The rain had a rhythm, soft and steady, against the glass walls of the neuroscience wing. It was a new building—steel bones, artificial light, and that sterile chill of university renovations. The students called it "The Annex", but no one really knew what the annex had been before.
Elias did.
Sort of.
He had stumbled across it by accident.
A late-night study session. A spilled coffee. A misplaced file in the university archives. That was how he found Project Thanaton—a flagged but unlabeled document buried deep in the neuropsych database. Redacted. Corrupted. But not erased.
SOUL INDEX: 41.7
SUBJECT CONDITION: Post-clinical death
MACHINE STATUS: Containment failed
He didn't sleep that night.
---
Now, a week later, Elias stood outside a locked metal door in the oldest part of the building—past the modern labs, down two unlit stairwells, past an "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" sign that had been half-scraped off the wall.
The air smelled like mold, ozone, and rust. A janitor had told him this sublevel was sealed after "a chemical incident in the '40s." But the Annex had only been donated to the university eight years ago, and the entire basement was curiously missing from the blueprints.
He pressed his palm against the door.
Cold. Too cold.
It looked like something that belonged in a bomb shelter—no handle, no keypad, just a solid black panel in the center. He tried again, tapping lightly, almost as if the metal might answer back.
Nothing.
Then, from the far end of the corridor, he heard footsteps.
Slow. Uneven.
He spun. "Hello?"
No answer.
The lights overhead flickered once. Twice.
Gone.
For a moment, Elias stood in pitch darkness, the hallway behind him stretching into the void. His breath caught in his throat.
Then—
Buzz.
A mechanical hum behind him. The black panel on the door glowed faintly red.
He turned.
And the door clicked open.
---
Inside: darkness. Dust motes. The faint smell of burned copper.
Elias reached for his phone flashlight and stepped in.
This wasn't a lab. It was a theater of machines. Rusted metal arms hung from the ceiling. Wires snaked across the floor like veins. And at the center of it all, half-shrouded under a torn white sheet, was something that looked like a coffin crossed with an MRI machine.
The words stenciled on its side were nearly scratched off—but he could still read them:
THANATON UNIT // S-37
PROPERTY OF NEUROSPHERE CORP
DNR — DO NOT REACTIVATE
Elias took a slow step forward. His heart wasn't racing—but his skin knew. Something primal told him this room should not be open. That the dead things here were not done dreaming.
His hand hovered over the machine's control pad, covered in grime.
And then—
A soft voice, right behind him:
"It remembers you."
He whirled around.
Nobody there.
The door had shut.
And locked.
---