[Location: High Command Science Division - Vesper's Lab] [Time: Drop + 14 Hours.]
Vesper didn't do a psych-eval. She plugged a thick optic cable into the base of the Ouroboros Drive and downloaded my personal telemetry—the data Aris didn't care about. The biological data.
She sat at her terminal, the glow of the screen reflecting in her thick-rimmed glasses. I sat on a stool in the corner, a heavy gray blanket draped over my shoulders, shivering despite the climate-controlled air.
"The Drive... it registers a temporal singularity as a 'biological cessation event,'" Vesper muttered to herself, typing rapidly. "I need to see how many times the Drive engaged to formulate your survival path."
She hit the decryption key.
The screen flashed. A number appeared in large, stark white font against the black background.
[CESSATION EVENTS RECORDED: 311]
Vesper stopped breathing. Her hands hovered over the keyboard. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and put them back on, as if hoping the screen was a glitch.
It wasn't.
"Three hundred and eleven," she whispered. The horror in her voice was absolute.
She slowly turned in her chair to look at me. I was just staring at my hands.
"The drop lasted fifteen minutes," she said, her voice cracking. "Caelum... from the moment the pod hit the ground to the moment you killed the dreadnought... the timeline only advanced fifteen minutes."
"I know," I said.
"But for you..." tears finally spilled over her lower eyelids. "If each loop took five minutes... ten minutes... Caelum, you were down there for weeks. Subjective weeks. Burning to death. Getting crushed. Over and over again."
She stood up, her legs shaking. She walked over to me and fell to her knees in front of my stool, looking up into my bloodshot eyes.
"You remember them all, don't you?" she sobbed. "Every single time you died."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you stop?" she pleaded, grabbing my right hand. "The Drive has a manual override! You could have stayed dead! Why did you keep waking up?"
I looked down at her. I saw the nineteen-year-old girl who had promised to fix me if I broke. I saw the guilt tearing her apart.
"Because of Silas," I said quietly. "In Life #8, she got cut in half by a Stalker-Unit. In Life #18, she choked on neurotoxin. In Life #187, she was crushed by a Burrower."
I pulled my hand away from hers and wrapped the blanket tighter around myself.
"The Algorithm is perfect, Vesper. It doesn't make mistakes. The only way to beat a perfect machine is to become one. If I stopped... if I let myself die... Silas dies. The rookie dies. Everyone dies. I am the only one who can afford to pay the toll."
Vesper buried her face in her hands, weeping openly. The brilliant, rational physicist was completely broken by the cruel math of her own invention.
"I'm a monster," she cried. "We built a torture device, and we strapped it to an eighteen-year-old boy."
"It doesn't matter," I said, my voice dead and hollow. "The math works."
I stood up, letting the blanket fall to the floor. I walked to the heavy steel door of the lab, the silver Ouroboros arm humming softly at my side.
"Fix the thermal venting on the arm," I instructed without looking back. "It overheats during sustained localized EMP discharges. I drop again in forty-eight hours."
I walked out into the cold, sterile hallway, leaving the girl who built me crying in the dark.