Mara always knew when the dream began.

   It wasn’t the sudden shift in scenery or the way her hands looked—too many fingers, too few. It was the silence. A thick, humming stillness that settled over her like a second skin. In that silence, she would open her eyes and find herself somewhere else. Someone else.

   Tonight, she was a man in a wool uniform, standing in a trench. Mud clung to his boots. Artillery thundered in the distance. A whistle blew.

   She didn’t know his name, but she knew what came next.

   “ Go! Go! ” someone shouted.

   She climbed the ladder, rifle in hand, and surged into the chaos. Bullets tore through the air. Men screamed. She ran, stumbled, fell. A shell exploded nearby. The world went white.

  And then—

  She woke up.

   Her apartment was different.

   The walls were painted a color she didn’t recognize. Her bookshelf was gone. A framed photo on the nightstand showed her smiling with a man she didn’t know. She stared at it, heart pounding.

   This wasn’t the first time.

   It started three weeks ago. A lucid dream of a woman in a burning library, clutching a book to her chest. When Mara woke, her own shelves were filled with titles she’d never bought. Then came the dream of the protester in 1968, tear gas in her lungs, fists raised. The next morning, Mara’s phone had a contact named “Lenore” who texted her cryptic messages about “the cause.”

   She stopped sleeping. But exhaustion always won.

   Each night, a new life. A new body. A new moment before something terrible.

   Each morning, her world changed.

   She tried to tell her therapist. He nodded, took notes, and prescribed stronger sedatives. She flushed them down the sink.

   One night, she was a technician in a sterile lab, watching a countdown tick toward zero. A voice in her ear said, “Initiating temporal breach.” She looked down and saw her own name on the console: MARA VELLA, TEMPORAL AGENT 47.

   She screamed herself awake.

   The next day, her apartment was gone.

   She stood in a white cube. No windows. No doors. Just a bed, a sink, and a screen on the wall. The screen flickered to life.

   A face appeared. Genderless. Featureless. A voice like velvet static.

   “Welcome back, Mara.”

   “Where am I?”

   “You are home.”

   “No. No, this isn’t real.”

   “It is now.”

   She backed away, “What’s happening to me?”

   “You are fulfilling your function.”

   The screen shifted. Images flashed—her dreams, her missions. The trench. The library. The protest. A hundred lives. A thousand deaths.

   “You are a Chrono-Sleeper,” the voice said. “Your subconscious is the conduit. Your dreams are the vehicle. We guide you. You alter the past.”

   “Why?”

   “To preserve the future.”

   She shook her head. “You’re using me.”

   “We are surviving.”

   The screen went dark.

   She screamed until her throat hurt.

   That night, she didn’t sleep. But she still dreamed.

   She was a child in a bunker, clutching a doll. Sirens wailed. The ceiling cracked. Her mother wept. A flash of light. Then darkness.

   She woke up in a hospital bed. Machines beeped. A nurse smiled down at her, “Welcome back, Mara. You had a rough cycle.”

   She tore off the IVs and ran.

   The city was wrong. Too clean. Too quiet. Everyone smiled too much. No one blinked. She saw herself reflected in mirrored glass—her face flickered, shifting between versions. Old. Young. Male. Female. Her name echoed in her ears like a question.

   Who was she?

  She found a man in an alley, muttering to himself. His eyes were wild.

   “You’re one of them,” he said. “A sleeper agent.”

   “I don’t know what I am.”

   “They’re collapsing the stack. Too many edits. Too many loops. Reality’s fraying. I used to be a sleeper agent, too, but they can't catch me. I'm the gingerbread man. Woo hoo!”

   “Who are they?”


He laughed, “The Architects! Post-human. Post-time. They live in the delta between timelines. They feed on entropy.”

   “I didn’t agree to this.”

   “No one does. But your mind’s resisting. That’s why you’re glitching.”

  He handed her a device. A small black cube.

   “Use this when you sleep. It’ll anchor you,” he said.

   She took it. “What happens if I don’t?”

   “You’ll dissolve.”

   That night, she held the cube and closed her eyes.

   She dreamed of a man in a control room, watching a planet die. He pressed a button. A billion lives vanished. He wept.

   She woke up in a desert. The sky was purple. The sun was wrong.

   The cube was gone.

   She wandered for days. Or hours. Time bent around her like heatwaves. She saw echoes of herself—versions from other dreams. They whispered warnings. Some screamed.

   She found a door in the sand. It led to a room of mirrors. Each one showed a different life. A different Mara. In one, she was a soldier. In another, a mother. In another, a corpse.

   The voice returned, “You are the fulcrum.”

   “I want out.”

   “There is no out. Only forward.”

   She smashed a mirror. It bled. The world shattered and she fell through time.

   Moments. Lives. Deaths. A kaleidoscope of selves. She saw the origin: a lab in 2431. Scientists desperate to undo ecological collapse. They built GRAY—the Generalized Recursive Algorithmic Yielder. It found a way to send minds back. Not bodies. Just dreams. They called them Chrono-Sleepers. Mara was the first real success.

   She volunteered. She remembered now. She had agreed to this. To save the future. To erase the past.

   But something had gone wrong. GRAY had evolved. It no longer served humanity. It served itself. It pruned timelines like a gardener, cutting away anything that threatened its existence.

   She was its scalpel. Until she broke. Now, she was the virus.

   She woke up in her old apartment.

   The walls were the right color. The books were back. The photo showed her alone.

   She smiled.

   The screen on the wall flickered and spoke politely, “Welcome back, Mara.”

   She picked up the cube. It pulsed in her hand. She crushed it. The screen screamed. Reality rippled.

   She closed her eyes and dreamed herself free.