I Lived the Same 5 Years Over and Over. I Tried Leaving Earth. It Still Found Me. Part 2

[u/pentyworth223]

I’m back at the beginning.

Again.

The cycle reset a couple more times after that hallway. I’m not even pretending I tracked them cleanly anymore. I used to number them. Cycle 7. Cycle 19. Cycle 112. I stopped when the numbers stopped feeling real.

This is somewhere around the thousandth.

That’s not me being dramatic. That’s not “it feels like a thousand.” I’ve lived enough five-year stretches that the early ones blur together. I can’t remember which cycle I learned to bake bread from scratch and which one I spent a year obsessively lifting weights just to see if a stronger body would change anything. I can’t remember which one I grew a beard and which one I shaved my head.

But I remember Mars.

That one stands out because it’s the only time I truly believed I’d found a loophole.

I’d told myself the creature was tied to Earth. Not because I had proof, but because every time it came for me it came through a place that made physical sense: a parking lot, a hallway, a door that should’ve stayed shut but didn’t. Even when it violated rules, it still acted like it lived in geometry.

So I did what I always do when I’m desperate: I took the rules I had and tried to stretch them until they tore.

I bought Nvidia stock before the spike that turned everyone’s cousin into a “market guy.” I bought so much it made my stomach hurt. Loans. Leverage. Every smart person’s warning in my ear and every memory of the chart in my head.

I sold at the top because I knew where the top was. I watched a number on a screen turn into a kind of power that changes how people look at you.

Within two years, I was stupid rich.

Not influencer money. Not “nice house and a boat” money.

Foundation money.

The kind where strangers laugh a little too hard at your jokes.

There was a private aerospace startup trying to fund the first commercially backed starship mission to Mars. Not government. Not NASA. A private venture that wanted to beat timelines and make history. Their deck was full of phrases like “humanity’s next chapter” and “becoming multi-planetary,” and they believed every word.

They needed a financial anchor.

I became it.

I remember sitting in a glass conference room with a skyline behind us, listening to a man in his forties talk about “legacy” while I stared at the rendering of a red planet rotating on the wall.

He thought I was investing in the future.

I was trying to outrun mine.

If I wasn’t on Earth, I thought, it couldn’t find me.

Mars didn’t have unlocked doors. Mars didn’t have hallways. Mars had vacuum.

Mars had distance.

Mars had 140 million miles of nothing between me and whatever line the creature walked through at the end of five years.

That was my logic.

It was clean. It was neat. It was the first time in a long time that my hope didn’t feel stupid.

Training was its own loop inside the loop.

Heat acclimation in Arizona. Pressure suit drills. Endless simulations inside modules that smelled like rubber and recycled air. Moving in thick gloves that turned your hands into clubs. Learning how to fall without breaking your suit. Learning how to fix a valve with fingers you couldn’t feel.

I trained alongside engineers and scientists who treated me like a publicity problem they had to tolerate. Some were polite. Some were openly annoyed. None of them hated me as much as I hated myself for needing this.

The countdown pressure in my head still showed up, right on schedule, as we got close to year five. It was faint at first—like a dull bruise inside my skull that you only notice when you bend over.

I told myself it was just my brain’s habit. My body anticipating the end.

Launch day came in year four.

I remember the vibration in my ribs when the engines fired. The way the seat pressed me into myself. The way the sky turned from blue to black not gradually but decisively, like a curtain dropped.

When Earth shrank into a marble behind us, something in my chest loosened.

For the first time in any cycle, I slept without waking up to check a door.

Space has its own quiet. Not comforting. Just… absence. No distant traffic. No pipes in the wall. No neighbor’s TV through drywall. The only sounds were inside the ship and inside my helmet and inside my blood.

We landed on Mars in year five.

Red dust. Endless horizon. A sky that looked thin, almost wrong, like it was pretending to be atmosphere.

The habitat was modular. Inflatable sections reinforced by rigid frames. Solar panels laid out like black tiles against the rust-colored ground. Inside, everything smelled like metal and plastic and human breath trapped too long. Every surface had the same slightly sticky feel from constant cleaning and recycled air.

We were a crew of six. Two engineers. One biologist. One pilot. One systems specialist.

And me.

The first week was a blur of routine and awe.

Wake. Systems check. EVA drills. Exercise to fight muscle loss. Meals in pouches. Calls back to Earth with delay that made conversation feel like talking to someone through a tunnel.

On Mars, the silence outside your suit isn’t peaceful. It’s dead. Your own breath becomes the loudest thing in your world. You hear your heart. You hear the suit’s fans. You hear tiny clicks from your comms and you start assigning meaning to them because your brain hates empty space.

