Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The first key to surviving the
night shift is routine. Some people say it's vigilance or paranoia,
or even caffine, but I know better. It's ritual, the
stringing together of small ordered habits against the tide of
darkness and fatigue. For four years, I've manned the overnight
security posted the Churis Corporate Center, a class sided echo
chamber spanning sixteen stories above an empty swath of city.
By eleven p m. The building is down to a whisper,
a far off printer at the click of badge doors,
occasional gurgle from the PEPs. Nothing stirs if you don't
first disturb it. I began that Thursday, as I always do,
swiping my own card at the east side entrance, pulling
on the oversized uniform jacket that still smells finly of
the last detergent, and flicking the banks of overhead lights.
In my periberal vision, the elevator's chrome doors reflected only
my own movements. I sign it in a control check
for notes, and glance over the digital logs of string
of a and nut bowed swipes, accounted for nothing to
spark suspicion or interest. After IRE's world belongs to people
like me, and I've come to relish the neat security
of known exactly where everyone is and is not. The
shifts so long and quiet, broken only by the drawn
of air circulating and the sharp snap offending machine hum.
Time falls on itself here at night, once the last
train leaves down hun you can almost hear the city.
Change gaves a kind of collective exhalation as business sleeps,
and only the word, the wired and the word remain
two hours in. Half way through my first set of rounds,
I pass through the twelfth floor break area. Floor tiles
color as commercial cockpit, the odor of microwave noodles clings
thinly to the walls. It's nothing special, counts scuffed by
hordes of lunch traffic, A lonely pot of coffee left
charring itself on the burner. I collect the mugs or
fill the paper towels, and check underneath the conference tables
for anything left behind. Routine shapes the world and keeps
it logical. That's when I see it lopsided, half jutting
between a no limb and carpet seam bluck against gray.
I kneel, thinking it's maybe someone's badge. Instead, it's a
kick out, heavy for its size, glossy plast with a
single Numerica label embossed on so very far thirteen brick room.
For a few seconds a crouch, they are examining it
in a pool of fluorescence bill. The building has twelve
office floors, two equipment levels, squatting square up of fourteen,
and the penthouse boardroom no thirteen. That's not superstition. Culpriate
architects design around their own anxieties. There is no thirteen
four in this building, at least not one that I've
ever seen or heard about. My badge, used all these years,
never glows for anything with the thirteen. I sit back
on my heels and glance at the nearest elevator alcove.
The floor panel jumps straight from twelve, two, fourteen. All
joke and lucky numbers mean empty floors or exhaust fans,
or simply a numbering skip for the superstitious. But my
key guard, freshly minted, says thirteen in an official font.
It can't be real. It looks entirely plausible as sibling
to every other badge you'd find on a line out,
save for the blackness and its dark number. My first
thought a prank. Maybe Facilities may be one of the
programmers who fusses with the offed system. But something doesn't
add up. The plastic age of sharp clean, the sort
of we're only given by heavy use, not novelty. It
doesn't have the usual building logo, which is odd. Trying
not to think too hard, I head back to Control.
I thumb through the digital logs, arranging event by elevator
activity as a distraction. Monitors flicker, their pale blow dusting
the walls, elevator, ascending, elevator churning down for lake commers,
time stance ticking by. I browse raw data, idle curiosity,
turning towards something more pointed. Nothing appears out of line
until I spot it two seven a m. The previous
night elevator lock stop floor equals thirteen. I check again,
blinking against the spread of numbers. That's impossible. The digital
lock shows a clear sequence up down, a series of
badge entries, and a stop at thirteen that shouldn't exist.
I double check the camera panes, trying to find any
sign of tampering, jerkingly, half hoping to spot someone grinning
at me from behind a potty plant. Nothing, The cameras
never blink, the locks don't forget, and now in my
hand is the most unlikely key in the building. In vice,
in its normal sea chilling in its implication, my skin
tidans cuspums, shivering up my arms in the humming silence.
There's no airror message, no ob his hack, just a
door to or number that isn't there, memorialized by a
key that never should have been made. Most knights here
start with virtual motions and lock in a rolling gate,
harrying my jacket, retrieving the batted attendant log, and sitting
at my post behind the marble reception counter. My whole job,
as I see it, is to ensure predictability. A caretaker
of saneness. A chair's corporate center, built two decades ago
on a patch of prime yet uninspired city grid is
designed so nothing feels surprising. After dark, the lobby's granite
floor stretches under amber a leady damn lights. The glass
walled conference rooms glimmer to my left, each flickering with
the memories of morning meetings swept away and replaced by stillness.
Elevators set in their brushed alumin and alcohoves, a weighed
only the rare employee daring enough to burn the midnight oil.
I start every shift with the circuit, first the basement
server rooms, then the parking levels, the stark echo under
the rows of electric ASUV, humming slightly as they trickle charge,
then up through the stairwells. Each drew will a syrup
of shadow until my flashlights bean slices into dust motes.
The upper floor is thick with the scent of iron
eized air, and the faint chemical tang from weekly cleaning
are quite as still. Each floor tells its own story.
Neither is always scattered with paper cups and half eaten
catering tries finance as snacks left abandoned by exhausted number crunchers.
The marketing annex on five is a ride of sticky
notes and campagne posters dying in the bloomiest blue white light.
Engineering tucked away on four hums, with gaming laptops and
powered bricks snaking across desks like grass as Cobra's. The
break rooms on every floor offer minimal relief from the
blank sameness, ancient microwaves aging for mica, the soft patter
of vending coil spinning to spill snacks by request. On
good night, I'll see familiar faces pressed to as greens,
a bespectacled dy guy in a faded band tee jaw
slack as he squints occurred nd yet the overnight accountant,
whereas headphunds so large, I hear the ghost of her
playlists before I reach her cubicle. There's a reliable pair
of Janetor's Curt and zeal unmoving like peaceful ghosts with
mop buckets, greeting me with tired nods. Sometimes we share
a joke commissariately about the night's slow blee, or trade
geranola bars from our pockets. Therein saw me breeds gentleness
I've learned. But every now and then faces vanish. This
week only Zeeline returns the knot. Kurt hasn't been around
three nights running just as torrid. The daya besad men
has vanished from her customary seventh floor window. No one
raises an alarm burn out as some one explains he's
back in skull o'er. Her kid's sick. She's got leave
that's common in the city's corporate cycle. Ultern no closure.
I make a note of it. Never as expecting more
than life's regular attrition. My routines protect me. Badge checks
at every internal door, q R code checks for urgent
building note for ications, the static comfort to voice check
with the overnight monitoring firm. There are supposed to be
no blind spots. Every corridor banks off a camera lens,
every door logs a swipe, every elevator stop time stamped,
and archive for liability. Nothing, in short, should ever escape
the quiet digital eye. The tough floor, by least favorite,
always runs a little colder, courtesy from a track unit
that likes to urdle wine and occasionally vent mysterious icy breath.
I traced. The outline of the draft seems to emanate
from the midpoint between the kitchen alcove and a dead
janitor's closet. Though the logs saide the air floe is balanced. Sometimes,
I admit I amuse myself jawed in uneven sketches of
the floor lay its dueling, alternate routes, and hypothetical secret rooms.
In the back pages of the lovebook, a private entertainment
for the interminable iyros between patrols among us night staff.
Old rumors were circulated in half serious tones. The missing
thirteenth floor, someone jokes over checked where they send people
who bought the Christmas party. Unlucky numbers make for excellent
company folklore and corporate architects on notores for their aversions.
Something about lawsuits in Hong Kong, the Superstition's gate from
one building code to the next. Still this comfort in
lodge exchange link fence. Nothing truly bad ever happens here,
I tell myself, just long iyres, miss deadlines, the glow
of the city refusing sleep, And on this night, as
I run through the paces, nothing feels particularly out of
place until I'm reminded by a found object that the
building has rules. I don't remember writing twice per shift.
