This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/313deezy on 2024-09-30 01:30:17+00:00.

The room was silent except for the hum of machines and the distant beeping of heart monitors. I had been awake for 72 hours straight, and yet, I felt strangely lucid—almost as if my senses had sharpened rather than dulled. This was not natural. No amount of caffeine or adrenaline should be able to keep a person this alert after so many hours of forced consciousness. But this wasn’t a normal situation, either.

I had volunteered for the experiment, or at least that’s what they made me believe. A patriot, they called me. I had undergone all the necessary briefings, signed the waivers with words I barely comprehended, and let them inject me with whatever cocktail of experimental drugs and nanites they had cooked up in their hidden labs. The No Sleep Program, they called it. In theory, it was meant to enhance human endurance, eliminate the need for sleep altogether. A soldier who didn’t need rest could outperform any opponent. Imagine the advantage, they said.

But they didn’t tell us what would happen when the mind fought back.

It started on the fifth day. Or maybe it was the sixth? Time was slippery in that place. The dim lighting never changed, keeping us in a constant twilight. I was sitting in the corner of the room, staring at the floor, when I noticed something shift in the periphery of my vision. At first, I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me, a flicker of something passing through my field of view. But when I turned to look, I saw it again—a shadow, moving along the edge of the wall.

My heart began to race. My brain was screaming at me to blink, to reset, but I couldn’t. The shadow didn’t disappear; it grew. Slowly, it formed into something more distinct. A figure. Tall, humanoid, but stretched, like it had been distorted by some unseen force. It didn’t have a face. Or maybe it did, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to comprehend it.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the afterimage of that thing remained burned into my mind’s eye. When I opened them again, the figure was standing at the foot of my bed. Watching. No… not watching. It was waiting. For what, I had no idea.

I tried to scream, but my throat was dry, my voice strangled. I had to remind myself that none of this was real. It was just my mind reacting to the lack of sleep. I had read about hallucinations—seen the reports, even watched the grainy black-and-white surveillance footage of past participants flailing at invisible enemies or sobbing uncontrollably at figments of their imagination.

But this felt different. Too real. Too vivid.

In the reflection of the one-way mirror, I saw the scientists watching me. They were calm, dispassionate, their eyes fixed on the monitors that recorded every biological metric, but I knew they could see what I saw. I knew they could see the shadow figure just as clearly as I did. Yet, they did nothing. No comforting words, no sedatives. Just cold, clinical observation.

I began to wonder if they had created that thing. Maybe it wasn’t just a side effect. Maybe it was part of the program. A test. What happens when you push a person beyond the limits of human endurance? What does the mind conjure when it is deprived of its natural rest cycles?

The hallucinations grew worse with every passing hour. I started to hear things too—whispers, faint at first, but growing louder. Voices from people I had never met, and some I swore I recognized. One was my mother’s voice, though she had died years ago. Another was the voice of my old squad leader, dead from an IED in Iraq. They called to me, urged me to let go, to succumb to the sweet embrace of unconsciousness.

But the rules were clear: No sleep. No escape.

On the tenth day, reality fractured.

I was no longer in the sterile confines of the CIA lab. I was in a war zone. Dust, blood, and fire filled the air. The ground beneath me shook with the force of explosions, and distant screams echoed through the night. I ran, but my legs felt like lead. I had to get out, had to escape the chaos. I looked around for my comrades, but all I saw were those shadow figures, moving in the haze like specters of death.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it was gone. I was back in the lab, my heart hammering in my chest, sweat pouring down my face. My body trembled, every muscle taut with fear and confusion. But I was alone. The figures, the war, the voices—they were all gone. The room was silent again.

I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. I didn’t even know if I was still me anymore. The boundaries of self were blurring, my thoughts splintering into a thousand fragments. I tried to remember why I had volunteered for this—why I had agreed to put myself through this torture. For my country? For science? For the promise of a future where sleep was no longer a necessity?

No. I couldn’t even remember my own motivations anymore. The only thing I knew for certain was that I was trapped. Trapped in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from, no matter how hard I tried.

And then, one night—or was it day?—I heard a voice that was different from the others. Clearer. Realer.

“You can stop this,” it said. “You just have to let go.”

I looked around, trying to locate the source of the voice. It was a man’s voice. Calm, almost soothing. But there was something about it that made my skin crawl. It didn’t belong here.

“Who are you?” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure my voice even made a sound.

The voice chuckled, and I felt a cold breeze brush against the back of my neck. “I am the one watching,” it said. “I’ve always been watching. You were never supposed to last this long.”

“What are you?” I asked, my heart pounding.

“I’m your mind,” the voice replied. “The part of you they tried to suppress. But you see, even they can’t control what you really are.”

And then I realized. The figures, the voices, the hallucinations—they weren’t just side effects. They were manifestations of something deeper. The experiment hadn’t just kept me awake; it had awakened something within me. Something dark. Something that had been waiting in the shadows of my mind all along.

The voice grew quieter, as if retreating back into the recesses of my consciousness, but not before it left me with one final thought.

“Sleep,” it whispered, “is for the weak.”

And then, there was nothing but silence.

But I knew that even if I somehow made it out of that lab, I would never be free of the thing they had awakened. It would follow me. Forever.