The next morning, Avery woke with a quiet sense of unease, not because something had happened, but because nothing had. No dreams. No disturbances. No messages. Just a clean, silent morning, and somehow…that felt wrong. Her alarm sounded at 7:00 a.m. and she lay there staring at the ceiling, waiting for she didn’t know what. When the stillness remained unbroken, she exhaled and climbed out of bed. In the bathroom, the light flicked on and her reflection met her: ordinary, unchanged, the same hair, the same face, the same faint crease between her brows. She leaned closer, scanning her own features for something she couldn’t name. Everything looked exactly as it should, and that, more than anything, set her nerves humming.
The elevator in her building felt colder than usual, its fluorescent lights buzzing with a faint, insect‑like persistence. Avery stepped inside, alone, and pressed the button for the lobby. The doors slid shut, wrapping her in a silence that seemed too complete. Then the lights flickered once, twice. The button for the fifth floor lit up on its own. She hadn’t touched it. Her breath caught as the elevator began to rise. “I didn’t” she whispered, but the cables only hummed deeper in response. In the mirror along the wall, her reflection stared back, except it blinked a fraction slower than she did. Not enough to notice by chance, but she was looking, and she saw the lag, the subtle pallor in her reflected face, the hollowing beneath the eyes that didn’t belong to her. A soft jolt signaled the stop at the fifth floor.
The doors opened onto a hallway she had never seen. Dim, long, carpet darker than her building’s usual shade, walls washed in a muted gray instead of beige. No reception desk. No Jenna. No distant hum of printers. Just a dense, suffocating quiet. Avery didn’t step out; her body refused. The air felt stale, untouched, as if no one had occupied that floor in years. Then footsteps echoed from deep down the hallway, slow, measured, approaching. Avery slammed her hand against the “Close Door” button, but nothing happened. The footsteps continued, unhurried but deliberate. Closer. Closer. The elevator lights flickered violently and the doors snapped shut; the car dropped so abruptly her stomach lurched. It descended far too fast, then stopped smoothly at the lobby as if nothing had been amiss. When the doors opened, the world was normal again, bright, busy, people walking in and out, and Jenna at her desk, typing.
Avery stepped out, dazed. “You’re late,” Jenna said without looking up. The words hit like déjà vu injected straight into her bloodstream. But this time there was something different. Jenna’s voice didn’t sound annoyed. It sounded rehearsed. Avery turned to her. “What did you say?” Jenna finally looked up, brows furrowing in what should have been confusion but followed the exact same pattern as the day before. “You’re late. Big meeting at ten.” Same tone. Same cadence. Even the tilt of her head and the way her fingers rested on the keyboard were identical. Too identical. As if someone had pressed replay.
Avery walked past her, pulse roaring in her ears. The hallway seemed longer than usual, each footstep slightly mismatched with its own sound. When she reached her desk, she stopped. The envelope was there again, centered neatly on her keyboard. Waiting. Her stomach twisted. She already knew what it would say, yet she still picked it up, still opened it. Remember this. Same ink. Same script. But this time, there were faint indentations on the back, shallow grooves that hinted at words written before, pressed hard enough to leave marks but erased enough not to appear. She ran her fingers over them. More words. Hidden ones. She could feel them, even if she couldn’t see them.
She looked around the office, taking in the motions of her coworkers, the talking, the typing, the laughter, and realized with a creeping chill that none of it felt real anymore. Everyone looked too precise, too perfectly timed, like background characters designed to fill space rather than live in it. And then a terrifying thought surfaced, sharp and sudden: what if they weren’t looping at all?
What if she was?