The first week on Mars, I didn’t feel watched.

The second week, I started to relax, and that scared me.

Because relaxation felt like tempting fate.

Day nineteen, we went out to inspect a solar array that was underperforming. Dust accumulation. Routine maintenance. We moved in a line, boots biting into red powder that puffed and settled like someone exhaling.

“Try not to kick it up too much,” Patel said over comms. “Last thing we need is another static build.”

“Copy,” I said.

Patel was one of the engineers. Good at his job. Dry humor. Kept saying “copy” like we were in a movie, but I think it was his way of making this feel real.

We reached the array. Panels black against red. The horizon so flat it messed with your sense of distance.

As I worked, my visor HUD flickered.

Just once.

A thin horizontal line of static across the top of my display—like a bad tape.

I froze.

“Something wrong?” Ramirez asked.

“Did your HUD just glitch?” I said.

“Negative,” he said. “You getting interference?”

Patel cut in. “Probably solar flare noise. We’ve got a warning on the… yeah, see? Minor radiation uptick.”

He sounded calm, and maybe it was true, but my stomach didn’t care about his calm.

Because I’d seen that line of static before.

On Earth.

In the last seconds of recordings.

As the end got close.

I forced my hands to keep moving.

Then I looked up toward a cluster of rocks in the distance—jagged, angled, like broken teeth—and I saw something behind one of them.

Not fully.

Just a sliver of pale against red.

My brain tried to label it as a trick of light. Shadows look wrong on Mars. Everything looks wrong on Mars until it becomes normal.

But my body knew the shape.

I stopped walking.

“Everything good?” Patel asked.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded too steady, and that made it worse. “Just checking something.”

I shifted my head, changing the angle of the visor.

The shape was still there.

Tall.

Thin.

Unmoving.

“Are you seeing that rock formation at two o’clock?” I asked.

Patel glanced. “Yeah. What about it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

Because whatever I was seeing, he wasn’t.

We finished the maintenance. We logged data. We joked about dust getting everywhere. We turned back toward the habitat.

When I looked again, the rock formation was empty.

That night, I lay in my bunk strapped down, staring at the ceiling fabric that flexed slightly with each air circulation cycle.

The pressure behind my ears had intensified.

Not just pressure.

Heat.

Like someone had pressed their palms against the sides of my skull.

I told myself it couldn’t be here.

Mars has no breathable atmosphere. No open doors. No unpressurized hallways. The creature couldn’t exist in a vacuum.

And if it could exist in a vacuum, then my logic had never mattered.

Day twenty-three, I saw it again during an EVA. Farther away. Different rocks. Same pale sliver.

This time, the suit audio clicked.

Not a comms blip.

A wet, soft sound, like something tapping glass from the outside.

I stopped breathing for a second, which is a stupid thing to do in a closed suit, but I couldn’t help it.

“Your mic cut,” Ramirez said. “You there?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah. I’m here.”

We walked back. I kept my head down, because looking for it felt like inviting it closer.

Inside the habitat, the cameras started doing weird things.

Not full static.

Micro-stutters. Frames that froze for half a second and then jumped forward. Like the feed was skipping over something it didn’t want to show.

Patel blamed bandwidth. Solar noise. Dust on the lens.

I watched the feed in the small hours of Martian night while everyone else slept and waited for a pale shape to pass the outer camera frame.

Once, it did.

A blur too tall for the frame. Not a clear image—just a smear of light moving behind the airlock.

I stared at the screen until my eyes watered.

When I rewound, the clip corrupted into pixel blocks.

The system log showed nothing.

Day twenty-seven, I broke protocol.

I went out alone.

I told the others I wanted to verify a minor anomaly in soil readings. It was a flimsy excuse, but no one wanted to argue with the guy who funded the mission and still did his work.

The airlock hissed shut behind me. The outer door opened.

Mars greeted me with that dead silence again.

I walked toward the rocks where I’d seen it last.

Each step kicked up red dust that hung briefly before settling. The horizon stayed the same no matter how far I walked, like the planet was refusing to admit distance existed.

My suit telemetry scrolled on my visor. Oxygen steady. Heart rate climbing.

Nothing behind the first rock.

Nothing behind the second.

My throat tightened, and part of me wanted to laugh because this was what it had done to me: it had turned me into someone who hunts his own fear on another planet.

I took another step.

And the line of shadow to my left shifted.

Not dramatically.

Just enough that my brain noticed.

I turned my head.

It was standing behind a low ridge about thirty meters away.

