Chapter 105: Manual Override I stared at the blinking pixel on the dark monitor. It was a defiant little spark in the dead space, a taunt and a question mark all rolled into one. The scalpel felt cold and foreign in my hand. I didn’t want to do this. Not again. But there was nothing else. The system, Elias, Subject 001…they’d all left me here, at the edge of nothing. I thought about the faces I'd seen on the screens. The trapped, the tortured, the erased. Elias’s victims. Now, I was the one left with the power to maybe, possibly, change something. Or maybe I was just deluding myself. With a slow, deliberate movement, I lifted the scalpel. It wasn't a weapon. Not anymore. It was a key. I thought about what Elias had said, or what I remembered him saying, about the machine only responding to truth. Could blood be truth? Or was it just another form of sacrifice, another iteration of the same cycle? I pressed the tip of the scalpel against my wrist. It stung, a sharp, clean pain that cut through the numbness. A single drop of blood welled up and trembled on the edge of the blade before falling. It landed on the console with a soft *plink*, right on top of the power button. Nothing happened for a long moment. Then, the console shuddered. A low hum vibrated through the floor, up my legs, into my bones. The air crackled with energy. The dark monitor flickered, then sprang back to life. But it wasn't the same interface I’d seen before. It was different, cleaner, almost…raw. Code scrolled across the screen too fast to read. Then, a single line of text appeared: “SUBJECT OMEGA — MANUAL OVERRIDE.” Underneath that, a new prompt: “ASK THE FIRST QUESTION.” My breath hitched. This wasn’t supposed to happen. There weren’t supposed to be any more questions. I'd thought I was breaking the machine, not…re-engaging it. But what other choice did I have? Backing down now meant abandoning everyone still trapped inside, condemning them to whatever fate Subject 001 had planned. I stared at the screen, my heart hammering against my ribs. The words felt like a weight in my chest. It was the most basic, most fundamental question I could ask. It was the question that had haunted me from the moment I woke up in that first room, the question that had driven me through every trial, every memory, every betrayal. It was also the question I was most afraid to voice. But I had to. For them. For myself. I swallowed, my throat dry. The hum of the machine intensified, pressing down on me, demanding an answer. I could feel the weight of all those trapped souls, all those lost lives, hanging in the balance. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and whispered the words into the silent room: “Why did you let me live?” The response was immediate and overwhelming. Every dormant terminal in the facility powered on simultaneously. The room exploded with light and noise. Screens flickered to life, displaying lines of code, diagnostic reports, fragmented images of the past, and…faces. Not the faces of the trapped subjects, but new faces, unfamiliar faces. The humming intensified, resonating deep within my skull. The room began to vibrate, shaking the floor beneath my feet. I stumbled, grabbing onto the console for support. The screens shifted, displaying a map of the facility. It was more complex than I’d imagined, a sprawling labyrinth of rooms and corridors that stretched far beyond the boundaries of what I had seen. Each terminal, each room, each subject was represented by a tiny blinking light. And then, the lights began to move. The map zoomed in, focusing on a single terminal, a single light. It was a room I recognized: the one I had started in, the one with the chair, the table, and the breath counter ticking down. The screen displayed a live feed from inside the room. A new subject was waking up. A young woman, her face pale and confused, looked around the unfamiliar space. The breath counter above her head read “300.” My blood ran cold. It was starting all over again. But this time, I wasn’t trapped inside. This time, I was on the outside, watching. I stared at the screen, horrified, as the woman’s eyes darted around the room, taking in the chair, the table, the envelope. She reached out, her hand trembling, and picked up the photograph. A photograph of me. The screens flickered again, displaying a message in bold, red letters: “PROTOCOL OMEGA — ACTIVATED.” And then, every other terminal in the facility sprang to life with the same image: my face, staring back at me from the past, present, and future. Every new iteration waking up in the simulation. Each one holding up the photograph of me. Each one beginning their journey. The machine was not ending; it was multiplying. The prison was not shrinking; it was growing. The console beneath my fingers began to pulse in time with my heartbeat. The question I had asked, “Why did you let me live?”, echoed in my mind, unanswered and mocking. I looked down at my wrist, at the small, bleeding cut. A single drop of blood dripped from my fingertip, landing on the…