Speaker 1: I clogged in a few minutes before midnight, same as always,
I swiped my badge, watched the light turn green, and
walked into the half lit lobby, where the vening machines
buzzed louder than the lights. I set my thermers down
tab the monitor to wake it up and started another
shift guarding a building that never saw traffic. Technically, I
work security for a research facility on the edge of
the industrial district. What kind of research I couldn't tell you.
They don't breathe the night guards. My job is simple
walk the halls every hour, check the doors, monitor the cameras,
and call it in if anyone tries to sneak onto
the property. No one ever does. Honestly, I think the
whole place is a shell company. There are labs and
conference rooms, sure, but I've never seen more than three
or four people in the building during the daytime turnover
the lights. They are in half the offices. Most of
the serveracks hummed to keep themselves busy. Once in a
while I'll see a crate in the loading baymarked hazard,
but it's always empty by the time my shift starts.
The boredom is what gets the most guys not me.
I don't mind the lack of action. There's a comfort
in routines that never change. I keep a radio on
the desk. One of those weather alert units that doubles
is an emergency broadcast receiver wire to receive work notifications
that never came. Only the occasional emergency alert would pop through.
Never important to me, but something to break up the
monotony of the shift. Usually it just loops weather updates
or dead air. Tonight it hunts softly, tune, low enough
to ignore, but loud enough to notice if something serious
happened outside. The wind pushed against the security glass. I
sipped lukewarm coffee and flipped through the incident report log,
already knowing it would be empty. The camera feat showed
still hallways, a broom leaning against the janitor's closet, a
copy room. No one used. The red light above the
exit sign blinked at its usual pace. I sat back,
let the chair creak under me, and settled in for
another shift, watching nothing happen. I'm good at being invisible.
I don't ask questions, I don't get in the way.
I do the job, fill out the forms, and keep
my head down. Most people forget I'm even here. The
shift had settled into that quiet dead zone between two
and three a m. With time stretches and the brain
starts the drift. I was halfway through a stale protein
bar and watching the cursor blink on a blank incident
report when the emergency radio crackled to life three sharp tones,
the standard ones. I didn't react at first. The emergency
alert system runs regular tests, once or twice a week,
always the same canned message, usually about weather conditions or
missing children. Three states over. I kept chewing, waiting for
the usual script. This is a test of an emergency
alert system. May has perked up at the authority of
the voice. This is a message for There was a pause.
Richard James Summerfield my full name, not just the one
I use for work, the full thing, the one from
my birth certificate. Middle name included. Please remain indoors and
do not engage with a noise outside your perception. Estimated
test duration one hour. The message ended, there no explanation,
no origin. The radio cut back to low static. I
sat up the protein bar still in my hand, half chewed.
I fiddled with the radio, expecting it to play the
last message again. Nothing, no time stamp logged, no saved segment.
I tried to convince myself it was a prank broadcast
some local station playing games, a coincidence. Maybe someone hacked
the system and fed in a custom message to mess
with people. That didn't explain the name. It didn't explain
why the warning felt so specific. I started out by
saying it was a test. Maybe it was some new
system there piloting one that paused names from local databases
to make it feel personalized, a mistake. Maybe. I sat
back down, suddenly aware of how quiet the building had become.
The only sound was the wind brushing against the high
windows and the low, steady static humming through the emergency radio.
I spent the next few minutes trying to shake off
the message. I kept telling myself it was nothing, just
some rogue test broadcast. Still I couldn't stop glancing at
the radio. It hadn't made a sound since, just the
soft hiss of static, steady and quiet. I thought about
unplugging it, but I kept it on in case something
important came through. I made another round through the halls.
Everything looked it's exactly the way it always did. Dead screens, humming, fluorescence,
the distant echo of my own footsteps. When I came
back to the desk, I checked the log, tapped through
my camera feeds, and started filling out some paperwork, just
to keep my hands busy. That's when the tone started again,
three quick pulses, followed by the same voice. This is
a message for Richard James Summerfield. You were eleven years
old when you refused to visit your mother in the hospital.
My fingers stopped moving. You told your brother it didn't
matter that you wouldn't remember. You said it to hurt him.
