The chamber didn't breathe. It pulsed.
Not with air — but with light.
click… buzz… flicker…
The walls came alive, screen after screen jittering awake, until the whole Core was a carousel of fractured images. My own life, projected in grainy loops.
There I was, stumbling into the Veins back at the beginning clothes torn, sarcasm already loaded like a broken gun. There I was laughing at a corpse because that's how you keep from breaking. There I was pretending tunnels were just bad jokes written in concrete. The blood, the betrayals, the ruins I called victories.
Every mistake, every sneer, every fragile crack in the armor broadcast on repeat.
I felt my throat dry up. "No one was there. Nobody could've—"
The voice slithered in, deep, distorted, as if the air itself carried it:
"You walked in the day you chose to notice. From the start, Dylan, you belonged to me."
I swallowed. Hard.
"Great. So what, this is your Netflix recap? I didn't ask for the highlight reel."
The screens weren't just showing the past. They were annotated. Every line of sarcasm, every muttered doubt, transcribed at the bottom like equations in a madman's thesis.
Sarcasm ratio: 87%. Self-preservation motive: active. Trust deficit: constant.
I laughed, though it came out cracked. "So all of this me being the snarky bastard in the room was just data collection for you?"
"Not entertainment," the Architect replied, voice sharp as a scalpel. "Proof. You were always the design's echo. You rebelled exactly as expected. You doubted exactly on time. You laughed when required. And every death, every step, every betrayal… placed you where you stand now."
I clenched my fists. My reflection on one screen clenched them too. It was live now, real time me in this chamber, surrounded, drowning in my own history.
Then it changed.
The screen glitched, static hissss dragging across the glass. When it cleared, it wasn't the past. It wasn't even the present.
It was me wearing the Detective's coat, face hidden in shadow. The loop played in silence, just that image, again and again.
My stomach dropped. "No. No, that's not—"
"The loop closes," the Architect breathed. "There is no difference between your beginning and your end. You are the Detective. You are the investigation. You are the one who chases yourself."
Something inside me snapped. I lunged at the nearest screen, fist colliding with glass.
crack!
The surface spiderwebbed, shards raining down in shimmering splinters.
I smashed another.
crack!
And another.
crack! crack! crack!
Every hit felt like splitting my own skull open. Every fragment was my own face staring back.
I stood there panting, hands bleeding, glass crunching under my boots.
"I don't care if you wrote the script," I growled through my teeth. "I'll burn the pages anyway."
The walls shuddered. Not from me, but from it. The Core itself splitting, cracks spreading outward like veins of light. As if the Architect wanted this reaction, needed me to fracture.
And still, the voice whispered, calm and merciless:
"Every rebellion is still within design."