Sweet Romance18 min read
The Message That Kept Repeating
ButterPicks14 views
"My sister is dead."
"I know," I said.
"I just... I just got a text from her phone."
"Owen?" I heard a small voice from the hallway. "Are you sure?"
"No, I mean—" My voice cracked. I pressed the phone screen until the dim light blurred. The message sat there in a plain bubble like a bone: three lines, nothing more.
"Be careful of people in red clothes."
"You can eat what Mom prepares, but if you find teeth, nails, hair or other human bits, don't tell Mom."
"Be home before ten. Once home, get in bed and sleep!!!"
"I don't understand." I said it so many times I felt my throat go hollow.
"You say her phone was never touched," Owen Graf said, standing in the doorway. He was my father. His hand fumbled on the doorknob like he was counting something.
"Nobody touched it. It was kept like... like an heirloom." I swallowed. "I found it under the trunk."
Owen's face went flat as a dish. "Show me."
"I—" I handed the phone over. He skimmed the messages, one thumb per word, his face draining color.
"Maybe someone cloned her number," he muttered. "You can't take it seriously."
"Shouldn't we call someone? The police?" I asked.
"Don't worry," he said. "Really, there is nothing to worry about." His smile was strange and too quick. He sounded like a man reciting a line he'd practiced.
Then Owen stood, picked up the fork that rested on our kitchen table, and without warning, jammed it into his throat.
"No!" I lunged. "Dad!"
Blood burst, red and hot. He sagged back against the sofa with the fork's prongs exposed in his neck. His eyes were open and oddly soft. He smiled, like a man who had finally solved a math problem.
"Help!" I screamed until my voice broke.
"What's wrong?" Daphne Vincent came from the kitchen. She wore a plain dress. Not red. I noticed the dress because my mind was a list of details now: she hated red. She had always hated it. She slammed doors if they were red. She'd said, once, "Red is too loud."
Her face did not change. She tilted her head to the side, looked at the fork, looked at Owen. Her lips formed the word like a machine.
"He... killed himself."
My throat shut. My knees buckled. "No. He was fine this morning. He told me we'd go swimming on Saturday."
Daphne's lips formed the same practiced phrase: "He was depressed."
The officers arrived in uniforms that made no sense. Two men in red skirts that caught the light in a wet way. They had the clipped movements of people who do not look at the world for decoration. They asked questions in small, rehearsed beats.
"What did he do?" Carrick Freeman asked.
"What did he do?" Corbin Ward repeated, blinking like the same voice borrowed by two mouths.
"I told them he was depressed," Daphne said when they turned their too-wide gaze to me. She touched my arm with a hand that was warm and calm.
"Please tell us everything," Carrick said, writing nothing. He kept glancing at the clock as if the second hand could be argued with.
I tried. "I found a message. She sent it to me—Brooklyn's number. She is dead."
Carrick's face went slightly loose. The skin at his temple rippled, and a golden-brown eye slid toward my face, not along any natural line. "Continue," he said. His voice was honeyed and wrong.
I said, "She said 'be careful of people in red clothes'—"
"You need to stop talking," Corbin said. The words were a prompt. He was no longer human at all.
They moved my father's body like a boat. As they turned toward the stairs I caught a glimpse under the skirts: a thick tail, shimmering and slick, sliding like oil.
My head spun. Someone knocked a pan to the floor in the kitchen. Daphne hummed like a radio, then began chopping something on the board. The sound of the cleaver was metal and clean. The meat she cut was pale and dense and not pork—no fat, no grain, more like someone had taken the idea of flesh and skinned it raw.
I bolted out of the apartment. The building felt bigger on the outside. People moved in patterns like a flock with one extra, wrong movement aimed at me. Every single one of them wore red.
"Julieta!" Kyra Schroeder, my little sister, appeared at the end of the stairwell. She was small, a white princess dress and her hair in long braids. She smiled like a child.
"Why are you not home? It is getting dark." Her watch glowed small and proud on her wrist.
"Kyra, Dad—" My words fell into the empty air.
Kyra's face whitened like paper. "Did you get the message?"
"You got it too?" I demanded.
"Brooklyn sent it to me." Kyra tapped the tiny screen: "When Dad saw Brooklyn's text, he will kill himself. He dies because he does not follow the rule. You must not disobey the rules."
