THE SIXTH

Prologue

The basement smelled of alcohol, dust, and anxiety.

Four people were gathered around an old medical chair where a young woman sat with her eyes closed. Her breathing was even, almost inaudible. A man in glasses, who looked like a doctor, monitored the readings on a screen. His face was impassive, but the tension was betrayed by his knuckles, clenched white.

“Pulse is stable. Pressure is normal,” he said, more to himself than to the others.

Opposite him, leaning against the wall, stood a man in an expensive suit. He wasn't looking at the woman. His gaze was fixed on the numbers on the screen, and it held the cold thrill of a gambler who had placed his final bet.

The third, a woman with her hair pulled into a tight bun, was feverishly scribbling in a notepad, checking her notes against formulas on a whiteboard. Her lips moved silently, repeating the calculations. She was the creator of what was now flowing through the veins of the woman in the chair.

The fourth sat slightly apart, in the shadows. He was the only one who did not look away from the test subject’s face, and in his eyes, there was neither hope nor excitement—only a deep-seated, heavy anxiety. He was waiting for failure. He was terrified of success.

It was then that the woman spoke. Her voice was quiet, devoid of emotion, as if coming from a great distance.

“I see doors.”

The doctor leaned forward. “What are they like? Can you describe them?”

“They are blind,” the woman whispered. “Without handles. No light from beneath them. Just a smooth wall.”

In the ensuing silence, her next words sounded like a sentence.

“They are disappearing. They were never there. And I am disappearing, too.”

Her voice trembled, colored for the first time with a raw, animal terror. The man in the shadows involuntarily gripped the arms of his chair. The scientist froze, her pen hovering over the page. The investor tore his gaze from the numbers and stared at the woman, as if afraid his asset was about to turn to dust.

Only the doctor remained outwardly calm. He looked at her, and his eyes held a mixture of horror and revelation. A world without pain. A world without hope.

When the drug’s effect wore off, the woman opened her eyes. Her gaze held a thick, viscous emptiness that could not be measured by any instrument. She looked at each of them and said softly:

“I don’t want to go back there. Pain is better. Fear is better. But not that emptiness.”

They didn’t yet know what they would become to each other: saviors, executioners, or simply fellow travelers into the abyss. They didn’t know this was only the first step.

But in that moment, each of them understood: the door they had been so desperately searching for might not be an exit, but an end to everything. And they had just inserted the very first key.

Chapter 1: The Cracks

A few days after the first experiment, the silence in the lab had become dense, like a vacuum. The team would gather, but the work stalled. The emptiness they had glimpsed in Mira’s eyes had now settled between them.

Kairos was the first to break it. He tossed a folder of printouts onto the table.

“Our investors are getting nervous. They were expecting a breakthrough, and they got… a side effect. We need something more manageable. Elion, your idea of ‘healing reality’ sounds nice, but the market needs stability.”

Elion looked up from the journal where he was documenting Mira’s condition.

“The market can wait. We’re dealing with a human soul, not stock futures. Mira is still waking up in the middle of the night. We can’t risk it again until we understand…”

“Until you understand,” David interrupted from his dark corner. There was no aggression in his voice, only infinite weariness. “You’re looking for a justification for your ambition, Elion. You always have. I remember in university, you’d argue with professors about a doctor’s ‘moral right’ to alter human nature. You don’t want to save us. You want to rewrite God’s design because you’re not satisfied with it.”

Elion turned pale. “You have no right…”

“I do,” David cut him off. “My signature cost a man his life. I believed in the same kind of ‘miracle,’ in a genius who also promised to ‘fix the world.’ I signed off on the trials. Now, for the rest of my days, I will only sign prohibitions. And I won’t let you repeat my mistake.”

Tension hung in the air. Sofia, who had been silent at her monitors, abruptly spun her chair around.

“Enough! Your personal dramas won’t help us solve the problem on a chemical level. Substance K-1 created a vacuum. It’s logical to assume we need to create something to fill that vacuum. Not individually, but collectively. If we could connect consciousnesses…”

“...we could create the perfect product for corporate team-building,” Kairos finished for her with a cynical smirk. But at that moment, Mira, who had been sitting in the chair drawing her endless doors in a notebook, looked up at him.

“You’re afraid,” she said quietly, yet with such force that everyone fell silent. Her gaze was fixed on Kairos. “You don’t want money. You’re afraid of becoming just like your father. A loser. I saw it. When I was… there.”

The smirk vanished from Kairos’s face. For the first time, he looked not like a predator, but a cornered animal.

“Don’t you dare,” he hissed.

But Mira was already looking at Elion. “And you are afraid of silence. In it, you hear your father’s voice telling you that you’re asking the wrong questions.”

