Chapter 112: You Called. Now Listen. I stared at the red button. It sat there like a wound in the table, raw and deliberate. No label beyond the three words etched beneath it — RECALL SUBJECT 001. No explanation. No warning. Just the color, the shape, the implication. I didn’t need to be told what it meant. I built this. I knew what every button did, even the ones I tried to forget. My finger hovered. I thought about walking away. I thought about leaving the room, leaving the machine, leaving the ghosts behind. I thought about silence. I thought about peace. I thought about what it would feel like to never hear another voice from the walls again. But I pressed it. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t close my eyes. I just pressed it, like I was turning a key in a lock I’d spent my whole life trying to pick. The room didn’t shake. The lights didn’t flicker. The air didn’t change. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic. Just a low, mechanical sigh from somewhere deep in the walls, like the machine had been holding its breath and finally let it out. Then the screens came alive. Not one. Not ten. Not even a hundred. Every screen in the facility. Every terminal. Every monitor. Every reflective surface that could be hijacked by the system. They all lit up at once, like stars blinking into existence in a dead sky. And on every single one of them — his face. Subject 001. Not the broken thing I left behind. Not the ghost I tried to bury. Not the child with the rabbit or the boy in the hospital bed. This was him now. Calm. Commanding. Eyes open, steady, fixed on me like he’d been waiting for this exact moment since the first breath I took in this room. He didn’t smile. He didn’t frown. He didn’t move. He just looked at me, through me, past me, like he was seeing every version of me that ever existed — the surgeon, the architect, the brother, the liar, the coward, the man who pressed the button. The silence stretched. I didn’t speak. I didn’t ask. I didn’t beg. I just stood there, hands at my sides, chest rising and falling, breaths ticking down somewhere in the back of my mind like a clock counting toward an execution I’d scheduled myself. Then he spoke. One sentence. Clear. Quiet. No echo. No distortion. No machine in his voice. Just him. “You called.” A pause. Not for effect. Not for drama. Just because he knew I needed to hear it. Needed to feel the weight of it. Needed to understand that this wasn’t a glitch. This wasn’t a trick. This wasn’t a test. This was a response. He leaned forward slightly in the frame, just enough to make it feel like he was stepping closer, like he was about to reach through the glass and grab me by the throat or the hand or the heart — I didn’t know which. “Now listen.”