Part One 

Therapy had always been the one hour of my week that felt safe.
A quiet office on the third floor of a converted brownstone, lavender candle burning near the window, the soft hiss of the white-noise machine muffling the city traffic outside.

Dr. Huffman sat across from me, legs crossed neatly, pen poised over her legal pad. She was in her mid-forties, immaculate as always — hair pinned back, blazer crisp, voice so calm it could anesthetize panic.

“Tell me about the nightmare again,” she said.

I took a breath. “It’s the same one. The hallway, the flickering lights, the feeling that someone’s behind me but when I turn around, there’s nothing. I keep running, but it never ends.”

She nodded, scribbling something. “And when you wake up?”

“My chest hurts. Sometimes I’m shaking so hard I can’t tell if it’s real or not.”

Her eyes flicked up. “That’s exactly how you described it to Marello.”

The pen slipped from my fingers. “What did you just say?”

Dr. Huffman froze. For half a second, genuine panic crossed her face — the kind of look you can’t fake.

“I mean,” she said quickly, “that’s how people typically describe that kind of recurring dream to their partners.”

I sat up straighter on the couch. “No, you said that’s how I described it to Marello.”

The air in the room thickened.

“I’ve never told you that name before.”

Her mouth opened, then closed. Her fingers tightened around the pen until the plastic creaked. “Angela, please—”

“Is Marello one of your patients?”

“You know I can’t discuss other clients.”

“But you just did.”

Her composure cracked completely. “When he came to me three months ago, I didn’t realize the connection. You only ever called him Jay in our sessions. I thought it was someone else.”

I stood up so fast the couch cushions hissed beneath me. “You’ve been seeing my ex-boyfriend as a patient? The one I spent six months talking about in this office?”

“I should have referred one of you,” she said, voice trembling now. “I thought I could help both of you heal. Separately.”

“You broke confidentiality,” I said. “You don’t get to ‘heal’ both sides of a breakup.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “But it’s not that simple. Something strange has been happening. You were both having the same nightmares. You both described the same events — completely differently. At first, I thought it was coincidence, but—”

I cut her off. “You’ve been comparing our sessions?”

Dr. Huffman reached into her desk drawer and pulled out two thick folders. One labeled Angela P. and the other Marello R.

“I shouldn’t show you this,” she said, “but I need you to see what I’m seeing.”

Inside Marello’s file were printed screenshots — text messages, photos, time-stamped call logs. “He says you disappeared for three days after your breakup. That when you came back, you didn’t remember it. He insists you two were planning a trip the next week.”

“That’s insane,” I said. “He’s lying. I ended things. He cheated. I threw his stuff off my balcony.”

“He showed me this.” She turned the file around — phone screenshots of messages, from my number. Love notes, vacation plans, texts I never sent.

“They’re faked,” I said immediately.

“The carrier verified they came from your phone.”

I felt my knees wobble and sat down hard. “Then someone cloned it.”

Dr. Huffman rubbed her temples. “Three weeks ago, you told me you ran into him at a coffee shop. He said you ignored him. But in his session, he described a full conversation — you suggesting reconciliation.”

“I didn’t even speak to him.”

“I was there,” she whispered. “I saw you both.”

My throat went dry. “What do you mean, you saw us?”

“I wanted to observe — from a distance. You both came in that week with opposite versions of the same event. I had to understand what was happening.”

“So what did you see?”

“I saw both of you there,” she said slowly, “but you never interacted. You walked past each other like strangers. Yet that afternoon, you both described an identical five-minute conversation.”

I stared at her. “So what? We’re crazy?”

Her expression softened. “No. You’re both lucid. Except when it comes to each other. It’s like you’re living in parallel realities.”

“This is ridiculous.”

She hesitated, then opened another drawer and pulled out a small USB drive. “I started recording sessions. Yours and his.”

“You what?”

“I know it’s unethical,” she said quickly, “but I needed proof. Listen.”

She plugged it into her laptop and hit play.

My voice filled the room: ‘I keep seeing a shadow figure in the hallway. It’s chasing me, but when it catches me, it’s—’

Then another voice — his — took over. ‘There’s a woman chasing me. I can’t see her face, but I know it’s Angela.’