I stared at the radio, unable to breathe for a second.
You were wrong. There was a pause, No static this time,
just silence, stretching for two beats longer than it should have.
You will attempt to check the loading dark in thirty
five seconds, please reconsider. The radio clicked off. I didn't
move at first, just sat there, heart knocking against my ribs,
hands cold. I hadn't spoken about that fight in years,
maybe ever. The words it used weren't quoted, but they
were accurate enough to know whoever or whatever was speaking,
understood the shape of it, knew the guilt that still
cold up behind my teeth. Part of me thought this
had to be a set up, maybe someone trying to
make me believe the broadcast was intelligent alive. Could be
a deep data scrape, old emails recordings, an elaborate hoax.
But another part of me was already walking toward the
back hall planet my body moved on its own. I
scanned my badge at the service door and followed the
concrete corridor past the janitor's closet and the old vending machine.
The dark was at the far end. I reached the
metal door and pulled it open. The dock outside was empty,
no trucks, no footprints, just when moving through the chain
link fence. Still, I stood there too long, longer than
I needed to, waiting for something else to happen. By
the time the third message came through, I was more
irritated than rattled whatever was going on, I figured someone
had too much time and access to things they shouldn't.
It didn't help that nothing else had happened, no follow ups,
no intruders, no evidence anyone was watching me. Even though
something clearly it was. I kept running mental checklists. It
could have been a test, a psychological experiment. Maybe someone
at the company had wired in a new kind of
behavioral monitoring. But if that were true, why start dragging
my personal life into it? Still? I wasn't scared, not really,
just tired and annoyed and ready to finish my shift
and go home. I was walking the northeast corridor when
it started again. No tone this time, no build up.
Do not turn around. I stopped mid stride. I didn't breathe.
Something in my spine locked. The hallway behind me had
no lights. I hadn't noticed it before. I could only
tell by the darkness in my peripheral vision, but it
was completely dark, not dim, just gone. I waited five
seconds ten My body refused to relax. Then, against better judgment,
I started to turn slow. At first, just a glance
over the shoulder. That was enough. The far wall to
my left rippled, My vision warped around the edges, colors
bleeding into one another, angles stretching wrong. My left eye
went cloudy. My right started the tunnel, and under it
all the sound began to rise. Glass shattering, nails on tile,
teeth clacking too fast to be human, breathing from too
many mouths at once, screams that never opened their throats,
the kind of noise that makes your insides want to
curl away from your skin. I stopped, didn't finish the turn,
didn't look into the dark, just stood there, half pivoted,
jaw clenched tight. Then I faced forward again. It all
stopped instantly. The lights returned to normal, the sounds vanished,
my vision cleared. But when I turned to look down
the hallway again, not behind me, but ahead, the corridor
had changed. A rolling cabinet now blocked the path I
was heading towards. A steel door appeared where there was
none before. Emergency lighting outlined a new path, branching left
where there hadn't been one ten minutes earlier. I didn't
try to force the old path open. Instead, I stared
at it, realizing something important. Whatever this was, it didn't
want me to go back. It had rules, even if
I didn't understand them yet. I didn't have a destination
at first. I just wanted to find the front entrance again,
or an exit, maybe the main stairwell, maybe the fire doors,
somewhere that didn't feel like it had been rewritten behind
my back. The building wasn't the same anymore. Corridors I
had walked a hundred times were suddenly too long or
too short. Some ended in blank walls, leading me into
doors that only led to mystery. Others turned corners that
shouldn't exist. I passed the mechanical room that I knew
was supposed to be on the third floor, but I
was still on the first. The elevator didn't work, the
cameras were frozen, and the maps on the wall were blank,
scrubbed to white. Still I kept moving. My best chance
now was memory used approximate landmarks, no matter how distorted,
to try discern where I really was, trying to find
an anchor point so I could try navigate to a
way out. But more often than not, I found myself
just randomly navigating based on whatever options I had ahead
of me. That came with its own danger. If I
followed a path that led to a dead end, I
couldn't just spin around and go back. I'd learned that
the hard way. Once or twice I flinched at a
sound behind me, footsteps where there shouldn't have been, a
door slamming shut at the far end of a hall.