Elion flinched as if struck.

She turned her gaze to David. “And your fear is the loudest. You’re not afraid of making a mistake. You’re afraid of forgiving yourself.”

Finally, she looked at Sofia. “You hide. Behind formulas, behind calculations. Because numbers don’t betray you. Unlike people.”

Mira closed her notebook. The silence in the room was different now—not empty, but filled with their fears, their pasts, their cracks, which she had just exposed.

She wasn’t just a conduit. She was a mirror. And now, each of them was afraid to look into it again. But it was in that very moment that the idea for a new experiment was born. Not to heal the world, but to escape from themselves.

After Mira fell silent, leaving them alone with their exposed fears, no one could speak for a long time. The idea for the new experiment, born of desperation, needed to take shape.

Sofia slowly approached the whiteboard, erased a few old formulas, and picked up a marker.

“Substance K-1…” she began, her voice echoing in the silence. “It didn’t open a door. It did the opposite. It sealed it. It created a wall where there was a passage. It wasn’t a portal. It was…”

She paused for a moment, searching for a word that could describe the horror Mira had experienced.

“A counter-portal,” Elion finished for her. The word fit perfectly. It was precise, cold, and terrifying.

“Yes,” Sofia nodded, writing the term on the board. “A counter-portal. It locks a person in absolute solitude. But if a lock exists, there must be a key. Not an individual one. We’ve already seen where that leads. We need a key that opens a common door for all of us.”

She circled an empty space on the board with her marker. “We need a collective protocol.”

Chapter 2: The Sixth

The idea was born of fear. After Mira had exposed their wounds, the loneliness in one's own head became unbearable. The lab had turned into a room with five mirrors, and each was afraid to look at their own reflection. Sofia's proposal to create a "shared world" was no longer a scientific breakthrough. It was the only means of escape.

“Substance S-2 is designed to synchronize neural pathways,” Sofia explained, placing five syringes of a pale blue liquid on the table. “Theoretically, it should create a shared field of perception. Not just empathy, but a single consciousness for the five of us.”

“A group chat with full immersion,” Kairos smirked, rolling up his sleeve. “If this works, we’ll sell it to every corporation from Silicon Valley to Tokyo. But first, I want to see if the game is worth the candle.”

“This isn’t a game,” David said harshly. He stood by the door, ready to leave at any moment. “You’re creating a mental dictatorship. A world where dissent shatters reality. Do you even realize what you’re building? The perfect prison.”

“Or the perfect cure for loneliness,” Elion countered. There was a preacher’s note in his voice. “Man suffers because he is alone. We will give him unity. It is our duty. Mira?”

Mira, who had been silent, simply nodded. She was ready. She had always been ready.

They administered the drug simultaneously.

At first, nothing. Then the world blurred, losing its definition. The lab walls dissolved, and they were pulled into a stream of light. When their vision returned, they were standing in the square of a radiant white city. The architecture was flawless, the air crystalline. And they were not alone.

Standing beside them was a sixth person.

He was smiling—a pleasant young man who, it seemed to all of them, they had known their entire lives. His name was Leo. He was part of the team. How could they have forgotten him?

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Leo said. “I knew we could do it.”

They felt not just their own emotions, but a shared wave of euphoria. Elion felt David's calm, Sofia felt Mira’s childlike wonder, Kairos felt Elion's satisfaction. Everything was right. Everything was in its place. Leo was their center, their anchor in this world.

But David, even here, remained himself. He frowned, staring at the perfect buildings. “Something’s wrong… This is too… simple. Who are you, Leo? I don’t remember how we met.”

The question sounded like a crack in glass.

The world shuddered. Leo’s smile distorted for a moment, becoming predatory. The white walls of the city became covered in dark veins, like rotting flesh.

“Don’t think about it!” Elion shouted at David. “Hold on to the collective!”

But it was too late. The doubt of one became poison for all. The city began to crumble. The sky above them cracked, showering down shards of darkness. Leo reached out to them, his face contorting in a silent scream.

“Hold on to me!” Mira cried, trying to maintain the remnants of reality.

Panic engulfed them, ejecting them from the shared consciousness.

They woke up on the cold lab floor, gasping for breath, covered in a cold sweat. The roar of the collapsing city still echoed in their ears.

“Is… is everyone okay?” Elion rasped, sitting up.

“I think so,” Kairos replied, rubbing his temples. “Damn David… ruined everything.”

“But he got us out,” Sofia said quietly. “Leo. He showed us the way back at the last second.”

Everyone nodded in agreement. They remembered it clearly. In the chaos of the collapse, it was Leo who had helped them find their way back.

