The building was called The Ascent. It was a windowless monolith of gray concrete and humming fluorescent lights, stretching upward into an infinite void. Adam had been an employee of The Ascent for as long as he could remember. His job was simple: sort the blue files into the blue bin, and the red files into the red bin.

Every ten years, the "Promotion" occurred. The employees who had shown the most efficiency were allowed to ascend to the next floor.

Adam was the most efficient sorter in the history of the fourth floor. He lived for the Promotion. He spent every waking second optimizing his movements, ignoring the whispers of the others who had stopped caring, who spent their days staring at the ceiling in a catatonic haze.

"Just one more floor," Adam would tell himself. "One more floor, and I'll be closer to the top. One more floor, and I'll see the sky."

He ascended. Fourth floor, fifth, tenth, fiftieth. With every promotion, the files became more complex, the bins more numerous, the silence more oppressive. But Adam didn't care. He was climbing. He was evolving. He was becoming the perfect instrument of The Ascent.

After a lifetime of sorting, Adam reached the Final Floor.

The doors slid open with a hiss of pneumatic pressure. He stepped out into a room of blinding white light. There were no files here. No bins. No supervisors. Just a single, floor-to-ceiling mirror.

Adam walked toward the mirror, his heart hammering against his ribs. He expected to see a god, or a king, or at least a man who had conquered the void.

Instead, he saw a young man in a cheap polyester suit, holding a blue file. He saw himself on his first day, forty years ago, standing in the doorway of the fourth floor with a look of naive hope in his eyes.

He looked behind him. The door he had just exited was gone. There was only the mirror and the white void.

Adam realized then that The Ascent was not a building; it was a Möbius strip of bureaucracy. The "top" was simply the point where the loop closed. His entire life's work—the efficiency, the ambition, the sacrifice—had been a journey to return to the exact moment he had started.

He looked at the mirror and saw the young Adam blink.

"Welcome to the fourth floor," the reflection whispered.

Adam sat down on the white floor and began to laugh. It was a dry, rattling sound that echoed forever in the empty room. He had finally reached the peak, and the view was exactly what he deserved: a perfect, infinite circle of nothing.

*** OTMES_v2_CODE: [T-S: 15.0, M1: 7.0, M3: 9.0, M4: 8.0, N2: 0.9, K1: 0.6, I: 0.8, R: 0.0, Theta: 270, E: 21.2]