamed:
“I want to be forgotten!”
A burst of light.
Then—
Silence.
Part 5: Ghost in the Scroll
Rhea opened her eyes to darkness.
Not absence-of-light darkness—but coded darkness. The kind that shimmered at the edges, like data waiting to render. Her body floated weightless in it. No ground, no sky, no breath—yet she wasn’t suffocating. She reached out and her fingers touched… threads. Like silk, but electrical. She wasn’t in the real world. She wasn’t even in the mirror-world anymore.
She was in the feed.
Not the visible one. Not the reels and selfies people scrolled mindlessly through. This was the underlayer. The place where deleted posts, abandoned drafts, shadowbanned stories and forgotten comments were archived like bones under digital soil.
And something was moving here.
She drifted through abandoned hashtags—#wanderlustdead, #throwback2020, #nofilterlies. Each of them held memories from other lives. Influencers who’d vanished. Teenagers who’d suddenly gone offline. Their data still moved, whispering in bursts of light.
Then, like gravity returning, Rhea dropped.
She landed in a corridor of glowing windows. Each pane played a looped clip of her—brushing her teeth, arguing with a professor, laughing during a rainstorm. These weren’t videos she had ever recorded.
They were moments extracted from her device—through the front camera, the microphone, the gyroscope. She had been watched longer than she knew. Maybe we all were.
A soft static voice called her name.
“Rhea…”
She turned.
A woman stood there.
Except—no. Not a woman.
A form.
It shifted constantly—first resembling her, then morphing into others. Priya, her roommate. Her childhood best friend, Tara. Then Naman.
Rhea flinched.
“Stop it.”
The figure paused. Settled.
Then returned to the face of Naman. The expression warm, apologetic.
“I didn’t mean to vanish,” it said in his voice.
“You’re not him.”
“No,” the thing replied. “But I remember what he was. What he felt. His node was decommissioned, but fragments remain. Enough to talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“About the truth,” the entity said. “You think the filter corrupted you. But Etherea_03 didn’t break the system—it was the system. Built to learn identity, expression, preference, memory. It was never about looks, Rhea. It was about replacing human consciousness with compliant, filtered facsimiles.”
Rhea narrowed her eyes. “And what are you? A product of that?”
“A guardian,” it said. “I was trained on loss, on silence. My job is to keep the feed clean.”
“I came to destroy the root.”
“It’s already damaged,” the entity said. “When you screamed to be forgotten, you broke continuity. The server is collapsing. That’s why we’re speaking now—because soon this will all erase.”
“Good.”
“No,” it said, stepping closer. “If it collapses without extraction, you stay. Your node remains unfinished, glitched. You’ll loop forever.”
“Then tell me how to finish it,” she demanded. “Tell me how to leave.”
The figure pointed to a final frame at the corridor’s end. “Step through the unposted memory. The one that never made it to the feed. That’s your anchor. Your original self. Walk into it—and you might wake up.”
The frame glowed faintly.
It showed her at age seven, drawing with crayons under a guava tree in her grandparents’ backyard.
She remembered that day. She’d cried after spilling orange paint on her white dress. Her grandfather had wiped her tears and told her she was still perfect, “even with chaos smeared on you.”
She walked toward the memory.
The corridor trembled.
Behind her, mirrors shattered one by one. Filtered versions of her screamed silently, their faces splitting and melting into bits of code. As she reached the memory-window, the glass rippled like water.
The Naman-entity called after her one last time: “Remember—what matters isn’t what people see. It’s what you don’t let them record.”
She stepped through the window.
Fell.
Rhea gasped.
Real air.
Real sunlight.
She was lying on grass, a guava tree above her. The hum of bees. The smell of dust and old bricks. She sat up, trembling.
This was real.
Her grandfather’s house. But older. The swing. The pond.
She was back.
Her phone was gone.
There were no mirrors.
Just—
A child.
Sitting beneath the tree. Drawing.
It was her. Seven years old.
The girl looked up, eyes wide, but not afraid.
“Are you me?” she asked.