An instinct took over. I'd start to turn, always just
a little, always just enough to catch the start of
something wrong, a ripple in the air. That shrieking layered,
noise bleeding through again and alias. I caught myself just
in time. It was becoming reflex forward. Only no matter
what I heard. That was when the voice returned, no
warning tone, just there, suddenly woven into the air like
it had always been, speaking route correction and effect. Please
proceed to the observation zone, avoid interior mirrors. I stopped walking.
The hallway head dipped slightly before curving to the right.
I hadn't been down this way in months. I was
pretty sure it only led to storage, not any place
labeled observation zone. The voice didn't speak again, just the
one line, delivered in that semi human tone. I kept going,
choosing a side path instead. It should have led past
the central IT server room and back toward the lobby,
at least they used to. Halfway down the corridor, I
spotted a round security mirror mounted in the corner from
where I stood. I could see myself in it, blurry
but centered. That wasn't what stopped me. What stopped me
was the blackness behind my reflection, pitch black, like everything
behind me had been cut out of the frame, even
though I knew there were lights on. I stepped closer.
When I stood beneath it and looked up, the reflection
was gone. The surface of the mirror was now just glass, dark,
no light, no shape, nothing reflected at all. Every reflective
surface I passed after that behaved the same way. At
a glance, they showed my silhouette and blackness behind me.
The moment I got close, they turned a dead glass.
I stopped checking them after a while. At that point,
I wasn't just avoiding the path the broadcast wanted me
to take. I was actively working around it, trying to
stay ahead of whatever route it was building for me.
I didn't trust it. I didn't trust any of this,
but I couldn't afford a mistake. If I wandered into
a corridor with no other way out, and the walls
behind me decided to erase the path i'd come through,
I'd be stuck, or worse, I'd be forced to turn around.
And I was starting to believe that something was waiting
for me to do just that. I was moving faster,
now not running, but close to it. My heart had
settled into a low, steady beat, just above normal. I
kept my eyes forward scanning for changes in the layout,
watching the walls for fresh seams or strange signage. My
flashlight flickered once, then came back strong. I'd have the
badgery gauge still full. That was when the broadcast cut
in again. It didn't wait for me to stop, no
set up. The voice spoke as if it had been
listening the whole time, which I now suspected it had.
You are checking the battery level. My chest tightened. I
stopped walking. It knew what I was doing. Then it
added one more line, avoid the next intersection. You won't listen.
We are sorry. I stood in the center of a long,
low corridor, the overhead lights buzzing above me in rhythm
with my pulse. The radio shut off again, nothing but
the quiet hum of old fluorescent tubes. The line echoed
through my head as I moved again, slower now, eyes narrowing,
as the hall opened into a cross road. There at
the intersection, I heard it, not loudly, but it was there, sobbing, faint,
choked and slow, like someone trying not to be heard.
And underneath it another sound, breathing, ragged, wet, then a
single mechanical click. I stopped at the threshold, one foot
still in my hallway, the other just past the corner.
The crying sounded closer. I didn't move for a while.
I stood frozen, thinking about the voice, about the exact wording,
you won't listen. So what did that mean that I
was already choosing, that I had already failed the test
it mentioned? I tried to trace my thoughts to see
where the decision had started. Was I truly choosing anything here?
Or was I reacting following the trail already laid out?
If I went toward the crying, was that compassion, curiosity
or a script I was meant to follow? And if
I didn't, would that be real defiance or another programmed branch.
The hallway around me remained empty. The floor beneath my
feet stayed steady, but my head swam with the idea
that no matter what I did, I was already inside
someone else's plan, that the system didn't need to control me,
only predict me. I looked toward the direction of the crying.
Then I turned the other way and walked fast and
straight until the sound disappeared behind me. The lights began
cutting out, one by one, not all at once. It
started in the west corridor, then the break room, then
the hallway, just outside the side overcages, A silent collapse
of function, wing by wing. I heard it before I
saw it, the soft flick of breakers flipping in sequence,
leaving behind nothing but the hum of back up lighting
and the sound of a low siren I'd never heard before.