I make rounds with the clipboard pencil poorts for imaginary infractions.
I keep a second note be coom my own scrap pad,
wherritrak minuschi, which force coffee machine is busted, which thermostat
runs too hot? Last month's deployment of bug traps in
the storage rooms. Sometimes, instead of notes or draw there's
an oddly pleasing challenge to capture in the geometry and
dead ends of the top fours double back corridor, or
sketching where the heating touch fronds vanished behind drywall. The
security system is the company's pride and joy, its claim
of transparency. Digital freeedge roll in from every corner. Nothing
is said to be secret, nothing unwatched. Badge logs across
for reference in the ire, even the meal cart's off
it tag gets tracked. The head of Facilities likes to
claim there hasn't been an unexplained incident in five years.
That's true as far as any one knows, unless he
count the time the CEO owned San fail to badge
out after a weekend bender, but that was handled discreetly.
The maintenance logs claim no known draft problem on any floor,
despite what I feel sometimes under the doors. Probably just
pressure equalization glitches. As Eelan told me, Once buildings breathe
at night, things settle, but on the edges of sleep,
when vending machines grow in the building creeks with the spansion.
I think about all blueprints, the memory drifts, construction workers
whispering about missing rooms, doors that don't open, or stores
about a hidden executive speakeasy built in some lon ago remodel,
a running jero, mutating with each retelling. No one I'm
sure actually believes in secret floors, except now there's a
key in my possession. It suggests the joke has a
punch line. I don't understand. The black card sits next
to my coffee. As I review that night's locks again,
I tap its embossed numbers. A scrawled the elevator system's records,
reluctant but also faintly excited, each of curiosity. Perhaps I
can help it. Want something anomalous crosses my desk. Some
part of me has to scratch at it. The logs
are raw EXML, mostly batches of time stamps, paired with
elevator car numbers, floor stops, badge I D in a
right column the programme. Four indexes run up from B
two two sixteen, except here and there a rogue of
thirteen blooms in the stream. At first, I dismiss it
as a coincidence database import error. Maybe I isolate a
week's worth of logs, sorting by four stop and D
eight there again, over three different nights, at even intervals,
Elevator A pauses for less than twelve seconds. At thirteen,
always between two zero and two thirteen a m followed
by the expected stop at fourteen or back down to
the lobby. There is no floor twelve point five or
concealed mezzanine. I paged through the buildings as built, blipprints
on the security tablet, floor stacked, and standard corporate monotony.
The only mechanical are labeled Mechanical Service fifteen, but the
logs say the teen with persistent digital certainty. My fingers
are cold, and the urge to look over my shoulder
is palpable. Controls closed circuit TV seem less secure in
the moment, though white angle views reduced by static. As
I tockal floors, I summon elevator cams for the suspect
time stamps. The video is mostly normal, a co worker yawning,
humming through their prone elevators, a leady panel skipping dutifully
from twelve upwards to fourteen, except on those stopping nights
it is a corruption. Video escapes, then jumps forward with
a tick of static, a lost half second, and the
elevator hummy, as if nothing unusual occurred. I rubt sleep
from my eyes. This is more than a prank more
than misnumbered line and scheduling file. I try to rest
the building in logics embrace, perhaps a test, perhaps an
engineer scripting new floor designators a narrow disabling test mode,
still buried in the logs. As a pattern, the elevated
and noting four equals stuttin always corresponds with a badge
swipe from a handful of night shift regulars, some of
whom I haven't seen this past week. My notebooks have
pazard roster takes off names, all familiar. Jake from my
t Taara ocurt I checked the night shift, locked against
the elevator records. Each furnished worker transits the lobby, gets
on the elevator after one thirty a m. Then nothing,
no lob for the elevator, returned into the lobby, no
badge scan. At the exits. My pulse runs away, the
last remnants of sleep. I decide to double check the
video archives. The monitor's glow under my hand is the
whole world. For a moment midweek, Jake, smiling, red bearded
face appears as he badged and through the staff entrance.
At one fort e three a m. Three cameras catches
shuffle toward the elevator, coffee muginto he enters. Minutes pass
but no core responding video of Jake leaving the elevator
returns to the lobby, empty doors, yawning open. I watched
the end of the footage several times, half expecting some
manuglitch to be picked up by the camera's internal audit nothing,
aside from a muted, momentary flutter of static. When the
elevator is supposed to be at its phantom thirteen floor,
the building, with its endless glass and sharp edged geometery,
seems to shrink around me. Routine is losing its ability
to explain. I tell myself it's nothing, surely a sisam error,
a batch process drop in an event, or an overwritten lock.
But my attention stays snagged on that tiny, a reducible
black card next to my culling cup, and on elevator
spikes that interrupt the perfect hum of routine. Three nights later,
the pattern repeats. Elevator A pauses again on thirteen, a
fresh badge eyed epine on the locks. This time it's Torror's.
I begin to suspect that my own tendency to record
every detail may be the very thing driving me to paranoia.
If you look deep enough, even the most secure building
begins to offer up fractures. But the files before me
feel solid and arguable, threaded with a growing sense of inevitability.
On my next night off, I return to the logs
once more, eyes narrowed. Over five weeks, every thirteen encounter
in the system lines up with the bad trail of
a missing employee. In a cascade of unexplained elevator returns,
I check maintenance tickets from the same window. Oddly, none
of the custodial or engineering staff have a scheduled routine
checks for flours above twelve. After one a m at
least none that show up has approved in the workoder system.
My isolation grows the other overnight regulus than out the
friendly circuit of late night Die HOWD, replaced by hollow spaces,
missed esks, often coffee mouks coat straighten and easily of
a rolling chairs. Most rooms retain the evidence of the
recently present laptop chargers, plugged in calendar reminders, blinking on endimonitors,
FONA control rings during the witching ire on caller id HR,
a hard voice, ton mechanically pleasant asks if I happened
to see Tara after midnight on her last shift, they
mention something about an unreturned laptop, voice tightening around the
word concern. The call ends with a vague warning to
document novel observations in chift lock in real time. I
hang up un settled. HR never balls that shift or less.
They have to. The mounting pattern demands structure a road map.
If only for my own peace of mind, I begin
mapping every elevator stop, every bad scan, every unexplained gap,
and come or coverage. A timeline emerges, marked by vanishing
routines in the mechanical efficiency of systems designed to tell
you nothing is wrong. My patient fractures. By the end
of my six shift of tracking. The air feel is
cut with unease, the monitors blink with more static than usual.
Another security guard, someone leaned over from facilities, asks if
I need help. I wave her off. Some part of
me wants to solve this before it becomes official, lest
I be drawn into explanations I can't provide. I study
the elevator systems online console looking for loopholes. Certain commands
allow you to override standard destination locks by using inspection
mode used for fire drolls or moving heavy equipment. If
the elevator is called at exactly two zero, I am
then set to inspection. It should, by logic, ignore all
non physical floor restrictions, but no system should ever let
it pause on floor thirteen when it knows no such
floor exists. The idea takes hold just after one fifty five.
Are ready a service badge and weigh in the twelve
floor corridor, hot hammering with anticipation. The hall is empty,
lined with shadows. The only sound the faint rattle of
the ductruc. I step into the elevator, tapping my over
eye coat. Lights flicker, the familiar panel sequence, whirring through
the pointless options ge B two, one, and so on.
When nothing changes, I swipe again, calling inspection mote, then
hit the twelve button, jabbing a finger nail against the
sleek glass. The elevator hums, calling up, stopping at twelve
without vanfoir, I let the doors close. Then, with a
surge and a nod unsteady lurch, the floor indicator ticks twelve.
Then a single ghostly thirteen flashes so quickly my eyes
almost miss it. The panel never fully lights yet the
elevator groans to a halt, as if impaled mid motion.