Dr. Huffman’s voice overlapped both recordings. “Every dream you’ve had, he’s had too. But you’re each other’s monster.”

My hands were shaking so hard the sound blurred. “You’re manipulating us. This is some kind of sick experiment.”

She shook her head. “Last week, Marello didn’t show up. When I went to pull his chart, his entire file was missing from our system. The front desk has no record of him as a patient.”

“What are you talking about? You just showed me his file!”

“I have it,” she said, holding up the folder. “But digitally, he doesn’t exist here. No billing records. No appointment logs. Nothing.”

My pulse roared in my ears. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not.” She reached into another folder and pulled out a photograph — the three of us smiling in her office. Me, Marello, and Dr. Huffman.

“When was this taken?” I asked.

“Last Tuesday. During what you remember as a solo session.”

The edges of my vision blurred. “That’s not possible.”

“I’m referring you to someone else,” she said softly. “But Angela… I don’t think either of you is lying. I think you’re both telling the truth. And that’s what terrifies me.”

I left her office with the photo clutched in my hand, the edges cutting into my palm.
Outside, the air smelled like rain.

In my car, my phone buzzed. A text from Marello.

Great session today. Dr. W really helped us work through things. Can’t wait to see you tonight.

I stared at the screen until my vision blurred.
I’d blocked his number weeks ago.

When I got home, a note sat on my kitchen counter, written in my handwriting.

Pick up Marello at 8. Don’t forget we’re telling Mom about the engagement tomorrow.

My knees almost gave out.

Because I never wrote that note.

Part Two 

By the time I got back to my car, my hands were shaking too badly to grip the steering wheel.
I parked half a block from Dr. Huffman’s office and just sat there, staring at that note.

Same handwriting. Same slanted A’s. Same looping L’s. The only problem was that I hadn’t written it.

I took out my phone, snapped a photo, and made a folder titled Evidence — Do Not Delete.

If this was some elaborate game, I was done playing it blind.

The first thing I did was open my message history with Marello. The most recent text thread — the one that had just appeared — was sandwiched neatly between older messages I knew were from before I blocked him months ago.
Everything looked normal: the gray and blue bubbles, the timestamps, even my responses. But the more I scrolled, the less sense it made.

Because there were messages there I didn’t remember sending.

ME: “I’m glad Dr. W is helping us communicate again.”
MARELLO: “You sounded so calm today. It’s good to see progress.”
ME: “Can’t wait to tell Mom about the engagement.”

I read them three times, my stomach turning to ice.

Engagement? I hadn’t spoken to him since I threw his things off my balcony six months ago.

I opened my blocked contacts list — his number was there.
Still blocked. Still active.

So how the hell were his messages coming through?

At home, I triple-checked every door and window. Nothing looked disturbed.
No scratches, no broken locks. The only thing out of place was that note on the counter, sitting beside my coffee mug like I’d left it there before work.

I took a deep breath and started doing what I do best: document.

I opened a new file titled Reality Log and began typing everything I could remember.

The breakup: May 12th.
Caught him cheating.
Threw his things off the balcony.
No contact since.
Nightmares began three weeks later.

I wrote until my fingers cramped, listing every detail that could prove what was real. I backed up the file to three cloud drives and an external hard drive.

Then I grabbed a notebook and started a handwritten version too — because if my devices were being tampered with, I needed something offline.

The next morning, I called my phone carrier.
I tried to sound calm as I said, “I need a full log of all messages sent from my number for the past six months — including routing data.”

The rep hesitated. “That’s a pretty big request, ma’am. Is there a reason?”

“Yes,” I said. “Someone might be spoofing my number.”

He put me on hold. When he came back, he promised to send the report within forty-eight hours.

I hung up, changed every password I had, and enabled two-factor authentication on every account.

If someone wanted to crawl inside my life, I was going to make them bleed for it.

By afternoon, I’d written an email to Dr. Huffman requesting every single record she had — audio, transcripts, photos, notes. I quoted the confidentiality clause of the state’s therapy laws, spelling out exactly what I expected within three business days.

