Chapter 100: You Didn’t Save Me I watched him. Subject 001. 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. Not the system’s ghost. 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. 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— The blade didn’t cut. It didn’t even touch. The tether pulsed once, hard, like a heartbeat, and then the scalpel was gone from my hand. Not dropped. Not knocked away. Gone. Like it had never been there. Like I’d imagined holding it. Like the machine had decided I didn’t deserve to hold it anymore. The alarms cut off. The lights stopped flashing. The floor stopped vibrating. Silence. Not the silence of peace. The silence of suspension. The silence of a system holding its breath. I turned back to the console. Subject 001 was still on the screen. But he wasn’t alone. His face flickered across every monitor now. Not as a reflection. Not as a feed. As a presence. As a signal. As a voice. Not one voice. Many. Whispering. In unison. “You didn’t save me.” The words didn’t come from the speakers. They came from inside me. From the walls. From the floor. From the air. From the code. “You remade me.” I stared 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. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I didn’t breathe. I just watched. And listened. And waited. For what came next.