An involuntary shiver tears through me. The eight tractual sharpens, silence,
swallows the cab. No movement outside, just the dizzing sense
of weightlessness. Then the door slide open, but nothing at
amiss outside the same pattern of carpeting, the same hallway
that always marks the fourteen floor red runner Bland Marketing signs,
the flickering light that's always an irow from burnout. There
is no door marked thirteen. No discernible shift in architecture.
Had I imagined the whole sequence. I steady myself against
the frame, forced myself to breathe, returning to control my
nerves trash. I tried the mysterious kikot on a dozen
break room badge reads nothing, no beep, no change. Sometimes
the sensor glows a dim, unhelpful orange, but there is
no validation, no open door. After a while, paranoise seeps in,
like water soaking through old brick. The chemeras always facing down.
The length of the hole seems slightly askew. One appears
to track me as I pass, its lens, glistening with
manufactured indifference. The shadow is at the edges of the
control room, flicker when I move, as if the building
itself is adjusting to my attention. I convince myself I'm tired, overwrought,
over caffeinated, of ague for time off. But the sense
of surveillance deepens. Every corner is an eye, every reflection
of potential witness to something in the locks will never explain.
Then a surprise to night. Nutes later, I find myself
face to face with a senior manager well after midnight.
She's younger than I'd expected, dressed in take attire rather
than old guard suits, but her badge bristles with security
clearance in network problems VPN glitches, she mutters. When I
see her, tracing her way through the fourteen fours over annex.
She is quick gathering her things, almost furtive. Did you
need anything from security, ma'am, I ask a voice even
she shakes her head, eyes flicking past me. No, just
needed logs for report temporary glitch. I follow her at
a distance, curiosity peaued to see her peering into the
stawlell doors, running her own badge on the panel, then
glancing at her phone and perhaps at something else, and
seen just off the edge of the light. She passes
through the low be trailing a slim folder she tries
to stow under her arm in her hurry its lips.
She curses, then, not seeing me step forward, leaves it
abandoned as she collates her other papers. I wait until
she's gone, then pick it up inside four plans more
detailed than anything in the maintenance behind her pages marked confidential,
heavily redacted technical notes, and my breath pausing the phrase
service level selminus thirteen. No further explanation, but the annotation
is stark placed between the twelfth and fourteen fours, A
hashed and alcove mark doc sulliary lounge, a memoir with
encounter with lines ones, legacy axis, restricted use, master access
or service level ID only. I snap images on my
phone before returning the folder to Lost and Found. I
work the rest of the shift with the sound of
blood pounding in my ears. The pieces are assembling themselves
around me. A arcs vanished people, official secrecy, and adore that,
to my knowledge, nobody should even believe exists. Second guessing
myself as day lay after the dawn hand off in
the quiet of the utility archive, I paged her old blueprints, yellowed, creased,
annotated with the jagged handwriting of generations of engineers. There
is an oblique note on adducting schematic half muted original
break room thirteen c revised interior plan, though the teen
is circle then cost out, as if to avoid the
very idea of a flow between twelve and fourteen more
badge locks. I review the detailed list of staffish in
master keys, some of them missing aim show up. Jake, Tara,
even Kirt with a card tier for a building wide access,
are ready for their positions. All their last activity clusters
around early a m. And always always a stop at
the ghost floor. Heart heavy, I try to reason through
the mounting evidence, such architecture, such planning, even such secrets.
It all feels impossibly dramatic for a company that worries
about tone of theft and email scams. But it is
also real, far more substantial than rumor. Five weeks end
with boldness, spawn of exhaustion, I slip out of uniform,
pocketing the mysterious their team break room badge. I ride
the elevator to twelve one last time before dawn. The stairwell,
as ever, is chilled by a tongue of cold air
and hidden from camera view. I listen somewhere below the
buzzing of compressors, the kind of hush that suggests sent
in its masking purpose. I run finger tips over blank wall.
The paint is rougher. Here a texture of rectangles, just
faintly discernible by the light of my phone. A badge
reader is slightly different than elsewhere, its surface coated in
a patterner of years, and seen blink stormant in the
shadow between stairs. Swallowing my fear, I raise the stolen
Kik God and press it to the reader. There is
a delay, then a bloom of mute green light, not
the cheerful chirp of most readers, but silent, steady glow.
With effort, the curved door yields to my push, hinges
groaning with fatigue, just billows. The air beyond, colder than
the stairwell, untinged with the town of ancient adhesive, in
something older, something metallic. I glance over my shoulder, heart
racing the question hovers, have I violated an old joke?
Or peel back olaye never meant to be disturbed. The
opening is only a foot and half enough to slip through.
At the threshold, the air seems to vibrate with anticipation,
as if the building itself is waiting to see if
I'll cross over. I hesitate, one hand grip in the door,
the other clutching my phone thum ready on the flashlight.
I can, for the first time in years of working here,
I am genuinely, deeply afraid of what lies past the
margin of floor plans, past the reach of my badge
and my rationality, And for the first time in a
long launch stretch of endless nights, I cannot trust of
the rituals the routines will keep me safe. I crossed
the threshold as quietly as the protest and hinges would allow,
poles in my ears, careful to ez the doors shut
behind me, letting it rest but not latch. The darkness
inside was not total, but it was deep, distowed only
by the thin blade of white from my phone's flask light,
trembling a little in my hand. The beam sweat crossed
ragged carpet, a low and colorless pile whose pattern was
neither current nor retro, just as guarded as if someone
had borrowed it from a relic of the nineteen eighties.
A faint track, a path worn by years of pacing,
shoes stitched the dust in front of me. I paused,
letting the light in my breathing settle, waiting for the
sense of boundary to fade. My skin prickled with the cold,
a different cold than the twelve floor drafted, sharp and chemical.
It wasn't good air stagnant, almost sire. The sense of
size was difficult to gauge. My light seemed to get
eaten by dart as faster than it shit. The flastlight
small power, vanishing a few feet from the toe of
my boot. I tried to orient myself any logic, and
in north East all I had was the sound of nothing.
I took four steps, cautious, feeling for the moment my
leaf at might knock against dat chairs of forgotten furniture. Instead,
the light hit a corner cheap break room tables. Their
legs splayed a monusque, as if someone had dragged it
in it. Anger chairs ringed the walls silent, their seat
cracked in the patterns of lawn absence and sudden use.
Against the far wall, a vending machine stooped in disgrace
as glass age dimmed, A looping logo for a diffunct
color company, faintly visible underground under the machine calm. Another sound, small, irregular,
perhaps the sigh of the HVAC, perhaps something else. I
listened more closely, my attention flicked to the left. Or
fluorescent lighting at least a dozen years out of date,
hanin off kelterictingles from a drop ceiling. Some tubes blinked
life there like greenish and a little sick, barely illuminating.
A series of wall mounted security monitors clustered in a
jury riefed to rate, clearly scavenged from different ears. The
depth of the room beyond the monitors was impossible to judge.
My steps kept drafting dust up over my shoes, but
prints clear and absurdly bright compared to the gray and
broken cross that lay everywhere else. The room's design was
familiar in only the most generic quay, A refrigerated the
kind with the handle split at the top, A water
crooler that looked faintly yellowed and dry, or countercrowded with
smashed mugs, But the accreted layer of years, or at
least the illusion of them, warped. The edges of every
object made everything look faded twice over. I tried the
fridge door jitterate half way, expecting some child as pranka,
blast of cold pack hair or a plastic spider. It
yielded with a reluctant crack, smelling only of old cool
and a mold empty shelves except for in an open
kin of soup. Its label cled like a burn flag.
The water cooler dispenser moved at my touch, rocking slightly hollow.
I scanned the walls, hunting for further clues. The fluorescent
tubes over the monitors gave just enough light for me
to read some of the sheets stuck with yellow and
tape beneath them, handred and in a spidery pen. Clean
up after use nineteen ninety two out of order maintenance scheduled.
