Thea stood in the freight elevator, her reflection staring back — but only hers. No Igor. No movement behind her. Just a sterile, too-silent box humming with fluorescent light.
"Igor?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Nothing.
No reply.
No friend.
Then the lights dimmed and the mirror glitched — her reflection lagging, like a poorly synced video call. She tilted her head. Her mirror self didn't follow.
It smiled instead.
Wide. Unsettling.
Not her.
"Igor, I swear," she muttered, backing away from the mirror, "if this is some kind of psycho hologram prank—"
Before she could finish, the lights snapped off.
Pitch black.
And then, a sound.
Wet.
Sloppy.
Shuffling.
The lights blinked back on for a split second, revealing the mirror again — only this time, it wasn't a mirror. It was glass.
And on the other side, a figure stood.
Tall. Silent. Wearing a distorted version of her own face — stretched like plastic wrap across bone.
Its eyes were black pits.
Its mouth hung open, and when it moved, it didn't blink — it crackled.
Tap. Tap.
Its fingers reached up to the glass.
"Exit," it croaked, voice like a warped cassette. "Only one. Only you."
Thea bolted for the side panel — but there were no buttons. Just a metal panel that said:
"EXIT GRANTED UPON COMPLETE ACCEPTANCE OF REALITY."
"Cool," Thea muttered. "Guess I'll just accept my way into a seizure."
The floor beneath her shifted. Tilted.
The elevator began rising — fast. So fast her knees almost buckled. On every wall, flickers of her memories played: fragments of conversations with Igor, childhood trips to the woods, her high school dance (the one where she and Igor snuck out early to go ghost-hunting).
Then they glitched.
Replayed.
Then distorted.
Igor's face changed. Blurred. Disappeared.
In one scene, he wasn't there at all.
"System malfunction," a voice intoned overhead, too calm. "Companion file corrupted. Preparing replacement."
"What? No. No!" Thea yelled. "You don't just replace people!"
"Redundancy protocol engaged. Generating compatible substitute: Egor 2.1 Beta."
A chime.
And then, standing beside her…
Was a version of Igor.
Kind of.
He had Igor's build, sure. Same hoodie. Same bored expression. But his mouth stretched unnaturally wide when he spoke.
"Hey bestie," he chirped. "Wanna trauma-bond?"
Thea gagged. "Oh hell no."
She turned and drop-kicked the clone straight into the elevator mirror — which shattered.
Glass shards floated mid-air, glittering like frozen stars.
Everything went still.
Then:
DING.
The elevator doors opened.
But not to a hallway.
Not to a new test zone.
To a void.
And in the middle of that void — standing calmly, hands behind his back, looking like he'd been waiting for her to finish her existential panic — was Igor.
The real one.
"About time," he said. "Did you get the bootleg Igor too? Mine tried to sing me a lullaby and called me 'sugar muffin.' I threw a stapler at him."
Thea ran to him and nearly tackled him in a hug.
"Never leave me alone in an elevator again."
"Wasn't my choice. The elevator called me a 'non-essential variable.' Rude."
They both turned to face the void together. Behind them, the elevator collapsed — pixel by pixel, glitching out of existence.
Ahead, a long bridge began forming under their feet. Floating planks materializing one at a time into a narrow path that hung over… nothing.
As they walked, a speaker crackled to life again.
"You are progressing admirably. However, the path forward is not meant for both."
They both stopped.
"Oh come on," Igor said. "Again with the only-one-can-leave nonsense?"
The voice continued, mechanical and cheerful:
"The mirror of the self reflects the truest threat. Who do you fear more — the world? Or each other?"
"That's a dumb question," Thea said. "We literally have matching trauma scars."
"And matching tattoos," Igor added. "Technically illegal ones. Let us bond in peace."
The bridge split into two paths — both leading in different directions.
A timer appeared above them: 01:00.
Sixty seconds.
Choose a path.
Or fall.
They looked at each other.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Igor asked.
"Probably."
"Split, then find a way to break their system?"
"Exactly."
They clasped hands. "Meet you at the glitch."
"Always."
They ran — each down a different path.
Thea's path twisted through flickering versions of her bedroom, a graveyard of memories both real and planted. Voices whispered doubt.
But she ignored them.
Igor's path? A warped IKEA nightmare where every door led to another room of meatballs and existential dread. One lamp yelled at him to "respect the flow of consumerism."
He kicked it into a shelf.
At the same time, both reached the end of their paths — where a final door waited.
The same door.
On either side.
As if reality looped.
They touched the handles — and the walls around them collapsed.
Both were suddenly in a single chamber, standing face to face.
Behind them, the voice spoke one last time:
"Level Complete: No Face, No Exit."You rejected separation. You chose convergence. Very interesting…
And just like that — the floor dropped beneath them.