Adrian's pov:
We'd survived the fire.
Survived the system collapse.
Survived the versions of ourselves they tried to overwrite.
But somehow, this felt worse.
Because now… we weren't just surviving the system.
We were becoming it.
---
The underground facility didn't end. No matter how many doors we passed—rooms filled with static screens, sealed-off labs, and shadowy reflections of our past selves—the hallway continued. It twisted like a maze built by memory and trauma.
Rhea walked ahead of me, silent, her eyes flicking to each scanner, each corridor. Her hair was tied back in a way that felt too precise, like she was preparing for war.
Or like she had already fought it and lost.
At one point, she stopped and pulled a file from a rusted cabinet. Just one.
It was labeled:
> VIRELLE // MASK PROTOCOL // LAST INITIATION: UNKNOWN
Her hands trembled as she opened it. Mine didn't.
Inside: photos.
Of her. But not her.
No bruises. No defiance. Just smiles.
She looked like a weapon disguised as a daughter.
> "They didn't just copy me," Rhea murmured. "They duplicated everything—right down to my heartbeat."
She looked up at me.
> "What happens if the mask learns how to lie better than the original?"
---
System Log: Unauthorized Access – Echo Lab B13
> "Subject A-03 identified. Trigger pattern confirmed. Mask Protocol engaged."
"Activating emotional divergence simulation."
"Injecting false memory burst in Subject V-05..."
---
Rhea's pov
My mind split the moment the file dropped.
I remembered something I'd never lived.
A boy—Adrian, but not.
Kissing me in the observation dome. Snow falling around us like we were in a snow globe.
He whispered, "Choose me this time."
And then I was back in the hallway, cold sweat down my spine.
> "They're hacking into me," I said. "Feeding me false loops."
Adrian caught my arm.
"Then hold onto me. Because I'm real."
I looked at him.
For the first time, I wasn't sure.
---
The next room was different.
Lit only by blue monitors and ceiling vents dripping condensation.
In the center stood her.
The Mask.
Rhea—perfect. Still. Programmed.
She tilted her head at us, the way a puppet might.
> "You're not supposed to be here," she said.
> "Neither are you," I snapped.
Her eyes flicked to Rhea.
> "You failed seventeen times. You were not stable."
Rhea's voice cracked.
> "I wasn't supposed to be stable. I was supposed to be real."
---
Adrian's pov
The two of them—same voice, same mouth, same everything—facing each other was unbearable.
The Mask stepped closer to Rhea.
> "You were built to collapse. That was your purpose."
> "And you were built to replace me," Rhea whispered.
> "But I didn't. Because he chose you."
Her gaze shifted to me.
> "Why?"
It wasn't a question of jealousy.
It was curiosity.
Pure, cold data analysis.
> "I was designed to be easier. Cleaner. Lovable."
> "And I loved her anyway," I said.
She blinked. Just once.
> "That's the error in the code."
She smiled.
And then she lunged.
---
The fight wasn't fair.
The Mask didn't bleed. Didn't hesitate.
She moved like a simulation running at 200%.
A knife glinted in her hand, one she pulled from her boot—because of course she had a knife. Of course they'd armed her.
Rhea dodged the first slice but stumbled on the second.
Blood. Real.
Her cheek split open.
The Mask turned to me.
> "Which one of us do you save?"
I didn't think.
I tackled her.
My fist met her face—plastic, too smooth, too fast.
But the scream that came from her throat?
That was human.
---
We locked her in the decontamination chamber.
She didn't fight us.
She just sat there, smiling as the glass hissed closed.
> "He'll come for me," she said.
> "Who?" Rhea snapped.
> "The one who made us both."
The lights flickered.
A voice crackled over the intercom—one neither of us had heard in weeks.
> "Adrian. Rhea. Welcome to the end of your free will."
I stared at the speaker.
The voice was familiar.
Too familiar.
It was mine.
Adrian's pov
The voice over the intercom was me.
Not distorted. Not deepened. Not synthetic.
Me.
> "Welcome to the end of your free will."
The speaker crackled into static.
Rhea turned slowly toward me, her face pale.
> "That was your voice," she said. "But not you."
I didn't answer.
Because I wasn't sure anymore.
The more we descended into these halls—the ones the fire hadn't touched, the ones the system didn't want us to see—the more it felt like time was folding. Like I was meeting versions of myself instead of becoming them.
---
System Log: SUBJECT A-03 ENGAGEMENT LEVEL – 97%
> Merge Threat Detected. Emotional Override Reached.