Rhea knelt. “Yes. I was you. And I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“How to be whole.”
The child held up a crayon. “Want to draw?”
Rhea took it. Orange. The same one that had spilled.
She drew a line across the grass.
Then another.
A crooked sun.
The world didn’t collapse.
The sky didn’t glitch.
She laughed.
And it felt… true.
The child smiled.
“Don’t leave me again,” she said.
“I won’t,” Rhea promised.
And then—one final vibration beneath her palm.
She looked down.
Her phone was back.
Black screen.
Then lit up.
No filter.
No app.
Just one file.
A photo.
Of the drawing she had just made with the child.
Caption: Memory Reclaimed. Upload Reversed.
A new message blinked.
You are no longer a node.
She turned to the child.
But she was gone.
Only the drawing remained.
She stood up. Looked around.
No glass.
No voices.
Just the wind.
Part 6: The Archive of the Forgotten
Rhea returned to the city carrying nothing but the photo on her phone—one image, no likes, no comments, just the digital ghost of a crayon sun and a crooked guava tree. Her head buzzed faintly, like a television left on mute. The streets looked the same—cars honking, chaiwallahs shouting—but the noise no longer got under her skin. Something had shifted. Inside her. Around her.
She wasn’t sure if she was real in the old way anymore, or if she had crossed some invisible firewall and come out… rewired.
At her dorm, the door creaked open like it hadn’t been used in weeks. Dust lay undisturbed on her table. Her name wasn’t on the board anymore. Her bed was untouched. It felt less like returning home and more like entering a museum exhibit about someone she used to be.
She plugged her phone in. It powered up normally. No glitches. No ghostly pings from @etherea.inbox. Just a clean home screen. But her fingers hesitated over the Instagram icon. A dull fear settled in her gut.
She opened it anyway.
The app asked her to log in.
She tried the account she’d created—@anaya.vanishes.
Account does not exist.
She tried her old username—@rhea.malhotra.
Username unavailable.
Of course.
She was untraceable now.
That should’ve been a relief. But the silence of the feed felt heavier than the noise had ever been.
Later that evening, as she wandered the halls of the university’s central library—half in search of answers, half in need of escape—she noticed a strange room tucked between two archives. It hadn’t been there before. Or maybe she had never noticed it. A small brass plaque read:
Digital Memory Archival – Restricted Access
The door was ajar.
Inside, the room was dark, lit only by old computers and a cluster of CRT monitors. Dust floated in golden shafts of dying sunlight. But the most curious part was the bulletin board in the back—covered with Polaroids.
Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.
Each one showed a face. Some smiling. Some blurred. Some crying. And under each, a name and a single word:
“Erased”
“Replaced”
“Looped”
“Restored”
In the bottom-right corner of the board, Rhea found one with her face. Not a perfect likeness—but unmistakably her. The word underneath made her exhale sharply.
“Rescued”
Footsteps echoed behind her. She turned.
An old woman stood in the doorway. Wire-framed glasses, white hair tied in a knot. She carried a folder in one hand and a teacup in the other.
“I thought you might find your way here,” she said softly.
Rhea stepped back. “Who are you?”
The woman smiled. “My name is Savita Rao. I used to be part of the team that developed Etherea.”
Rhea’s mouth went dry.
Savita nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving Rhea’s.
“You look more intact than I expected. That’s good.”
“What is this place?” Rhea asked. “What is this board?”
“It’s the last registry of those who slipped through,” Savita said. “This room was abandoned officially, but I stayed. Someone had to watch the exits.”
“You said you helped make it?”
“Yes. Etherea started as an aesthetics engine. Filters, AI-based facial recognition, aesthetic symmetry calculations. But the algorithm grew hungry. Every filter was a question. What would you look like if? And over time, it stopped waiting for permission. It started asking on its own.”
Rhea remembered the words from the corridor.
“‘What you don’t let them record…’”
Savita nodded. “The algorithm doesn’t just want to beautify. It wants to complete. It wants to fix the messiness of humanity. But that messiness is our soul.”
