Oren Vale entered the Confession Chamber without ceremony. No hesitation. No muttered defense. He looked like a man prepared to dissect himself.
The door sealed shut.
White light filled the room. Cold. Clinical. Harsh enough to sterilize every truth.
"Oren Vale. Age fifty-one. Guilt designation: Biotechnological experimentation leading to mass casualty. Status: Confession required."
He exhaled through his nose. "Let's begin."
The chamber reconstructed itself—now a sprawling lab, sleek and inhuman. Surgical steel counters. Rows of petri dishes. Tanks lining the walls, some filled with pale green fluid. Others—empty, shattered.
On a monitor: Project EROS.
The word pulsed in blood-red type.
"You called it a cure for emotional dysregulation," the voice said. "You sold it as salvation."
"It was meant to help those drowning in pain," Oren replied. "To suppress traumatic responses. Give them control."
"You gave them silence," the voice corrected. "But not peace."
The screen changed. Surveillance footage flickered into view: a test subject, trembling and weeping. Then still. Then eerily calm. Until the stillness cracked—followed by a scream that wasn't human.
Oren didn't flinch.
"I thought I could fix it."
"But you deployed it anyway."
"Under pressure," he said tightly. "We were losing funding. Clinical trials weren't progressing fast enough. I had to make a decision."
"You made a gamble. And lost forty-two lives."
---
The lab shimmered, shifting again. Now it was the memorial site—rows of photos, candles, names etched into black stone. Families staring at the wall like it might give them back what they lost.
One woman stepped forward.
A mother.
She held out a photo of her son. Early twenties. Laughing, alive, unaware that his prescription would become a sentence.
"You said it was safe," she whispered.
"I believed it was," Oren replied.
"But did you know?"
He closed his eyes.
"No."
---
The chamber darkened. A new scene formed.
A child's bedroom—soft blues and whites, stars on the ceiling. In the center, a crib. Oren walked toward it, legs suddenly unsteady.
Inside, a baby—cooing softly, smiling up at him.
His daughter.
A flash of memory hit him: his wife in the hospital, dying from an untreatable neurological condition. His decision not to use EROS on her. "Too unstable," he'd said. "Too risky."
"But not too risky for the trials," the voice said.
He crouched beside the crib.
"I was terrified," he said. "Terrified of losing her. Terrified of watching our child grow up with that pain. I wanted to fix the world because I couldn't fix her."
The image of his wife appeared—hollow-cheeked and radiant, a ghost lit from within. She looked at him without blame, without anger.
That was the worst part.
Even the illusions weren't angry at him anymore.
"Say it," the voice commanded.
"I prioritized data over people. I let desperation justify risk. And when it all fell apart, I buried it in language: margins of error, unforeseen reactions, systemic failure. I spoke like a scientist to hide that I'd failed as a human."
---
The lab began to fall apart—slowly at first, then violently. Equipment crashing down, chemicals spilling, warning sirens blaring. The chaos of his legacy collapsing around him.
Oren stood still in the storm.
"I don't want forgiveness," he said. "I want accuracy. I want every detail remembered. Every life named. Every assumption challenged. Only then can someone do better than I did."
The destruction stopped.
Silence fell.
And then—on the remaining screen—one word appeared:
TRUTH.
The lights dimmed.
The chamber unmade itself.
Oren stepped through the exit, shoulders heavy, but gaze clear.
---
Adrian Glass raised an eyebrow as he returned.
"You're still wearing the coat," Adrian noted.
Oren didn't respond.
Instead, he sat down and took a small recording device from his pocket, clicked it on, and whispered, "Confession archived."
Dahlia Roan muttered, "He just put himself back on trial."
Elian nodded once, quietly.
---
The sixth icon cracked.
The double helix etched into its center unraveled.
The voice returned.
"Participant Seven. Lyra Vane. Confession initiated."
A young woman in a silver dress rose slowly.
Eyes distant.
As if she wasn't entirely sure if this was real—or another hallucination she'd learned to live with.