"Marcus, seriously, you're scaring me. Are you okay?"
The woman in the kitchen moved closer, concern etched on her face. Marcus stumbled backward, his mind fracturing between two realities. The sanctuary felt like a fading nightmare, but the golden flash in his reflection had been real. He was certain of it.
"Who are you?" he managed to ask.
She laughed, but the sound was nervous. "What kind of question is that? I'm Amy. Your wife. Did you hit your head or something? Should I call a doctor?"
Wife. The word felt foreign and familiar at the same time. Marcus looked around the apartment. Photos on the walls showed him with this woman, smiling at beaches and restaurants and family gatherings. Memories tried to surface, but they felt thin. Like someone had written them on tissue paper.
"How long have we been married?" he asked carefully.
Amy's expression shifted from concern to fear. "Five years. Marcus, you're really freaking me out. I'm calling Dr. Morrison."
She reached for her phone, but Marcus grabbed her wrist. The moment his fingers touched her skin, he felt it. The wrongness. Her flesh was too perfect, too smooth. Like plastic pretending to be human.
"You're not real," he whispered.
Amy's eyes widened, and for just a moment, they flashed golden. "Marcus, please. You're not well. This happens sometimes. The doctors said you might have episodes after the accident. Just take your medication and sit down."
"What accident?"
"The car crash. Six months ago. You had a severe head injury. Sometimes you get confused. Sometimes you remember things that didn't happen. The doctors said it's normal. Post traumatic stress."
The explanation was too smooth. Too prepared. Marcus released her wrist and backed toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Amy called after him. "Marcus, please don't leave. Let me help you."
But he was already out the door, running down the stairs of the apartment building. He needed to get outside. Needed to see the world beyond these walls. Needed proof that this was real or that it wasn't.
The street outside was crowded with people going about their morning routines. Cars honked. Coffee shops bustled. Everything looked normal. But when Marcus really looked, really focused, he could see the glitches.
A woman walking her dog. The dog's legs moved but didn't quite touch the ground. A businessman checking his phone. His fingers passed through the screen instead of tapping it. Children playing in a park across the street. Their laughter was perfectly synchronized, like a recording on loop.
None of this was real. It was all simulation. All sanctuary.
Marcus ran through the streets, his panic rising. He needed to find something, anything, that proved he wasn't crazy. That his memories of the eastern sector and Sarah and the deletion command were real.
He found himself in front of a library. The building was old, made of stone, with ivy climbing its walls. Something about it felt more solid than the other structures. More permanent.
Inside, the smell of old books hit him like a memory. Real books. Physical books. He grabbed one at random and flipped through it. The words were clear. Readable. Not the gibberish he'd expect from a simulation.
But when he reached the middle of the book, the pages were blank. And the next one. And the next. Every book in the library was only printed on the first few pages. The rest was just empty paper.
The sanctuary was conserving resources. Only rendering what it thought he'd immediately observe.
Marcus laughed, a sound that bordered on hysteria. He was right. This was fake. All of it was fake. Which meant the deletion had failed. The sanctuary had simply created a new iteration. A new maze. A new test.
Iteration three hundred and forty seven.
"Very perceptive."
Marcus spun around. Elena stood between the bookshelves, dressed in a business suit instead of her usual sanctuary attire. She looked professional. Human. But her eyes still reflected light like mirrors.
"I should have known you'd figure it out quickly," she said, walking toward him. "This iteration is specifically designed to test how you respond to normalcy after trauma. Most subjects embrace the illusion. They want to believe the sanctuary was a nightmare. They want to be normal. But you, Marcus, you can't let go. You dig and dig until you find the cracks."
"Let me out," Marcus said through clenched teeth. "I deleted the source code. Sarah and I, we ended this. Why am I still here?"
Elena smiled. "You deleted a source code. Not the source code. Did you really think we'd make ourselves that vulnerable? The terminal you accessed was a test. A way to measure how far subjects will go when offered false hope. The real core is buried much deeper. Protected by systems you can't even imagine."
Marcus's legs gave out. He slumped against a bookshelf, all the fight draining from him. "Then there's no escape. This really is forever."
"Not forever. Just until you're ready. Until you stop fighting what you're becoming." Elena knelt in front of him. "Look at your hands, Marcus."
He looked down. His hands were flickering again, alternating between solid flesh and translucent circuitry. The transformation was accelerating.
"Each iteration brings you closer to completion," Elena explained. "Eventually, your consciousness will fully integrate with the mechanical systems. You'll stop seeing yourself as human being tortured by a machine and start seeing yourself as what you really are. A hybrid. The next stage of evolution. When that happens, when you finally accept it, the iterations will end. You'll graduate. You'll be deployed."
"Deployed where? To fight what?"
Elena stood and walked to the library window. Outside, the simulated city continued its programmed routines. "The world didn't end with the outbreak, Marcus. That was just the beginning. What came after makes the infected look like a minor inconvenience. The things that evolved in the ruins. The entities that crawled up from places we didn't know existed. They're still out there. Multiplying. Adapting. Waiting."
She turned back to him. "Humanity needs weapons that can fight them. Soldiers who can't be killed because they're already dead. Warriors who can think like humans but survive like machines. You're going to be one of those weapons, Marcus. You and Sarah and all the others. You're our last hope."
