When Adam was thirteen, his father gave him a strange piece of advice:
“If anyone ever offers you a red pill or a blue pill… choose neither.”
At the time, Adam laughed it off.
Years later, in Chicago, he understood why.
The pills had become the biggest invention in human history.
Blue pills allowed people to relive their happiest memories in perfect detail for eight hours. Birthdays, first kisses, weddings, childhood summers—anything. Millions became addicted almost instantly.
Red pills were the opposite.
They forced users to relive their worst memory.
Every pain.
Every regret.
Every trauma.
The company behind them, NeuroDyne Industries, claimed the red pills helped people heal by confronting buried pain directly. Therapists praised them. Governments approved them. Society became divided into two kinds of people:
Those escaping the past.
And those trying to survive it.
Adam worked as a janitor inside NeuroDyne’s headquarters. Quiet job. Night shifts. Easy money.
Until he found Room 9.
The door was hidden behind a maintenance hallway and required special clearance, but one evening an employee accidentally left it open.
Inside sat hundreds of people in chairs wearing neural headsets.
None of them moved.
At first Adam thought they were asleep.
Then he saw their faces.
Some were smiling.
Some were screaming.
But all of them had tears pouring endlessly from their eyes.
A scientist noticed Adam standing there.
“You’re not authorized to—”
“What is this?”
The scientist hesitated.
Then sighed.
“Testing.”
“For what?”
The scientist picked up two pills from a nearby tray.
One red.
One blue.
“They’re the same drug.”
Adam frowned.
“That makes no sense.”
“The colors are just marketing.”
The scientist explained that the pills did not contain memories at all. They amplified emotion by unlocking hidden areas of the brain. Blue-pill users expected happiness, so their minds created comforting fantasies. Red-pill users expected pain, so their minds generated nightmares.
The experience wasn’t real.
The brain invented it.
Adam stared at the motionless people in horror.
“Then why are they stuck like this?”
The scientist looked exhausted.
“Because eventually the brain stops distinguishing imagination from reality.”
Suddenly one of the patients began laughing hysterically.
Another started clawing at their own face.
Monitors flatlined.
Alarms erupted.
The scientist grabbed Adam’s arm tightly.
“You need to leave.”
But Adam noticed something strange on a nearby monitor.
Every patient’s brain activity showed identical patterns.
Even though they were supposedly seeing different memories.
“How is that possible?” Adam whispered.
The scientist went pale.
Slowly, reluctantly, he turned one screen toward Adam.
It showed recorded footage from inside the hallucinations.
Not memories.
Not fantasies.
A place.
A massive black room filled with billions of human figures standing motionless in silence.
Watching.
Waiting.
Every single user eventually saw it.
Whether they took red or blue.
Adam stepped backward.
“What is that?”
The scientist’s voice trembled.
“We don’t know.”
On the monitor, one of the motionless figures suddenly moved closer to the camera.
Then another.
Then thousands.
The scientist whispered the final words so quietly Adam barely heard them:
“We thought the pills opened the mind.”
The screen filled with smiling faces.
“But something on the other side opened theirs too.”