“Twitch,” by Khanh Pham: February 2025 Runner Up

Akia’s eyes shot open abruptly, leadened with sleep. The fluorescent LED lights of her bedroom were blinding. Her joints ached, as if they had been in the same position for a month. There was something… off.

It was too quiet.

Her last memory was of exuberant and colorful chatter, someone raving about a new humanoid robot prototype, how Shin Jinrui, a rising Japanese tech company, captured global news headlines as the first to venture into the world of adaptive artificial-intelligence and back-chaining algorithms and succeed. Somebody said their prototypes were undergoing simulation tests. Perhaps she had been at a company conference. She ran her fingers through her coarse hair, feeling stitches on her left temple. Akia jerked upright, her mattress stone cold.

There was a piece missing in what was, presumably, last night. Maybe selective amnesia, she thought automatically, not knowing how she did. Her eyes swept the barren, peeling gray wallpapered room, that was hers to take refuge from the outside world, cloaked by a veil of dust and newfound unfamiliarity. Akia suddenly heard a barely audible twitch from her kitchen.

It was a security camera that she had installed a few weeks ago after she had read an article about neighborhood stalkers.

Or that’s what she remembered, but her memories just felt…hollow, like a building with a facade and nothing behind it. Like they weren’t really hers, but something implanted into her brain. And there was something else she wasn’t remembering that she knew would make everything cohesive. Akia, whenever she had a panic attack, or what she remembered were her panic attacks, would scour her apartment for anything just to occupy herself. She remembered how her palms would become slicked with sweat, her heart would accelerate and ring in her ears. But then again, she had never felt her heart hammer nor her hands perspire, she just...knew. Akia began rummaging through her grimy drawers. Amidst all her seemingly familiar trinkets was a chip, a filed, crystalline piece of silicon that read,

TESTER 092 SHIN JINRUI. MEMORY CARD.

It was oddly the size of the patch of stitches on her left temple.

She heard the camera twitch again.