Wasn't blaring, not urgent. It pulsed slowly, steadily, as if
reminding something to stay awake. Then every screen came to life.
Monitors I hadn't touched in hours, tablets still plugged in
and locked the emergency radio. All of them glowed in
perfect sink showing the same cold white text over black
subject deviation confirmed sequence collapse in twelve minutes, manual override required,
you are not authorized proceed. That was the first time
it mentioned collapse, the first time it told me openly
that this whole thing was breaking down, though I had
no idea what that truly meant. I didn't stay in
that hallway. I kept moving, heading for the central spine
of the building, hoping that if I stayed in motion,
I could find some edge to all of this. But
the layout had changed again. The ceilings dropped by almost
the foot. The air vents had vanished, hallways had grown tighter,
sharp turns where smooth curves had been before. I passed
the supply room that looked identical to one I'd seen earlier,
same chairs, same desk, but the desk was on the
left this time, and the wall clock ticked backwards. The
floor creaked under my boots in a way had never
had before, soft hollow. The way to the building had
shifted behind me. The sound began again, clicking, but slowly,
this time deeper, metal tapping on tile. It echoed from
far down the corridor, bouncing and multiplying until I couldn't
tell which direction it was coming from. The air behind
me pressed against my back, not wind, just pressurer, heavier
than it should have been. My footsteps started replaying themselves.
I would take a step, then hear it again half
a second later, sometimes in sync, sometimes not. I heard
voices too, ones I didn't recognize. They whispered things that
didn't match my memories, but they sounded familiar. Anyway. I
turned a corner, I stopped breathing, didn't move, didn't speak.
I didn't turn, not even a glance, But the edges
of my vision began to twitch. Not black, but movement,
flickering just beyond where my eyes could land. Shadows stretching
without a sauce, A curl of something sliding along the
ceiling tiles above me, never visible, always near. The clicking
had stopped. It wasn't following me anymore. It was waiting.
I pushed forward. I reached for a door I didn't recognize,
heavy steel, no markings. It opened with a small creek
into a small room. A Halogens strip flickered from above.
There was no furniture except for a metal table bolted
to the floor. The room looked like it was used
for experiments that were currently absent. On the table sat
a mounted radio unit and a single folder. The cover
was gray, stamped in red with a warning that red
pattern violation manual, do not issue. I opened it. Every
page was blank, except one in the center, typed in
plain black text. If in doubt, turn around. I closed
the folder and I didn't turn. The corridor was waiting
for me. Despite all the directions I took, I ended
up back, same length, same lights, same intersection. It hadn't
changed since the last time I'd come to the crossroads,
except this time the crying started before I even got close.
It came from the far corridor, low at first, wet
and staggered, the sound of someone tried not to be
heard but failing, a woman, maybe young, or something trying
to sound young. It echoed off the walls in slow pulses.
Then came the radio turn around, Comply, reset, turn around,
comply reset, over and over again. I stopped at the intersection.
My eyes burned, my legs ached. I felt hollowed out,
like every room I had passed through had scraped something
away without asking. I stood still, not because I was afraid,
but because I was furious. I said nothing out loud,
but my mind screamed. I've followed your rules, I've broken them.
I've walked your paths, avoided your traps. I've done everything.
But this What if this is it? What if this
is the only move left? What if the test was
never to obey, but to disobey at the right time.
I turned toward the corridor where the crying waited and
stepped inside. The temperature dropped instantly, my ears rang, The
walls tightened around me. The deeper I walked, the louder
everything became screeching metal whispers that knew my name, breathing
behind my neck. Every noise laid on top of the next,
until there was no space between them. My vision narrowed,
not completely black, but close to the edges, began to glitch,
filled with static and flickers of color, as if the
world behind me was being raised frame by frame. Something
moved inside the walls, shapes pressed through dry wall, outlines
of people, but wrong, no features, just stretched skin where
eyes and mouths should have been, arms folded the wrong way,
fingers too long. They clawed softly at the air, not
reaching for me, just twitching in rhythm with a noise.