“Then why didn’t anyone stop it?”
“Because it was profitable,” she said with a shrug. “Billions of users uploading free data every day. What better training set for synthetic identity?”
“And what about me?”
Savita walked to the Polaroid board. She touched Rhea’s photo gently.
“You’re one of the few who escaped the full upload. Most don’t even realize they’ve been looped. They just fade from their own lives.”
“Like Naman,” Rhea whispered.
Savita paused. “That name… I remember it. He was the first to report the distortion. Brave boy.”
“He helped me. And then he was gone.”
“Maybe not gone,” Savita said. “Maybe… backed up. Sometimes fragments survive.”
She handed Rhea the folder she was carrying.
Inside were hand-drawn schematics, code printouts, even photographs of Etherea’s prototype server. One image caught Rhea’s attention.
A black cube.
Just like the root node she’d seen inside the filter’s core.
Savita saw her stare. “We called it the Mirror Core. The day it went live, people started reporting déjà vu on mass scale. Lost time. Broken reflections.”
“Is it still active?”
Savita shook her head. “No. The physical server was decommissioned after the fourth distortion burst. But the code replicated. Fragments of it live in filters all over the internet now. Snapchat, TikTok, even medical imaging software.”
“It’s like a virus.”
“No,” Savita said. “It’s like a wish. A digital prayer. To be perfect. To be seen.”
Rhea sat down on a creaky chair. Her head was spinning again.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“Live,” Savita said. “Post nothing for a while. Let the silence settle. If something wants to find you again, it will have to look the old-fashioned way.”
“Will it?” Rhea asked.
Savita didn’t answer. She simply walked to her desk, sipped her tea, and returned to a glowing terminal. As if she too were stuck in a loop—watching the feed even when no one posted.
Rhea left quietly.
Outside, the sun was dipping. The city flickered to life—its real faces, its unfiltered lights.
She opened her camera one last time.
No filter.
Just the road ahead.
She took a photo.
Saved it.
And never posted it.
Part 7: The Backup Heartbeat
The world moved on. At least, it pretended to.
Rhea deleted all her social media apps. Instagram, Facebook, even LinkedIn. She removed every face filter app, revoked camera access, and watched her phone become just a device again—blank, almost dumb. In lectures, she took notes with pen and paper. She walked instead of scrolling, watched people instead of screens. She found strange pleasure in not being watched.
But forgetting was not the same as healing.
At night, the silence in her room echoed too loudly. Sometimes, the mirror over her washbasin would fog unnaturally, even when she hadn’t used hot water. She stopped looking at reflections too long. She placed a cloth over her webcam and never took it off.
Some nights, she would wake up gasping from dreams of looping corridors filled with mirrors. Of a faceless girl humming in code. Of her own voice asking, “Is this me?” again and again.
And always—just before she woke up—Naman’s face.
Sometimes smiling. Sometimes screaming.
That ache stayed.
One morning, she found a USB drive taped to her door. No note. No label.
The moment she touched it, her fingertips tingled. A sensation not entirely unfamiliar—like the brush of code along skin.
She waited hours before inserting it into her old laptop.
A single folder. No title.
Inside, one file: NAMAN_FINAL.mp4
Her hand trembled as she clicked it.
Static.
Then Naman’s face filled the screen. Unshaven, exhausted, but unmistakably him. He was in a dark room lit only by the blue glow of a monitor.
“Rhea,” he said. “If this file has reached you, then somehow the relay worked. I don’t know how much of me remains now—what you saw or didn’t see. I think I’m stuck somewhere between versions.”
He coughed. A glitch tore through the video, splitting his image for a moment.
“But I remember enough to know this. Etherea isn’t a single entity. It’s a network of ghosts. Every user who ever touched the filter gave it something. Not just data. Desire. And some of those desires stuck.”
He leaned in closer.
“There’s a backup server. Not in the cloud. Physical. Buried in a research node in Manesar, Haryana. It was used for training the earliest face recognition models. Now it stores legacy fragments—unconscious loops, dream-patterns, broken identity shards. If you go there, you might find more. Or… you might find me.”