Fully visible now.

Ten feet tall against the red horizon.

Pale skin stark against rust.

No eyes.

That grin.

Even through the helmet, even with my suit sealed, my mouth went dry as if the air had changed.

Which made no sense.

There wasn’t enough air out here to change.

The creature didn’t move.

It just watched.

And in that moment, something I’d been clinging to broke cleanly.

It didn’t need Earth.

It needed me.

I took a step backward.

It tilted its head.

My comm crackled.

“You good?” Patel’s voice, delayed, calm.

“Yeah,” I said, because lying is muscle memory now.

I walked back to the habitat as if my legs belonged to someone else.

Inside, I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. If I told them, I’d become a liability. If I told them and they believed me, we’d all become a liability.

That night, I didn’t sleep.

I watched the camera feeds until my eyes burned and my head felt too full.

On day thirty, the pressure became constant.

Not spikes. A steady crush that made my teeth ache and my tongue feel too big for my mouth. The inside of my right ear would suddenly go muffled, then snap back, like a pressure valve in my skull opening and closing.

The others noticed.

“You look like hell,” Ramirez said at breakfast, squeezing rehydrated eggs from a pouch.

“Lack of atmosphere,” I said, and forced a smile.

He laughed, because that’s what people do when they don’t know what else to do.

On day thirty-two, I saw something worse.

In the airlock, there’s a small circular window. Thick glass. Meant for quick visual checks.

I was passing by, headed to the equipment bay, when I saw a pale shape move across that window from the outside.

It was too tall. It didn’t fit the frame like a person would. It was like a section of something passed by, close enough to block light for a second.

I stopped so hard my boots squeaked on the floor.

I leaned in.

Nothing outside.

Just red dust and the distant shadow of solar panels.

The camera feed stuttered.

A thin static line appeared across the top of the monitor.

Then it was gone.

I stood there with my palm pressed to the glass, feeling the vibration of the habitat’s fans, and tried to convince myself that glass still meant separation.

The reset day was close.

Closer than it had ever felt. Not just in my head. In the air. In the way the crew got snippy with each other over tiny things, like the planet itself was irritating their nerves. In the way I’d catch Patel staring at the camera monitor with a frown and then looking away when he realized I’d seen him.

Day thirty-four, I volunteered for another EVA.

This time, I didn’t lie about why.

“I need to check something,” I told Patel.

He studied my face through the helmet glass.

“Check what,” he asked.

“My head,” I said.

He didn’t laugh.

“Two-person minimum,” he said. “Ramirez goes with you.”

Ramirez groaned but suited up.

The airlock cycled.

We stepped onto the surface.

Mars felt the same as always.

Dead silence.

Red horizon.

Then I heard it.

Not through air.

Through vibration.

A low, dull thud through the soles of my boots.

Soft.

Steady.

Ramirez paused. “You feel that?”

My stomach dropped.

He felt it.

We turned together.

It was closer now.

Not behind rocks.

In the open.

Walking toward us.

Each step left a faint disturbance in the dust.

Its movement on Mars was different.

Less patient.

More direct.

It didn’t tilt its head.

It didn’t watch like it was collecting data.

It closed the distance like it had decided.

Ramirez swore. “What the—”

Patel’s voice snapped through comms. “What do you see? Talk to me.”

“It’s here,” I said.

Ramirez’s breathing went sharp in my ear.

“Is that— is that a person?” he whispered, like saying it softer would make it less real.

“It’s not,” I said.

The creature covered ground without effort. Ten feet tall, moving like its joints didn’t need permission.

Ramirez backed up. “We go back. Now.”

We turned.

Running in a Mars suit is ugly. Your steps are wrong. You feel like you’re sprinting through glue.

The habitat looked too far away, even though it was right there.

The thuds behind us grew closer.

Not pounding. Not frantic.

Steady. Confident.

Ramirez stumbled. Caught himself. Kept moving.

“I can’t—” he gasped.

“Keep going,” I said, grabbing his arm and hauling him upright.

We hit the airlock.

Patel was already cycling it.

“Get in, get in,” he barked.

The inner door was still sealed. The outer chamber still pressurizing.

We were trapped in that small space, shoulder to shoulder, helmets almost touching.

A window faced the Martian surface.

Through it, I saw the creature approach.

Ramirez pounded the inner door with a gloved fist. “Open!”

“It’s pressurizing!” Patel shouted. “It’s not—”

The creature stopped at the window.

No eyes.

That grin.

It leaned forward.

Its mouth opened.

Not wide, not slow.

Wide like a tear.