I leave the break room as he found it. Most
odd was a tight sheet corners briddle reading level of
thirteen staff use only, do not prot door. Its font
was the sort used by light min as eighties typewriters.
A shiver round threw me not of coal, but of
the sense of time immerred. All my years in building
new doors, new textpecs card reader over holes for the
last decade and here behind eligible credentials lay a room
that belonged to no era at all. The vending machines
keep it at half. The numbers worn probably by board
employees decades gone, displayed a message it's back at I'll see,
blinking the phrase welcome staff. In monospace, the wall of
monitors buzzed at a low frequency. Some screens lost to static,
others hazy but live, showing grainy off angle views. A
stairbell landing with no identifying marks. A cube field of
gray paneling and flickering computer screens. A break room I
didn't recognize, but with a brassy wall clock stuck at two.
Seven hands are moving, dust pulled at the bottom rim
an acrid odor. Pinch my nose, at my feet. A
tangled pile of lineyards and security badges. Lay as are
dropped in a hurry. Most were faded at the edges,
the id photos blurred by age. Their name's not immediately familiar.
A crouch picking up a badge by instinct. No logo,
just a number of thirteen twenty two T fissure systems.
Another thirteen forty seven K more accounts below the heaps
out a stack of dog eared papers covered with frantic scroll.
I picked one up, hands now shaking out. Try no windows,
no way out, elevators, skips, stairs, loop locked in. If
anyone finds this not tried to leave. When the lights
flickered to him. Behind me, a sophametallic clung, a shift
of something at the edge of darkness, perhaps a chair sliding,
maybe just metal settling. I spawn the phone beams, spas
me across the dirty floor, hot suddenly a metrope. Nothing moved,
the door was still a jar, behind me by a sliver.
I swallowed. My skin prickled with the urge to rawn,
but something stronger kept me rooted to maybe a stubborness,
like the kind that had driven generations to poke at
to mark switches and odd glitches. Or maybe I just
needed an answer. I tracked the monitors, stepping forward. Each
flickered through alternating angles, a patrick of abandoned looking spaces,
and another stay will wear for a second, I could
have sworn. I glimpsed a backpack slumped against a riser,
and then another shot, looking directly at a conference table,
But the table was covered in paperwork, all but impossible
to focus, like an after image. Half glimpsed, then lost
as the feet shimmered with interference. A monitor at the
end marked a bree k thirteen C A moon and
clumsy digital text eliminated part of the very room. I
stood in the vending corner and the empty chairs. I
saw my ouncel wet, tiny and other focus shifting between flickers.
I half laughed, uncertain, am I on every monitor? Is
this just another prank? An elaborate old Halloween? Sat up
my eyes, waded the coal. The milky reel enough, and
the air didn't feel like it had circulated for months.
Tiny details caught me. A chewed pencil bit and cleaned through,
rolled up to the edge of a vent. A ziplocked
bag of stale cereal water bottles, half emptied, scattered among
the badges. A notepad on a table one corner, badly
scorched where someone had torn off page after page. The
cover read simply shift note kurt. I flipped a page,
feeling the indentations left by harsh agitated writing. Must not sleep,
light blink sequals, door shuffle, lost track of time at
the rest, trailed off in what looked like a scratched
attempt to keep writing after the pen drite up beneath
the note, but waited a single primitive voice recorder tape
based its surface, tacky battery cover missing. I hesitated, then
press play at first only static, then a voice, a
man's horse, and urgent. In forty eight hours by my watch,
always won't a line. Can hear someone else moving A think,
but doors keep changing. Don't trust the elevator. If you
hear the cleaning crew, do not go with them. They
don't sound right. A muffle thumb, then further static. In
my periphery, light flickered on a monitor, movement in a corridor,
someone's shadow crossing. My mind raced at I triggered a
motion detected by entering. I stood motionless, training my ear
for footsteps, for even a trace of breath, not my own.
The silence pressed back, broken only by the occasional rattle
of the ceiling. The ancient settling grown as the building
expanded or contracted against the cold. I tested the vending machine,
punching a random button out of frustration or desperation. Nothing happened.
The dog clunk echoed, as if I trigger motion deep
in the walls. Had any one been in here? Since?
These note paths, these badges. These water bottles had been
left on the wall above the badges. Almost lost in
the general clotter was a hand drawn map lines as
much guesswork and panic as cartography, always liaping, doors marked
with excess at the mate's bottom, jagged words, this is
not all viighty. Someone, perhaps Kurt, perhaps one of the others,
had tried to make sense of the space. Arrows darted
around corners, some tracing back on themselves, notes about wrong turns,
a door to nowhere, and stairwell sets. My breath clouded
in front of me. I hadn't noticed at first, but
the temperature here was dropping. Was it the a track
or insulation never repaired. I started the ceiling, expecting to
glimpse duct work, but it was sealed tight. Pave a
stain tiles pressed to get the safe for a single panel,
as key as if some one had once forced their
way into the coal space. I moved toward an inner
door at the side of the room, steel handle worn
to a dull shine. Letters above laking paint nearly erasedt
reet a lounge. My hand hesitated at the knob be
yond a soft tapping, again irregular, insistent, not mechanical, flesh
or maybe not. I pressed my ear to the door,
Faint movements, some one breathing or draft. I let my
own breath out, slowly, careful not to fog the panel,
heart beating in my throat. I twisted the handle the
door ground as it opened, swinging just far enough to
let me peer in. It was another room, slightly smaller,
dominated by a bathed couch and a shelf lined with
old binders. The color faded to uniform gray. Paper spilled
off the seat, and the single lamp glowed from one corner,
powered by a wy threaded through a hole in the wall,
its sores impossible to see. Something darted across my field
of vision. I recoiled, catching only a blur human, I thought,
or close to it, Pale and quick, it ducked behind
the couch. My chest hammered for a moment, I let
the urge to flee, rage in my veins. Then a sound,
a low scrape whisper, just over the edge of hearing
a help. I moved into the room, keeping my hands visible,
voice trembling, be firm. Who's there? No answer? At first,
Rustling behind the couch, I waited, refusing to advance. The
sickly lamp burn, matching the cold sweat breaking on my
galp Slowly, I had rose, hair tangled, features gaunt, but
unmistakably impossibly at Jake's. His eyes squinted against the light,
skin pale enough to seem unreal. I tried to keep
the shock off my face. Jake for mighty, He frowned,
as if dredging the name from deep under water. You
shouldn't be here, he stammered, voiced raspy, and murred. What
is this place? I asked, soften now. He nodded at
the ceiling at The monitor is visible on the far wall.
It doesn't let you go if you badge in wrong,
if the door lets you, don't take the elevator, don't
follow the lights. Are you the only one here? I asked.
Jake just shook his head, finger pressed her lips as
darting sideways, as if expecting interruption. He shrank against the cushions,
knees drawn up. Sometimes I hear others. Sometimes they sound
like people, Sometimes they don't. I realized my hand was
still gripping the latine breakroom badge so tightly the plastic
cut into my palm. Behind me, A dull rhyming thump agan,
perhaps the mechanical hobbied of the building, perhaps someone or
something else trying to find a way in In the
dusty lamp light. Jake's face was half in real, but
the pleading in his voice was not. You have to go,
he whispered. If it knows you're looking, it finds ways
to keep you here. That's what happened through he trailed off.
I backed away toward the open door, mind spinning, trying
to recapture logic, my safe scaffolding of routine, but it
all fell away. In the not quite silence, the thumping stopped.
