Blinded and bound, Major Mason Rourke wakes in a sterile room, handcuffed to a bed. As fragments of past missions surface, the certainty that once guided him is offline. Between interrogators, ghosts, and the suffocating absence of machine guidance, Rourke confronts a terrifying possibility: that the war he fought, and the man he became, were built on a lie.

Landed in the Thrilling 32 of Writing Battle’s Fear 2025 Microfiction Competition.

Disorienting. Morally Corrosive. Paranoid. Haunting.