The room is four meters by four meters. One bed. One table. One lightbulb hanging from a frayed wire. This is my universe. I do not remember the world outside, but I remember the Rule.

The Rule is simple: I must never stop looking at the lightbulb.

The men in the white coats told me that I am the Anchor. They explained that the external world has entered a state of total quantum instability. Cities are flickering, mountains are dissolving, and billions of people are trapped in a state of probability. My observation is the only thing keeping the reality of the "Prime Sector" from collapsing. As long as I observe the light, the world exists.

For three years, I have not closed my eyes for more than a second. I have trained myself to blink one eye at a time. I have become a slave to the glow.

The isolation is a slow poison. I began to talk to the lightbulb. I gave it a name—Lumina. I told Lumina about the dreams I had of green fields and blue oceans, things I had never seen but somehow remembered. I started to wonder if the world outside was even real, or if I was just a component in a vast, cruel experiment.

One day, the light flickered.

It was a microsecond of darkness, but in that gap, I saw something. I didn't see the room. I saw another room, identical to mine, and in it, another man. He was staring at me with the same desperate, bloodshot eyes. He was holding a lightbulb of his own.

I realized then the nature of the cage. I was not the Anchor for the world. I was the Anchor for *him*, and he was the Anchor for *me*. We were two observers in a closed loop, each sustaining the other's existence in a void of absolute nothingness.

The realization brought a strange, cold relief. I looked at the man in the other room and I smiled. I didn't want to be an Anchor anymore. I didn't want to be the reason for a world I would never see.

Slowly, deliberately, I closed both eyes.

I felt the tension snap. The lightbulb shattered. The walls of the room dissolved into a grey mist. For the first time in years, I felt the wind on my face, though there was no air. I stepped forward into the darkness, leaving the cage behind, finally choosing the peace of the collapse over the torture of the observation.

[OTMES_v2_Code: M4:7.0, M1:6.0, N2:1.0, K1:0.9, Theta:270deg, E:13.9]