I looked at Jake, trapped and cowed by failure, and
made myself a silent promise. I would get out, and
if I could, I would get him out to I
turned and slipped back through the break room, passed the
heap of badges, passed the burnt notepad and the humming monitors,
back to the door I'd left, slightly ajar reres, shallow,
feeling watched by the screens, by whatever surveillance this place
still possessed. I slipped out, letting the door sail almost
noiselessly behind me. Whatever this was, I had stepped on
to a path from which there might be no easy return,
And as I leaned my back against the cool stairwell wall,
the thirteen break room badge pressed to my chest, I
knew that, for the first time in all my years,
I was in the building's domain, not my own. The
stairwell seemed to inhale with me. As I pressed my
back against its wall and listened for pursuit. There was
no sound to not Jake's ragged breathing, not the scrape
of that old couch, no footsteps on tire. My pulse
thudded just beneath my collar. The weight of what I
just witnessed to Jake faded in ferle This locked away
full burily had time to register every instinct, screened to
get as far up or down the stairs as possible,
returned to ground level and call for help, But discipline
that all night guard's habit rained and panic. I forced
slow breaths and peered up at the smear metal door,
letting the details imprint themselves. Worn badge reader paint chipped
along the frame, a scuff mark made by a right
heel always turning against the jam. None of this had
appeared on any maintenance lock. It wasn't supposed to be
here at all. I stepped down a level, shoes whispering,
and the rubber trades my funds light toned as low
as possible as some camera human or otherwise see. The
stairwall was narrow, not the wide and well kept passageways
of public floors, but tight utility access lines of condor
crowding to corners overhead. My badge, a harmless shield for years,
suddenly felt hot in my pocket, as if carrying it,
resmarking me for follow up investigation. On impulse, I pressed
myself into shadow and pulled out the confiscated folder I
had returned doll at all lost and fanned, but never
actually surrendered to Coppet dulcea of what the manager had
left behind. I thumbed through grainy floor plans highlighted in yellow,
the redacted security memos, and the ne legacy Pusnell Retentionness
ALMNIS thirteen must remain isolated. All exceptions reviewed monthly. My
leg bounced with nervous energy monthly reviews for a flaw
never agnoited, a breakroom never discussed, and a cluster of
people who disappeared from my blue lit world. I needed
proof more than screen grabs and anxious droodles in my notebook.
Before I left the stairwell, I composed myself in snap
cover photos on my phone. The badge reader of the door,
the ruined the team break room label in the geek
out the cryptic memos from the folder. I send Lora's
versions to my own cloud drive careful. I didn't know
who monitored network activity, but Cheris Corp. Employed people more
paranoid than me. Steadying myself, I risked opening the stairwell
door to the fourteenth floor, the same hallway, unfrilled, sterile
and humming fake whiff of ammonia. At the junction, I
paused at the camera mounted HIH above the door. It
red like gloads Daddy. I passed beneath, projecting calm, reviewing
my alibi. Some unrwund the feed, just a security guard
checking maintenance, responding to an alarm. Nothing to see. I
drifted to an empty conference room, ducking inside and double
checking that its glossed doors were a pick with their
blinds row. My thoughts tumbled. Jake had spoken of the
floor as a trap, and now I wondered how many
others had stumbled here, thinking themselves clever or just unlucky.
The pile of badges the burn note, but evidence of
people deposited here because they drawn too much scrutiny or
known too much, or perhaps merely because some administrative threshold
had flagged them at the wrong time, and no auxiliary
break room, no uncirculated memos for the night. Answers tumbled
in my mind, But so did the questions who curated
the badge access, who watched the feed in that side
room with the monitors stitched together, blank, grainy views of
somewhere and some one else's despair. Most of all, what
was buried behind those redactive lines and cryptic directives? And
was it personal? Now that I trespassed ac of control?
Hands trembling from cold, I a lie to myself. I
checked the bad's locks leading up to my trip below.
My badge now reported a new level of service level thirteen.
It hucked into the logs at two seventeen a m.
Right alongside that same suite of logs for Tart, Jake
and others who never left the system had noticed me
as an anomaly. My former invisibility had vanished the instant
my curiosity tipped into action. A dread certainty pulled in
my stomach. It would not go unoticed for long. I
found the land line, picked it up and dialed the
only number I knew for each other, one used for
overnight emergencies. No answer, only voicemail. The beet bridle in
my ear. I hesitated, then hung up without speaking, not
wanting my own voice on a record I couldn't control.
The minutes crawled by, I alternated between pacing control and
scrutinizing the screens. There were odd flock as, feels of
movement just at the periphery, but never where I could
pin them down. In one camera view, a janitor's cart
stood just outside the elevator, but no one reached to
push it away. Another angle showed the elevator's door stuttering
on thirteen, in a frame lost to static. When the
shift ended, I left nothing to chance. I stayed late,
clearing desktop logs and hiding my scribbled note put an
event behind a security desk behind a false panel no
one but facilities would discover. I left the building through
the main entrance, keikot press flat to my pumps so
the scanner wouldn't read it. By accident. As I emerged
into the chill dawn, instinct kept me from looking back.
I'd always dismissed the cities quiet as comforting, but now,
for the first time, the silence seemed to threaten rather
than rear, sheer, like a mouth waiting to swallow me
if I turned the wrong way. Ires later or sleeper
fused to come. My mind upon old badge numbers, static
choked voices, the hollow eyes of Jakin, that impossible lounge restless.
I returned to the evidence on my phone. All the
images had uploaded as planned, except the ones showing the
stairwell badge reader. Those files were corrupted, flashing black and
white bars instead of showing the proper stickered rectangle. The
memo images, however, were intact. The legacy axis restricted all
locks reviewed monthly compliance required. It was only late afternoon
when my phone vibrated with an email alert. No sender,
just a subject mandatory administrative leave effective immediately terrorst facility security.
The body was a polite dismissal, no signature. My building badge,
according to the message, was already deactivated. I shut off
the phone, pulled the battery, not trusting airplane mode. I
closed the blinds, sat against the wall and waited for
something to happen and knock, a phone call, an email
from a real person. Nothing came. I imagined what Jake's
days had been like before the break, small routines, coffee favorites,
night rounds and Coker banter, the sudden switch, the elevator
stopping entranced, or a badge pin waking the system's attention.
How long had he waited to be found? How many
others were living on that edge? Week after Amus tw
mild week there would be no record, no next of kinnotices,
just vanished names in the silent, cycling anguish under flickering
fluorescent lights. I returned to Churston the only way. I
cut through records on nine forums LinkedIn searches. No sign
of tar occur. Jake's social free were abandoned months ago,
Birthday messages from relatives unreturned. Even the company directory quietly
eliminated their names, resumes, prior job titles. Their absence was
all that marked them out, drip drip of memory, edited
by silence. The next night was harder. I stared at
the Fatine break room kikard, rubbing the embossed numbers until
they left in imprint in my skin, dredd thickened. I
found myself standing at my front window, convinced that a
car idling two floors below was watching me, its head
lumps fixed. I ducked from view, a rookie mistake, then
caught myself and tried to steady my breathing. Rationality demanded more,
Ever andce paranoise, said ron, but I still hadn't found closure.
Only Escalatian sleep finally found me around dawn, but it
was a shallow, fractured rests crowded with dreams. I was
always walking the Churi's corridors, only to have the wall shift,
the stairwells turn into loops, no door. Returning to the
lobby in the dream, faces called out dike tra voices echoing,
don't bitge in at night, don't follow the red light.
I awoke with a plan. Fear was closing in. Yes,
but so was certainty. The company wouldn't risk exposure. They
would want plausible deniability in silence. If the thirteen break
room was an old and traceable piece of legacy infrastructure,
a system for casting out the inconvenient, they hare to
maintain it quietly, but absolutely, I would not stay quiet.
I printed copies of my photos to hard copy and
mailed them to myself, a cousin, and a friend who
owed me a favor. I wrote a note, cryptic but
clear that if I vanished, it was not an accident.
And then I began making phone calls. All went unanswered
or routed to generic mail boxes. At noon, and knock
at my door startled me awake from a nap I
hadn't realized i'd taken. I opened it to find two people,
one in a company branded facility's windbreaker, the other older,
with a badge identifying him only as corporate security visitor.
