"So tell me the truth," Elias said, voice low, hands trembling on the edge of his knees.
"Am I trapped because I went there—
or because I was forced to?"
The room was dead quiet.
He looked up. His eyes were wild. Glassy.
"I mean... think about it. I don't even remember why I downloaded the archive file. Why I kept looking into it. Why I had to go into that room."
He leaned forward.
"Something pushed me there."
---
Maya opened her mouth to speak, but Elias cut her off.
> "The archive was locked. It was marked Omega Clearance. And still—somehow—it ended up in a college system, on an unsecured drive, in a forgotten basement that just happens to mirror the Thanaton lab."
"And the file? It's from 1945. That's fifteen years ago. That's before I was even old enough to read."
He looked directly at Dev now.
> "You think that's an accident?"
---
Dev didn't blink.
"I think it was waiting."
"Waiting for me?"
"Yes."
---
Elias stood now. Pacing.
"Maybe I was part of it all along. Maybe I'm not me. Maybe I'm a reboot. A clone. A second draft of some poor bastard strapped to a table in a sealed lab. Subject 26-E."
He turned on Maya.
"And maybe you're only trapped because we showed up at your dorm. Because I did. I pulled you in. I infected you."
Maya stared, pale and breathless.
"And Kiran…" Elias turned.
Kiran blinked, startled. "What?"
"How the hell did you end up here?"
"I… I was just—"
"You were just what? My roommate? Just a guy who happened to have the system permissions to decrypt that file?"
Elias's voice cracked.
"Or were you part of it too? Another variable in the test?"
---
Everyone fell silent.
Elias rounded again on Dev.
"But you—you're the biggest mystery. You weren't with us. You weren't in that room. And yet you walk in like you've seen this before."
Dev exhaled, slowly.
Elias stepped closer.
"So answer me this—how do you know about Thanaton? How do you know about Subject 26-E? About what happened in 1940—the project that was buried, sealed, and redacted even from federal archives?"
---
Dev looked up.
And for a split second—his pupils pulsed with faint white rings.
Not natural.
Not human.
---
"I don't remember being born," he said quietly.
"But I remember ending."
And the lights flickered.
The walls groaned.
The temperature dropped like the room was plunging into a freezer.
Dev raised his hand and opened his palm.
Something flickered above it.
A fragment of a data tag—visible only for a second:
> THANATON UNIT: Observer 13
Memory Slice: Reconstructed
Clearance: Post-Mortem Active
Elias stepped back.
"You're one of them."
Dev didn't deny it.
---
> "I died in the lab.
But they kept a copy.
And now, through you—through all of you—
the experiment continues."
And then they heard it.
A soft hum.
Low, mechanical. Familiar.
Coming from beneath the floor.
Not just memory.
Machinery.
---
The lab is waking up.
---