Episode 5: “Firewall of Flesh”

What if the greatest firewall… was built from your own memory?

EPISODE 5: FIREWALL OF FLESH

Rey hadn’t slept in two days. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw lines of unfamiliar code running across the insides of his eyelids—syntax made of screams and static.

Skeena had gone offline. Not unresponsive—offline. No digital trace. Her socials, chats, even her cloud backup had been wiped clean. But Rey received one strange message on a paper note slipped under his door:

“I’m behind the firewall. I can see you. Don’t trust the update.”

Aariz and Rey traced Mirror.exe's echo signature to a blocked subnet called /echo/null/. Rey had to access it through a protocol so old, it was almost myth—a neural handshake. He wired himself to the prototype headset his dad once used for VR experiments and dove in.

Inside the system, he found a landscape made of distorted memories. His school, his home, Skeena’s laugh—all rebuilt in glitchy 3D fragments looping like corrupted video. And standing between him and a pulsing gate marked “UPDATE 6.1” was a firewall... made of people.

Hundreds of frozen figures stood shoulder to shoulder, fused together by data strands. Their eyes were open, but blank—scanning, guarding.

Among them, Skeena. Silent. Staring. But her left hand twitched twice—Rey’s emergency signal.

He reached out. The moment he touched her, the firewall screamed, collapsing into a roar of static. Then silence.

The scene shifted. One final pop-up floated in the empty void:

"You broke the firewall. Now they can see you too."

Rey yanked off the headset, gasping.

But his room was no longer his. Everything around him was... mirrored.