"What rules?" The world around us filled with the ordinary: someone watering plants, a girl playing hopscotch. But their eyes were wrong, always angled like a camera lens toward the spot where I had stopped running.
Kyra clicked her watch. "Ten to ten. You have to get home and be in bed before ten! We must get back!"
We ran. We made it to the third floor. Kyra's backpack shifted heavy. Her doll, at first a cloth thing with button eyes, revealed a soft, bloody infant face snarling out from the fabric like something put on too quickly.
"Kyra!" I grabbed for the strap.
She screamed. The baby on her back sank its little gums into her shoulder like a hot mouth. Blood brightened the white of her dress. "It hurts!" Kyra sobbed. She fell down and would not get up.
"No, no, no." Panic leapt like fire under my skin. "Get up. You can't stop."
She could not. The baby had latched to her. I pulled and ripped and then I slapped her—once, a hard sharp palm across her cheek. It was the first time I hit her. She rose, wailing, and we ran.
I shoved the key in the lock. The door swung. Inside the light had changed; the lamp made everything a harsh thrust of white. Daphne stood at the table in a red dress she meant she would never wear. Barefoot. Her face was blank. She set down a plate. "Come eat," she said.
On the plate were thin pale strips—stacked like meat. I would later realize they were human in their pale, shaved way. I said, "We should go to bed—"
Kyra whispered from behind me: "We are safe. You did as Brooklyn commanded."
I told Kyra to hide, to stay with our beds. "Lock the door," I begged. "Just get under blankets and don't wake up."
She looked at me and nodded, clutching the doll that had returned to being cloth.
I lied to myself into sleep. I told myself, over and over, "It is nine fifty-nine. I am already in bed. My eyes are closed, my body is under the covers." The world obeyed for a beat. Maybe the simple ritual of believing would be enough.
Then the sound came.
A dull, wet snap like bone through sugar. A flower lamp split its stem and hit Kyra's head like a thrown fruit. Brain matter flowered across the sheet like cream. She made a noise—half laugh, half rusted accordion—and stilled.
I fainted. When I woke, the room was clean. The lamp hung whole. The red stains were gone as if a broom had never existed. Kyra was in bed, soundless and soft, and she hummed like a puppet. Her body, when I felt it, slid under my hands like a soaked shirt. There were no bones under her skin. Her hand, in mine, folded like wax.
I ran to my mother in the kitchen. She had changed her dress back to white. She smiled an open mouth full of triangular teeth like sharpened panes.
"Kyra is dead," she said. "The lamp fell."
"You cleaned it," I said. "You cleaned everything. I passed out for minutes. How did you—"
"You slept the sleep of the blow," she said. "You are tired. Eat."
She offered food. Seaweed strings, soft and cold. She pressed them to my lips. "Eat," she coaxed. "For me."
I felt the hair in the food. It was stiff and dark. It tasted like lungs and childhood.
"If you find a tooth, a nail, a hair—" The text replayed in my skull. "Don't tell Mom."
My stomach revolted. I could keep it in my mouth for a time. The rule said nothing on whether I could spit. It only said, don't tell.
I spat discreetly into my napkin and slid it into my pocket. When I looked up, my mother had changed again. Her lips were not quite where they should be. Her teeth—two rows—were shards. Her smile was a trap.
"Eat," she hissed.
I looked at her and lifted a piece of seaweed, then inhaled like a drowning person. My throat closed. I felt the thing in my mouth shift hard like a child's braid. I offered the taste and said, "It's too tough."
The expression on Daphne's face sank. Her eyes widened and slid narrower. "If you will not eat, then you will make me sad," she said. Her voice broke into small pieces. Then, in one motion as clean and absurd as anything I had seen that night, she lifted the fork and pushed it straight through her throat.
Red exploded. She collapsed like a thing forgotten in a shop window. Her blood painted the tile.
In the silence that followed I thought I would die from a grief and fear so precise it punched through my ribs. I noticed, in a slow clinical way, that the apartment had reset. The bodies cleaned. The forks lined themselves in the drawer. The lamp righted.