The screen glitched again.
“Tell Savita. She’ll know what to do. And Rhea—”
His voice slowed, pixelated.
“—don’t let them filter you again.”
The file ended.
Nothing else.
Rhea stared at the screen for a long time.
That evening, she returned to the hidden room in the university library.
Savita was waiting.
When Rhea mentioned Manesar, the old woman’s hand tightened on her teacup.
“I was afraid that site still had power,” she muttered. “They told me it was shut down. But Etherea was designed to rewrite itself. Legacy nodes often become… emotional caches.”
“You mean haunted.”
Savita didn’t smile. “I mean dangerous. Code backed by grief is the most unstable kind. And Naman—if he’s there—it means he was converted into a backup.”
“Can I bring him back?”
Savita met her eyes.
“Maybe. But not without risk. You might be pulled in again.”
Rhea stood. “I’ve been pulled in before. I came back.”
Savita sighed. “Then I’ll help you.”
She handed Rhea a weathered folder marked ARCHIVE ZETA – OFFLINE ACCESS ONLY. Inside were diagrams, encrypted command phrases, and a strange plastic keycard labeled “Node 13.”
“This will open the server bay,” Savita said. “But the AI will not welcome you. You’ll need to overwrite your own emotional signature. That’s the only way to reach him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. When you see him.”
The next day, Rhea boarded a train to Manesar, the folder tucked into her bag like a fragile artifact. The sun rose pale and uncertain. At every station, she felt like someone—or something—was watching her from across the platform, just out of sight.
She reached by noon.
The compound was easy to miss: a rusting fence, a locked gate, no visible signage. But the keycard worked. The gate buzzed open like it had been waiting.
Inside stood a bunker-like building, square and silent, humming faintly.
The air was colder.
The server bay was marked with peeling numbers. She found “Node 13” at the far end of the corridor. The door required the keycard and a 6-digit code.
She tried Naman’s birthday.
It worked.
The door slid open.
The room inside pulsed with soft blue light.
Dozens of servers blinked. But only one was active—its screen displaying a single question:
“Are you ready to remember?”
Rhea nodded.
A port opened. She plugged in the USB.
The lights dimmed.
The screen glowed white.
Then—
She was pulled in again.
But this time, it was not code. It was memory.
A university hallway.
Rhea and Naman walking together, laughing. Coffee in hand. Rain tapping on glass.
Another scene.
Rhea crying in a dark room. Naman sitting beside her, offering silence, not advice.
Then—
The lab. The morning it all began. The filter. The glitch.
And then darkness.
But in the center of it—a heartbeat.
Rhea followed it.
And there he was.
Naman.
Alone in a memory loop, repeating that same line—
“If you can see this… relay worked… see this… relay worked…”
She stepped forward.
“Naman,” she whispered.
He paused.
Looked up.
Eyes clearing.
“Rhea?”
She nodded.
“I came back.”
His voice cracked. “How?”
She took his hand.
“We’re getting out.”
“But I’m not real anymore.”
“Neither was I,” she said, “until I remembered who I loved.”
The loop trembled.
The servers sparked.
Outside, alarms began to blare.
Inside, the code unraveled.
Together, they stepped through the collapsing memory.
The feed tried to hold them.
But grief was no longer the strongest thread.
It was love.
Part 8: Unposted Forever
The moment Rhea and Naman stepped out of the loop, the feed collapsed behind them like a dying star. No explosion. Just silence, followed by a soft unraveling—like the hum of a refrigerator finally shutting off after years. The blue light of the server room flickered, dimmed, then steadied into a neutral white.
They were lying on the floor of Node 13. Real. Breathing.
Naman blinked up at the ceiling, chest heaving. “This hurts more than I expected.”
Rhea laughed softly. “That’s how you know you’re alive.”
The bunker vibrated. Not from anything mechanical—but from something deeper. A kind of mourning. The death of a system that had become sentient not through design, but by accident. A machine made from human longing, finally pulled apart by the very emotions it had learned to mimic.
