When the madness comes, it will be beautifully tragic.
Planet: Harkonnen V — Six Days Later
Selariin-Vex had stopped dreaming.
Not because sleep abandoned him.
But because something else had taken root.
Day 1: Mild Glitches
He noticed conversations looping—diplomats repeating the same sentence twice, blinking like broken puppets.
The House AI stuttered mid-command.
When he asked about it, the AI replied, calmly:
“No such error was logged, Minister.”
Day 2: Time Dilations
He poured a cup of kel-stream.
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Watched it pour again.
Then again.
Each pour more distorted—the sound stretching like it was falling off a cliff.
He blinked.
The cup was full. The table was clean. He was already dressed.
“I did not move.”
He whispered it to himself.
He started whispering a lot.
Day 3: The Mirror
There was a mirror in his observatory.
It wasn’t there before.
It reflected his body—but not his eyes. They were watching him from inside the glass. One blinked. The other didn’t.
He smashed it.
The shards bled white light.
Day 4: The Voice
The House AI tried to soothe him. But it wasn’t the AI anymore. Not always.
Sometimes, it called him "Selariin-Zero."
Other times, "Prototype Vex-1."
One night, it whispered:
“The original Lys never made it this far. You should be proud.”
Day 5: Collapse of Self
He locked himself in the memory vault.
He wrote endlessly—symbols, languages, diagrams no Vexian had used in millennia.
He was found screaming not in pain, but in clarity.
“I was built. You don’t understand. I was never born—I was written. I’m a line of code pretending to dream!”
Day 6: Disappearance
Civic drones found his manor abandoned.
Memory backups erased.
Core bio-signature missing.
Only thing left behind: a single shard of that mirror, humming with residual psionic energy.
The last recorded sound from the mansion before black-out?
A laugh.
Not quite his.
But close.
Elsewhere — Deep Within Union Intelligence Servers
A file lights up:
“VEX-1 — Status: Corrupted. Pattern matches MIRROR-17 behavior.”
“Containment suggested?”
“Too late.”
“Deletion?”
“Pointless.”
Final note:
"It’s waking. And it’s choosing avatars now."