Mind Seperator

It started in Omaha, a city too dull to expect anything like the Severance. At 11:43 p.m., people froze mid-step—grocery clerks, night owls, insomniacs staring at screens. For five minutes, they weren’t mad, exactly, but wrong. A woman tried to pour coffee into her purse, muttering about “the left side forgetting the right.” A man drew circles in the air with one hand while the other scribbled nonsense—two halves of him at odds. Then, at 11:48, they snapped back, blinking, confused, as if waking from a dream they couldn’t pin down. No one was hurt. No one understood.


Two weeks later, it hit Lincoln. Same deal: five minutes of people acting like their minds had been split down the middle. A teenager laughed hysterically while tying his shoes backward. An old man spoke fluent gibberish to his dog, who tilted its head in shared bewilderment. When it ended, they were fine—physically, at least—but left with a lingering unease, a sense that something vital had been unplugged and replugged off-kilter.


Dr. Evelyn Hart, an FBI profiler with a soft spot for puzzles, got the call after the third incident, in Topeka. She studied the reports: no injuries, no toxins, just five minutes of what she dubbed “the Split.” Victims described it like their thoughts stopped talking to each other—one half of their mind drifting, the other groping blindly. A baker said her hands kneaded dough while her brain planned a vacation she’d never take. A teacher wrote equations with her right hand while her left doodled stars. It was temporary, reversible, but weird—and it was spreading.


Evelyn mapped it out. Each attack hit a 10-mile radius, centered on nowhere—empty lots, quiet roads, a shuttered gas station. The downtime between strikes was three to five hours, suggesting a mobile setup that needed recharging, maybe a human operator who needed a sandwich and a nap. She pictured a lone tinkerer, some genius-gone-sideways, severing minds from their silent harmony like a surgeon snipping the corpus callosum. But remotely. And for what?


By the fifth event, in Wichita, the public was baffled more than terrified. News crews filmed a cashier counting change with her left hand while her right waved at no one, a five-minute glitch that became a viral clip. Theories swirled—5G gone rogue, a prank, a government test—but Evelyn saw intent. The Split wasn’t random chaos; it was precise, controlled, like an experiment scaling up.


She pitched her trap: wait for the next hit, plot the radius, race to the center before the perp could move. Her team grumbled—too much guesswork—but she’d clocked the pattern. Three hours downtime if he ate light, five if he lingered. He was human, predictable, and she’d beat him at his own game.


The sixth Split struck Great Bend at 1:12 a.m. A trucker steered straight while humming a tune his lips couldn’t form. A nurse folded sheets with one hand while the other tapped an SOS she didn’t notice. At 1:17, it stopped, and Evelyn’s chopper was already slicing through the night. They landed at 1:39 near an old barn off Route 281, flashlights piercing the dark.


Inside, a man sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, sipping a soda, surrounded by a mess of wires, car batteries, and a dish-shaped emitter aimed at the roof. He looked up, startled—mid-30s, unshaven, wearing a faded hoodie. The batteries were drained, their last spark spent on Great Bend. A notebook lay open beside him, filled with timestamps, coordinates, and a scrawled mantra: “They’ll feel it too.”


“Feel what?” Evelyn asked, her gun trained on him.


He smirked, wiping his mouth. “The gap. The quiet where the halves don’t meet. You’re all connected, you know—tangled up in each other. I just… unplug it. For five minutes.”


“Why?”


“To show you. What it’s like when the pieces don’t fit.”


Agent Ruiz cuffed him while the techs bagged the gear. Evelyn stared at the emitter, its metal cold but faintly humming, like a ghost of its last pulse. The man wouldn’t say more, just kept that smirk as they hauled him out. Back at headquarters, the lab boys tore the device apart—crude, impossible, a mash of radio tech and fringe science. It shouldn’t work. But it did.


The case closed. Six cities, thousands briefly unmoored, no lasting harm. The Split was over, they said. Except Evelyn couldn’t shake it. She kept the notebook, traced that phrase—“They’ll feel it too”—and wondered what he’d meant. One night, she woke at 1:12 a.m., her left hand clenched, her right slack, a faint whisper in her skull like two voices arguing across a chasm. It lasted five minutes, then faded.


He was still locked up. The device was scrap. But as she lay there, staring at the ceiling, she felt it—a disconnect, subtle, fleeting. Like something he’d started was still out there, drifting, waiting for the halves to split again.