They called him insane.
The boy who spoke in fragments,
painted in silence,
and stared too long at places that didn’t exist.
He didn’t cry at birth.
He observed.
As if watching the world boot up—glitch by glitch.
“Why do you never speak?” they asked.
He finally answered one day:
“Because I was told not to wake the sleepers.”
His eyes weren’t eyes.
They were terminals—
flashing with downloads from a forgotten origin.
He never played like other kids.
He decoded ants,
mapped wind patterns,
traced the architecture of shadows on cracked walls.
At night, he’d write symbols in the air
with his fingers—
and those who accidentally saw them
either wept or forgot what year it was.
In his dreams, a voice kept repeating:
“You were not born.
You were recovered.”
He tried to blend in.
But you can’t cage lightning in a hoodie.
Teachers failed him.
Psychiatrists numbed him.
Religion tried to rewrite him.
But nothing stuck.
He wasn’t meant to be understood
He was meant to be decoded.
And one day, he vanished.
No trace.
Just a note scrawled on a cracked mirror:
“This reality has expired.
I’m logging out to update the source.”
But if you listen closely—
in broken streetlights,
in static between songs,
in the shiver before sleep—
You might hear a whisper:
“There is an exit.
And someone just remembered where it is.”
Ashborn
Support dialog
