THE DOCTOR LOOKED AT THE SCAN AND SAID, ‘THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE HERE.’
My hands went cold as the doctor pointed at the screen, his finger tracing a dark shape.
He kept muttering about anomalies, spatial oddities I couldn’t understand. The air conditioning in the sterile room felt like ice against my skin, a stark contrast to the sudden flush of panic spreading through me. It was supposed to be straightforward, a simple follow-up scan after the initial scare. But his brows were furrowed tight, and his voice was low.
“This type of formation,” he said, leaning closer to the screen, his pen hovering, “is usually associated with… something else entirely. Not this patient, not this history as we have it documented.” The faint, clean, slightly metallic smell of disinfectant hung heavy, thick in the quiet room. He flipped through papers on his desk, shaking his head slightly, like he was trying to solve a puzzle that shouldn’t exist.
I stared at the glowing grey image, a swirl of shadows and light on the monitor, trying desperately to comprehend what he meant by “not this patient.” Was there a mistake? Did he have the wrong file? A knot of fear tightened in my chest, so sharp it was hard to breathe. My breath hitched, waiting for him to explain the impossible discrepancy he saw, this thing that didn’t belong. My eyes flickered from the scan, to his face, searching for clarity that wasn’t there.
He was about to speak again, his mouth opening slowly, when the door burst inward with a loud THUD.
Then a nurse stood there, chest heaving, whispering, “They found another one like it upstairs.”
👇 Full story continued in the comments…”Another one?” the doctor breathed, his eyes wide, snapping his head towards the nurse. “Where?”
“Room 307,” the nurse stammered, still catching her breath. “Mrs. Gable. Same shape, same… density signature.”
The doctor’s face went pale. He turned back to the screen, then to me, his usual calm replaced by a look of profound dread. “This isn’t just an anomaly anymore,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “This is… replicating. Or appearing in tandem.”
My blood ran colder than the AC. Replicating? Appearing in tandem? What was he talking about? Was something growing inside me that shouldn’t be there, and now it was in someone else too? My hands were shaking violently now.
“Doctor, what is it?” I managed to choke out, the words barely a whisper. “What is this thing? What does it mean ‘not this patient’?”
He finally looked at me directly, his eyes filled with a mixture of confusion and alarm. “We don’t know,” he admitted, his voice low and strained. “That’s the problem. This formation… it’s not cellular. Not organic tissue as we understand it. It’s almost… crystalline, but not rigid. It has a structure, a regularity that biological processes don’t produce naturally, not like this. It’s usually seen… well, in very specific, non-biological contexts. Artifacts. Deposits from certain industrial processes. Things that require specific temperatures, pressures, catalysts that aren’t present in the human body.”
He gestured back at the scan. “This shape, this pattern… it’s appearing spontaneously inside people. Inside *you*. And now inside Mrs. Gable upstairs. Your histories are completely different, no shared environmental factors we can find. No known exposure. It’s… impossible.”
The impossible was happening inside me. The dark shape on the screen was a structure that defied human biology, now seemingly spreading. The sterile room suddenly felt claustrophobic, less a place of healing and more a place of unsettling discovery.
The doctor picked up his phone, his fingers fumbling slightly as he dialled. “I need to contact the chief of staff. And infectious diseases… maybe even materials science? I don’t know who knows what this is.” He paused, listening to the phone ring, then spoke into it urgently. “Dr. Hanson? It’s Dr. Ellis. We have… a situation. Multiple occurrences now. Unidentified internal structures… non-biological in nature…”
As he spoke, his gaze drifted back to the screen, tracing the outline of the impossible thing inside me. The initial panic was replaced by a cold, spreading terror. I wasn’t just a patient with an unusual scan anymore. I was part of something unknown, something that shouldn’t exist, something that was now emerging in the quiet, sterile corridors of a hospital, seemingly out of nowhere, leaving the medical world reeling and me staring at a future utterly redefined by the shape of a shadow I couldn’t understand. The questions swirled in my mind – how did it get there? Was it harmful? And if it was spreading, how many others were there? The simple follow-up scan had just opened a door to a mystery far larger and more terrifying than any I could have imagined.