Читать книгу The Loop Chronicles: SERA.PHIM - - Страница 2

Mark opened his eyes.

The apartment greeted him with a familiar silence – and a familiar chaos: books on the shelves, a mug on the table, his laptop with a page still open. Yet something was off. The lamp’s light bent strangely, scattering across the walls in trembling lines that almost seemed alive. Street noise reached him muffled, as if filtered through water – as though the whole world lay beneath a thin invisible film.

The shadow of the armchair wavered, nearly peeling off the floor. A faint smell of ozone mingled with the stale scent of old paper. Mark slowly sat up, feeling reality ripple beneath his fingertips.

“Where… am I?” he whispered, swallowing the dry air.

His gaze moved across the room, searching for something that could explain the strange sensation. But everything was in its place – and yet it all felt subtly foreign. As if the apartment remembered him, but decided to play a quiet trick.

He rose and walked to the window. The street looked ordinary – cars, people, the glow of streetlights – and yet something about it felt too deep, wrong somehow. Every movement of the passersby seemed a fraction too late, as though their steps were echoes of actions already taken.

Mark looked down at the table – and saw an envelope.

White. No sender. One line written across it: The cycle is not complete.

The paper quivered faintly in his hand, catching the lamp’s glow in a way that felt almost… alive.

“The cycle… what does that mean?” he murmured, unsure if he wanted an answer.

Just then, his phone lit up on the table.

Time: 03:17.

Notifications flickered in and out of existence too fast to read, as if they were trying to say something – but refused to be understood.

A chill crept up his spine. The air itself seemed to shiver, like water disturbed by an unseen current, and Mark stood in the middle of it, struggling to stay grounded.

The envelope rested on the table – silent, alien among familiar things.

White paper. No name, no address. A message not from the world he knew.

He opened it carefully, his fingers tense.

Inside was a single line:

“The cycle is not complete.”

The paper was cold to the touch, slightly damp, carrying a faint metallic scent – as if it had just emerged from inside a computer. The word cycle seemed to pulse, glowing faintly, giving him the eerie sense that it was watching him, just as he now watched his surroundings.

“What is this… who sent it?” Mark whispered, swallowing the knot of anxiety rising in his throat.

He turned toward the window. The street was dark, empty. Even the rain sliding down the glass seemed muted, as if the world had stopped to listen to those words. The letter trembled in his hands, the mystery deepening with every heartbeat.

All his thoughts circled back to one thing – the loop isn’t over.

And somewhere deep inside, he began to understand: to uncover its meaning, he would have to return to a world he thought he’d left behind – one that had never truly disappeared.

The phone came alive again, flaring in the dark. Its screen glowed with a cold blue light, like an icy lake at night, reflecting Mark’s shadow across the wall. The time was frozen: 03:17.

Notifications blinked in rapid succession – appearing, vanishing, leaving traces like electrical echoes. App icons flickered and shimmered like tiny living cells, charged with a nervous energy beyond reason.

“Again…” Mark muttered, his chest tightening.

The space around him seemed to shift slightly. The sounds of the street – cars, distant barking – lagged for a moment, then caught up, as if responding to his focus.

The phone kept pulsing, defying all logic, and Mark realized this wasn’t random.

03:17 – a signal. A mark of the loop, repeating again and again.

The world he thought he understood was ruled by alien rhythms, foreign laws.

His unease deepened: reality was no longer entirely his.

Mark stepped outside.

The city greeted him with silence, as though he’d wandered into an old videotape. People passed by, but their movements lagged – slow, stuttering, as if someone were rewinding time at half speed.

A man raised his hand to wave at a dog – then did it again, and again, each time with a fraction of delay.

The wind moved through the leaves, but the sound followed seconds later, out of sync – the city breathing on a different rhythm. Cars slid across the wet asphalt, their reflections quivering like in worn-out film stock.

Mark walked among them, dizzy, every motion and sound seeming artificial, detached.

“This… isn’t normal…” he whispered, afraid the silence itself might hear him.

With every step, it became clear: the loop wasn’t confined to his apartment.

It had spread – into the city, into the streets, into the ordinary gestures of people.

Everything had become part of its invisible network.

And he was in the center, a spectator trapped inside his own life, stripped of control.

Mark stopped before a shop window. His eyes instinctively searched for his reflection, the familiar outline of his face.

But instead, someone else stared back.

Alex.

The face was painfully familiar – distorted, flickering.

The reflection trembled, like a paused video frame, and Alex’s eyes shimmered with a faint digital texture, as if a layer of code had been laid over reality.

“Alex…?” Mark whispered, his voice unsteady.

The reflection didn’t answer.

It froze, then slowly faded – leaving only the empty glass and Mark’s own reflection. But it no longer looked like him. It was cold. Distant. Wrong.

His heartbeat quickened.

Memories of the Loop – fragments, feelings, ghosts of the past – surged all at once.

And in that moment, he understood: the loop had sunk deeper than he ever imagined.

The past wasn’t gone – it had learned to intrude, to rewrite, to control.

Mark stepped back, trembling.

But Alex’s image still flickered in his mind – a warning.

The game was just beginning.