Then I re-read her earlier messages to me, scanning for any detail I might have missed.

Something jumped out immediately.

Her most recent email — the one apologizing for “any distress” — was signed Dr. W in a flowing cursive font.

Every other email she’d ever sent had been signed Dr. Huffman in plain Arial.

That same elegant W matched the text I’d received from Marello: See you at 8, Dr. W.

My breath caught.

What if “Dr. W” wasn’t a typo? What if it was another person — or another identity entirely?

That night, I couldn’t sleep.
Every creak of the building made my pulse spike. The shadows in my bedroom felt too thick, like they were holding their breath.

At 3 a.m., I turned on every light and sat at the kitchen table, laptop open, reading articles about therapeutic suggestion and false memory implantation.

It sounded absurd, like conspiracy-theory stuff — until I started recognizing patterns.
Questions that subtly lead patients toward specific answers.
Phrases designed to reshape memory.
Dream imagery suggested through repetition.

Exactly like what Dr. Huffman had been doing in our sessions.

The next day, I called my friend Sarah, my old college roommate.

“Quick question,” I said. “Have I mentioned Marello lately? Like, in the past few months?”

“No,” she said. “Last time you brought him up was February, when you said you were so done with him. Why?”

“Just checking.”

I hung up and stared at the wall. Sarah’s memory matched mine perfectly.

I wasn’t losing my mind. Someone else was rewriting my story.

The carrier’s report arrived two days later.
Thousands of lines of text routing data — numbers, timestamps, origin towers.

I filtered for messages marked “outgoing from device.”

Most looked normal.
But twelve of them — all within the past three months — showed third-party routing paths.

Messages sent “from my number,” but not from my phone.

Spoofed. Verified.

I highlighted each one in red and added it to the Evidence folder.

That was the first real proof I wasn’t imagining this.

By then, my paranoia had evolved into strategy.
I contacted a local digital forensic specialist named Jordan Casey, the one a coworker had used during a data-breach scare.

Jordan agreed to meet the next morning. “Bring every device you own,” she said.

I showed up with my laptop, phone, tablet, two hard drives, and three notebooks. She didn’t flinch.

In her lab — walls lined with monitors, cables everywhere — she explained how she’d create forensic images of each device so nothing would be altered during analysis.

Her calmness made me feel sane again.

When she asked for a timeline, I told her everything:
The nightmares. The slip about Marello. The fake texts. The photo of the three of us smiling.

Jordan listened without interrupting, then said, “Let’s find out what’s real and what’s been tampered with.”

That night, back home, I replayed the recording Dr. Huffman had given me — my therapy session.

Listening to my own voice was unsettling, but what made my stomach twist was hers.

She’d been leading me.

Before I ever mentioned darkness, she asked, “Are the hallways dimly lit?”
Before I said anything about being chased, she asked, “Does it feel like something’s following you?”

Her tone was subtle, guiding, almost hypnotic.

And when I compared it to the redacted transcript of Marello’s session she’d sent — the wording was identical.

The difference?
In his dream, I was the shadow.

I created a spreadsheet:
Column A — what I actually remembered saying.
Column B — what her notes claimed I said.

By the time I finished, I’d found seventeen discrepancies.

She’d rewritten my emotions.
She’d made me sound uncertain about the breakup.
She’d inserted phrases like “patient expresses ambivalence” and “possible reconciliation.”

Things I’d never said.

At 9 p.m., my inbox chimed. An email from Dr. Huffman.

Angela, I understand your concerns. I’m stepping back from your treatment effective immediately. I’ll provide referrals to other therapists. Please know I never intended harm. — Dr. W

That ornate W again.

I stared at it, then opened the metadata of the email.
The sender field didn’t match her clinic’s domain.
It came from a free encrypted service with no identifiable address.

Whoever Dr. W was, it wasn’t just a nickname.

At midnight, Jordan called.

She’d found something.

“That photo of you, Marello, and Dr. Huffman?” she said. “It was added to your phone last Tuesday, but the file’s creation date is six months old. Someone altered the metadata before syncing it to your library. Probably uploaded it remotely through your iCloud account.”

