The Echo Chamber

I’ll never forget the night I fired up that hulking machine—steel panels glowing like a spaceship altar, wires snaking everywhere, humming like it was alive. The lab smelled like burnt toast and old books. I slapped my palm on the frosty screen, felt it shudder awake, and muttered, “Show me the beginning.”

The room flickered. Suddenly, I was staring at the almost-people. Small, crouched figures with knobby limbs, poking through ferns with stick-thin fingers. Their eyes were too bright, too curious, like they knew fire was coming but hadn’t invented it yet. The machine pumped smells into my head—wet leaves, sour berries. I heard their clicks and hoots twist into something like words.

Then the scene ripped sideways. Big, thick-bodied hunters with fur cloaks and jaws like anvils trudged across a frozen plain. One woman cradled a child, her voice a low rumble that made my ribs ache. Nearby, slimmer folk with quick hands strung beads from animal teeth, trading them to the heavy-browed hunters for strips of dried meat. Kids giggled, swapping trinkets, but the vision frayed before I could see why.

Deeper in time, the machine showed me a city that drowned itself. Black stone towers, half-eaten by the sea, glowing jellyfish-lights bobbing in flooded streets. Boat-people paddled past, their faces a jumble of sharp angles and rounded cheeks, like they’d been carved from different clays. They read the stars with gear-filled stones, sang to gods made of hurricane wind, and etched stories onto oyster shells so thin they’d vanish in sunlight.

Under the city’s bones, though—that’s where it got weird. Crushed statues of things with too many fingers. Cave paintings of floating rocks and tunnels dug by soundwaves. The machine stitched together their music, and it came out warped—like a lullaby played on broken piano wires. I swear the ground under my feet groaned, like it remembered.

When the machine finally let me go, my shirt was soaked with sweat. I couldn’t stop seeing the overlaps—how the thick-bodied hunters taught the others to survive blizzards, how the bead-makers showed them new paths through mountains. Even the islanders, knee-high and clever, dancing around campfires as giant monitor lizards hissed in the dark.

That drowned city? Its people were a stew—chunks of the thick-browed, dashes of the slim traders, pinches of others I couldn’t name. Their kids had cheekbones from here, noses from there, eyes that held whole continents.

But the worst part? The machine kept flashing to the under-layers. Skeletons with skulls like crushed melons. Tools that looked like they were made for hands with extra joints. Like the world kept baking new kinds of people, burning half, and starting over.

I killed the machine’s power. The quiet was worse. We’re not some purebred miracle—we’re salvage. Scraps of the thick ones’ grit, the traders’ wanderlust, the islanders’ sneaky smarts. That drowned city’s ghosts? They’re in us. Literally. Our blood’s a museum no one remembers building.

I didn’t sleep. Just stared at my hands, wondering how many minds were folded into my DNA. We’re so busy squabbling over borders, but the joke’s on us—we’re all patchwork. Living proof that the world’s best trick was hiding a thousand lost tribes inside one.

And somewhere out there, under parking lots or desert sands, the machine’s still whispering: Keep digging. The story’s not yours alone.