The room was a void of blinding, sterile white. No corners, no shadows, just an infinite expanse of alabaster that seemed to vibrate at a frequency just beyond the reach of human hearing. Dr. Aris lay on the obsidian table, his breath shallow, the scent of ozone and sterile saline filling his nostrils.

"Initiating the Extension," a voice announced. The voice was genderless, devoid of inflection, the sound of a machine dreaming of logic.

Aris felt the surge. It wasn't a feeling of growth, but of expansion. His consciousness suddenly stretched, pulling away from the confines of his skull, expanding until he could feel the heartbeat of the building, the hum of the city outside, the very rotation of the earth. For one glorious second, he was everything. He was the wind, the stone, the light. He was eternal.

And then, the snap.

A sudden, violent contraction. A scream that didn't leave his throat but echoed in the hollows of his mind. The world blurred, the white room spinning into a vortex of grey.

"Initiating the Extension," the voice announced.

Aris gasped. He was back on the table. The scent of ozone. The sterile saline. The blinding white.

"Wait," he whispered, his voice sounding distant, as if he were speaking through a thick layer of water. "I... I just did this. I remember... the expansion. The light."

"Patient 01, please remain still," the voice replied. "The procedure is about to begin."

The surge came again. The expansion. The god-like awareness. The feeling of becoming the universe. And then, the snap.

"Initiating the Extension."

The first ten loops were terror. Aris fought the cycle, screaming, begging the voice to stop, trying to claw his way out of the obsidian table. He analyzed the timing—exactly four minutes and twelve seconds from the first breath to the final collapse. He began to count the milliseconds, searching for the flaw in the code, the glitch in the synchronization.

By the thousandth loop, the terror had evolved into a cold, analytical curiosity. He began to treat the loop as a laboratory. He tried to change his breathing, to shift his thoughts, to imagine a different outcome. But the loop was absolute. The sequence was a perfect circle, a Möbius strip of consciousness.

By the millionth loop, Aris stopped fighting. He began to build a city within the four minutes. He constructed libraries of memory, cathedrals of thought, entire civilizations that rose and fell between the "Initiating" and the "Snap." He became the god of a four-minute universe, a master of a flicker of time.

He realized that the "error" wasn't in the machine, but in the definition of eternity. The Vanguard had promised a long line—a straight path stretching into the horizon. But Aris had found the truth: eternity is not a line; it is a circle.

In the ten-millionth loop, as the white room faded and the expansion began once more, Aris didn't scream. He didn't fight. He simply closed his eyes and smiled.

"Initiating the Extension," the voice announced.

"I know," Aris whispered, welcoming the snap. "I've been waiting for you."

*** OTMES-T4-S04-M1-N2-K1-TH180