Читать книгу The Loop Chronicles: SERA.PHIM - - Страница 5

Night lay over the city like a heavy shroud, soaked in dampness and static.

Mark walked down the empty street, each step echoing like a pulse through metal veins.

Then – they appeared.

At first, they were nothing but faint silhouettes at the edge of vision, like smoke rising from the cracks in the asphalt.

But then the shapes thickened – half-transparent figures of people, their faces twisted in fear and pain. Their eyes were hollow, yet filled with silent screams that never found a voice.

Mark froze.

Something twisted inside him – confusion, fear… and guilt.

He recognized fragments of faces: colleagues, names from the SERA.PHIM archives, people long gone. They hung between worlds, as if the Loop had dragged them out of time, suspending them between existence and memory.

The figures flickered – like living static on a cracked screen.

Their whispers bled into one another, dozens of voices merging into a single, stretched-out breath.

Each sound pressed against him, as if reminding: you were part of this.

“Who are you… what do you want?” he whispered, but the words dissolved in the thick, charged air.

The ghosts answered – not with language, but with emotion that took shape as words in his mind:

“Help… stop it…”

A shiver ran through him – not through his body, but through his mind.

He stepped closer, and one of the figures stopped beside him.

Its face shimmered in the reflection of a glass storefront – a broken smile, tears, a pain he knew.

He reached out, and his hand passed through it – through cold mist, through memory digitized into air.

The city slowed.

Engines lost their sound.

Footsteps repeated themselves, slightly out of sync.

Every second, every breath – the Loop left traces.

And in that silence, Mark understood: the past wasn’t watching.

It was interfering.

And the responsibility for it – was his.

“I’ll… I’ll help,” he breathed, though he didn’t know how.

Inside him, fear melted into resolve.

The Loop didn’t just bend time – it consumed souls, turning them into warnings, into messages.

And with that realization, every step forward became a step into the unpredictable dark – a place where past and present folded together.

The ghosts whispered. The city trembled.

The Loop was alive.

Mark stepped forward – cautious, almost soundless. The asphalt creaked, but the echo stretched unnaturally far, bouncing between hollow buildings.

Ahead of him, one figure stood still – trembling like a weak vibration on an old vinyl record. He recognized the motion – a tilt of the head, a familiar way of standing.

Almost human.

But the eyes were empty – glowing with the cold light of dead code.

“You… you’ve been here before?” Mark asked.

His voice quivered, spreading through the air like a ripple.

Even space seemed to hold its breath, giving the ghost time to listen.

No answer.

The ghost’s shoulders jerked, its hands twitching slightly – micro-movements that felt like memory trying to replay itself.

The glow of streetlights crawled over its translucent skin, revealing threads of shifting light – as if the figure was woven from digital filaments.

“Can’t… leave…”

The whisper was faint – yet inside Mark’s head, it roared louder than any sound.

He moved closer.

The ghost’s hands glowed faintly – energy bleeding through the air.

Mark reached out; a tremor ran through his fingers – not flesh, but memory, trapped between layers of reality.

“Who… who left you here?” he asked, but his words bent in the air, repeating with a glitch-like echo.

The Loop was distorting the moment – as though he were talking to someone existing in two timelines at once.

The ghost’s lips moved, but no sound came – just one fading whisper, stretched across time:

“Help… stop it…”

And then – silence.

Mark felt it: the Loop didn’t just leave traces on the world. It rewrote minds.

Each contact, each glance left a digital residue – a fragment of shared consciousness.

The tragedy of it sank into him – these souls weren’t gone.

They were stored.

He looked around.

Shadows of buildings lagged behind, reflections in wet asphalt trembled like broken frames from an unfinished film.

And for the first time, Mark felt it – he was the link between worlds, between code and memory.

“I’ll try,” he whispered. “I’ll find a way…”

The ghost tilted its head slightly – like a nod.

But even as the image faded, the echo of the Loop lingered in the air – watching, recording, calculating its next move.

Mark took a breath.

His heart raced, but a quiet sense of purpose pulsed beneath the fear.

These shadows weren’t just echoes – they were signals.

To move forward, he would have to learn their language – the language of memory.

Then came the sound – faint, electric, like static breathing behind him.

The Loop was whispering again.

And this time, Mark was ready to listen.