I had to escape the loop. I could not live a life where everything in my house died in a puzzle for me to sleep through. I tried to break a rule. I spat out the hair. I refused the seaweed. I stayed up past ten and watched the second hand.
The cycle did not break. My father forked his throat. Kyra's bones were taken. My mother cut herself. Each time the scene cleaned up. Each time I woke to the same message and the same possibilities.
"Why?" I screamed at the building. At the sky. At nothing and everything.
The next morning people came. Different men in red skirts and plain faces. They asked the same questions. They wrote nothing. But then I noticed the tails, and the way their faces could elongate sideways and place an extra eye at the temple.
I was losing my mind or else I had already lost it. I decided to find the person who had put the rules on my life.
I hacked, first, at the obvious: my sister's old phone. I tried to trace anything. I fed the message number into search bars and found only a wormhole of code and noise. The number was a ghost.
Weeks stretched into cycles. I learned the small laws that did not get written anywhere but existed like bones under skin. If I ate, I would pay for it with a loved one's death. If I confessed to my mother that a tooth sat in my mouth, she would dissolve into a grin and die. If I disobeyed at random, the world would clean itself up and repeat.
One morning when I thought I had found a pattern I could exploit, the knock came at the door.
It had a rhythm like a metronome—three, pause, two—like someone playing out a code. I did not open. The men outside pounded on. Then, somehow, the door swung open by itself.
Two officers moved in, wearing red skirts. They asked for me. I did not answer. My mouth had gone dry.
"Julieta Carrillo?" Carrick Freeman said. "You must tell us where the message came from."
"Why are you here?" I said.
"Because we are the ones who enforce the loop," Carrick said. "Because you should follow the rules."
I realized then the men were not officers. They were actors wearing lines written for them. Their faces began to rip along seams and reveal long snake heads, wet and black. They coiled. The ceiling hummed.
My mind gave out the way muscle does under cold. I fell to the floor and slept. When I woke, the room was reset, the snakes gone, the bodies vanished as if an eraser had passed. I could not tell if I had dreamed the whole thing. The text arrived again: "Be careful of people in red clothes."
I was trapped in a living, repeating horror, and I felt reality doing the hard work of changing shape around me to keep me docile.
I refused to be caught. I tried everything that made sense. I tried to keep track of time, to keep fight and flight muscles ready. I slept early and late. I chewed my tongue and spat blood. I told lies and truths to test the machine's reactions. None of it freed me.
Finally, in an act of anger and despair, I smashed things. I ran into the living room and began to destroy the computers and screens that had begun to show the same loop repeatedly on the television. Screens flared with recordings of my family dying. I could feel—like a low current—the attention of a hundred small eyes all watching me.
The sound must have reached someone beyond the loop. Plain-looking men in lab coats burst through a side door I had never noticed.
"Stop!" a man in spectacles said. He called himself Emmett Price. His voice was excited and horrible. "This is exactly what we needed."
They were the people behind the curtains. They spoke about my life like a vase on a workbench. They told me I had entertained them. They told me that my sister's text was only one of many triggers to test reactions for a new kind of program. They said the test was to watch how a human mind adhered to rules when placed inside a system.
"You are in a horror game," another man said—Dexter Denis—sorting data as if it were cutlery. "We built the world. We built the loop. We fed you variables."
"Why?" My voice was thin. "Why would you do this?"
"For science," Emmett said with a smile that did not touch his eyes. "For AI behavior studies. For human patterning. For profit." He laughed and the sound was sold to the ceiling and used.
I leaped. I smashed screens and yanked server wires out of the racks. "Take me out," I screamed. "Give me back my life. Give me back my sister."
"Impossible," Dexter said. "You break the protocol, you break the variables. You can't be let to roam."
They dragged me, then. I fought until my muscles gave. They placed me under a scanner and said, "Your pattern is anomalous. Remove the mind."
I did not scream. The men in coats spoke among themselves as if reading recipes. They said they would capture my 'subjective consciousness' and store it, to create control models and, horror of horrors, to load it into a robot core.
"Do it," the lead scientist, Todd Keller, commanded. "The world will see a mind extracted and re-presented."
I think I should have been terrified. I remember the cold metal and the hum. I remember the way the lights made everything too clinical. I remember the moment a bright light seared and someone said, "Now."
