Kamcy
Following the arrows in the hallway as they guided me forward, my mind wandered.
This was it.
I was about to take a step I had been planning for a long time—one I'd been quietly setting in motion piece by piece. I stopped in front of the black door, staring at it. Then I turned and looked back down the hallway I'd just come from.
It won't be long now, I told myself, and stepped forward.
The black door swallowed me whole.
One step in, and the heat vanished. The ache in my muscles, the sting in my lungs, the phantom weight of exhaustion—gone. Peeled away like a bad memory. My heartbeat flattened. My breathing stopped feeling like breathing.
Human sensation drained out of me.
It happened instantly, a transition so familiar it had become routine.
I didn't slow down. I didn't cling to the feeling. I'd learned early on that noticing the loss only made it linger. So I kept walking, boots tapping softly against the polished floor of my workspace.
The lights hummed above me—perfectly even, perfectly white. No flicker. No warmth. I had reset everything to its original settings, just to remind myself why I hated this place so much.
The glass table waited at the center of the room, smooth and untouched, like it always had. Waiting for me to get back to work.
The floor was pristine.
And that was what brought the memory back.
My early days here.
I'd grown tired of counting—of waiting—of existing. So I'd decided to end my life. Somewhere deep down, I'd hoped it wouldn't be painful. Or at least that I wouldn't really die. After all, who truly wanted to die?
But another part of me had hoped that if I did die… it would be permanent.
It wasn't.
My death had been anything but painless. I'd bled out from my wrist, cutting in the wrong places over and over because I didn't know how to do it properly. And when I finally succeeded, I woke up again—healthy—lying in a pool of my own blood.
Looking at the floor now only brought back disgust.
This floor. So clean. As if I'd never knelt here bleeding. As if I'd never woken up crying, realizing the truth.
They'd let me kill myself on purpose.
Not out of mercy.
But to teach me hopelessness. To show me that no matter what I did, I was trapped. That compliance was the only option.
I sat down, letting myself sink into the chair. My reflection stared back at me from the glass—eyes steady, face calm, something hollow behind it that I no longer cared to hide.
"So," I muttered.
My voice sounded flatter. Less… alive.
"I guess this is it."
My hands didn't shake. There was no dramatic hesitation. My body felt distant, light, like it already knew I wouldn't be needing it much longer.
I nodded once.
It was time.
I didn't reach for the table to work.
That was the first real truth Mr. Adeyemi had told me when I arrived here.
The table, the interfaces, the floating panels—they were props. Not tools. Things I'd leaned on to pretend this place worked like the real world. Like action required movement. Like control required touch.
This system didn't respond to typing.
It responded to intent.
To thought.
I closed my eyes.
And accessed the system's search bar.
One of the perks I had gained allowed me to search for any form of media during allocated times—music, audio, spoken recordings—to entertain myself. Of course, I expected a system like this to flag such a silly attempt and halt it, but that was exactly what I was counting on.
All my time here had given me insight into how the system functioned. My time in the training room especially had sharpened that understanding.
I had always wondered how I was possible—how a digitized being like me came to be, how a full human consciousness was turned into this, and how it continually reconstructed our data packet when damaged.
I believed it all came down to one thing.
It observed.
From the moment I arrived, it had been watching me. Measuring everything—reaction times, emotional spikes, micro-hesitations before decisions.
It was profiling us.
Every action I took fed a model. Not a video recording, not a replay—something deeper. A behavioral map. A probability space of how Kamcy responded.
That map was used for several purposes.
To track our memories.
To keep our behavioral patterns consistent.
And above all else—
Restoration.
When I died, the system didn't rebuild me from scratch. It restored me from its latest understanding of me—a snapshot of who it believed I was at the moment of failure.
The system wasn't resurrecting me.
It was reloading me.
And reloads depended on data.
That was where my plan lived.
Music access. Media privileges. Observation clearance.
That was what they had given me.
On the surface, it was harmless. A morale tool. A way to keep subjects compliant. I could search any song, any audio, any spoken-word recording, and the system would fetch it instantly. It was also used to retrieve my previous works—programs I had analyzed, rewritten, and submitted—so I could review them for mistakes.
But search wasn't just input.
Search was processing.
Behind that simple bar lived layers of interpretation: query parsing, semantic expansion, relevance ranking, personalization, caching, logging.
I didn't type a wall of text.
I didn't dump code.
I didn't try to overwhelm character limits like an amateur.
Instead, I constructed a pattern.
Short queries. Repetitive ones. Slight variations. Filters stacked in ways that made sense individually but conflicted collectively.
Searches that referenced each other.
Searches that requested the same media through different semantic paths.
Searches that forced the system to retrieve particular files—a set of programs I had submitted after analysis.
Each search nudged the system's recovery logic slightly off balance. Each query added ambiguity to my behavioral profile.
And the final piece—the dangerous piece—was death.
I turned away from the interface and dragged my hand slowly across the glass table. The surface reflected my fingers perfectly.
I grabbed the chair and slammed it down.
The table exploded.
Glass shattered outward, skittering across the floor like ice. The sound cracked through the workspace, sharp and final.
I knelt.
My reflection stared back at me in a hundred broken pieces.
"This is necessary," I whispered.
Fear crept in then.
Not fear of dying. I had crossed that line long ago.
Fear that it wouldn't work.
Fear that I'd wake up again in this room—intact, watched, reset—with all this effort reduced to another data point.
The fear whispered patience.
Caution.
Wait a little longer.
Test more.
I clenched my jaw.
"That's how you stay trapped," I told myself.