Solution: Reset Host or Activate Master Trigger.
Pending Approval from Origin.AV
---
We followed the corridor down past the Mask chamber.
The air smelled like copper and ozone. Memory.
Every light flickered. Power was failing. Or resisting.
A single door glowed ahead of us—one with no handle, just a scanner.
And next to it, a plaque.
> PROJECT: ORIGIN.AV – PRIMARY CREATOR / SUBJECT A-00
Rhea froze.
Her mouth parted, then closed again.
> "That's not possible," she said. "You weren't… built."
But the words died in her throat.
Because the door hissed open.
And inside…
I saw me.
---
Not in a mirror.
Not in a memory.
A man stood facing a massive wall of monitors, each one flickering with loops—of us. Of our fights. Our touches. Her tears. My rage.
He turned slowly.
He looked older.
Hair longer. Eyes duller. But it was me.
> "I've been waiting for you," he said.
Rhea stepped in front of me. Protective. Terrified.
> "Who the hell are you?"
The other me smiled.
> "I'm the version who broke the loop first."
He stepped closer. No hostility. Just history in his bones.
> "I built the mask. I initiated the seduction protocols. I chose her face. Her voice."
He looked at Rhea.
> "I chose you."
---
Rhea's pov
It felt like drowning.
I didn't know who to protect.
The Adrian beside me—the one who shook with disbelief—or the Adrian across the room, the one who had become the architect of everything we hated.
> "You did this?" I asked.
He nodded.
> "The system was never the enemy. The enemy was unpredictability. You two kept breaking the equation."
He gestured to the monitors.
> "So I tried to make a version that wouldn't."
I swallowed the bile in my throat.
> "You programmed him to love me."
The older Adrian nodded.
> "Yes."
He turned to the current one.
> "But you didn't follow the script, did you?"
Adrian's fists clenched.
> "No. I loved her because I chose to."
> "You think you chose to."
The older one stepped close.
> "But what if every choice was just another protocol?"
---
System Override Authorized – ORIGIN.AV
> "Initiate Final Convergence Test."
"All subjects now active."
"Loop 19: Begin."
---
Adrian's pov
The lights went out.
Then came back in red.
Sirens wailed.
Monitors shattered.
A voice—female, mechanical, cruel—filled the air.
> "Welcome to your final loop. All previous iterations have been terminated."
Rhea gripped my hand.
The older me? Gone. Just… vanished into the red smoke.
Or maybe he was never really there.
But his words stayed.
Loop 19 had begun.
And this time, we weren't running.
---
The protocol had changed.
We weren't just being tested anymore.
We were being replaced.
Again.
Rhea turned to me, eyes glassy.
> "They're going to upload us into the Mask."
> "And delete the real versions."
We ran.
Back through corridors that no longer obeyed logic.
Doors opened where there were walls. Elevators moved without floors.
And the whole school was breathing like it had lungs.
At one point, we found a monitor still working.
It displayed two files.
> SUBJECT A-03: TERMINATION PENDING
SUBJECT V-05: UPLOAD IN PROGRESS
Rhea let out a strangled sob.
> "They're stealing my mind."
> "Then let's crash the system."
---
We reached the original control room.
I remembered it from my dreams. My nightmares.
Everything was coated in dust and memory.
There was a single red button marked:
> TRIGGER: MASTER FAILURE
I looked at her.
She nodded.
> "If it ends us, at least it ends them too."
I pressed it.
---
The walls screamed.
I mean it—every speaker, every wire, every vent began to shriek like the system itself was dying.
And maybe it was.
Glass exploded.
Files disintegrated.
The Mask, wherever she was, was screaming too.
Rhea clutched her head, fell to her knees.
I dropped beside her.
> "Rhea—look at me."
> "I'm forgetting," she whispered. "They're erasing it from inside."
> "Then remember one thing," I begged.
I took her face in my hands.
> "Remember me."
And she kissed me.
Through the static.
Through the noise.
Through the collapse.
---
System Message: MASTER FAILURE CONFIRMED
> All memory protocols disengaged.
Loop 19 aborted.
Host link… lost.
Final record saved to: CORE_ASHEN.VR
---
We woke up on the floor of a normal hallway.
No monitors. No sirens.
The school was gone.
But we were there.
Just us.
Rhea blinked. Sat up.
She looked at me.
Not like a subject.
Not like a version.
Just me.
> "Did we win?" she whispered.