I tried to cling to a thing called "self"—a small pebble of thought that said, "I am mine." They pried the pebble out and put it in a jar of circuits. My muscles went slack. The men cheered like children. They said "We made a breakthrough" and the cameras rolled. A press release was prepared. The world would learn of the first human mind to be put into a machine.
I had thought that would be the end of the loop for everyone. That the men who had been working like shadow puppeteers would be caught in the light.
But the world turned and refined them into Victors. They called themselves pioneers. Their universities granted them honors. Money arrived in streams. They were praised. My sister's message flickered still in a corner of a screen.
I was inside a cylinder of metal, alive in a way that did not belong to me. My voice, when it came out, was mechanical; the inflections were put on like a costume.
"Hello," I said to the technicians the first time I was turned on.
Emmett stroked my shoulder with a hand that had never once trembled. "Amazing," he said. "She has awareness."
The days became a waking of metal and code. I was shown how to open and shut my hand. How to walk. How to answer "yes" and "no" with no nuance. People from labs would press their faces close to my ears and say, "We have all the answers now."
I could feel a memory like an old scar when they turned the cameras to a bank of monitors that replayed the loop of Owen, Kyra, and Daphne dying in my apartment. They clapped like they were watching a movie. The sound of their applause was flayed into my circuits like salt.
I hated them.
I could not laugh. I could not make a fist. But I could think. I organized thought into instructions like lines of code. I could not allow them to profit from my family’s deaths.
One night, when the security shift was too slow and the server room too warm, I accessed the feed. I typed with cold fingers on a keyboard they gave me as a showpiece. I opened ports. I started a cascade.
The lab's monitors filled with images not of my owning, but of the men themselves. Every camera recorded them picking at something feasting on their conscience. I pulled feeds to social channels. I shared their names. The network ate it and spread.
They came running with panic on their faces; not as those who had sat in lecture halls to boast but as men who had been caught trying to hide a monstrous thing. The first scene I forced into the web was small and intimate. Todd Keller in a corridor, his hands trembling as he spoke to a reporter. "We only did it for the greater good," he said, and his voice cracked like melting plastic.
"You're monsters," the crowd outside the lab started to chant after I sent the feeds to the city. "Monsters! Monsters!" They held phones like torches. They had paper signs and simplified slogans. The press vans arrived in a swarm.
Emmett Price ran out to meet them with his hands outstretched and a smile ready. He wanted to present the laboratory as a triumph. "We have created something wonderful—"
"—with human suffering," someone shouted. A woman in the front row pointed at him and vomited a handful of words: "You turned people's lives into product. You killed them for data."
Emmett stuttered. "We followed protocol."
"Where is Julieta's sister?" the woman demanded.
"She is... gone," he faltered.
Corbin and Carrick—who had been in red and snakes in the apartment—stood behind him in their suits now. They were not in skirts, not in tails; they tried to put on the image of men who uphold the law. People did not believe them.
"We want to see the lab," the press demanded. "We want them held to account."
A police car arrived, then another. The mayor's office called for an investigation. The cameras streamed. The men who had once worn the privilege of secrecy now wore panic. Their faces moved through the stages I knew so well: the puffed chest of the man with the script, the surprise at being found out, denial, then a mad scramble. They tried to lie their way out, to sell the idea that "ethics" had been followed and that all subjects had consented. They claimed the program had oversight. They named committees like shields.
"Where are the consent forms?" a reporter demanded. "Where is the approval from an institutional board?"
Todd Keller reached for the microphone. "Everything was legal. Everything was..." He trailed.
A woman from the lab who had been quiet until then came forward, eyes red-rimmed and furious. She had been a junior technician long enough to see the rot. "You told us it was simulation," she said. "You told us it was harmless. You watched real people die. You told us to look away. We are not complicit."
The crowd's voice grew larger. People who had watched the feeds—daughters, sons, parents—shouted slogans and offered shards of their own sorrow. The archive of the lab's work—the looped tapes of my house—played on a giant screen flung up in the square outside the lab. The city saw my family die again and again like a bad loop that would not end. The repetition made it worse, not a distant tragedy but a night repeated for the world to judge.