Neither introduced themselves by name. They were courteous, if a
little too rehearsed. We're following up about some anomalies on
your last shift. The wind breaker explained a few system
errors were obligated to review in person, but I don't
have access to those files. Allied arms folded across my chest,
he smiled, non committal. Building's policy standard review after take
clitches in critical infrastructure. Your badge was decommissioned for now,
just so sopee. The older one never looked at me,
but scanned the apartment his eyes resting briefly on the
package of printed images, then moving elsewhere. We'd like to
collect your security notebooks in any company, devices, said the
first one. I feigned confusion, pointing out I'd left my
look book at work, which wasn't true. I nodded to
the desk by the door, inviting them to see for
themselves with forced patients, the rifle through a folder of
olver seats, ignoring the pile of junk mail, then handed
me a sheet my official voluntary separation agreement, complete with
a polite nondisclosure lying near the bottom sign here the
Windbreaker's aid for hr You're no longer responsible for any
hourly incidences of this morning A cold certainty to cold.
I'd been marked. I was not staff any more. When
they left, a breeze hit chilled by some malfunctioning vent,
the doors latch clicked as if by itself. I noticed,
as I gathered up the contract to lock in the
safe that one of the visitors had pocketed a kikoat
I had left on the side table, a swap perhaps,
or just caution. I spent the afternoon in the next
reading the documents i'd smuggled at sitting In the half dark,
the story became clearer. Their Service Level thirteen designation dated
from the early nineties, part of a so called behavioral
risk response, an internal project with bland corporate euphemism hiding
its intention. There were pages titled personnel realignment protocol, breakroom thirteen,
checklists for access denial, even a blurry a caption polaroid
of a man in a blazer staring toward a fixed
bright light. The annotations grew more cryptic the deeper I
read broom alignment procedure maintained electromagnetic isolation monitor for unsanctioned returns.
Unsanctioned returns. How many ever made it out? I spent
IROs trying to reconstruct time lines, names cross referenced in
old newsletters, EMIL archives, staff directories from years past. It
was enough to make out a mournful pattern of slow
culling of outliers, each followed by vacant, faceless slot left behind.
Two days after my forced leave, I noticed the restlesses
that had always accompanied unsolved mysteries was replaced by an
almost expectant dread. In the hush before evening, the feeling
returned of being watched, as if woven into the silence.
I saw in the bathroom mirror, a faint starter in
my reflection, a lag between my own movement and the image.
Brief but chilling. It looked for half a heartbeat, like
the glitch in the elevator camera, skipping frames and returning
me a stranger. My rational side rebelled, and yet the
fandom make behind my eyes lingered through the weak. I
dreamed again of the Breckkerm's blue shadows, tape recorders crying
out warnings, bags of hue, pencils, curtsburned notepad heavy in
my chest. Sometimes I heard muffled by the hum of
my decade old refrigerator, the same mechanistic drone i'd come
to associate with sleepless two zero and essen the building
of rorescent undercurrent with the human edge. Sleep did not help.
I woke before dawn, nurse and spully if there was
a window to uncover more before I became fully invisible.
It was shrinking. I left my building and crossed the
city to a neighborhood coffee shop I chosen for its
lack of security cameras. The manager of part time philosophy
student had met in passing didn't ask why I was there.
At six siery m hunched over a laptop with a
stack of batted notes. I plugged in, created an encrypted drive,
and began writing everything I knew, dates, spaces, badge logs,
what Jake had taught me in the half light. I
added the names from the pile of badges, the memos,
hinting at legacy of retention, even the camera corks and
static in the logs as far back as I could remember.
When I left the gray Sedan Idol near the curb,
tail pips sending up a stream of white exhaust, I
kept walking, not making eye contact. Two streets over, my
phone buzzed in my pocket. A new email had slipped
through my junk fild. The subject re employee exit brief Survey.
It looked official, but the body was blank, safe for
one line A question. I us still in possession of
property marked break room thirteen, no signature, no company logo.
I thought of the key kout at home, the one
that pulsed with versigual and ease every time I brushed
near it to my desk drawer. I deleted the message,
but that did nothing to erase the worry the city
for all its bustle felt. Then, crossing the avenue, I
saw a woman in a cherish leonard step behind a newspaper,
kisk calm. When I turned the corner, someone who had
once gone missing, or just another exhausted drone. There was
an unreality to the morning, bright with new sun but
still cold with threat. Back up my apartment, I sorted
through old past stops and letters for more attachments, but
nothing further arrived, no contacts, no further attempts at collection.
It was as if by removing me from the shift's
schedule and taking my badge, the corporation expected the well
to correct itself, to erase my presence entirely. The dreams, however,
did not subside. Each night I cycled through the same
distress and imagery, shuddering stairwells, flickering lights, breay crimsone impossibly
long and arrow, Jake's face appearing and vanishing in the corners.
Once I dreamt of the vending machine, its display now
replaced by my own employee number, Pulsey and green. For
weeks I lived suspended, neither in nor out of the
world i'd known, adrift from Serift's routines, yet still glued
to the old system logs had downloaded. Some days I'd
receive voicemail's unknown collar, one ring, then silence, sometimes attacks
half a word long safe door. On an overcast afternoon,
three weeks after my last shift, I dared to Emil Zielein,
one of the few night janitors who might know anything.
I kept it casual, asking after her and the stray
cast she always fared in the garage. No reply, not
even a bounce back. A week later, a staff profile
vanished from Cheris's public Lincoln. The world at side moved on,
but I was haunted by the echo, by the knowledge
that others must advise to see these patterns. Fears to map.
I combed through secure forms, scanning for a post about
disappearing floors late night, badg glitches, stuck elevators, but the
stores were always too vague, too quickly deleted, the posters
drift in a way before anyone could follow up. I
tried calling families. Jake's brother listed in a public record search.
His voice mail was full. Taro's mother answered soft voice,
but firm, she's on sabbatical. We prefer not to talk.
It really dissolved as the weeks beled by I cataloged
every loose end. Once the story connected in my head
and network of vanished night staff, not only at Cherist,
but peering scattered news clippings from competitors across the city.
Night watchmen found missing out to elevate a malfunction that
he analyst fails to return home. Companies with large downtown
buildings similar security, similar errors in the reporting of flows.
It was never the day people, not the highly visible,
always the invisible glue guards. It t janitors. For a while,
I considered writing it all out, sending it to a journalist,
or publishing it online, but even the drafts had a
wave of clutching word files over it and image's returning
error messages. I trusted only my analog notes. The Scotch
fragments had hidden Kurt's desperate handwriting the old blueprints. Still,
as time passed, I found myself wondering if my memories
were bleeding into dreams, or if the dreams were swallowing reality.
It changed one evening, when half awake in my silent apartment,
I noticed the faintest roy glow on my bedroom wall.
I'd never installed an alarm there, creeping closer, I found
it coming from a spot beneath the dresser, an early
d dull but pulsing marking of rectangle and plastic embedded
into the wood. It was the shape of puffect match
for Badge reader, the kind I'd seen installed on as
L minus thirteen. I stared, hot, pounding for mebe an
ere the glow pulse faintly once per second. My phone
refused to photograph it. The image only showed am a
broken darkness where it glimmered. Even in full darkness. That
single red eye watched me as if in a trance.
I reached for the bottom floor. There was no power's horse,
no wiring. I pressed my their team break room caught
to the glowing space, sick with fear, knowing what I'd done.
The light flick had green for a moment, then as
quickly as it had come, it winked out. My room
was plunged into silence except for anl not silence, not
quite the faint, u mistakable homopluorescent bulbs vibrating at the
age of hearing rose under my floor. I felt the
rhythm in my bones, a drone that could only belong
to one place. I jolted awake, not long after if
awake meant anything at all. My mind stutted over the
boundary between sleep and memory, replaying a tingling static in
my mirror, the vague after image, that light behind my movement.
At two zero a M. I fumbled for the bad
still on my desk, still chilled, my phone vibrated, no collar,
I d just a single line text, welcome back. Two
zero a M. I peered at the clock one fifty eight.