They slowly got to their feet, composing themselves. The silence was broken by David’s calm, almost indifferent voice. He stood in the middle of the room, slowly counting.

“Elion. Kairos. Sofia. Mira. And me. Five.”

He looked at each of them with a heavy gaze.

“But where is Leo?”

Chapter 3: The Man Who Wasn't There

David’s question hung in the air like a crystal of ice. “But where is Leo?”

The first reaction was irritation.

“What a stupid question,” Kairos snapped, heading for the coffee pot. “He probably stepped out. He always had that annoying habit of slipping away without a word.”

“Yes, he just helped me up,” Elion confirmed, rubbing a bruised shoulder. He looked around. “Leo?”

Silence.

Sofia frowned, walked over to the main computer, and opened the lab’s access log. “That’s strange. In the last twelve hours, only the five of us have entered. And no one has left.”

“A system glitch,” Kairos waved it off, though with less confidence. He set his cup down. “He… he’s been with us from the beginning. He helped me with the presentation for the investors.”

“He helped me with the calculations for S-2,” Sofia added, her voice trembling. She rushed to her desk, which was piled with papers, and began to rummage through them frantically. “Here! Here, I remember, he was sitting right here last night…”

She froze, staring at a page of highly complex formulas. In the margins, next to her neat handwriting, were quick, brilliantly simple corrections. The very corrections that had allowed the substance to work.

“This… this isn’t my hand,” she whispered, raising her frightened eyes to them. “I didn’t write this.”

She held the sheet out to the others. No one recognized the handwriting. But they all remembered Leo, leaning over Sofia’s desk, making those corrections. They remembered his jokes, his encouraging smile. Kairos remembered shaking his hand after a successful deal. Elion remembered their long argument about the philosophy of suffering. David remembered how Leo was the only one who understood his skepticism.

Their shared memories were vivid, alive, and absolutely real.

There were five of them. There had always been five of them.

Panic began to flood the room. This was no longer just a failure. It was an invasion. Something from the world they had created had seeped into their memory, into their history, and had even left a physical trace on paper.

“What was that?” Elion nearly shouted, looking at his own hands. “A collective hallucination?”

“Hallucinations don’t correct formulas!” Sofia shot back, her voice breaking. “He was real. There, in that world, he was real!”

“We have to go back!” Elion said decisively. “We have to find out who he is and get him out of there!”

“Or it will pull us in there forever!” David countered. “You don’t understand. We didn’t create a world. We just opened the door to someone else's house, and something looked back at us.”

At that moment, Mira, who had been silent all this time, walked over to the whiteboard where Sofia had left her notes. She stared intently at the foreign handwriting, then traced it with a trembling finger.

“He wasn’t human,” she whispered, and everyone turned to her. There was no longer emptiness in her eyes. There was an echo of another’s gaze.

“When the city started to collapse, I saw his true form. He didn’t look like a person. He was… like hunger. The hunger of that place. And he wasn’t helping us escape. He was pushing us out, because we were in his way.”

She looked at the inscribed sheet in Sofia’s hands.

“And he’s still hungry.”

Chapter 4: Echo in a Foreign Body

Paranoia became the fifth element in the lab, as real as the alcohol and ozone. The sheet with the foreign handwriting lay under glass on the central table—evidence proving the impossible. They weren't working anymore. They were searching for a defense against the ghost they had created.

It was Elion, obsessed with the idea of "fixing" everything, who first voiced what the others were afraid to think.

“If the mistake was made in the past,” he said, looking at "Leo's" formulas, “then it must be corrected there. Sofia, your early research… You talked about affecting temporal perception.”

Sofia flinched. “T-3? That’s insane. The theory is unstable. We don’t know what will happen if you tear a consciousness from its timeline.”

“I’ll tell you what will happen!” David interjected, his voice sharper than ever. “A void! A body without a consciousness is an empty vessel. And if there’s something out there leaving traces in our reality, do you think it would miss the chance to occupy that vessel? You don’t want to exorcise a ghost, you want to invite it into your home!”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” came Kairos's calm voice. He stood with his hands in his pockets, and for the first time, there was neither cynicism nor thrill in his eyes. Only a cold, absolute desire for power. “You’re all afraid. Elion wants to save the world, David wants to escape his past, Sofia wants to hide behind her numbers. But I want to win. To defeat this… ‘Leo,’ you need a weapon he doesn’t have. Knowledge of the future. I’ll do it.”

Mira looked at him with a long, piercing gaze.

“Sometimes,” she whispered, “the echo comes before the voice. And it stays forever.”

But that didn't stop Kairos.

The experiment was short and terrifying. As soon as Substance T-3 entered his bloodstream, Kairos’s body arched in the chair. The monitors went haywire. He mumbled something: fragments of childhood memories, names no one knew, stock quotes from the future.