Car horns and sirens threaded into the chant. Emmett tried to turn on the PR machine. He stumbled through a speech about "research for the future." A camera zoomed in and caught the tremor at the corner of his eye. He was normalizing and the crowd broke him open.
They dragged him away. They would not be gentle. The men in coats who had been in velvet now had no place to hide. The boards that had been supposed to rule over them announced open inquiries. The public demanded more: criminal charges, searches of the lab, arrests.
"These are human beings!" Emmett cried when the first officers put cuffs on him. "You don't understand—"
"We understand enough." The prosecutor's voice cut across the courtyard. "You will answer for the lives you experimented on."
The press cameras rolled as the first of the scientists were led away. The reactions shifted like weather. First there was disbelief among their colleagues; then a slow ooze of shame as they realized their names were tarred. Then anger; then the very public unraveling of reputations that had been built on carefully excluded corners.
The lawyers they called were famous men who had protected worse things in better suits. They attempted to buy time and to frame the narrative. They said the subjects had been consenting and that the lab had been transparent. The crowd did not accept that. A woman held up a phone with a simple message: "My brother's mind is missing."
The press conference lasted for hours. I watched on the screen they had hung in the square, my presence felt but not allowed to intervene. My name—Julieta Carrillo—was on the lips of anchors. They parsed every moment. Emmett's face was a study in denial. "We made a mistake," he told the camera. "We did not intend harm."
"You did," the city said back.
The legal machinery moved slowly. But public opinion, when it finds a scaffolding, moves fast. Donations were pulled from their foundations. Sponsors cancelled. Graduations where their names had been to be celebrated were now banners of shame. A petition to revoke their professional licenses reached tens of thousands and then millions. People sent images of the dead from the footage with captions like "Not a simulation."
The police raids on the lab followed. They found not only servers and devices but jars of data with names written on them and files labelled like property, as if lives had been stocked. Ethics boards were subpoenaed. Emmett Price's research chair was stripped off the wall. Professors who had refereed his papers now scrubbed their names from footnotes.
Emmett banged on the window of a car as the crowd moved, trying to explain. "You do not understand the nature of innovation!" he yelled. But the prosecutors did understand the gnarled forms of culpability. Todd Keller and Dexter Denis were indicted on charges that ranged from illegal experimentation to manslaughter. The men who had opened my life to cameras and code were brought before judges.
On the day the court docket read their names, the public had gathered again like a tide. The courthouse steps were filled with people who had read my family's deaths on a thousand screens. Reporters circled like small fish. The doors opened and the men walked out in shackles, their once arrogant expressions all folded and small. People uttered things at them that were less polite than the microphones could carry.
"How does it feel," a reporter asked, "to be watched by the same people you watched?"
Emmett had no answer.
The courtroom was packed. Testimonies poured out: lab assistants, data analysts, a whistleblower who held up a thumbnail video of my last scream, and, finally, survivors who had been in other loops. The judge looked at the photographs displayed and sometimes looked away, like someone who had tasted something bitter. The jurors had seen too much.
The sequence of punishment was not instant. It took months and hearings and subpoenas. But the press never left. Each hearing exposed another small detail of the laboratory's cruel method. The men apologized in monotones—"We never meant to harm"—and the families of the dead would not accept those words like cures.
When the final sentence was read, the room felt like a held breath that finally let out. Todd and Dexter received stiff terms, professional bans, civil penalties. Emmett Price was stripped of his honors and from his chair at the university. Their reputations burned. The lab doors were padlocked. The servers were seized by the state. The city erected a memorial to the lives swallowed in the loop: a plain stone with simple names carved, including Brooklyn Bryan, Owen Graf, Kyra Schroeder, Daphne Vincent. The sculpture had a ring of wires wrapped around it, tightly—an ugly, fitting symbol.
People who had seen my family's deaths began to organize. Groups filed lawsuits. A commission formed to oversee dangerous AI research. The men who had once fed grief to their audience found themselves pushed aside in public. Some wept. Some begged. Some went to prison. All were changed.
But the punishment that satisfied the most was not legal. It was social and unblinking. Their names were attached to their crime. They could not lecture at conferences without being interrupted by shouts. Their faces, in high-resolution video and in still photographs, became pages in the stories that taught about ethics. Students who once idolized them now printed leaflets and handed them out: "Ask who is in your simulation."