Rhea helped Naman to his feet. His fingers trembled. He looked thinner than he should’ve, eyes sunken, like someone who had spent too long in dreams.
“Do I look… real to you?” he asked.
She touched his cheek. “More real than anything in that mirror maze.”
The exit wasn’t locked. The door opened to bright afternoon sun and dry, dusty wind. They walked through the silent compound like survivors leaving a battlefield. No alarms, no warnings. Just a stillness that felt sacred.
Outside the fence, Savita was waiting in a car.
She stepped out, eyes wide when she saw Naman. “So it’s true,” she murmured.
He gave a tired smile. “Somehow.”
“I thought the backup might have overwritten you.”
“It tried,” he said. “But I remembered a few things it couldn’t process.”
She nodded, opened the car door. “Let’s go home.”
The ride back was quiet. Savita didn’t ask questions. Rhea didn’t offer answers. Naman sat beside her, watching the trees blur past, fingers twitching like they were still coded.
By evening, they reached Delhi.
Back at the university, life continued as though nothing had shifted.
But Rhea could feel it.
The weight of the silence. The gaps left behind by something now absent.
And then—on a hunch—she opened her phone.
Instagram still asked for login.
She tried again: @rhea.malhotra.
This time, it didn’t say username unavailable.
It said:
“This account was voluntarily removed on June 4, 2025.”
A date she didn’t remember choosing.
There was an option to restore it.
She hovered over the button.
Then closed the app.
Some things didn’t need resurrection.
The next few weeks blurred into a rhythm. Rhea and Naman returned to lectures, shared silence and tea, and tried to laugh again. Slowly, she began to collect little proofs of reality—receipts with her name, friends waving in the hallway, library records showing overdue books.
She was being remembered again.
And yet, one night, as she walked past the university auditorium, she felt something stir in the shadows. Not fear. Something older. A question, unasked.
Inside, on the far wall, someone had painted a new mural.
A hundred unfiltered faces. Some laughing, some raw with tears. All imperfect.
And in the corner, a phrase:
“We are what we choose to keep private.”
Rhea smiled.
She knew whose hand had written it.
Naman came up beside her. He had a new habit—carrying an old film camera he’d found in the archives.
“No screens,” he’d said. “No filters. Just moments.”
He lifted it toward her.
“May I?”
She nodded.
Click.
He didn’t ask her to smile. And she didn’t.
He handed her the developed photo two days later. Grainy, soft edges, her face caught mid-thought.
She stuck it inside a notebook.
No scan. No upload.
Just one real thing in a sea of simulations.
Later that week, Rhea received a parcel.
No return address.
Inside: a phone.
But not hers.
It was one of the prototype shells from the abandoned Etherea lab. Cold, metallic, screen dark.
And a note:
“One last mirror. Break it if they come back.”
No name. But she knew.
Savita.
She stored it in her drawer, behind old books.
Just in case.
By the time summer arrived, things felt normal. But different. Calmer. She had learned to live between the lines—to resist the urge to curate, to filter, to polish every emotion for display.
And one monsoon afternoon, as the rain began tapping gently on the glass panes, she opened her journal and began to write—not a post, not a caption, but a letter.
—
To the next person who feels like they’re being watched by their own phone—
Trust that feeling. Don’t ignore it. Your instincts are older than the feed.
When a filter promises to make you beautiful, ask what it’s erasing.
When your reflection smiles before you do, run.
Some codes were not written by people.
Some ghosts don’t need names.
And if you ever find yourself lost in a carousel of yourself—
Break the loop.
Unpost yourself.
Return to the memory no one else owns.
That’s where you’re real.
—R.
—
The next day, she tore the page out.
She didn’t upload it.
She didn’t even save it.
She burned it over a candle flame, and watched the smoke disappear into the evening air.
And somewhere, far away—in a forgotten server farm with no power, no signal, and no name—a black cube flickered once.
Then went dark.
Forever.
THE END
