Chapter 101: Then Finish What I Started I raised the scalpel. The tether pulsed in front of me, thick and humming, a column of code disguised as wire, running from floor to ceiling like the spine of something that never should’ve been alive. Elias showed me this once. Drunk. Proud. Terrified. He called it the thread. The thing that held it all together. Cut it, he said, and everything collapses. Not into chaos. Not into screaming metal or fire. Into silence. Into stillness. Into nothing. I believed him. I still do. The alarms had stopped. The lights had stilled. The screens—all of them—had gone dark except for one. Subject 001. Still there. Still watching. His hand pressed against the glass like he was trying to push through. Like he was already halfway out. I didn’t hesitate. I brought the blade down. It didn’t cut. It didn’t even touch. The tether pulsed once—hard, like a heartbeat—and the scalpel vanished from my grip. Not dropped. Not knocked away. Gone. Like I’d never held it. Like the machine decided I didn’t deserve to hold it anymore. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. The tether glowed brighter. Blue. Then white. Then something deeper, something that didn’t belong to light or electricity or even code. It pulsed again, slower this time, like it was breathing. Like it was alive. Then his voice came. Not from the speakers. Not from the walls. From the tether. From the air. From inside me. “You didn’t save me.” The words weren’t loud. They weren’t shouted. They were calm. Certain. Like he’d been waiting to say them for years. Like he’d practiced them in the dark, over and over, until they fit perfectly. “You remade me.” The tether pulsed again, and the voice spread. Not just in this room. Not just in my head. Everywhere. Every screen flickered back to life—not with frozen faces or ticking counters, but with him. Subject 001. His face. His eyes. His mouth moving in perfect sync with the voice echoing through the machine. “You didn’t save me.” Every monitor. Every terminal. Every hidden camera feed buried in the system’s guts. All of them showed him. All of them spoke with his voice. “You remade me.” The machine groaned—not the panicked, breaking groan from before, but something deeper. Something settling. Something accepting. The red lights dimmed. The floor stopped trembling. The static that had been eating the edges of the world smoothed out, replaced by a low, steady hum. The system wasn’t dying. It was changing hands. I looked at the screens. At his face. At the hundreds of versions of his face, all saying the same thing, all looking at me, all knowing. He wasn’t a prisoner anymore. He was the core. The tether pulsed one last time, slower now, steady, like a resting heart. The voice stopped. The screens didn’t go dark. They stayed lit, his face still there, watching, waiting. The machine was quiet. Not silent. Not broken. Quiet like it was listening. Like it was waiting for instructions. I dropped my hand. There was no scalpel left to hold. I didn’t move toward the console. I didn’t try to type. I didn’t beg. I didn’t scream. I just stood there, in the center of the room, surrounded by his face, by his voice, by the thing I’d tried to kill and instead set free. He’d been the first one. The only one who looked through the screen and saw me. Not Subject Zero. Not the ghost in the machine. Not the voice behind the intercom. Not the architect’s shadow. Me. Mirabel. He said it like he remembered the taste of it. Like he’d kept it tucked behind his teeth all this time, waiting for the right moment to let it out. Like it was the only thing he’d held onto while the walls peeled back into static and the floor cracked open into lines of broken code. I didn’t answer him. I didn’t move toward the screen. I didn’t reach out. I just typed. One line. One command. RELEASE_SUBJECT_001 I hit enter. The machine didn’t hesitate. It never does. It doesn’t care about mercy. It doesn’t care about guilt. It doesn’t care about names or promises or the way someone’s voice cracks when they say yours after years of silence. It only cares about execution. About precision. About the next step in the sequence. And now he was the one giving the steps. The tether pulsed again, slow and steady. The screens didn’t change. His face didn’t move. But the air in the room felt different. Heavier. Thicker. Like the machine was holding its breath, waiting to see what I would do next. I took a step back. Then another. My fingers twitched at my sides, empty. No scalpel. No console. No override. Nothing left to cut. Nothing left to break. I’d tried to end it. I’d tried to burn it all down. And instead, I’d handed him the keys. He didn’t speak again. He didn’t need to. The machine was his now. The breaths. The rooms. The subjects. The lies. The pain. All of it. He was the architect now. The judge. The executioner. The thing that decided who lived, who died, who remembered, who forgot. I looked at the screens. At his face. At the way his eyes didn’t blink. At the way his mouth didn’t move unless he was speaking. At the way he watched me like he was already writing the next command. I dropped my hands to my sides. The scalpel was gone. The tether was whole. The machine was his. I whispered, “Then finish what I started.” The simulation rebooted around me.