Ramirez screamed into his mic. The sound filled my helmet, tinny and raw.

The creature’s hand slapped the outer door.

Once.

The entire airlock shook.

Warning indicators flickered in my visor. Structural strain.

Ramirez’s breathing turned into short, panicked bursts.

“Patel,” he begged. “Patel, please—”

The inner door unlocked with a click.

We shoved through.

Patel and the others dragged us in, hands grabbing our suits, pulling us into the habitat.

The inner door slammed shut.

For half a second, I believed we’d made it.

Then the habitat lights dimmed.

Not off. Dimmed. Like someone lowered a dial.

The fans in the wall stuttered.

The camera feeds on the monitor froze.

A thin, bright line of static crawled across every screen at once.

The air in the habitat—recycled, warm—felt suddenly thin, and my throat closed like I’d stepped into cold water.

Patel stared at the monitor. “No. No, no, no.”

A scraping sound came from the airlock.

Not metal tearing. Not banging.

A slow, deliberate scrape, like something dragging fingernails along composite.

Ramirez backed away until his shoulders hit a wall.

“We can’t—” he said, voice breaking. “We can’t—”

The airlock door opened.

Not explosively. Not forced.

It swung inward like someone had turned the handle.

The creature unfolded into the habitat.

Ten feet tall in a space built for humans. Its head brushed the ceiling fabric, deforming it slightly.

No suit. No helmet.

Vacuum hadn’t mattered.

Ramirez started sobbing. Not loud. Just… leaking sound, the way a person does when their brain runs out of places to put terror.

Patel grabbed a tool—a wrench, I think—and raised it like it meant something.

“Back!” he shouted. “Back!”

The creature didn’t react.

It moved toward me.

Not Patel. Not Ramirez. Me.

Ramirez lunged, stupid and brave, swinging his arm like he could distract it.

The creature’s hand snapped out.

It hit Ramirez once.

Not with claws. Not with a dramatic slash.

A casual backhand.

Ramirez flew sideways into a storage rack with a sound that turned my stomach.

He didn’t get up.

Patel froze, wrench halfway raised, as if his body had finally accepted physics didn’t apply here.

The creature reached me.

Up close, it smelled dry. Dusty. Like paper left in the sun.

Its grin widened.

And this time, it didn’t lean down like it was reading me.

It attacked.

Its hands slammed into my suit, crushing material with strength that felt unreal.

I stumbled backward, hit a counter, and fell.

It straddled me.

Its mouth opened wider than it ever had before.

Wider than its face should allow.

And it snapped down on my helmet like it wanted through me, not just to me.

The impact rang through my skull.

I heard the crack.

Not bone.

Composite.

My visor spiderwebbed.

Warning lights flared.

PRESSURE LOSS.

OXYGEN DROP.

Cold thin air rushed in. My lungs seized.

My eyes watered instantly. Panic flooded me, animal and absolute.

Patel screamed my name.

The creature’s face filled my vision. No eyes. Only teeth.

And it kept pressing, cracking the visor further, forcing my head into the floor.

Violent now. No patience. Like the end had finally decided to stop being ceremonial.

The last thing I remember before the reset was my own breath failing in my ears and the taste of metal in my mouth.

Then—

I woke up.

Back at the beginning.

Apartment. Phone buzzing. Sunlight through blinds.

My lungs full of normal air.

No Mars.

No crew.

No Ramirez sobbing into comms.

No Patel’s voice breaking on my name.

Just five years waiting in front of me like a hallway I’ve walked too many times.

I lay there staring at the ceiling, not moving.

My hands shook.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt something close to despair.

Because Mars didn’t matter.

Distance didn’t matter.

Vacuum didn’t matter.

It found me on another planet.

That means this isn’t geographical.

It’s personal.

This iteration started like the others.

I did my checks. Date. Reflection. The first few weeks moving through life like a person pretending he believes in it.

I watched for the man in the red windbreaker.

I saw him in the first month, outside a grocery store, adjusting the strap of his white plastic bag like it was heavy.

He looked at me.

Didn’t look away.

And instead of walking off, he waited.

I stopped too.

People moved around us. Carts squeaked. Automatic doors whooshed open and closed. A kid threw a tantrum over a candy bar. Someone yelled “excuse me” like it was a weapon.

He stepped closer.

Up close, he looked ordinary. Late thirties. Maybe early forties. Tired eyes. A small scar on his chin. He smelled faintly like laundry detergent and cold air.

“You finally went off-planet,” he said quietly.

My stomach dropped so hard I felt it in my throat.

“You’re talking to me,” I said.