I picked up a shard of glass.
It felt cold. Solid.
I took a breath.
And drove it into my neck.
Ms. Destiny
I was mid-stroke when the alarms detonated.
Red light flooded my office. The ambient lighting snapped off, replaced by harsh emergency pulses. My tablet chimed once, twice—then went silent.
For half a second, my brain refused to catch up.
Then the floor vibrated.
I stood just as a knock struck my door—hard, panicked.
"Come in," I said.
The door slid open and a junior technician rushed in, breathing like he'd sprinted the corridor.
"Ma'am," he said. "We have a situation."
I didn't wait. I moved around my desk.
"Explain."
As we stepped into the hallway, alarms screaming overhead, he spoke fast.
"Subject 1004 terminated himself. But at the moment of death, something triggered inside recovery. The system keeps attempting restoration, but it can't register completion."
I stopped.
"Can't… register completion?"
"Yes, ma'am. It thinks the restore is unfinished. It keeps retrying."
The lights flickered.
Then everything went dark.
The alarms died mid-wail.
Backup power kicked in seconds later. Red strips glowed faintly along the walls.
I closed my eyes.
"Return to your station," I ordered. "Lock your terminal."
He hesitated. "Ma'am—"
"That's an order."
He ran.
I turned toward the core wing.
Mr. Adeyemi would already know.
Kamcy
"Aaaaaaaaaargh!"
I woke up screaming.
The world stuttered.
The workspace tore at the edges, snapping back into place like a damaged feed. The hum of the lights stretched, warped, and collapsed into static.
I pushed myself up.
Pain slammed through me—not physical, not localized. It felt like my thoughts were scraping against themselves.
"Arrrghhhh!"
I screamed as my vision tore apart, my view swerving violently. My head felt like knives were being driven into it. Then, suddenly, it stopped. I looked around, breathing ragged.
Then I saw me.
No.
Us.
One to my left. One behind me. Another forming as it glitched and split, its edges flickering as it pulled itself together.
The system's voice crackled overhead.
"Attention all subjects— remain— calm— system under—"
It cut out.
Then restarted.
Repeated.
More of me appeared.
Each copy glitched into existence, stabilized for a heartbeat, then split again.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
The space filled with Kamcy.
I didn't dwell on it. This was the plan.
I focused.
No table. No interface. No props.
Just intent.
I pushed outward—not physically, but cognitively—flooding every channel I could reach with signals.
Distress pings.
Help requests disguised as corrupted telemetry.
I didn't know who would hear them. Only that the system was too busy trying to fix me to stop it.
My plan had been executed. It was quite simple, born from a simple idea.
Before being trapped in this hell, I had an app on my phone used to hide videos I didn't want anyone to find. The app placed the videos in a space the phone's operating system couldn't see or interact with—yet the files still consumed storage.
After my time in the training room, I understood this system didn't store us as files in the normal sense, but as a state. Like a game: when you quit, your current state is saved so that when you resume, you continue from where you left off.
That was how it kept us intact.
Updating us. Running us from our previous state.
What helped my plan even more was a simple question: how large were their servers? How much storage did they really have? We were full human consciousnesses, digitized, with vivid memories intact—and I was labeled "Subject 1004."
That meant there were at least 1003 others. Maybe more.
That knowledge was enough.
The command prompt I used through the search bar did something simple: retrieve programs I had previously submitted. Those programs contained fragments of a virus hidden in their code. When activated, they performed one task—and that task required my death.
When I died, the virus waited until the system attempted to restore my saved state. The moment it did, the virus acted, hiding me from the system. The system grew confused and attempted restoration again. The virus repeated the process.
A loop.
That same behavior spread to other subjects stored on the servers.
My hope was that with enough of us being restarted endlessly, we would cripple system security and eventually crash it entirely.
But before that happened, I had tasks to complete.
First, I sent help requests through every broadcasting channel I could reach. I jacked into their systems, pulled location data, information about where we were, and made it easy for someone to find us.
Of course, that made me vulnerable if the system recovered.
That was where the final part of my plan came in.
I would pretend I was deleted or destroyed during my escape attempt. In truth, I would hide within their servers and wait—either for help to arrive or for an opportunity to escape.
At the very least, I would be in control of my life.
Now I had three possibilities.
The system might crash with me inside.
They might fix it and catch me.
Or I might finish what I started before either happened.
Whatever the outcome, I had a lot to do.
Mr. Adeyemi
I stood behind the programmers as their displays drowned in warnings.
Recursive restoration loops.
State duplication overflow.
Archive cache exhaustion.
Footsteps approached.
"Sir," Ms. Destiny said. "We're losing stability across multiple sectors."
"I know," I replied calmly.
Ms. Moritemi exhaled sharply. "What in God's name is going on?"
"Subject 1004 didn't attack the system," I said. "He played it."
They looked at me.
"The recovery engine is doing exactly what it was designed to do—restore until continuity is achieved."
I gestured to the screens.
"Unfortunately, continuity no longer exists."
I smiled faintly.
"The unexpected variable," I continued, "is that old corrupted subjects—archived, abandoned—are being re-indexed. Duplicated. Reintroduced."
"That's what's draining power," Ms. Moritemi said quietly.
"Impressive," she admitted.
"What do we do then?" Ms. Destiny asked, half-panicked seemingly not sharing our excitement."Power is failing across sectors. We need everything we can get to stay safe."
I shook my head.
"There's no need to panic."
I watched the system choke on its own safeguards.
"This doesn't matter," I said softly. "The system will fix itself soon."