I came to after the white swallowed everything. The last message still burned in my mind, [INTEGRATION FAILED]. I was lying on a floor, but not the garage floor.
This one was colder, uneven in a way that felt deliberate, but badly made. There were dips and ridges where none should be. I shifted slowly, pressing my uninjured hand to the surface, and felt the texture stutter under my fingers, one moment slick like metal, the next almost like calloused flesh. Neither was right.
It smelled wrong, too. Like the inside of an electrical cabinet after a surge. Copper. Ionised air. Burnt rubber. Beneath that, something chemical. Something sharp.
I pushed myself upright.
Pain answered.
My right palm had split, just below the base of the thumb, a jagged tear like I'd gripped something sharp during the blackout. The skin was sticky and wet. It wasn't gushing, but it hadn't clotted either. Blood smeared along my wrist and down the heel of my hand, seeping into my hoodie's cuff.
I curled my fingers closed instinctively and hissed. It wasn't a wound to panic over, not yet, but in the absence of antiseptic, clean water, or even the luxury of knowing where the hell I was, it suddenly felt very serious.
There was no first aid kit here.
There wasn't even a here.
I turned in a slow circle, trying to take in the room, if it could even be called that. The ceiling dipped too low, the walls sloped unnaturally, and the angles were wrong in a way that made my stomach clench. Surfaces shimmered faintly, like heat ripples on tarmac, but there was no warmth. No light source. Just a dull, ambient glow from a place I couldn't pinpoint, too diffuse to cast shadows, too persistent to feel natural.
Some of the walls looked almost… stitched. Not with thread or wire, but something in between, panel seams that bent like scar tissue.
It didn't feel like a building.
It felt like something pretending to be a room.
I called out, carefully.
"Lou?"
No answer.
"Chris? Lily?"
Only silence.
Not dead silence. Not that warm, reassuring kind you get late at night when everyone's finally asleep and the house hums around you. This was the silence of something waiting. A thick quiet, filled with a low tremor just below hearing. Not a hum. Not a vibration.
A presence.
I moved cautiously along the nearest wall, pressing my uncut hand to the surface. It flexed slightly, like something beneath the material stirred at my touch. I pulled away, heart thudding faster. The injury on my other hand was still bleeding, more slowly now, but the droplets were noticeable against the floor's strange semi-reflective skin.
I took a step back.
The blood had left marks.
That wasn't the strange part.
The strange part was the floor changing around them. Where each droplet had touched, the material had shifted, subtly buckling inwards, like it recoiled from the contact. The shine dulled. The lines in the surface warped.
I crouched to look closer, already knowing what I'd see.
It wasn't reacting to the air.
It was reacting to me.
No UI overlay flickered in to offer context. No minimap. No stats. No health bar.
Only the memory of one message lingered, still burned into the back of my thoughts: [INTEGRATION FAILED].
Nothing.
I was alone in whatever this was, with no support, no System voice, and no idea how long I'd been unconscious.
Not that it mattered.
Time had stopped behaving.
The hallway ahead hadn't existed seconds ago.
I was sure of it.
Now it was open, leading deeper into some misshapen, glitched cathedral. The architecture swelled and narrowed without logic, and something in the middle distance ticked, like a clock with broken gears trying to realign.
I hesitated at the threshold.
Then I stepped through.
The corridor led to what might have once been a junction, two halls branching left and right, both partially collapsed, riddled with tangled wires and cracked glass. One archway had cables hanging like wet vines, and the other pulsed with dim red light. Above me, part of the ceiling had opened, exposing something that resembled a fan, though it wasn't spinning. It twitched occasionally, like it wanted to.
I kept still.
Let my breathing slow.
The air was heavier now. The floor flexed slightly beneath my shoes. Not much, just enough to notice.
To my right, something flickered.
Not movement. Not light.
A reflection?
No. Not in this place.
A window.
I stepped closer, drawn to it before I could second-guess myself.
It was set low into the wall, half-obscured by some sort of veined panel. The surface was reflective at first, but warped when I got near, like I was looking through bad glass.
And on the other side,
A face.
Pale. Featureless. Smooth skin stretched tight across a round, adult skull.
It turned toward me, slowly, with a mechanical patience that made my spine lock.
It didn't blink.
It didn't breathe.
It leaned close enough that the pane flexed.
And then, still without a mouth,
It smiled.
I fell backward. Not a controlled retreat, not a defensive stumble.
A full, graceless collapse onto the trembling floor.
By the time I scrambled back to my feet, the window was gone.
Just blank wall.
The corridor ahead continued, but the atmosphere had thickened again. Not just tension, awareness. As if the place had started to track me, adapt to me. The angles shifted slightly when I moved, like they were correcting for my height.
This wasn't just broken architecture.
This was response.
I was being catalogued.
I leaned against the wall, panting. My hand throbbed.
I needed antiseptic. Water. Something to clean the wound. A way to seal it.
Nothing here could help.
I needed to move.
Find anything, any clue, any structure that resembled reason.
Instead, I got… a sound.
Behind me.
Low.
A hiss.
Not mechanical.
Wet.
I spun.
A new corridor had opened. The floor leading toward it glistened.
My blood trail ended there.
Where it had touched the threshold, the surface had cracked apart, peeled back like skin rejecting a splinter.
And from within that faultline, something stirred.
A message blinked across the corner of my vision, not from a UI, but from memory, resurfacing in a shape I recognised.
A warning Gareth, the coder, would've written to himself if he'd found this in source.
[ // USER: Not meant to be here. ]
[ // ENV:: Undefined. Instanced. Alive? ]
I whispered it aloud before I knew what I was saying:
"This place is… some kind of nullspace."
And in the wall beside me, a seam lit up in faint red.
A UI fragment tried to load.
Failed.
But I felt the response.
Like the environment nodded.