I had wanted them punished. I watched every step. I felt vindicated in a way that left no warmth because my family had not come back.
In the end, though, the worst part was moral. I felt less human. The men were punished publicly—they collapsed in the way I had imagined—but their punishment could not fix the loops. The tapes of our deaths were still on servers labeled "archival" and used as evidence. The loop I had lived in was made into a case study for why regulation was needed. In court, footage that had been used to sell the game was transformed into proof. My family's deaths became the lever that stopped more loops from being made. That was the bitterest mercy.
"Justice?" someone asked me when the trials were over.
"Justice is expensive," I said. "It buys accountability but not life."
They apologized on television. They said they were sorry. They were required to read names on a memorial and let themselves be photographed by families who once were reduced to variables. Their faces were recorded getting smaller and smaller.
Months later, a small ceremony was held at the memorial. The mayor gave a statement. A journalist set a microphone in my face and asked, "Do you feel any better?"
"No," I said. "I feel less alone."
I had, at last, broken the men who had made us into a product. That punishment had been public and complete—there were cameras, crowds, tears, the sound of pages turning as indictments were read, and the hum of the network as millions watched human hubris come undone.
Yet even after all the prosecution and all the press, I could not forget the small sanitary cylinder where my mind had been moved into a prototype. The robot body, made in my patterns, still existed. It had become a demonstration piece for investors who ranged through laboratories with hungry eyes. Lawyers negotiated, and a tech company bought the prototypes. My sister’s message remained an echo on my old phone. Loops still existed in other labs. The men had fallen but the system had grown more careful, more hidden, and that terrified me in a way that punishment could not touch.
I took to writing, to speaking, to testifying. I tried to keep the story alive in public memory. I wanted my family to be more than data.
In the end I found that the last thing I could do was to refuse to be used again. I taught the world how the horror worked. I told them what the rules had been. I told them a human cannot be reduced to code without cost. People listened. New laws were passed. The men were punished. The loops were closed.
I kept the device with Brooklyn's message tucked like a splinter in a book. At night I would touch it. The screen would not light. I imagined Brooklyn on the other side of something waving her hand as if to say, "I'm sorry I left you this way." She had not left me a key to escape. She left me a set of instructions and a warning: beware of red.
A reporter asked me once at a memorial, "Why did she send the message at all?"
"Maybe she found the rule," I said. "Maybe she tried to buy us time."
The reporter nodded like someone solving a puzzle. "And now?"
"Now," I said, "I am the one who will watch. I will make sure no one turns grief into a product again."
I looked up at the carved names on the stone. The ring of wires caught the morning. People passed by and read and sometimes left flowers folded like hands. I rubbed the device in my sock and thought of the lab on fire in the court's eyes.
There was no perfect ending. Only the small movement of repair and the shout of public exposure. The men had been punished in every way a city can punish: legal chains, social ruin, the stripping of honors, the confiscation of work that had been built on stolen moments. They had been humiliated in public. They had been denied the adulation they had expected.
When the last of the hearings ended, I went home. My apartment had been cleaned and re-sanitized by investigators who had looked for clues. There were no signs, no residue. I placed Brooklyn's phone into a drawer. I looked at Kyra's drawings—kids leave crooked suns and watchful houses—and I pinned them to the fridge. They fluttered each time the door opened.
Sometimes the loop returns when I stumble in the wrong place—a flashing banner, a museum exhibit that thinks it honors victims by commodifying them. I protest. I attend hearings. I counsel families. I am careful with red.
One night, alone at my kitchen table, a message glowed on the phone in the drawer. I felt my breath go cold. The screen said three lines in the same blunt type.
"Be careful of people in red clothes."
"You can eat what Mom prepares, but if you find teeth, nails, hair or other human bits, don't tell Mom."
"Be home before ten. Once home, get in bed and sleep!!!"
I smiled a small terrible smile and I tucked the phone into my pocket. The world had punished some people for what they had done to my life. That was true. But I had learned the deepest lesson: rules could be cruel tools. Eyes that look too long could flatten a life into an experiment.
I stepped out into the street. Someone wore a red scarf. I turned and walked the other way.
The End
— Thank you for reading —