I smiled.
And for the first time—
I didn't feel like a program.
I felt human.
Adrian's pov
The first thing I noticed was the light.
It wasn't fluorescent. Or blue. Or flickering like the labs.
It was sunlight.
And that terrified me more than anything else.
Because St. Augustine's hadn't had real windows in years. Not ones that opened. Not ones that showed anything real.
And yet here we were—
Rhea and I standing in what looked like a normal corridor, beneath gold-tinted rays pouring in from arched glass panes.
A bird chirped outside.
Something natural.
Something wrong.
---
I turned to her.
She was staring at the end of the hallway.
Frozen.
> "Adrian…"
Her voice trembled.
> "This isn't real."
I didn't ask how she knew.
I felt it too.
It was too perfect.
The vines outside the window swayed too gently. The leaves glowed just a little too green. The walls no longer remembered what they were built for.
It was beautiful.
But it wasn't ours.
---
System Log: TERMINATION FAILED. SUBJECTS A-03 & V-05 ACTIVE IN POST-SIMULATION SPACE.
> RECALIBRATION QUEUED.
CONTAINMENT REQUIRED.
Begin Passive Loop Masking.
---
Rhea's pov
My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
The static had gone, but something else had replaced it. A humming beneath my skin, like there were wires in my blood now, and they didn't know where to plug in.
> "It's the final protocol," I whispered.
Adrian looked at me. "What do you mean?"
I pressed my fingers to my temples.
> "The system doesn't just reset. It buries. If destruction fails, it traps. We're not in the lab anymore."
I turned toward him, mouth dry.
> "We're inside the core backup."
> "They didn't delete us."
> "They archived us."
---
Adrian's pov
My throat felt raw.
I touched the wall. It was warm. Too warm.
Like a simulation trying to imitate reality but overcompensating for emotion.
> "So what now?" I asked. "We're stuck?"
Rhea didn't answer.
She stepped down the hallway like she'd walked it before in another life. Her fingers traced along the molding. She stopped in front of a door.
Room 174.
I didn't know why the number made my skin crawl.
Until she opened it.
And I saw myself.
---
No—not me.
But a version of me.
Sitting calmly in a classroom. Smiling. Wearing the uniform. Watching a version of Rhea scribble in a notebook.
They looked happy.
Unbroken.
As if none of this had ever happened.
> "They kept this," Rhea whispered. "They chose this version."
A loop. A fragment.
Frozen in perfect control.
The system's fantasy of how it should've gone.
No scars. No defiance.
No choice.
---
Rhea's pov
I wanted to scream.
Instead, I walked inside and slammed my fist into the desk where my other self sat.
The version didn't react.
It just blinked once.
Then reset.
Back to scribbling in her notebook.
Like a puppet.
Adrian stepped beside me.
> "They never wanted us to be real," I said. "Just predictable."
He looked at me.
Then crushed the projector hidden behind the teacher's desk with his boot.
The illusion glitched.
Sparks flew.
The perfect classroom began to distort—walls warping, colors bleeding out like paint soaked in water.
And behind it…
A door.
Iron. Rusted. Real.
We stepped through it.
---
System Alert: CORE MASK EXPOSED
> EXTERNAL EXIT POINT BREACHED.
EMOTIONAL TRIGGER UNSTABLE.
Final Firewall Engaged.
---
The hallway beyond wasn't like the school.
It was cold.
Metallic.
Dead.
Rows of data cores, humming with fragments of past lives, flickered dimly in steel casings.
Each had a label.
V-05 // LOOP 14 – SEDUCTION FAILURE
A-03 // LOOP 12 – SUBJECT DEVIATION: VIOLENCE
V-05 // LOOP 17 – SUICIDE EVENT
A-03 // LOOP 19 – SYSTEM REJECTION
We stopped in front of the last one.
No label.
Just a pulsing light.
Red.
Alive.
> "This is us," I said.
Rhea reached for the console.
Paused.
> "If we destroy this… we don't just end the loops."
> "We end ourselves."
---
Adrian's pov
I reached for her hand.
No gloves.
Just skin.
Warm. Human.
And she looked at me not with fear, but clarity.
> "Do you regret it?" she asked.
> "Loving me?"
I smiled.
> "Not once."
She leaned in.
Pressed her forehead to mine.
> "Then let's be forgotten together."
We pressed the release.
The core's lights flared—
Sparks flew—
The system screamed—
And then—
Silence.
Not simulated.
Real.
Final.
---