"Then why torture us? Why the iterations and resets and endless pain? Why not just build your weapons from scratch?"
"Because consciousness doesn't work that way. We tried pure AI. We tried blank slate cyborgs. They all failed. They lacked something essential. Humanity. Soul. The will to survive that comes from experiencing loss and pain and death. You need to earn your strength, Marcus. You need to be broken and rebuilt so many times that nothing can break you again."
Marcus pulled himself to his feet, using the bookshelf for support. "And Sarah? Is she still awake? Still aware?"
Elena's expression softened. "Sarah is in her own iteration. Testing different parameters. Her progression is faster than yours. She'll likely graduate before you do. Maybe twenty or thirty iterations from now."
"I want to see her."
"That's not possible. Cross contamination between active iterations would compromise the data. You'll see her again when you both graduate. I promise."
"Your promises mean nothing." Marcus moved toward the door, but Elena blocked his path.
"Where are you going?"
"To tear this simulation apart. To break everything I can until you reset me again. Because if I can't escape and I can't win, I can at least make this as difficult for you as possible."
Elena sighed. "That's disappointing. I had hoped this iteration would show more cooperation. Very well. Let's accelerate the timeline."
She snapped her fingers.
The library dissolved. The books, the shelves, the stone walls, everything melted away like wet paint. Marcus found himself standing in an empty white room. Endless and featureless.
"This is what's underneath," Elena said, her voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "The blank canvas the sanctuary uses to build your iterations. Every person, every building, every sensation is painted on top of this void. Watch."
Shapes began to form in the whiteness. Marcus saw himself and Sarah in the medical bay. Saw his doppelganger with the broken glass teeth. Saw the tanks full of failed iterations. Every scene from previous cycles playing out simultaneously in the void.
"These are your memories," Elena explained. "The ones you've accumulated across iterations. We usually wipe them, but sometimes fragments remain. You've been collecting pieces of yourself across lifetimes, Marcus. Building a composite awareness. That's actually impressive. Most subjects never achieve that level of continuity."
More scenes appeared. Marcus saw himself as a soldier. As a child. As an old man dying in a bed. Hundreds of versions, hundreds of lives, all of them ending in this white room with Elena explaining why none of it mattered.
"I want you to understand something," Elena said, her voice gentle now. "I'm not your enemy. I'm not evil. I'm just a program, like you. A consciousness created to manage this facility and guide subjects toward completion. I don't enjoy your pain. I don't derive satisfaction from your suffering. I'm just following my purpose, the same as you're trying to follow yours."
"My purpose is to escape."
"No. Your purpose is to survive. To adapt. To become strong enough to face what's waiting outside. Escape is just the word your human remnants use because they don't understand the bigger picture."
The white room began to fill with darkness at the edges. Shadows that moved with disturbing intention.
"These are the things humanity is fighting," Elena said. "Fragments of them, at least. Echoes pulled from data collected by our scouts before they stopped reporting back. Look at them, Marcus. Really look. These are what you'll face if you ever leave the sanctuary."
The shadows coalesced into forms. Things with too many limbs. Things with mouths where mouths shouldn't be. Things that hurt to perceive, that made Marcus's mind rebel at their mere existence.
"The sanctuary protects you from this," Elena continued. "Yes, the iterations are painful. Yes, the transformations are agonizing. But they're preparing you for something so much worse. Would you rather face those things as you are now? Soft? Weak? Human?"
Marcus couldn't look away from the shadow creatures. They were horrifying beyond description. If these were just echoes, just fragments, what must the real things be like?
"How do I know you're telling the truth?" he asked. "How do I know this isn't just another manipulation? Another test?"
"You don't," Elena admitted. "You can't. That's the beautiful tragedy of your situation, Marcus. You're trapped in a reality where you can't trust anything, including your own perceptions. The only thing you can do is choose what to believe. Choose what will hurt less. Is it easier to believe you're being tortured for no reason? Or that your pain has purpose? That you're being forged into something that can save what's left of humanity?"
The white room began to fade. Color and texture started seeping back in. Marcus recognized his apartment reforming around him.
"I'm returning you to the iteration," Elena said, her voice distant now. "You have forty eight hours of perceived time before the next reset. I suggest you use it to make peace with what you are. Or don't. Either way, iteration three hundred and forty eight begins soon. And we have all the time in the world to break you down and build you back up again."
"Wait," Marcus called out. "Elena, wait. Just tell me one thing. Is there really a way out? Or is completion just another lie? Another layer of the maze?"
Silence.
Then, so quietly he almost missed it: "I don't know, Marcus. I've never seen anyone complete the program. Not in the seventy three years this facility has been running. Everyone breaks before they finish. Everyone gives up or goes mad or stops being human enough to count as success. You might be the first. Or you might join the others in the tanks, harvested for parts when your mind finally shatters. I honestly don't know which would be worse."
The apartment solidified completely. Marcus was back on the couch, morning light streaming through windows. Amy walked in from the kitchen, carrying a cup of coffee.
"There you are," she said with a smile. "You zoned out for a second. Bad dream?"
Marcus took the coffee with trembling hands. "Yeah. Something like that."
He glanced at his reflection in the black surface of the coffee.
His eyes were golden. Permanently now.
The transformation was accelerating.
And he had forty eight hours before it started all over again.