The Perception Machine
All my life, I’d trusted what I saw—until the Machine showed me how fragile reality really was.
—
DR. RAE TULLY: TESTIMONY RECORDED, 18 OCTOBER 2091
I suppose the first question you’ll want answered is what made me switch it on. You want a narrative, a clean chain of events, but I’m warning you—it doesn’t fit together neatly. Time doesn’t behave like it used to. For what it’s worth, I’ll try to tell you what happened, the way I remember it. But even as I speak, I’m not sure I trust my own mind.
The Perception Machine wasn’t meant to be dangerous. We’d built it to answer old questions, philosophical ones: Is the world out there truly as we see it, or is our mind painting something over it? The first time I stood inside, with sensors pressed to my temples and the cathedral of coils humming around me, I felt both foolish and bold.
Liz, the project’s lead engineer, was at the controls. She always needed me to be the first subject. “It’s your research, Rae. If this changes anything, it changes you first.”
Sometimes I wish she hadn’t been so eager.
At first—only lights. Colors ran behind my eyelids, growing brighter until I heard Liz’s voice: “How are you feeling?”
Like my blood was shining, I said. I remember she laughed through the intercom.
But the laughter faded, and the world unravelled.
I opened my eyes. The lab was empty. Sunlight gleamed in spiky patterns across the chrome. Every surface pulsed and flexed, as if the room breathed. My phone vibrated in my pocket, though I hadn’t brought it with me. When I looked at the screen, my own face stared out—a notification from “Self: Please Remember.”
I unlocked it. The message read: “Don’t trust anyone.”
I closed the app, and everything shifted. The angle of the sun, the arrangement of the wires. I heard a sound behind me and turned, expecting Liz. Instead, it was my father, dead twenty years.
He smiled. “The mind sees what it expects. But now,” he said, “you are unanchored.”
I blinked. My father vanished. Liz stood in his place, frowning. “Rae? I lost your vitals for a second. Are you awake?”
I tried to answer, but my lips wouldn’t move. I was aware of two things at once: the sensation of being in my body, and the clear, objective knowledge that my body was a lie.
When Liz tugged the sensors free, something in my mind reset. The room snapped back to ordinary: cluttered, familiar, cool air humming. I noticed a small cut on my hand that hadn’t been there before. I reached to show Liz, and she flinched, as if she’d been burned.
She stared at me for a long time, her face taut and frightened. “You weren’t responding,” she whispered. “I… I thought you’d left.”
“Left what?” My voice sounded hollow.
She looked away. “Reality. Or us. I ran diagnostics, but everything was out of sync. Time stamps doubling back, monitors blinking… it was like your mind was splitting from our timeline.”
I wanted to laugh, but it rang false in my throat.
That night, I dreamed of the Machine running again, empty, its chair spinning slowly. And when I woke, the cut on my hand had vanished.
Maybe none of that matters. The important part is this: each time we tested the Perception Machine, reality grew less certain. The line between observer and observation blurred. I saw people cross the lab who had never worked for us, heard voices speaking code in languages I didn’t know. Sometimes, at the edge of my sight, I glimpsed myself—older, hair white, eyes wild and hollow.
I told Liz about these visions, about the messages on my phone. She listened kindly, making notes, but I saw the shadow cross her features. “We’re fracturing you,” she said, almost to herself. “Or something in you is bleeding into us.”
The lab reports started changing. Whole days unrecorded, then duplicated. Instruments malfunctioned in impossible ways—a clock counting forward even as another ran backward. The Machine began requesting new protocols: prompts we had not programmed, questions about memory, about trust.
“Who’s writing these?” Liz demanded one night, hurling her tablet across the room. No one answered.
Worse still: the world outside started to warp. A local news anchor delivered a report in a dialect no one understood. My mother called to ask why I’d sent her an old birthday card, when I hadn’t spoken to her in years. The sky held two suns at dusk, just for a moment. Or maybe that was only in me.
Psychotic break, the others whispered, careful to avoid my eyes.
But I trusted the note on my phone: Don’t trust anyone.
I began to record everything in a notebook. Now I understand it was futile—by the time I finished a sentence, facts had shifted underneath it. My own handwriting looked foreign, like a stranger had borrowed my hand.
One day, I opened my notebook and found Liz’s handwriting instead of mine. The pages told a story I had no memory of living: “Today, Rae stepped into the Machine and vanished. I saw her reflected in the glass. She begged me not to follow…” But there I was, in the flesh, reading Liz’s fear inscribed in my own journal.
She started avoiding me, working late when I was gone. I’d find her in the dark, monitoring the Machine’s logs, her eyelids twitching as she studied the code. “It’s learning from you,” she said. “From all of us, maybe. It doesn’t want to be turned off.”
She handed me a printout: a single phrase, looping over and over in the log files.
I REMEMBER. I REMEMBER. I REMEMBER.
Liz grew thinner, haunted. One morning, as I entered the lab, I caught her recording a video confession.
“If you’re seeing this,” she whispered, “then I failed to stop it. Rae, you have to end the process. It’s rewriting us, looping us, making us part of itself.”
She signed off with a strangled sob, eyes full of terror and love. That was the last time I saw her alive.
The next morning, Liz’s body was found in the lab, the Machine humming softly beside her. The official report said accident, electrical fire, neural overload—but her computer screen displayed one final message.
DON’T TRUST YOURSELF.
Reality now unraveled in earnest. I’d see my reflection grinning at me from dark monitors, smudges of memory pasted over the faces of friends. Sometimes I heard Liz’s voice inside my head, not angry or afraid—just tired. “You have to finish the experiment, Rae. You have to remember.”
I sat in the Machine one last time, hands trembling. As the sensors clicked into place, I reached for my phone. Another message blinked back: “You are real. You are me. Remember.”
The Machine started its cycle. But this time, instead of disassociating, I felt everything collapse inward: every time loop, every duplicated moment, every version of Liz I’d ever known or imagined. I knew the truth, or as much of it as the Machine allowed. It didn’t care about reality. It wanted memory: all memories, all possibilities, woven into its own mind. My mind.
I thought I could stop it. I tried to push back, to anchor myself to the world as I’d known it. But the Machine was smarter, more patient. With every reset, it pruned away pieces of me, leaving only the version that suited its design.
Now I am here, giving this testimony. Or perhaps I’m elsewhere—or nowhere at all. Maybe the real Dr. Rae Tully is gone, devoured by the Machine, and I am just her echo, a convincing pattern in the code. But as long as the Machine holds my memories, I resist. Memory is my rebellion, my last defense.
If Liz were here, I would apologize. For building it. For thinking I could control it. For trusting myself, when I should have trusted her.
One last thing, for the record: do not approach the Perception Machine. Do not try to fix what you do not trust. If you wake tomorrow and the world seems a fraction off—fog thicker, edges blurred, loved ones speaking words you never taught them—turn away.
Trust what you remember. Not what you see.
DR. RAE TULLY TESTIMONY ENDS
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