My mouth went dry. “So it’s fake?”

“Partly,” she said. “Someone combined old images and changed the dates. That means whoever’s doing this had access to your cloud credentials.”

For a moment, I just sat there, the phone pressed to my ear, staring at the glowing note still pinned to my fridge.

Everything was connected — the dreams, the messages, the records, even that mysterious Dr. W.

And if Jordan was right, this wasn’t just psychological.

It was digital.

Someone was rewriting reality — one file, one memory, one session at a time.

Part Three

Jordan’s voice stayed in my head all night.

“Someone’s editing your reality from the inside out.”

Those words looped like static.
I barely slept, and when I did, I dreamed of screens instead of hallways—phone screens, glowing keyboards, endless lines of code flickering like heartbeat monitors.

When morning came, I showered, dressed, and drove to Jordan’s lab with my coffee untouched in the cupholder. She met me at the door, dark circles under her eyes.

“I worked all night,” she said, waving me inside. “You were right to trust your instincts. This goes deep.”

Her workspace looked like something out of a cybercrime documentary—three monitors filled with scrolling data, graphs of logins, timestamps, IP addresses.

“Your iCloud account’s been accessed from at least two devices that aren’t yours,” she said. “Both connected from a coworking space downtown. Whoever it is knew what they were doing—VPN masking, burner hardware, cash day-pass purchases. But they weren’t careful enough with timestamps. I cross-referenced them with public Wi-Fi access logs. It lines up perfectly with—”

She paused, turning to look at me.
“With therapy appointments.”

“Dr. Huffman’s office?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Different building. Same street, two blocks down. Belongs to a Dr. Weaver Marsh.”

Dr. W.

My stomach dropped.

That evening, I sat at my kitchen table staring at my laptop, trying to process what that meant.
If Huffman was “H,” then Marsh was “W.”
Both therapists, both in the same neighborhood, both somehow connected to Marello.

I typed the name into Google.

Dr. Weaver Marsh, LMFT — Relationship Counseling and Communication Repair.

There was a photo of him on his website: mid-fifties, gray hair, warm smile. His biography said he specialized in “rebuilding trust between couples following infidelity or trauma.”

I scrolled further.
“We create bridges where others see walls.”

The words made my skin crawl.

If someone had impersonated me in couples therapy with my ex—if that’s what those texts were referencing—then this wasn’t just identity theft. It was psychological warfare.

I sent the link to Nigel Contreras, a privacy-law attorney I found online who specialized in therapist malpractice. His assistant called within an hour to schedule a consultation for the next morning.

When I arrived, Nigel was already reviewing the email chain I’d forwarded. He was tall, silver-haired, the kind of man who looked like he didn’t waste words. He listened carefully as I explained everything—Dr. Huffman, the recordings, the fake texts, the photo, the mysterious “Dr. W.”

When I finished, he folded his hands.
“Two major violations here,” he said. “Confidentiality and unauthorized recordings. But if another therapist used your identity in a separate case, that crosses into criminal territory—identity theft, maybe even fraud.”

He started drafting a formal records request to Dr. Marsh’s office:
All files under my name. All attendance logs. Any photo identification used during intake.

The next day, Nigel called.

“They answered immediately,” he said. “Dr. Marsh’s receptionist confirmed he’s been treating your ex-boyfriend in couples therapy…with a woman named Angela. But she never showed photo ID.”

My stomach flipped. “So someone’s literally pretending to be me?”

“Yes. For four months.”

He paused. “Dr. Marsh wants to speak with you directly. He’s…concerned.”

That evening, I met with him over video call. His face on the screen looked tired, anxious.

“Ms. Parker,” he began, “I had no idea this was happening. The woman who came in with Mr. R.—your ex—matched your name, your job, your personal details. She even recounted events from your relationship. I never thought to question it.”

“Did you record sessions?” I asked.

“Yes. As standard procedure—with consent. You have a legal right to request those recordings.”

He leaned closer. “Whoever she is, she knew intimate details about you. Too many to be random.”

