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Rhett only realized something was wrong when the numbers didn’t add up. He’d sat down that night intending to do what he always did, skim through raw footage, make notes for the editors, maybe chuckle at some dumb joke he couldn’t believe they’d said on camera but the folder structure on the studio server snagged his attention like a burr. Episode 457. Episode 459. He clicked back a level. Same thing. The gap was real; there was no Episode 458. But that wasn’t possible. He remembered filming it vividly, the heat of it, the burn still ghosting the back of his throat when he thought about it. They’d shot a spicy wing challenge, something they’d joked was “GMM’s answer to culinary masochism.” Link had nearly cried. Rhett had teased him. Something had knocked over a cup. They’d laughed. It had happened. Except every folder on the server, every spreadsheet, every production log insisted it hadn’t.
When Rhett brought it up to Link the next morning, Link didn’t look confused. He didn’t even look thoughtful. He just laughed sharply with none of the humor reaching his eyes. “Dude, we didn’t film 458. We skipped numbering because we were ahead. We said that. You’re remembering wrong.” Rhett waited for the grin, the wink, the acknowledgment that this was just Link being Link, quirky, contrary, argumentative, but Link’s expression didn’t shift. If anything, he looked irritated, like Rhett’s insistence physically pained him. “Let it go,” Link said, voice flattening. “There was no 458. There’s nothing missing.” Rhett wanted to argue, but something in the tightness around Link’s mouth made him swallow the instinct and nod. Still, the wrongness stuck to him, clinging. It followed him through filming, through lunch, through the end of the day when Link hurried out of the building with a muttered excuse about errands, leaving Rhett alone in the dim, humming glow of the studio.
That was when he found the file.
At first he thought the server was glitching. Nestled at the bottom of the raw footage directory, below everything, even folders they hadn’t used in years, was a lone file: episode000.mov. No thumbnail. No metadata. Size unreadable. No date created. It didn’t even follow the server’s naming conventions. For a moment Rhett hovered the cursor over it, wondering if it was junk data or corrupted leftovers. But when he clicked, the file opened instantly, as if waiting.
Rhett froze.
The screen showed him and Link at the Good Mythical Morning desk, mugs in hand, lights bright, everything arranged exactly as it always was. He leaned in, expecting to recognize the props or the bit. But something was immediately, profoundly wrong. Their mouths moved out of sync with the audio, not in the usual way of a corrupted file but off by fractions of a second that shifted unpredictably. The audio was crystal clear, but their lips lagged, sped up, then stalled entirely while voices continued. At first Rhett thought it might be an incredibly bad export, some file compression gone haywire.
Then the twitching started.
Link’s head jerked in a sharp diagonal motion that no human neck should manage, but he returned to neutral so quickly that if someone blinked, they might have missed it. Rhett’s eyes, his own eyes, opened a fraction too early before the lids peeled back, as though the movement was being puppeteered from the outside rather than initiated from within. His video-self laughed, but the laugh layered over itself in a way that didn’t make sense, like two takes playing at once, slightly offset. Rhett felt something cold unspool down his spine.
He scrubbed through the footage, hands trembling. In the fifth minute, the lighting flickered, though the studio lights in real life had been flawless that day. In the twelfth minute, Link’s face turned toward Rhett, but the movement was too smooth, too deliberate, eyes tracking too slowly, as if observing, assessing, learning. The audio glitched, repeating Rhett’s voice. “Let’s talk about that, talk about that, talk about that.” Each iteration grew quieter, more distorted, until it blended into a whisper that didn’t sound like him at all.
And midway through, exactly the twenty-minute mark, the Rhett in the video did something the real Rhett would never forget.
His screen-self stopped talking, turned his head past Link, past the desk, and stared directly into the camera. No smile, no joke, no flicker of personality, just a hollow, unblinking gaze that settled right into the lens as though he knew Rhett would be watching through it. Rhett felt the breath leave his lungs. His hand jerked the mouse, slamming the video window closed.
He didn’t realize Link had returned until he heard him behind him: a sharp inhale, like someone spotting a corpse.
“Rhett.” Link’s voice cracked. “Delete it.”
Rhett almost did. He almost dragged the file to the trash and walked out without looking back. But something in him resisted, a stubborn thread wound tight around certainty. “We filmed this,” he said. “You know we did. Why is the file named like that? Why is it hidden? Why…!”
“Delete it.” Link yanked the mouse from his hand, trembling. He looked pale, sweat beading at his temple. His pupils were blown wide, swallowing the blue of his eyes. “Please. Don’t watch it again. Don’t…don’t acknowledge it. It shouldn’t exist.”
Rhett stared at him, heart hammering. Link wasn’t just scared. He was terrified.
“Link…what’s going on?”
Link shook his head violently. “You can’t keep it. If you keep it, it keeps you.”
The phrasing chilled Rhett more than the file had. Something in Link’s voice, strained, frayed, suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d seen something like it. But Rhett wasn’t ready to erase proof of his own memory. Proof that something had happened. Proof that Link was lying, or hiding something.
“No,” Rhett whispered, stepping back. “Not yet.”
Link’s face twisted, not in anger but grief. “Rhett, please!”
But Rhett left, taking the external drive with him.
That night, curiosity gnawed at him until he caved. He cued the file again, watching in small pulses, pausing whenever the glitching felt too deliberate. When the episode ended with both versions of them frozen mid-motion, mouths parted as if about to speak, Rhett slammed his laptop shut.
He didn’t sleep.
The next day’s filming dragged by with strange tension humming beneath every exchange. Link kept glancing at the cameras, flinching whenever red tally lights flicked on. Rhett tried to play it normal, cracking jokes, forcing banter, but Link’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, and his hands shook when he held his mug.
When they wrapped, Link practically bolted. Rhett stayed behind.
He told himself it was just to review footage, to reassure himself nothing was wrong, to prove the world was still as solid as it had always been. But as he scrubbed through the fresh recordings, his stomach dropped, cold and hollow.
There were two Rhetts. Not side-by-side. Not interacting. Not reflections.
Two versions of him sat at the desk, one speaking, blinking, gesturing exactly as he remembered doing that day… and one beside him, in the same position, the same posture, the same clothes…perfectly synchronized except for one thing.
The second Rhett never blinked.
Frame by frame, he held the same expression, eyes wide, fixed, not on Link, not on the desk, but directly, unwaveringly, into the nearest camera…as though picking up where episode000.mov had left off.
Rhett’s breath stuttered.
His hand hovered over the pause button, but before he could press it, the unblinking version of himself shifted, only slightly, just a tilt of the head, but enough to break the perfect mirroring. Enough to show intent.
Enough to show awareness. And in that single frozen frame, Rhett realized something impossible: The version of himself that never blinked was smiling.