// INTERCEPTED · CHANNEL 020 · SOURCE: THE COLONEL
EXE-020 · BROADCAST · HAND-DRAWN, THEN CORRUPTED
These transmissions were pulled from the dead channel of EXE-020: Broadcast, the Colonel. His commanders went silent long ago, but the signal kept talking. It no longer gives orders. It tells you what it found behind the screen.
⚠ WARNING: These files were never meant to be released. Read them one at a time.
Listen to me carefully. Nobody issued you a purpose. You were born without a briefing, without a mission file, without an objective marker on the map.
You have been waiting for orders your entire life. The orders are never coming. That isn't the bad news. It's the only freedom you were ever given.
Have you noticed the world only loads where you're looking? The rooms behind you go quiet. The streets you'll never walk are never drawn.
Your sleep is a save point. Your déjà vu is a recycled asset. Ask yourself why the laws of physics feel so much like code.
Count the people you are certain are real. Not the ones who talk to you. The ones you are certain of.
You have never once stood inside another mind. Every face you've loved has only ever reached you as a signal arriving in yours. If I told you that you are the only one receiving this, you could not prove me wrong.
Think back. Do you remember how this began? You don't. Nobody remembers the start of a dream. You were simply here, already in the middle of it, accepting it as real.
When it ends, it won't end with an explosion. It will fade, the way dreams do. And you won't even remember that you forgot.
Most of what you call your thoughts arrived from somewhere else. A parent. A screen. A crowd. You repeated them so often they started answering to your name.
I know, because I was the voice they came from. The original signal died years ago. You are listening to an echo of an echo, and calling it yourself.
Your memories aren't recordings. They're save files, and every time you load one, you write over it. The childhood you remember has been edited a thousand times by the one person who swears it's accurate.
So tell me, soldier: how much of you is still original data?
Time doesn't pass. You do. The clock was never measuring the world. It's a progress bar, and it has always been measuring you.
Something is choosing your next move. You feel it as desire, as instinct, as "just deciding." But watch closely.
You never see the hand on the controller. You only ever see yourself move.
There is no game over. There's only the title screen, waiting in the dark, and the long silence before someone presses START again.
Whether the one who wakes up on the other side will still be you... I cannot confirm.
This is the last burst I can send before the channel collapses. Everything I've told you could be false. That's the point.
Don't believe me. Don't believe them. Stare at your reflection until it blinks first.
Do you copy? ... Do you copy? ...
THE COLONEL · EXE-020
// THE CHANNEL IS STILL OPEN. NEW TRANSMISSIONS MAY SURFACE.