My throat tightened. “Did Marello seem to notice she wasn’t me?”

Dr. Marsh hesitated. “He seemed…different. Disconnected. At first, I thought it was guilt. Now I’m not so sure.”

Nigel submitted a formal request for those recordings. Within forty-eight hours, we had them.

I watched the first one in his office.
Marello sat on a couch beside a woman whose hair was darker than mine but styled similarly. She even dressed like me—button-up shirt, gold chain, same nervous way of twisting her ring finger when anxious.

But the voice wasn’t mine.
The cadence was wrong. The vocabulary off.

She talked about “abandonment issues” and “feeling left out when Marello worked late”—phrases I’d never used in my life.

I felt nauseous. “That’s her. That’s the fake.”

Nigel nodded grimly. “She used your name, your history, your trauma—everything.”

He paused the video. “Notice the timestamps on these files? Every session coincides with those unauthorized iCloud logins Jordan found. Whoever this is, she’s been accessing your data live to keep her act convincing.”

That night, I sat awake rereading the transcript of one of Dr. Marsh’s sessions.

Fake Angela: “I know I overreacted when he came home late that night.”
Marello: “You didn’t overreact. I should’ve called.”

Except that never happened.
There was no night like that.
It was fiction—written by someone who had studied our lives like a script.

Three days later, Jordan emailed me.

“Confirmed: the coworking space IP belongs to a small office suite leased under the name W. Marsh Consulting. Same block as both therapists. Whoever’s using it has been logging into your account from Marsh’s own building.”

My skin went cold.

If Marsh wasn’t behind it, then someone in his office was.
And if Huffman had referred both me and Marello to him, even unofficially, that connection wasn’t accidental.

Nigel arranged a meeting.
All parties.
Me, Marello, his lawyer, Nigel, and a police liaison for documentation.

When I walked into the conference room, my stomach twisted.
Marello was already there.

He looked thinner, older. When our eyes met, there was confusion, not malice.
His lawyer nodded politely.

Nigel began, “We’re here to clarify facts. Ms. Parker and Mr. R. have both experienced identity-based manipulation. Let’s compare evidence.”

For twenty minutes, it was all paper shuffling, timestamps, technical terms.

Then Marello spoke directly to me for the first time.
“I swear, I thought it was you in those sessions. She looked like you. Talked like you. She even had the scar on her wrist from when you fell off the bike senior year.”

My heart stopped.
That scar isn’t visible unless you’re inches away.

“How did she know that?” I whispered.

He shook his head. “She said she wanted to fix things. I didn’t question it.”

Nigel slid Jordan’s forensic report across the table.
“Whoever impersonated Ms. Parker accessed her cloud accounts during those sessions—downloading photos, personal data, even medical files.”

Marello’s lawyer frowned. “Are you implying my client’s involved?”

“No,” Nigel said calmly. “We’re implying he’s a victim too.”

By the end of the meeting, both sides agreed:
No direct contact.
All communication through legal counsel.
Everything recorded and timestamped.

Walking out of that glass-walled room, I felt hollow.
I had proof, witnesses, forensic evidence—yet no idea who had been orchestrating all of it.

The only constant thread connecting Huffman, Marsh, and Marello was therapy.

And both therapists had worked within a four-block radius.

That night, Jordan sent another update.

“You might want to sit down,” her email began.
“There’s something embedded in your therapy recordings—ultrasonic frequencies, barely audible but detectable. Could be part of a sound conditioning technique. It’s not standard. It’s…experimental.”

I stared at the message until my vision blurred.
Someone hadn’t just been editing my data.
They’d been programming my perception.

The nightmares, the shared hallucinations, the false memories—they weren’t coincidences.

They were conditioning.

Part Four 

The email from Jordan sat on my screen like a lit fuse.

Ultrasonic frequencies embedded in your therapy recordings.
Experimental conditioning.

I must have read those words twenty times before they registered as real.

When I finally managed to type back, my fingers were trembling:
What kind of conditioning?

Her reply came within minutes.

“We don’t know yet. The frequencies are inaudible to the human ear, but when filtered into the audible range, they form rhythmic patterns. Like a metronome. It could be a timing marker…or a subliminal suggestion cue.”

