Beyond the reinforced windows, muffled voices drifted between the observation modules–the hushed murmurs of scientists.
masks and emotionless faces.
At the end of the corridor, screams were the only thing left to break the silence.
Room 05. Again.
Another subject, another failure.
Another forgotten name.
Inside Capsule 04, there was no sound. No screams. No movement.
I hadn't moved in days. Or months. Or maybe… years.
Wires stitched into my spine. Tubes sunk deep into my veins.
They called me Host-017.
Shortened: H-017.
A number. A project.
A thing that was never meant to dream.
And yet—for the past nine years,
one scene has repeated endlessly inside my mind.
It isn't my childhood.
It isn't my pain.
It's something else.
A memory… that doesn't belong to me.
There's a weight in it. A pull.
As if I'm meant to understand it.
As if I'm supposed to remember it.
But I don't.
You. The one who haunts my every thought…
Who are you?
The memory… always ends the same way.
I stand before the core.
It wasn't a room
Not a place.
A relic of a world that shouldn't exist.
A broken clock suspended in the void.
Ticking without sound as if the time stopped.
I constantly have this voice. Blurred one. Whispered next to my ears.
– "Don't do it. Not again."
My hand reaches forward.
Not by choice.
Something keeps calling me.
– "Saejin, wake up.."
But..who is Saejin.. Me?
The moment my fingers brush the surface,
a blinding light swallows everything.
Silence. Darkness.
There, nothing.
Just the weight of the choice.
And the sound of my own heartbeat, slowing.
I don't know what it means.
But some part of me does.
Some part of me knows…
I have already been here before.
The scientists introduce onself into the room.
Fortunately, they couldn't reach me. I was in the capsule.
"Subject H-017 is stabilizing," one of the scientists murmured, eyes fixed on the monitors. "Increase the neural feedback," another replied coldly.
"Let's see if it responds."
"No sign of emotional variance. It's... still dormant."
the other responded and then said.
"He has been sleeping for a long time now, shouldn't he have woken up?" he questioned as he approached the capsule. One of them was named 'Doctor Klein'.
The atmosphere changed when he entered the room, it was intense, silent.
Everyone stayed silent for a good minute before Doctor Klein finally spoke in his cold, stern voice.
"He's not waking up because of the Omega Code, which we installed a long time ago."