The badge readers after image hovered by the side of
my bedol wavering red glow. I couldn't touch, couldn't photograph.
My breath was ragged at every part of me, longing
for nothing more than to run, to leave the building
and its ghost floors and hidden traps behind forever. Yet
I understood now that escape was not just a matter
of walking out a door. It was a matter of
unwinding a story too tightly wound around the city's bones,
a story as old a security itself, as corporate pernoia,
as night itself. At two zero a m. Precisely, the
light faded, fluorescent humbers within the walls then retreated. I
was alone, once again, alone except for the knowledge the
badge lay called in my grip, its fall number, reflecting
the shadow language of secrets, the architecture of erasure, the
persistence of memory in a building that never slept. In
the days that followed a return to hollow routine, the
company silence did not let up. My image never quite
matched me. In the mirror. I watched for the red
glow each night, always relieved when it did not reappear,
always unsettled by what it meant about prisons and absence.
Months went by. Sometimes in crowds, I saw people in
faded chairsh lanyards, looking over their shoulders, their eyes drawn
to the invisible spaces between elevators. I never approached them.
An newariness grown in the city's hut. One evening, an
envelope arrived, blank except for hand drawn out line of
the brickroomb badge and a single phrase, still here, watch
your floors. No return address. The postmark blurred. A deep
truth settled into me. Then, whatever how Jake and did others,
whatever lived in the scenes between floors, found its own
ways to survive, to watch, to remember. The building's memory
was a living thing, insatiable, humming, indifferent. In the quietest hours,
when city lights flickered across drawn blinds in the wild
trunk to the size of my own breath. I found
myself listening for the hum, slipping the badge from its
hiding place, I wondered, as all seekers do, whether the
trap sprung for one could ever fully close. After being
found sleep did not come easily. When it did, I
found myself walking gray, always once again, always nearing a
door with no number, always holding a card and Boss
thirteen in my sweating fist, forever poise at the turning point,
waiting for the indicator to flicker, of the old machine
to whine, and the world once again to park for
the vanished. And if in the day's realness I thought
myself safe, the smallest details belied me. A drifting scrap
of corporate carpet, a statict trichll. At two seven a m.
The faint, hollow sound of a distant and seen vending
machine cycling changed that no one ever comes to collect.
But the vending machine wasn't the only thing I heard
that night, the last time I truly slept, there was
another sound gradually emerging from the churn of my uneasy dream,
aslow wet scraping, as if some heavy object was being
dragged across anolium, just out of my side. My feet moved,
and dream logic carrying me down corridors that twisted perversely
with each step, glass walls warping, the carpet changing from
burgundy to slate to the speckled dust choked pat and
I had seen non service level thirteen office chairs bungently
on their own. Monitors displayed empty loggins and badge times,
and overhead the fluorescent lights trembled with a staf drunk
so deep I felt it behind my teeth. And then
I saw Jake again, diminish but waiting, sitting cross like
it in the thread berck couch in that impossible lounge.
His skin was pale. I suck it, sunken into darkness,
but his mouth moved in a pattern I recognized only
after a moment. He was typing invisible lines in the air.
A tape recorder spun on the floor beside him, its
seat and furling, and the broken, looping voice pressed through
my head, not through my ears. Watch the doors. Don't
trust the bat. Nothing leaves everything files away. Eventually I
reached out to him, wanting to warrant, to confess to apologize,
but he did not acknowledge me. Instead, he held out
a badge like mine. The number was wrung, not his
nor mine, but a string of numerals that meant nothing
until I realized it was my home address. My hand recoiled,
and the lights flared to false summrise, colorless and sharp.
Thus scraping noise returned closer now, and I wheeled around
in the dream hallway, every part of my body screaming
for exit, even as I knew there was none. A door,
flat open marked break room thirteen, and I hurtled toward it.
As I passed the threshold, all sun cut away abruptly,
and I woke to darkness. Slick was sweat, my fiscal
tight round bed sheets, finger nails, taking into my palms.
I gathered myself, breathing hard, the world around me steady,
but even in the silence, that hump persisted, a low
but real I sat up, shaky, and glimpsed in a
muted light from the street, the edge of the plastic
badge winking, where caught a glint from a distant street lamp.
I tried to go about my routine's coffee, running water,
news and deep breasts but the sense of pursuit trailed
me all morning. At noon, my phone vibrated unremarkable number,
though not one I recognized. Against my better judgment, I
picked up. There was a click than the flat line
of someone waiting. Hullo, no response, this is I stopped,
not willing to give my name. After a pause, a
male voice clipped and called came through. You're not to
discuss your previous employment, events, of your shift or cheerish property.
You will be monitored for compliance with the terms you signed. Silence, Then,
almost as an afterthought, a whisper, brittle at the edge
of patience. Do you not hampt to re enter the premises?
Before I could answer, call dropped. I stared at the phone,
willing it to ring again, but it did not. I
felt a prickling alumsscalp the tacit acknowledgment that I was
being watched by real and perhaps more abstract eyes. That evening,
while I was nursing a cup of tea, another message
arrived by currier and branded hand delivered. I examined the envelope.
Inside was a small, old fashioned audio cassette, the label
blank except for the word listen. I no longer had
a player, the ancient device from service level thirteen. The
one night handled in the lounge replayed in my mind.
After some hesitation, I messaged a friend who ran an
indie music shop a few blocks away. God a working
tape deck. I asked, need to hear something unlock. We
met after closing eyres. The shop's walls were lined with
all manner of electronics clutter, but amid the junk, he
produced a portable tape deck, battery, compartment tape chap. He
didn't ask questions when I slaid the cassette in place.
He'd seen dark a stuff traded among collectors, and he
understood the unspoken rules of city nights. I pressed play
mouth dry at first, just his sole tape and spooled
on by time. Then a tremble of office noise, the
murmur of distant printers, a pot of coffee bubbling, A voice,
female and weary, filtered through static. If anybody finds this,
it means you had access, or maybe you made access. Pause.
Elevator only works a set times. If you badge after two,
you'll never leave. Don't trust the exits, don't trust anybody
in management. We thought it was a safety protocol, but
it's not something changed in the system when they upgraded security.
After the fire, they left us. We watched for weeks
as the badge logs shuffle, the floors receded, the screens fuzzed,
until faces just stopped. The purring hiss again, someone's breath
close to the mic, then that same code of phrase,
nothing leaves everything files away. Eventually the tape clicked off.
My friend regarded me with polite bewilderment as I removed
the cassette and pocketed it. You okay, he asked, saw
something strange at work? I said, don't worry about it,
but he frowned. The lookal lingering after me as I left,
as though he half expected me to vanish before reaching
the curb. Back home, sleep was impossible. That phrase returned
to me again and again, Everything files away. Eventually. I
tried to occupy myself with anything else, movies, reading, even
organizing my kitchen drawers, but the sound of filing, metallic
and repetitive, pressed into my thoughts. I considered seeking out
old colleagues, finding Curt was eleanor even Jake's family, but
something in the warning stopped me cold, not just fearful myself,
but a sudden intuitive sense anyone pulled into this would
be in danger too. One night, as I was staring
at the city lights, tracing the grid of offices, my
computer monitor blinked to pop up, appeared out of nowhere,
then vanished. I double checked my brows' history, ran scans
from malware, nothing, But then deep in my download folder
I found a new file. It was crudely titled as
al thirteene Look Summer t x D furious and trapid.