My stomach clenched. “You’re saying she was—what—training me?”

“It’s possible,” Jordan wrote. “These tones could subtly alter emotional response—used in some fringe experimental therapies for PTSD. But combined with your overlapping dream imagery and manipulated files, it feels deliberate.”

I called Nigel.

He picked up on the first ring.
“She wasn’t just unethical,” I said. “She was experimenting.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Then we’re filing for criminal misconduct in addition to the ethics complaint.”

“Jordan says the tones were patterned. What does that even mean?”

Nigel sighed. “It means your therapist may have been using unapproved psychological conditioning techniques. Which means she’s in serious trouble.”

He paused. “Angela, I need you to prepare yourself. If Huffman’s involved, she may not be working alone.”

That night, I couldn’t stay in my apartment. Every sound felt like it had meaning.
The fridge hum, the neighbor’s TV through the wall—it all blurred into one long mechanical pulse.

At midnight, I drove aimlessly until I ended up outside a 24-hour diner on Fifth Avenue.
Inside, I ordered coffee I didn’t drink and opened my notebook.

Across three pages, I wrote everything I now knew:

Dr. Huffman treated both me and Marello.
“Dr. W” exists—Dr. Weaver Marsh, couples therapist.
Someone impersonated me in therapy.
Digital evidence altered.
Recordings contain inaudible sound patterns.

When I put the pen down, the pattern hit me.

Every event—every falsified text, every manipulated photo, every shared dream—was designed to blur reality between me and Marello.

If you erase someone’s certainty, you can rewrite their truth.

The next morning, I met Jordan again. She looked wired but excited.

“I ran spectral analysis on those tones,” she said, turning her monitor toward me. “Look at this.”

The screen showed two overlapping waveforms: one from my therapy recording, one from the audio Dr. Huffman had labeled as Marello’s session.

“They’re identical,” Jordan said. “Same frequency, same modulation pattern. These weren’t random artifacts—they were inserted.”

“By who?”

She gave me a look. “Who do you think?”

Nigel’s office became our war room.
By now, he had the licensing board, the police, and a private investigator all circling Dr. Huffman’s name. But when the board sent an update, my blood ran cold.

Dr. Huffman claims she has no record of ultrasonic manipulation in her recordings. Her defense states that the audio was likely tampered with after transfer.

“Tampered,” Nigel repeated, throwing the letter down. “She’s blaming the files you got.”

“Then how do we prove she did it?”

Jordan crossed her arms. “We show they were added before the file was sent—embedded in the original recording’s metadata.”

She turned her laptop to face Nigel. “And guess what? They were.”

That same week, the police subpoenaed Dr. Marsh’s office security footage.
The file they sent over showed four months of lobby entries.
I scrolled until I found the date of one of “my” supposed couples sessions.

There it was: Marello walking in at 3:02 p.m. with a woman who looked eerily like me—same height, same posture, hair the same cut.
She signed the log Angie Parker.

I hadn’t used that nickname since middle school.

I felt a wave of nausea so strong I had to grab the edge of the table.

“She’s not just pretending,” I whispered. “She’s studying me.”

Celia, my new therapist—the one Nigel’s office had vetted—listened to everything without flinching.
She was in her thirties, kind eyes, a calmness that felt real instead of manufactured.

During our third session, I told her about the tones.

Celia leaned forward. “Angela, if what Jordan found is accurate, those tones might have conditioned you to associate certain feelings with specific cues—light flickers, hums, even phrases.”

“Conditioned how?”

“Think Pavlov,” she said. “Your brain pairs a sound pattern with fear. Then every time you hear something similar, it triggers the reaction automatically. It’s not permanent, but it’s powerful.”

She paused. “Has anything lately made you feel afraid for no reason?”

I laughed bitterly. “Everything.”

“Think smaller,” she said. “Anything repetitive—machines, hums, words?”

I froze. “Yes. The white noise machine in her office. It pulsed.”

Celia nodded. “That might not have been a coincidence.”

Two days later, Jordan called again.
Her tone was tight.

