Regulated Truth Sample Excerpt

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First, there was laughter.

Not human laughter. Nor was it AI-generated mirth packaged into friendly customer service tones. This was low and close, inside the skull, with a rhythm too steady to be natural. It vibrated against the back of Ashton’s teeth. Each chortle echoed footfalls in a long-abandoned corridor of his mind. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even truly sound, but it was there, everywhere. A warm, smoldering chuckle that seeped into his hair like second-hand cigarette smoke. It started deep in his bones and unfurled into his mind, curling around his thoughts until it was all he could hear.

Then came the heat, always the heat. Familiar now, routine even. The heat that made you feel like your body was an oil drum and someone had tossed a match down your throat for fun, you know, just to see how long you could scream before you turned into a human torch. It was a slow burn, one he’d grown to resent with an intimacy that only breeds contempt. It whispered sweet, hellish nothings through his nerve endings. A clingy metaphysical ex that refused to just politely fuck off and leave him in peace.

Ashton Frey was on fire again.

These days, the burning had a rhythm. A tempo. Like his body had been selected for the ‘BBQ-Grindcore - Volume: Infinite’ playlist. Each wave of heat felt like a track change, turning up the ‘extra crispy’ to eleven. He looked down and saw that his skin had begun curling; warping like cheap plastic in a microwave. 

“Oh good,” he thought. “This shit again…”

There were no screams. Not anymore. He was past that. Now it was just tired, resigned, sizzling. The sounds of a man who had, through extensive repetition, come to accept that being flambéed in his sleep was just part of his day-to-day. He blinked and noticed his eyes were gone. Vaporized like kittens in an industrial sandblaster. Missing eyes weren’t a problem here though, never were. Because he could still see. Vividly. Brilliantly, and picture-perfectly. The nightmares needed him to see, for the mirrors.

They arrived. The latest addition to his nightmare’s growing catalog of horrors. The first time he’d seen them, he’d been somewhat surprised. 

“Guess we’re doing mirrors now,” he’d thought. 

These days, though, he just watched them with a quiet, grim sort of acceptance. There were hundreds of them. Suspended in the air, embedded in the ground, scattered through the sky. Some were smooth, their glass pristine; others cracked and glitching like broken touchscreens, distorting the world with shattered edges. Each mirror reflected a different Ashton. Some old, some young. Others were burned, or torn apart in increasingly creative ways. One version grinned with teeth made of rusted wires. Another wept molten metal from hollow eye sockets. Yet another, perfectly unscathed, stared back at him with an expression of clear pity. That particular mirror’s gaze held something deeper within it. Something familiar; unsettlingly so. It was the only one he ever made the effort to turn away from.

Ashton didn’t feel fear anymore. That had burned out of him long ago. What he felt now was exhaustion. It reminded him of the feeling you get from pretending to be social just a little too long. It sunk into your shoulders, weighed down your thoughts, and made you wonder how you ever managed to wear the mask at all.
 

“I’ve had enough of this circus,” he muttered, the words spilling not from his lips, but instead, echoing back at him, repeated just slightly out of sync by every mirror. His own voice splintered into a thousand jagged fragments. 

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