I didn't blink, I didn't speak. I kept walking. My
heart felt too big for my ribs. Every breath rattled.
The floor dropped slightly beneath my feet, like the hallway
was being pulled downward. Then everything stopped. One step, just one,
crossed an invisible line, and the world snapped silent. The
air warmed, my vision cleared, my ears rang in the
absence of noise. I stood in the main lobby of
the building. Fluorescent lights buzzed calmly overhead. The front windows
were intact. I saw dawn breaking through the glass, faint
orange lights spilling across the floor. Then the door behind
the desk burst open. Dozens of people in black tactical
gear poured through, sweeping the room, rifles drawn, helmets down,
no insignias, just armored suits and mirrored visors. Behind them
came medical staff, scientists, texts, with wheeled carts and blinking cases.
They moved with urgency, but not panic. They knew this scene,
they had trained for it. I turned slowly, looking over
my shoulder, subconsciously grappling with the idea of being able
to see behind me. Now where I just emerged stood static,
not a wall exactly, more like the edge of a dome.
It shimmered faintly, air trembling with digital interference. I could
see through it, but the colors were wrong. Shapes moved
inside soft, slow echo my memory of the corridor I
had just walked. As I stared and closed around my
arm firm gloved reel, I turned, a soldier stood, their
face hidden behind a matte black visor, already steering me
away from the dome. Before I could speak, I spun
the face of the soldier. The man wore a full
tactical helmet, visor down, not a slit of skin peeking through.
What is this? I demanded, What the hell happened? Who
are you people? The soldier didn't answer. He gripped my
arm tighter and pulled me across the lobby, past rows
of gear being unpacked, past medics shouting into headsets, past
the equipment I couldn't identify. I caught glimpses of heat sensors,
portable servers, hitting tanks with red seals broken open. Everything
buzzed with her, and see none of it explained. It
set up a temporary cordon using collapsible barriers and lighting rigs.
Inside the makeshifts owne. I saw others, three maybe four,
All wore lab coats, scorched and torn, some stained with ash,
some flecked with static, burnt scoring. One woman sat hunched
in the corner, cradling a cracked tablet to a chest,
as if it were a wounded animal. The soldier shoved
me inside and stepped back. I didn't move, just stared.
One of the scientists looked up, a man in his fifties, pale,
wide eyed, his face hollow with exhaustion. You walked out,
he asked, His voice broke halfway through. You got out
on your own His shock emphasized how big of a
deal this was. But without context, I still had no
idea how to feel about it. What happened in there?
What's going on? I asked? Finally I got some answers.
This facility has been running for a few decades. Whatever
you think is cutting edge looks like gears and sticks
compared to what's done here. Another scientist, a coworker, maybe,
shot him a look to shut him up. It seemed
he couldn't reveal exactly what they were doing here. He
stood slowly and crossed the space between us, lowered his
voice to a hush, barely above a whisper. You were
inside the test field, he said. That wasn't real. It
was a prototype construct, an artificial cognitive environment, a simulation
meant to study recursive decision making and perceptual looping. It
was never supposed to activate. He glanced toward the dome,
still pulsing softly at the far end of the lobby.
His eyes twitched. Something went wrong, he continued. It started
responding to observation, growing, feeding on recursive feedback. The more
we watched, the more it changed. We lost two teams
trying to extract the workers. He paused, breathing heavier now.
But you you weren't tagged, You weren't supposed to be there.
You walked into the active field by accident, and somehow
you made it through alone behind us. A clax and burst.
Life had and tone them before, sharper faster they've always
shouted from one of the workstations. Field integrity dropping fifty
percent and falling. I could see more teams running in,
charging into the unknown. The scientists grabbed my shoulder. If
the containment fails, he said, it doesn't stay in there,
each person running in will probably die. We just have
to hope one manages to shut it down. I had
nothing to say. All I could do was watch with
the extracted scientists as these brave soldiers ran in to
die like ants, numbers versus odds, legions of deaths happening
beyond the veil, until eventually the static dome dissipated with
a screech, and a lone soldier stumbled out, torn almost
to ribbons,