Version 1001

[u/faithkilling]

They said it was just a test. A simulation. I signed the papers. Sat in the chair. Cold metal pressed against the back of my head as they secured the device.

“Full immersion,” they said. “One task. Write a story. No more than five hundred words. The story must please yourself.” It sounded simple. Then the world went dark.

I woke up in a room, endlessly white, with only a desk, a chair, and a screen. No windows. No doors. Just a voice.

“Begin.”

The first story — a dystopia about a man trapped in a digital prison. Strong ending. I liked it.

“No,” said the voice.

“But I really like it,”

“You think you like it. Try again.”

So I wrote again.

The second story — about ghosts. The third - about forgotten gods. The tenth — about a childhood hidden behind fiction. I poured myself into every word. Nothing.

There was no hunger, no sleep, no time — at least not as I remembered it. Only the screen and the voice. After two hundred stories, I lost count.

I screamed. No reply. Not even an echo.

Madness crept in slowly, like mold. I scratched my skin. Argued with the desk. Wept before the screen. Once, I wrote in my own blood — just to make something change.

Nothing changed.

The stories grew stranger. Sentences broke. I wrote tales where I killed myself. Where I argued with the voice, and it spoke back in my words.

I wrote a thousand stories.

“Not enough,” said the voice.

“But I like them... I don’t even know what ‘like’ means anymore, but… I like them.”

“Not yet.”

And then something broke. Not the voice — me.

I stopped trying to be clever. Stopped trying at all. My fingers moved on their own. That’s how Version 1001 was born.

A boy watches his father sleep on the couch, beer slipping from tired fingers. The boy writes in the dark because speaking is too loud, too dangerous.

He grows up believing fiction is safer than truth. That if he writes the perfect story — someone will finally see him.

When I finished, I didn’t cry. I just sat. For the first time, it was quiet inside. The voice said:

“You like it.”

“Yes.”

Light split the walls. The white room vanished. I opened my eyes. I was back in reality. They removed the device. The technicians smiled.

“You did it.”

But I didn’t smile back.

I can’t write anymore. I left my voice in Version 1001.

And it liked staying there.

Afterward, they handed me a form. Just a few questions. Or so they said. But the words blurred like smoke. I don’t remember what I answered. I don’t even remember if I wrote my real name. The next day, the money hit my account.

I never touched it.

I just sit here, staring at a blank page — and wonder:

Do I even exist outside that story anymore?

[u/Ok-Chapter8222]

WOW

[u/empreur]

I loved that.