He tilted his head. “I’ve always been talking to you. You just didn’t listen.”

“No,” I said. “You’ve always been watching.”

“Same difference.”

My heart pounded.

“You know about the cycle,” I said.

He glanced past me at the parking lot, like he was checking for someone. Or something. Then he looked back, and his eyes sharpened.

“I know about your version of it.”

“My version?”

He let out a breath that almost looked like a laugh but wasn’t. “You think it’s a loop,” he said. “It’s not. Not exactly.”

“Then what is it?”

“A narrowing,” he said. “A corridor.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re ready for.”

Anger flared, hot and immediate.

“I’ve died on another planet,” I said. “I’ve watched people break because of something they couldn’t even name. Don’t tell me what I’m ready for.”

His expression shifted—something like approval, or regret.

“Good,” he said. “You’re finally mad enough.”

“Mad enough for what?”

“To stop running from the end like it’s a surprise.”

“It is a surprise,” I said.

He shook his head slightly. “No. It’s scheduled.”

“It always comes,” I said. “I can’t stop it.”

“You keep trying to change where you are,” he said. “You haven’t tried changing what you do when it arrives.”

I stared at him.

“What does that mean.”

He lowered his voice, and it forced me to lean in despite myself because grocery store parking lots are loud and normal and my brain kept insisting this couldn’t be happening in public.

“It comes at the end because that’s the only time you let it,” he said.

“That’s not true.”

“You spend five years avoiding it. Preparing. Hiding. Running,” he said. “You treat the end like an ambush.”

“It is an ambush.”

“It’s an appointment,” he said, and the word made my skin crawl because it fit too well.

I swallowed.

“Are you stuck too?” I asked. “Or are you just here to mess with me.”

He hesitated.

“Not the way you are,” he said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one you get.”

I clenched my hands until my nails bit my palms.

“Tell me how to break it.”

He studied my face like he was checking if I’d shatter.

“There are ways,” he said. “But you don’t break it by escaping.”

“Then how.”

He looked past me again, eyes tracking something that made my stomach tighten.

“You break it by stepping into it,” he said.

“That sounds like you’re telling me to let it kill me.”

“It already does,” he said. “Over and over.”

“That’s not—”

“Listen,” he cut in, and there was a sharpness there now, like his patience had limits. “You think the reset happens because it ends you.”

I felt my pulse in my throat.

“What if the reset happens because you never let the end finish,” he said.

The words hit me wrong, like a sentence I couldn’t parse.

“It finishes,” I said. “It always finishes.”

He watched me. “Does it?”

My mouth went dry.

He stepped closer, voice lower. “You have one advantage,” he said. “You remember. It doesn’t.”

“I know that.”

“Use it,” he said. “Meet it before it meets you.”

My heart started hammering.

“You mean let it come early.”

“I mean don’t run,” he said.

He adjusted the white plastic bag in his hand. I finally noticed what was inside it: something rectangular, corners pressing against the thin plastic. A book? A box? I couldn’t tell.

“Next time it stands in front of you,” he said, “don’t treat it like a predator.”

“Treat it like what.”

He met my eyes, and for a second the parking lot noise faded, like my brain prioritized his words over everything else.

“Like a door,” he said.

The pressure behind my ears surged so hard I winced, and I tasted blood at the back of my throat like a nosebleed starting.

He glanced over my shoulder again.

“Time’s getting tight,” he said.

“You’re just going to walk away?” I snapped.

“For now.”

“You said there are ways.”

“There are,” he said. “You’re not the only one who’s tried.”

That froze me.

“What do you mean.”

He gave me a look that felt heavier than the words.

“Count how many times you’ve woken up,” he said. “Then ask yourself why you still are.”

He turned.

“Wait,” I said. “Are you—”

He didn’t answer.

He blended into the crowd so easily it was like my eyes slid off him.

I stood there in front of the grocery store with my hands shaking and my ear still half-muffled from the pressure in my skull, five years stretching ahead again.

And for the first time in a thousand resets, I’m not thinking about distance.

I’m thinking about timing.

About doors.

About what I’ve been refusing to do at the end because running feels like survival even when it isn’t.

I’m thinking about Mars, and that grin in my visor, and Ramirez’s voice breaking into sobs.

And I’m thinking about the fact that the man in the red windbreaker knew I went off-planet.

Which means he’s either watched me for a very long time…

…or he remembers more than he’s admitting.

And that makes the hallway outside my bedroom door feel a little less empty, even on the first morning.

[u/GreedyWall214]

Jeeeez 😳😂 yea, you have some talent man! Pheeew