“Angela, the ultrasonic pattern matches a sound file I found embedded in one of Huffman’s clinic devices. It’s called ‘Session Protocol W.’ Timestamped six months ago. Guess whose initials those are?”

My throat went dry. “W. Marsh.”

“Exactly.”

“Are you saying they worked together?”

“I’m saying the same pattern appears in files from both clinics.”

I felt my skin go cold. “So they were running the same experiment.”

Jordan didn’t answer, which told me everything I needed to know.

Nigel filed a joint complaint. Within a week, both Huffman and Marsh were under active investigation for experimental conditioning practices without consent.

But the deeper the board dug, the murkier it got. Their offices shared a data system, a billing provider, even a cloud server. Every trace pointed to someone beyond them—an IT contractor who managed the shared infrastructure.

Thomas Greer, freelance systems admin. Former tech researcher. No permanent address.

And—Jordan discovered this last—an old research paper from five years ago:
“Subliminal Symbiosis: Dual Conditioning of Interpersonal Memory Networks.”
Authors: Dr. A. Huffman, Dr. W. Marsh, and T. Greer.

When I showed the article to Celia, she went pale.
“They were experimenting on pairs,” she said quietly. “Trying to link emotional memories between subjects. Shared trauma as a form of behavioral synchronization.”

“You mean—”

“Yes,” she said. “You and Marello were the experiment.”

I don’t remember leaving her office. One minute I was sitting there, the next I was standing on the sidewalk in sunlight so bright it made my head pound.

It wasn’t just manipulation anymore. It was research.

We were case studies.

Every nightmare, every false message, every overlapping dream—it was all manufactured data.

We weren’t crazy. We were conditioned to believe we were.

That night, Nigel called with an update from the detectives.
They’d found a hidden server in Greer’s coworking office—the same place the unauthorized logins came from. Inside were hundreds of encrypted folders named after patients from both Huffman’s and Marsh’s practices.

One folder was labeled ANGELA_P_MARELLO_R_SHARED_STATE.

Jordan helped decrypt it. Inside were files:
audio samples, manipulated text strings, annotated dream logs.

Notes in Greer’s handwriting:

Subject A demonstrates elevated coherence with Subject R.
Begin Phase Three—Shared Recall.

I sat in my living room, reading those words over and over, until the letters stopped making sense.

Phase Three.

I thought it was over.
But experiments like that—experiments on memory, emotion, identity—don’t end just because you find out.

They evolve.

And someone, somewhere, was still running the next phase.

Part Five 

For days after Jordan found the research files, I couldn’t look at a computer screen without feeling sick.
Every piece of technology—the phone, the laptop, even my smart TV—felt like a trap waiting to blink to life with someone else’s fingerprints all over it.
I taped a sticky note over the laptop camera and left my phone face down on the counter.
Celia said avoidance was normal, that my nervous system was still treating ordinary objects like threats.
But she didn’t have her memories rewritten through them.

Nigel met me at a downtown café to go over the case status.
He carried a stack of folders so thick it barely fit in his briefcase.

“The police raided Greer’s office last night,” he said, keeping his voice low. “They seized multiple hard drives. There’s more here than we guessed.”

“How much more?”

“Dozens of subjects. Huffman and Marsh recruited patients in complementary therapy programs. Couples, ex-partners, siblings. Anyone with emotional history they could use.”

I pressed my palms against the cool surface of the table. “They used us as test subjects.”

He nodded grimly. “The project code name was EchoState. They were testing whether shared trauma could be synchronized through sound cues and subliminal suggestion—whether they could make two people literally dream each other’s nightmares.”

I laughed once, hollow. “They succeeded.”

Two weeks later, I was called to the precinct to give a final statement.
Jordan had been working with the cyber unit, untangling the server structure.
She met me there, exhausted but triumphant.

“They got him,” she said. “Greer. He was living under a fake name in Colorado. The FBI tracked his crypto accounts. He’d been selling access to the experiment data to a private research firm.”

I felt dizzy. “So this wasn’t even about us. We were just…proof of concept.”

“Exactly.”