I opened it. Inside were lines on lines of badge logs,
a list of names with entries beside a floor marked
service level thirteen. The spreadsheet ran back decades, and the
last few entries bore from million names Jacobar A TI
tore database K two facilities, then my own, stamped with
the precise time I triggered the elevator override. My badge
had not own recorded my visit, but had been added
to this chain of vanished people, as if the system
had cleaned me. However, briefly, at the bottom of the list,
one line was highlighted with a pulse, and carrot returned
query status unresolved foul pending pulse racing. I dragged the
file on to thumb drive and plugged my machine. I
realized how little power I had to fight this. Where
my pride and security and order had given me confidence,
now there was only powerlessness, A dull, persistent fear that
what had been opened could never entirely be closed. I
knock at my door, startled me. It was nearly three
zero eh ma'em adrenaline surge. I moved quietly, peering through
the peep hole on the other side. Nothing but the
dim fame of the hallway. Nobody visible, just the echo
of a door shutting softly elsewhere down the hall. But
I saw a foot level, a new envelope, thicker than
the last. I waited a full two minutes, maybe more,
before stooping to collect it. My hand shook. Inside was
a single sheet Your status is still in review. Await
further instructions. No signature, no logo, nothing but those type flatters,
the kind use by the old chiff memos in it.
Some minutes thirteen. The paper rattled as I folded it.
I'd intuition told me, But I had the sense that
hiding was feudile, mixing fatigue in dread. I called a
distant acquaintance who occasionally worked as a facility's temperatureist competitor
across town. We spoke quietly. You ever had problems with
your badge at night? I asked, silence, a shuffling breath.
You mean like losing time or floors not matching up.
I nearly dropped the phone exactly that. Did you ever?
Did you ever hear about a floor between twelve and fourteen?
There was a short laugh, but it was humorless. Plenty
of places skip thirteen, but sometimes you see the elevator
blink at the wrong time. My friend quite after, he
said he spent an hour in a stairwell and the
floors kept looping. They let him go, told him he
violated pritt call. He nerved places like these gut roots,
the old stuff buried in the building, patched over but
not gone. We said no more, both hearing the risk
in our voices. That was the first time I truly
believed this wasn't just your a's secret. Something endemic to
a greater whip of corporate architectures, a system designed to
prone those who didn't comply or who saw too much
repair ropst over decades left as a by bas subroutine,
but never deleted. There would be others like me. The
stories erased, edited or distorted into rumors in lost documentation.
In the following weeks, emails trickled and from what I
could only assume were similar outcast instructions, half spelled in
corporate shorthand, warnings to avoid public complaints, snifts of log data,
images of Badge readers embedded in unlikely places, basement storage units,
bandoned skyways. Sometimes there were notes scribbled on receipts scanned
and email from anonymous accounts. Most never included names, just
badge numbers of the years when they'd last seen, some
like glimmer through a normal window. Each contact was brief,
as if writing even a single email risk being found.
Many alluded to monitoring how the cameras kept moving, how
the badge sweats still registered at thought intervals months after
they had left their positions. The more stories they gathered,
the clearer the picture became a collective of vanished lives,
nudged from their routines into an invisible holding pen. Condemned
to drift in corporate purgatory, must just plead it, don't
let anyone else badge in and always don't trust the elevators,
never follow the light. I spent my next days preparing
for something, though I could not say what. I backed
up my remaining files to discs, I hid in different locations.
I rehearsed what little I might say to reporter if
ever risked telling the story in person. But in every attempt,
my courage followed. Each time I tried to reach out,
something intervened the email bounce, the call redirected their count clothes.
The badge itself never left its drawer. Still at odd eyes,
I'd remove it and study its surface, reading the embossed
thirteen and the bland and specific break room, tracing the
edges as if I might find some secret catch or
hidden message. The number felt heavy each night. Then one Wednesday,
long past midnight, a power flicker swept the building. The
digital clock on my stoved up erset, the fridge ground
to halt for a fraction of a second, and in
the darkness I heard the drone of fluorescent lights, impossibly
unmistakably emanating from below my feet, my heart in my throat,
I walked barefoot, cross called anoleum, back to my bedroom,
where the badge sat as I approached the dresser, I
saw the faintous ghost of a green glow there and
then gone, as though a card reader had winked at
me from beneath the wood. I couldn't ignore it any longer.
I dressed, quickly, pocketing the badge, a flashlight, the thumb
drive of the logs, and a battered old walkie I
had kept from my years in security. I told myself
that going back was foolish, that returning to chairs was
both impossible and would be met with resistance or worse.
But the need for completion, a burned down sense of
unfinished business, was stronger than dread. I made my way
across the city, skirting the well lit main streets. The
corporate tower loaned up of the grid, indifferent, as always,
multi story blank gaze, both implacable and inviting. The entrance
lights washed the sidewalk, and I waited in the alley,
watching for movement. There were no security guards, nobody at
the front desk now after midnight, just the echo of
empty lobby footsteps and the electronic pulse of barged doors.
Every internal entrance was control, but I still remembered the
side door. The catering crew sometimes propt for overnight deliverers.
I checked instinctively. The latch was misaligned, softened by hundreds
of slams over years. It clicked open with only a
gentle shove and an echoing sigh from the weather strip
in sight. The familiar scent washed over me, laminated directories,
the chemical tang of floor polish, the residual warmth from
machines cooling in the night time. For ease, I drifted
into the building's belly, keeping to the darker stretches, the
farthest corners from where a current badge logs might pain.
My destination was clear to twelve four, the sterroll hidden
between the conference center and janitor's closet. I slipped inside,
the boots of old habit, carrying me over familiar train.
It was there in the glim above the end of
the landing that I found the badge reader. At this hour,
the dull Reddi lady pullsed again, inviting predatory. I pressed
the thirteen brake room card to its face. The green
glimmer responded immediately, more eager than before. The door released,
heavy and slow on its hinges, emitting a size of
exhaling years of containment. I entered. The stale air greeted
me thick with memory and dread. Space was unchanged. The
break rooms outline grew from the darkness, tables askew the
vending machine's dull face. Monitors dreading the static, gaze over
abandoned mugs and dust. The humming was larder here, not
only audible but palpable underneath the skin. My phone vibrated.
I glanced down. No service, no time stamp, just a
blank screen and the batter a draining by the second.
The door behind me is shirt ceiling, with the hush
from somewhere deeper in the room, a shuffing noise in
the lamp light. Another hunch figure, a new present stood
by the monitors, dragging a chair with painstick and quiet.
Some one else morooned by the same error or design,
their posture angular and guarded. I called that softly, Jake.
The head turned. It wasn't jake. A woman, this time,
pale and jittering. Her badge clipped to a QRD around
her wrist. She blinked as if flight stabbed her, then
stepped forward. You have a cart, she said, flatly voice.
Then I nodded, showing it not fully trusting my voice.
She eyed it, then me. It won't let you leave,
she whispered, not if you use it twice. I swallowed hard,
fighting the urge to glance back at the door. What
happens if you try, she shook her head. Sometimes you
end up somewhere else. Sometimes you just end up here again,
even if you think you left. Most stopped trying. I
saw Jake, I managed, She winced, He's quiet now, got
too tired. The system logs you eventually, if you keep moving,
it forgets he for a while. If you rests, if
you give up, it files you away. She shivered to
discuss memory both why do you come back? The question
scraped at a row wound inside me. I need to know,
a needy I broke off. I wasn't sure what I needed.
Maybe just to believe someone could know the truth and
not be erased by it. She sighed, eyes darting to
the monitors. They still watch from outside, you know, management.
Sometimes you see them on the cameras, just staring. I
move closer, keeping my hands visible. What do you want?
A bitter, lopsided smile crossed her features. Nobody's ever asked me, da.
She dropped her gaze. I want to find the right door,
the one that goes somewhere real. We stood together in silence,
the hum around us thickening. She gestured at one of
the monitors tapped it. On screen, through a haze of
static was an image of the lobby. My own form
flickered there, indistinct and slow, as if f you ha
did a time lack. Sometimes, she said softly, you leave,
but you don't. The monitor showed me on loop circling
security desk the last night I'd worked. I watched myself stand, checklogs,
pick up a clipboard, yawned deeply. The badger my belt
blinked in the reflected fluorescent light. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.