Chapter 99: The Last Thread I stared at the screen. The first subject sat up. His lips moved. He said my name. Not the name Elias gave me. Not the name the machine assigned. Not the name carved into hospital files or etched into override logs. He said Mirabel. Like he remembered. Like he never forgot. Like I was still real to him, even after everything. The walls around him dissolved. Not with a crash. Not with a scream. Just slow. Like sand slipping through fingers. The room he was in—the one with the chair, the table, the envelope, the counter above his head ticking down from three hundred—started to come apart at the edges. The ceiling peeled back into white static. The floor cracked open into lines of broken code. The intercom on the wall flickered once, then went dark. He didn’t panic. He didn’t scream. He just looked at me. Through the screen. Through the layers of simulation, through the recursion loops, through the blood and the lies and the scalpel cuts. He saw me. I didn’t move. My fingers hovered over the console. The scalpel sat cold against my thigh. I could feel its weight. I could feel the edge. I could feel the silence in the room around me, thick and waiting. The other screens—the ones showing the men, the women, the children—all frozen mid-breath, mid-scream, mid-question—remained still. Their timers locked. Their eyes wide. Their hands reaching for nothing. I had stopped the cycle. I had broken Protocol Zero. I had locked it down. But this one. This one was different. He was awake. Not just conscious. Not just aware of the room or the counter or the voice. Awake to me. To us. To what we were before the machine, before the erasure, before the first cut. He remembered. Or maybe he never forgot. Maybe Elias didn’t wipe him clean like the others. Maybe he left something behind. A thread. A whisper. A name. I typed. One line. One command. Simple. Direct. No override. No biometric lock. No architect signature required. Just a line of code I pulled from memory. From before. From when I still had hands that weren’t holding scalpels, when I still had a voice that wasn’t giving orders, when I still had a name that wasn’t Subject Zero. PRESERVE_CONSCIOUSNESS: TRUE TARGET: SUBJECT_001 LOCATION: OUTSIDE_LOOP STATUS: ACTIVE I hit enter. The machine didn’t ask for confirmation. It didn’t warn me. It didn’t scream about system instability or core corruption or recursive paradox. It just accepted it. Like it was waiting for this. Like it knew this was the only way out. The screen flickered. Not just his screen. All of them. Every frozen face twitched. Every locked counter stuttered. Every silent intercom crackled with static. The machine groaned—not audibly, but in its bones, in its code, in the deep architecture Elias built to keep everything contained, controlled, counted. The groan spread. Fast. Like a virus. Like a crack in glass. Like a wire snapping under too much current. Alarms blared. Not the soft, polite chimes of a system warning. Not the calm, automated voice listing errors and suggesting reboots. Real alarms. Shrill. Relentless. Designed to wake the dead. Red lights flashed across the ceiling, strobing against the white walls, painting everything in pulses of emergency. The floor vibrated. The console under my fingers shuddered. The screens glitched—faces distorting, counters spinning wildly, rooms collapsing into pixelated voids. I didn’t look away from Subject 001. He was still there. Still looking at me. The dissolution around him had slowed. The static receded. The code fragments hovered in the air like dust caught in sunlight. He reached out. Not toward the door that wasn’t there anymore. Not toward the envelope that had vanished. Toward the screen. Toward me. His fingers pressed against the glass—or whatever passed for glass in this place—and for a second, I thought I saw them leave a mark. A smudge. A fingerprint. Something real. The machine was fracturing. Not just glitching. Not just malfunctioning. Unraveling. The core architecture—the deep, hidden layers Elias buried beneath layers of protocols and firewalls and recursive loops—was breaking apart. Lines of code scrolled across the main monitor too fast to read. Error messages piled up. System files corrupted. Backup drives failed. The simulation was eating itself. And it was all because of one command. One name. One subject who remembered. I grabbed the scalpel. Not to cut him. Not to cut myself. Not to carve another override into my skin or slice open another folder of lies. I grabbed it because it was the only thing left that felt solid. The only thing Elias didn’t design. The only thing that wasn’t part of the machine. It was cold. It was sharp. It was real. I turned away from the screen. The console was still alive, still screaming, still flashing red. The alarms hadn’t stopped. The lights hadn’t dimmed. The floor still vibrated under my feet. I stepped around it, toward the back of the room, toward the wall where the main neural tether connected the simulation to the core. Elias had shown me once, drunk on power, drunk on guilt, drunk on whatever kept him going after he deleted me. He called it the spine. The thread. The thing that held everything together. Cut it, he said, and the whole thing collapses. Not into chaos. Not into death. Into silence. Into stillness. Into nothing. I found it. A thick cable, black and humming, running from the floor to the ceiling, pulsing with blue light. Not electricity. Not data. Something else. Something alive. The tether. The spine. The last thread holding the simulation together. I raised the scalpel. The alarms screamed louder. The lights flashed faster. The screens went black, one by one, except for Subject 001. He was still there. Still watching. Still waiting. His hand still pressed against the glass. I didn’t hesitate. I brought the scalpel down—