The scream was unlike any that had come before.
This time, it wasn't just the building. It was something older. Something deeper. The foundations howled. The air twisted into shapes that weren't possible. It didn't sound angry. It sounded scared.
Jamie and Mira stood at the lip of the memory core, the pulsing heart exposed before them like a living wound. Every inch of the chamber was alive with shifting walls, flickering lights, and voices that spoke in time loops.
Behind them, Ansel pulled himself free from the fissure in the floor, coughing blood, his hand pressed to his ribs.
"You're both here," he rasped. "It's real then. I didn't imagine this."
"No," Jamie said, not turning. "You didn't."
Mira looked at the heart, then at Jamie. "What do we do?"
Jamie's eyes reflected the core's swirling light. "I think… I think it's waiting for us to decide."
Around them, the building began to rewrite again—but sloppily now, stuttering like a dying machine. A hallway appeared and vanished. A wall blinked into a forest, then into a funeral parlor. The ceiling briefly became a mirror, showing all three of them older, broken, alone.
"We don't have much time," Ansel muttered.
The void inside the core shifted again. The face returned—Jamie's face, hollow-eyed and twitching, half-burned, its voice a scraping whisper.
"Why did you come back?"
Jamie took a step forward.
"I didn't," he said. "You kept me here."
The face grinned, splitting at the seams.
"You came back because you never let go."
Mira stepped beside Jamie, wrapping one bloodied hand in his. "He's not here to let go," she said. "He's here to finish it."
The heart pulsed violently. Images erupted around them—scenes from every failed version of themselves. Mira screaming in a burning room. Ansel crucified in circuitry. Jamie curled on a hospital bed, eyes stitched shut.
The building was throwing everything it had at them now.
"You're not real," Jamie said. "You're memory dressed as prophecy. And I'm done playing your game."
He stepped into the heart.
And the world changed.
Not all at once, not with a crash—but with a shift. Like a book turning its own pages backward. Light bled from the core, washing the chamber in sterile white. The memory chamber stretched—expanding into an impossible archive: rooms orbiting in slow motion, typewriters clicking by themselves, phonographs spinning out screams.
Above them: a black sun. Beneath their feet: a glass floor filled with eyes.
Ansel stumbled inside, shielding his face from the light. "What the hell is this?"
"The engine," Jamie said, his voice echoing. "This is how it did it. How it redid it. Over and over. Everyone who ever entered this place... we're all still here. Just fractured."
From the spinning archive, fragments of people began to emerge—half-built versions. Some crying. Some repeating the same words. A little girl humming a song on loop. A man with no face asking, "Did I do it right this time?"
They weren't alive.
They weren't dead either.
Mira gritted her teeth. "Can we stop it?"
Jamie looked at the core—now split open like a flower made of circuitry and bone.
"I think we already are."
The void screamed again. A hundred Jamies shouted in unison. The archive began to collapse inward, folding on itself like crushed paper.
"No no no no—"
The glass beneath them cracked.
The archive shook.
"Jamie!" Mira shouted. "It's coming apart!"
"I know!" he shouted back. "But we're not done—"
A surge of light exploded from the void, knocking them all back. Jamie hit the floor hard, stars bursting behind his eyes. Mira was on her knees. Ansel didn't move.
The face rose from the void again, twisted now beyond human recognition. It had become something else—pure intent, pure memory, stripped of flesh. It loomed over Jamie like a judge.
"You think you won," it hissed. "But you've only remembered what I wanted you to."
Jamie sat up, nose bleeding, breath ragged.
"No," he said. "You've forgotten something."
The face paused.
"I'm not alone anymore."
The moment shattered.
Light tore through the chamber in blinding waves. The archive folded into itself with a scream that echoed across dimensions. The core began to melt—becoming smoke, then data, then memory undone.
Mira grabbed Jamie's hand. "We have to get out. Now."
Ansel staggered to his feet, face pale, voice weak. "There's a door. I saw it—through the cracks. I think it's real."
They ran.
Through collapsing halls, through ghost-rooms full of flickering people. Through a hallway now made of rust and teeth. Through a field of mirrors that shattered with every step.
At the end of it all: the doorway. Just standing there, in a blank void. No frame. No handle. Just open space.
Jamie looked back once.
The building was folding like a dying star, light leaking from its bones. It didn't scream now.
It wept.
He turned away.
Together, they stepped through.
They woke up somewhere else.
No walls. No sky. Just a blank white expanse that hummed softly, like a computer waiting for input.
Ansel sat up first, coughing.
Mira blinked, touching her face. No blood. No pain.
Jamie stood slowly. The weight was still there. The memory of it. But it no longer crushed him.
In the distance, a shape formed.
A figure.
Walking toward them.
Jamie squinted. "Who—"
The figure raised a hand in greeting. Smiled.
It looked just like Jamie.
But not the twisted one.
Not the hollow one.
This one was clean. Calm. Wearing a white coat. Clipboard in hand.
"Hello," the figure said. "We've been waiting to evaluate your choices."
Everything went still.
Jamie's voice was a whisper: "What is this place?"
The figure smiled wider.
"The real rewrite begins now."
What if the building never existed at all—but was just the surface layer of a deeper system, one that's still running, still observing, and has only now begun its real experiment? What if escaping wasn't freedom... but the trigger? What really begins when the rewrite is complete?