“He’s there!” Sofia cried. “He’s seeing everything at once!”

“Bring him back!” David ordered. “Now!”

A moment later, Kairos opened his eyes. He looked calm. Too calm. He sat up slowly, looked at them all, and smiled. A wide, disarming smile, but… slightly different than before.

“That was… informative,” he said in a steady, confident voice. “I saw everything. Our mistake. Our future. It's all under control.”

“What did you see?” Elion asked hopefully.

“Everything I needed to,” Kairos replied and stood up. He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and with an ease he’d never possessed, made several corrections to "Leo’s" formula. “By the way, our ghost isn’t that smart. His code can be bypassed. Like this.”

Sofia and Elion stared at the board in amazement. The solution was brilliant. David stared at Kairos himself.

“That’s not you,” he said quietly.

Kairos laughed. 

“Don’t start, David. I’m me. Only better. Version 2.0. I brought back what we need—knowledge. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some calls to make. I think I know which stocks are going to skyrocket tomorrow.”

He walked out of the lab, leaving them in a deafening silence.

They couldn't prove anything. It was Kairos—his face, his voice, his memories. But there was something alien in his movements, in the cold glint of his eyes, in his aura of absolute confidence. Something incredibly ancient and predatory that had tried on his body like a new suit.

The horror had taken a new form. The enemy was no longer in their heads. He was among them. And he was smiling to their faces.

Epilogue: The Universal Key

The lab became a cage. The "new" Kairos no longer bothered to hide. He acted quickly and efficiently, using his knowledge from the future and superhuman logic. In a few days, he transferred huge sums to his accounts, began buying equipment for a new, larger-scale project, and hired security that now controlled every exit from the university building. The other four became his prisoners. He didn’t threaten them. He simply waited, observing them with the cold curiosity of a surgeon observing bacteria under a microscope.

Despair is a powerful catalyst. It was what forced Sofia to sit up nights over her notes, trying to find the mistake. She looked at the three formulas: K-1 ("Counter-portal"), S-2 ("Collective Protocol"), and T-3 ("Temporal Parasite"). They were so different, so alien to one another.

But then she saw it.

It wasn't chemistry. It was architecture.

“They fit together,” she whispered one dawn, as Elion brought her coffee. She showed him three flowcharts drawn on a napkin. “Like three different keys for a single lock. K-1 creates the 'keyhole'—the vacuum. S-2 'fills' it with a collective will. And T-3 'turns' it all outside of time. Separately, they’re poison. Together…”

“Together, they’re our only chance,” Elion finished. The fanatical fire was back in his eyes.

They told David. He was silent for a long time, staring out the window at the guards below.

“So, this is the choice,” he finally said. “Die here under the watch of this… thing. Or risk it and possibly burn down the whole world. I’m tired of being afraid.”

The decision was made. They had to get to the safe with the samples.

Breaking through was nearly impossible. Kairos met them in the central hall, as if he knew they were coming.

“Curious,” he said with his new, alien smile. “The children have found matches and decided to start a fire. You have no idea what you’re trying to do. This key isn't for your doors.”

“Then whose is it for?!” Elion yelled.

“For the ones outside,” Kairos replied calmly. “And you’re still trying to open your own cramped little rooms. You’re not ready.”

But at that moment, Mira, who had been standing behind them, took a step forward. She looked directly into Kairos’s eyes, and for the first time, he flinched.

“You’re afraid,” she said. “You are just an echo. And we are the voice.”

While Kairos was momentarily stunned, David lunged for the safe. The alarm blared. Sofia was already mixing the three substances in a single syringe. The liquid inside shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, then became perfectly transparent, like a drop of pure water.

“Who takes it?” she shouted. Kairos rushed toward them.

“I do,” Mira said, holding out her arm. She had always been the door. Now, she would become the key.

Without hesitation, Elion administered the drug.

The moment the last drop entered her vein, everything froze. Kairos was frozen mid-stride. The siren fell silent. Mira slowly lifted her head.

And the lab disappeared.

The walls, the tables, the instruments—everything began to disintegrate not into atoms, but into glowing lines of code. The reality around them was transforming into a gigantic digital matrix. They stood on a platform of light in the middle of an infinite void, through which myriads of other world-platforms rushed past.

Kairos stared at it with a mixture of terror and awe. “It can’t be… So it’s true…”

He turned to Mira. She stood in the midst of this decaying world, calm and whole. And in her eyes, which reflected a thousand universes, they saw for the first time not emptiness, not fear, and not an alien hunger.

They saw the one who had been building their prison all along.

And he was smiling at them.