Title: The Unbreakable Rule
They called it The Rule - capitalized, revered, and never spoken aloud.
When I joined The Eclipse Institute, a secretive government-funded think tank buried in the Arctic Circle, the orientation was brutal. No phones. No contact with the outside world. You eat what they give. Sleep when they tell you. Work on what they assign.
But above all
Never enter Lab B-07.
Not during drills. Not by accident. Not even if someone begs you to. Especially if someone begs you to.
That was the unbreakable rule.
They didn’t explain why. The door wasn’t even locked just there, halfway down the east wing, black steel with a single handprint scanner. The hallway was always empty. Too quiet.
Of course, it festered in me. Curiosity doesn’t die in isolation. It thrives.
I lasted 42 days.
It happened just after midnight. I was returning from a graveyard shift in the neural mapping bay. The corridor lights flickered unusual, since the facility’s backup power systems were overengineered to the point of obsession.
Then I heard it.
Knocking. From inside B-07.
Three knocks.
Then a voice.
“Help me,” it whispered. My voice.
I froze.
That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t spoken. No one else was around. I checked the camera above the door it had gone dark.
Then again: “Please. It’s cold in here.”
I should’ve run.
Instead, I scanned my hand.
The door clicked open.
Inside: a clean white room, humming with artificial warmth. In the center "me."
Same face. Same mole under the left eye. Wearing the uniform I had worn yesterday.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you shouldn’t have opened it.”
Before I could speak, she lunged.
I woke up strapped to a chair. My head pounded. Blinding lights flared above me.
Across the glass wall in front of me, she stood my copy typing into a console. She looked calm. Like someone who belonged here.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
She smiled without warmth. “You broke The Rule.”
A voice crackled from the intercom. One I’d never heard before, cold and clinical.
“Subject 13-A successfully contained. Initiating sequence.”
I screamed.
Then the memories changed.
My childhood shifted my mother had blue eyes, not brown. My first kiss was under a pine tree, not a rooftop. Names I once held dear felt… scrambled.
And worse she had them now.
She wasn’t just pretending to be me. She was becoming me.
I don’t know how long they kept me.
Time in that place was elastic. Days bled into nights, broken only by injections and interrogations.
From what I could piece together, Lab B-07 housed an experimental echo-field—a chamber designed to trap temporal reflections. When someone entered, the field copied them from a moment in their past or future. An echo of who they were or would become.
Sometimes it worked.
Other times, the copy fought back.
I was one of the unlucky ones.
They couldn’t kill me they needed me alive for equilibrium, they said. To keep her stable. If I died, she’d unravel.
So I became a prisoner of my own existence.
But here’s the thing about keeping someone alive just enough: they start planning.
Two hundred and seven days later, a containment breach shook the institute. Something in Lab D mutated and turned half the crew into screaming husks.
In the chaos, my restraints deactivated.
I ran.
Not toward the exit. Not yet.
Toward the server room.
If I could find the logs prove what they’d done to me maybe the world outside would believe.
I accessed the archives. My hands trembled. Hundreds of subjects. All “replacements.” All echoes made to take over the real ones who broke The Rule.
Some had vanished from public life.
Some had mysteriously “changed.”
I was just one of many.
Then I heard her.
“You really don’t know when to stop, do you?”
She stood in the doorway, eyes wild, face smeared with someone else’s blood. Not mine.
She lunged.
I dodged, slamming the emergency purge button.
The alarms blared.
She screamed not like a human but like every version of me that ever could’ve been.
I escaped the facility with half a map, frostbitten fingers, and a flash drive full of horrors.
The institute buried the breach, of course. Claimed it was a gas leak. Released a fake obituary under my name: Dr. Elara Voss deceased in classified incident.
But I’m alive.
And I’m not the only one.
I’ve met others now. Survivors. People who remember lives slightly different from the ones they live.
Some have copies.
Some are copies.
And everywhere I go every town, every hotel, every gas station I see black doors.
Unmarked.
Waiting.
So if you ever find yourself somewhere strangemaybe an institute, a hidden bunker, a place with silence that feels too still and they tell you:
“You can do anything. Just don’t open that door.”
Run.
Because the moment you break the unbreakable rule…
You’ll never know if the one walking away is really still you.
Or just your reflection…
…stepping into your life.
React
