Code of the Broken Loop

The White Room

The blinding white light burned my eyes until I could not see anything at all.

My feet hit a cold metal floor. The smell of cheap coffee and damp concrete was gone, replaced by the sterile scent of bleach and clean air. I blinked hard, trying to clear the fuzzy spots floating in my vision.

I was sitting in a heavy metal chair in the center of an empty, bright white room. Thick steel straps were locked tight across my chest and wrists, holding me down so I could not move an inch. Across the room, a massive glass wall looked into another space, and standing right behind that glass was Commander Thorne.

His grey coat was gone, and he wore a tight black uniform. The glowing white diamond in his chest pulsed with a steady light that cast sharp shadows across his face.

"Subject Kiran is awake and stable," Thorne said. He was not looking at me. He was talking into a small black device in his hand, his voice calm and cold. "Memory wipe number four hundred twelve is ready to begin. Clear the previous data blocks and set his name back to zero."

Panic hit me hard in the chest. I pulled against the heavy steel straps with all my strength, but they did not budge. My arms strained until the skin turned red, and a sharp pain shot through my shoulders.

"Let me out of here!" I said, staring straight through the glass at him.

Thorne turned his head slowly and looked right at me. A small, cruel smile touched the corner of his mouth. He pressed a button on the wall panel beside him.

A sharp, electric shock shot through the metal chair.

My whole body locked up. Every muscle in my arms and legs seized, and a loud cry broke out of my throat before I could stop it. The pain felt like hot needles digging straight into my bones. My head spun, and for a second, the white walls blurred into streaks of grey.

"You do not belong on the outside, Kiran," Thorne said, his voice coming through the small speaker on the wall. "You are a tool. You write the code for our city, and when you start asking too many questions, we reset you. It is simple. It is clean. You save yourself a lot of pain if you just stop fighting."

"Go to hell," I breathed out, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw ached.

Thorne did not look angry. He just shook his head slowly and pressed another button.

The screen above my head flickered to life. Rows of bright green letters started scrolling down the glass at top speed. It was code. Thousands of lines of data, numbers, and commands rolling past my eyes. Below the code, pictures started to flash on the screen.

I saw myself standing behind the coffee shop counter, smiling and wiping down mugs. Then the picture changed. I saw myself lying on a metal table while people in white coats cut open my chest. Then another picture—me running down a dark alley with blood on my hands, screaming at a sky that had no stars.

Each picture hit my brain like a physical blow. My head felt like it was going to split open. Memories that were not mine, yet belonged entirely to me, flooded my mind all at once. I remembered dying three days ago. I remembered Lyra pulling me out of a burning data bin a month ago. I remembered that New Seoul was not a city at all, but a giant computer program running inside a massive machine, and Thorne was the warden keeping us locked inside.

"The memory block is taking hold," a robotic voice spoke from the ceiling speaker. "Target's neural patterns are fading. Thirty percent of original data erased."

"Hurry it up," Thorne said, checking his wrist monitor. "The security breach in sector four is spreading. We need this unit back on the coffee shop line before the morning shift simulation starts."

My chest burned. The golden light under my skin tried to push back against the cold metal straps, but it was too weak. The electric shock was draining my strength, making my fingers go numb. The screen above me flashed a bright, warning red.

Memory wipe at fifty percent.

I squeezed my eyes shut, gasping for air. The faces of people I had known in past loops started to drift away like smoke in the wind. Their names, their voices, everything I had fought to keep just seconds ago was slipping through my fingers. If I let go now, I would wake up in the basement coffee shop with a clean slate, pouring coffee for strangers who did not care if I lived or died, completely forgetting that I was a prisoner.

"No," I whispered.

My eyes snapped open. I stared right at Thorne through the glass.

The golden light flared up inside my chest again, hot and fierce. It did not feel like a trick or a gift. It felt like anger. Pure, heavy anger at every single time they had dragged me back to that basement and wiped my mind clean.

"You think you can just turn me off whenever you want," I said, my voice shaking with a cold fury that pushed past the pain.

Thorne frowned, his fingers pausing over the control panel. He stared through the glass, his eyes narrowing as he saw the bright gold light shining through my clothes.

"Increase voltage to maximum," Thorne said quickly, his calm tone cracking just a little bit. "The subject is overriding the baseline."

The machine hummed loudly, a high-pitched whine that rattled my teeth. A thick wave of blue electricity jumped from the arms of the chair straight into my skin.

I did not scream this time. I let the pain fill me up, turning it into fuel. I pulled my hands apart, hauling against the steel straps with every ounce of power I had left in my body.

The metal groaned. A loud crack echoed through the white room as the right strap snapped in half, the heavy iron piece flying off and clattering against the floor.

Thorne took a step back from the glass, his hand dropping to his belt where a heavy stun-blaster hung. "Stop him!" he shouted at the empty room.

Before he could reach his weapon, I ripped my other arm free, tearing the second strap off with a shower of sparks. I stood up from the chair, my legs shaking, my whole body wrapped in a bright, blinding coat of gold fire.

I raised my right hand, curled my fingers into a fist, and punched straight forward through the reinforced glass wall.

The glass shattered into a million pieces with a deafening crash, raining sharp shards all over the control room. Thorne threw his hands up to protect his face as the wave of gold light rushed toward him, blowing the control panel into a cloud of black smoke and flying wires.

I stepped through the broken window frames, the cold air of the control room hitting my hot skin.

Thorne stumbled back against the wall, a trickle of blood running down his forehead from a glass cut. The white diamond in his chest was spinning wildly, throwing off jagged sparks of blue light.

"You broke the loop, Kiran," Thorne said, coughing as smoke filled the room. "You have no idea what you just let out."

Before I could answer him, the floor beneath our feet began to shake violently. The white walls of the control room started to peel back like paper, revealing a massive, dark abyss filled with millions of glowing red eyes staring right at us from the dark.