8:00 a.m. – Orbital Corporation Boardroom, 95th Floor
The room was chilled to preserve its silence. Glass walls surrounded the elliptical table, polished so clean it mirrored every executive's tightened jaw and empty gaze. Eleven members. All powerful. All deeply compromised — and only one of them knew why.
Try One walked in wearing a tailored suit.
But what truly set him apart was the way he walked — like he'd sat here a hundred times already.
He had.
A thousand different greetings had taught him whose ego to flatter, whose silence was power, and whose anger was weakness.
Chairwoman Lin gave him a curt nod. "Mr. Elias... Your resume is unconventional. Why are you here?"
"Because I've already solved problems none of you know exist," he said coolly.
A few members smirked. The ones hiding fear under arrogance.
Try One tossed a small black dossier onto the center of the table. It slid, halted precisely before Lin.
"Page 7," he said.
She opened it.
Her face froze.
"You... shouldn't have this."
"Yet I do," he said. "Because I'm already ten moves ahead. I don't just want a seat — I want influence. And I'll earn it, starting with solving the leak in Sector 12 before it becomes public."
Her eyes darted to one of the executives who stiffened involuntarily.
Try One tracked it.
Weak link found.
"Give me one week. Or I reset, and next time, I'm not asking."
---
9:14 a.m. – Hallway Outside the Boardroom
Jun was waiting.
"They let you in?" he whispered.
Try One smiled. "They let a version of me in. I'm not Elias Cross. That's just one of my masks."
Jun frowned. "What are you planning?"
Try One's eyes were sharp. Focused. "Power doesn't come from seats. It comes from knowing what every player wants... and making them think they're getting it."
Jun swallowed. "And if they find out?"
"They won't. I've studied their tells, ticks, lies, and betrayals through 17,221 deaths. I know when they blink before they do."
Jun asked quietly, "Do you still feel human?"
Try One didn't answer. He simply walked away — a shadow who learned to live among fire.
10:03 a.m. – Orbital Corporation Executive Lounge
The espresso machine hummed softly, masking low murmurs and the quiet tension in the air. Try One sat across from Victor Hale, the executive who had flinched during the meeting. His coffee remained untouched.
"Relax, Victor. If I wanted to expose you, I'd have done it in front of the board," Try One said, swirling his drink.
Victor looked up, beads of sweat forming. "What do you want?"
"A conversation," Try One replied. "One you've had in other timelines. In most of them, you refused. In a few, you ran. In two, you tried to kill me."
Victor stared. "What are you talking about?"
"I know your offshore accounts, the blackmail, the real reason your wife left last summer... I've seen your cards so many times, I can play your hand blindfolded."
Victor leaned back, color draining from his face. "So what now? You're going to blackmail me?"
"No. I'm going to give you a choice." Try One leaned forward. "Loyalty or exposure. Stay close to me, and I'll protect you. Betray me, and the board will know everything before tomorrow's dawn."
Victor gritted his teeth. "Why me?"
"Because you're the weakest link," Try One whispered. "And weak links break first… or they learn to become stronger."
Victor didn't answer. But when Try One stood to leave, the man followed.
---
11:21 a.m. – Try One's Private Terminal
He typed quickly, fingers dancing across keys as facial recognition software began pulling files on each board member.
He spoke to himself quietly:
"Victor will buy me time. Lin will be the hardest. Gregory is power-hungry but predictable. Nadya hides secrets in silence. I just need one more thread…"
The system beeped. A red folder appeared: "Project Lazarus – Confidential."
His heart didn't skip.
Because it had done so in thousands of other loops.
And he had already decided — this time, he would open it with gloves on.
11:25 a.m. – Try One's Private Terminal
The screen glowed pale blue in the dim office. Try One's eyes scanned the lines of code and scanned documents inside the Project Lazarus folder. Most of it had already passed through his retinas in hundreds of other loops — corrupted files, heavily redacted pages, surveillance logs that reset every day like everything else.
But this time, he was trying something different.
He whispered, "Not just what they're hiding, but why they keep hiding it every loop."
He opened the metadata of one internal document — a quarterly research summary from the Orbital R&D division. Hidden inside the document's footer, rendered in near-transparent font, was a string of text he had missed before.
> "Observer Node 000: Rejected anomaly continues. Possible synthetic iteration."
Try One froze.
They knew.
Not everything, but enough to suspect that something — someone — wasn't behaving normally inside the loop.
12:10 p.m. – Hidden Archives Room, Orbital Sub-Basement
He descended through a service elevator using a cloned biometric ID he had made in Try #86,431. The lights flickered. Dust clung to untouched shelves of locked server towers. He stopped in front of a sealed metal cabinet, placed his palm on the scanner, and let the quiet beep confirm what he already knew: this cabinet only opened when Victor Hale authorized it.
Victor had never authorized it — not willingly. In most timelines, he died before Try One could get here.
But this time, he lived.
And Try One had his biometric handshake.
The cabinet opened. Inside were two files.
One was labeled "Project Lazarus: Control Model."
The other — a simple label:
> "Iteration 000: Try."
---
12:15 p.m. – Silence
He didn't blink.
There it was. Proof.
He wasn't just stuck in the loop.
He was the experiment.
They had built this loop — or at least trapped him in it.
He wasn't trying to escape anymore.
He was going to rewrite it.
12:17 p.m. – Hidden Archives Room, Orbital Sub-Basement
Try One's fingers trembled as he flipped open the folder marked "Iteration 000: Try."
Inside, he found observation logs detailing his behavior across multiple loops — how he responded to specific triggers, how many times he attempted suicide by loop #10,372, how often he manipulated certain individuals.
Every action was being measured.
Every adaptation, every skill he learned — cataloged.
And at the top of the report:
> Primary Designation: Test Subject T-001 (Cognitive Ascension Candidate)
Project Goal: Evaluate long-term human adaptability in closed-loop environments.
He wasn't a glitch in the system.
He was the system's purpose.
He smirked, pain sharp behind his eyes. "So this was never about me being broken… It was about me becoming something they couldn't predict."
He grabbed a portable drive from his coat — one he had pre-programmed in an earlier try. With practiced hands, he uploaded the data to his encrypted loop-safe cache — one of three locations on the planet unaffected by reset due to system permission blind spots.
It took him over 4,000 tries to discover them.
Now they'd help him tear everything down.
---
1:03 p.m. – Surface Level, Orbital Plaza
Try One emerged from the underground, the afternoon sun bleaching the streets around him. Civilians went about their day, clueless of the experiment running beneath their feet.
He looked at them.
All of them — free, in a way he hadn't been for what felt like millennia.
But freedom wasn't enough now.
Not while someone still had the key to the loop. Not while someone had the arrogance to treat his suffering as a test metric.
---
1:45 p.m. – Meeting Room, Observation Tower
He met with Maya again.
This time, he didn't lie.
"I know you're not just a data analyst," he said, sliding the Project Lazarus folder across the table. "And I know you've been watching me longer than anyone else."
Her eyes didn't widen.
She had expected this.
"Then you also know," Maya whispered, "you were never supposed to survive this long. You were supposed to break."
"I did," he replied. "Thousands of times."
He leaned closer.
"But now I break you."