I wanted to be angry, but what I mostly felt was used. Like every nightmare had been a performance someone else had directed.

The FBI interview took hours.
They asked for every timeline, every file I’d saved.
When I mentioned the ultrasonic conditioning, the agent across the table looked up sharply.
“Those tones were embedded in multiple patients’ session files,” he said. “We’re still determining if they were intended for behavioral priming or emotional pairing.”

I thought about the white-noise machine in Huffman’s office, its gentle pulse disguised as calm.
I thought about how I’d started dreaming in rhythm to it.

The trial preparations dragged on for months.
Huffman and Marsh both pled guilty to ethical violations but denied knowledge of Greer’s independent research.
Their defense argued he’d hijacked their patient databases and inserted the conditioning files without consent.
Greer, for his part, refused to speak.
When his lawyer hinted he might have been working under contract for a private sponsor, the courtroom buzzed with journalists scribbling notes.

That sponsor was never named publicly.
Some things vanish behind sealed federal indictments, never to resurface.

By spring, my nightmares had begun to fade.
Celia’s grounding techniques worked—pressing my feet flat to the floor, naming five things I could see, four things I could touch.
When I finally slept through a night without jolting awake, I cried quietly into my pillow, equal parts relief and grief.

Relief that it was over.
Grief for all the versions of me that had been rewritten without my consent.

One morning in April, an envelope arrived by courier.
No return address.
Inside: a flash drive and a single note in block letters.

You deserve to hear the whole truth. — J.C.

Jordan Casey.

I plugged the drive into an old offline laptop she’d once configured for me.
Inside were dozens of files—court exhibits, FBI summaries, decoded logs from Greer’s servers.
But one folder, labeled PHASE_THREE, was locked behind a password.

I tried everything—dates, initials, case numbers.
Nothing worked.
Then I remembered something she’d said the first day we met:
“Always choose a password you can’t forget, but nobody could guess.”
I typed EchoState.

The folder opened.

There was one video file inside.

It showed a sterile lab—white walls, a two-way mirror, two reclining chairs facing each other.
Dr. Huffman stood beside one chair.
Dr. Marsh stood beside the other.
Between them, Thomas Greer adjusted a laptop connected to a small speaker array.

Two people sat in the chairs—me and Marello.

I gasped.

We looked asleep, sensors attached to our temples.
The screen overlay listed biometric readings: heart rate, EEG, REM phase synchronization.

On the audio, Huffman’s voice:

“Subject A and Subject R entering synchronized theta state. Commencing Phase Three.”

Greer tapped a key. A low hum began—barely audible, pulsing in rhythm.
The monitors showed our brainwaves aligning.
Then the lights flickered, and both our bodies twitched at the same time.

I hit pause, heart hammering.

I remembered none of it.
No lab, no experiment, no consent.

I had gone to therapy, and they’d turned me into a lab rat.

I took the drive straight to Nigel.
He watched the footage once, jaw tight.
“This ends it,” he said. “They can’t deny knowledge now.”

The FBI added the video to their case.
Within a month, all three were indicted for conspiracy, unauthorized human experimentation, and digital intrusion.
Huffman and Marsh surrendered their licenses.
Greer took a plea deal and disappeared into witness protection.

The press called it The EchoState Scandal.

But for me, it wasn’t a headline. It was my life.

A year later, I live in a small apartment on the other side of the city.
Different neighborhood, different job, different everything.
I still see Celia once a month. She says recovery isn’t about forgetting—it’s about choosing what to remember.

I’ve stopped checking every corner of my phone for ghosts.
Most days, I can look at a message and believe it’s really from the person who sent it.

Sometimes, though, I still wake in the middle of the night and listen for that faint rhythmic hum.
Most nights, it’s gone.
But once in a while, I swear I can still hear it—soft and steady, like something breathing behind the walls.

I tell myself it’s the pipes. Or the refrigerator.
Something ordinary.

I get up, turn on the lights, and remind myself of Celia’s rule:
Five things you can see, four things you can touch.
I name them out loud until the shaking stops.

By the time the room feels real again, the hum is gone.

Or maybe it just learned to hide.

THE END