Shackles

In 1945, ten-year-old Luke watched his family burn while his neighbors looked on with "careful faces". Now trapped in a subterranean facility designed to erase children and remake them as compliant products, Luke is the only one who refuses to be unmade. Instead of fighting for survival, he observes. Treating his cage as a laboratory and his fellow captives as test subjects, Luke uses clinical logic to map the mechanics of human cruelty and connection. He has reached a final, terrifying conclusion: Suffering is not a malfunction of life, but its primary function. There is no justice to be found, only a structural flaw that must be corrected. And Luke has decided to offer the world the only mercy that actually matters: its end.