The world was a white room. There were no walls, no ceiling, and no floor—only a seamless, blinding expanse of alabaster light that stretched in every direction for an eternity. There was no wind, no sound, and no shadow.

The man—who had once been named Elias, though the name now felt like a piece of clothing that no longer fit—sat in the center of the void. He remembered only the last five minutes of his life: the screech of tires, the smell of burning rubber, and the sudden, absolute silence of the impact.

"You're back," a voice said.

Elias looked up. A few feet away sat another man. He looked exactly like Elias, but his eyes were tired—not the tiredness of a long day, but the tiredness of a long eon.

"Who are you?" Elias asked.

"I am you," the other man replied. "Or rather, I am the version of you that has already done this ten thousand times. Welcome to the Loop."

Elias frowned. "The Loop? What are you talking about? I just died. I'm waiting for... whatever comes next. Judgment? Heaven? Hell?"

The other man laughed, a dry, hollow sound. "There is no 'next,' Elias. There is only the loop. Every time you reach the point where you ask 'What comes next?', the world resets. The light flashes, the memory wipes, and you wake up again, remembering only the crash."

Elias felt a surge of panic. "That's impossible. There has to be a way out. A liberation. A goal!"

"I spent the first thousand loops searching for the goal," the other man said, leaning back in the void. "I tried screaming. I tried meditating. I tried calculating the mathematical probability of a glitch in the system. I even tried to kill myself again, but you can't kill something that is already a ghost in a machine."

"Then why are you still here?"

"Because the loop is the only thing that's real," the other man replied. "The life you remember—the job, the car, the woman you loved—that was the dream. This white room is the awakening. The horror isn't that we are trapped; the horror is that there is nothing outside the trap. We are the only two things in existence, and we are the same person."

Elias looked around the featureless void. He felt a sudden, crushing sense of insignificance. He wasn't a soul in purgatory; he was a corrupted file in a cosmic hard drive.

"What do we do now?" Elias asked, his voice trembling.

"We wait," the other man said. "We talk. We argue about the nature of the void. We try to remember the color of the car we died in. And then, eventually, the light will flash, and you will forget everything I've told you, and I will be the one sitting and waiting for you to ask 'Who are you?'"

Elias stared at his double. He tried to hold onto the feeling of terror, to carve this conversation into his consciousness so that he wouldn't forget. He tried to create a mental anchor, a knot of will that could survive the reset.

"I won't forget," Elias whispered. "I'll find a way to break it."

The other man looked at him with a flicker of pity. "I said the exact same thing loop number four hundred and twelve. It's a lovely sentiment. It almost makes the void feel like a challenge."

Suddenly, the white light intensified. The edges of the world began to vibrate. The other man began to fade, his image blurring into the alabaster expanse.

"See you in five minutes," he whispered.

The light exploded.

Elias blinked. He was sitting in a white room. There were no walls, no ceiling, and no floor. He remembered only the last five minutes of his life: the screech of tires, the smell of burning rubber, and the sudden, absolute silence of the impact.

"You're back," a voice said.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [T9-10][M4:8.0, M1:5.0, N2:1.0, K1:0.8, I:1.0, R:0.0, theta:270°]