The room hadn't moved.
But it felt smaller.
Every breath I took echoed too loudly now, as if the air was wrapped too tightly around me. My eyes stayed closed, but my mind refused to let me drift. Each heartbeat pressed into the silence like a question with no answer. The system wasn't speaking. There were no prompts. No overlays. Just exhaustion bleeding out of me in waves.
Somewhere behind the dark of my eyes, my mind began to unfold.
Not violently. Not like trauma.
More like weight.
Like a door opening inward.
And there, layered beneath the ache in my body and the static in my thoughts, came the memory.
Flashback
It had been Lee's birthday, or maybe Martin's—he couldn't quite remember, because they'd all chipped in together, and birthdays had become more of an excuse to organise ridiculous challenges than genuine celebrations. The idea had come from one of the group chats: a head-to-head escape room challenge. Couples versus couples. Men versus women. Old-school fun with a competitive twist. No kids. No distractions. Just one hour of locked-room problem-solving to see who could break out first.
The room had been styled like a mad scientist's lab. Faux copper piping lined the walls, fake smoke drifted out of a caged generator in the corner, and the air smelled faintly of dust and ozone. The game master had given them a brief warning: "Everything you need is in the room. No forcing anything. You'll know it when you see it."
They hadn't believed him.
Gareth had gone immediately for the filing cabinet, tugged the top drawer half-open and found a bundle of circuit diagrams tied in red string. Martin had found a locked briefcase beneath a hidden floor panel and handed it to Matt, who'd already figured out the number pattern scrawled on the underside of a framed certificate.
Lee was the one who got the first proper breakthrough. He'd stood still, squinting up at a fluorescent light strip in the ceiling, eyes following a crack along the drywall that no one else had noticed.
"There's writing behind this," he'd said, rapping the panel with a knuckle. "I think it's a UV ink puzzle."
Ten minutes later, they'd found the blacklight lens tucked inside a hollowed-out prop microscope.
Back in the Nullspace room, I stirred slightly.
The memory hadn't ended.
It was just shifting focus.
Patch didn't move. Her head rested across my knee now, the side of her faceplate pressed gently against my leg. Her body gave off faint warmth from her damaged vents. I could feel the gentle rhythm of her presence—like a heartbeat that wasn't mine but still counted for something.
Then came the second flash.
Flashback
The second puzzle had almost broken them.
The centrepiece of the room had been an old lab console, wires torn and exposed, with six toggle switches arranged in a pattern that didn't match any logic diagram they could identify. They'd wasted fifteen minutes flipping switches, trying Morse code, even brute-forcing binary combinations while the countdown timer overhead ticked mercilessly toward failure.
It had been Matt—usually quiet, usually watching—who cracked it.
"They're not electrical," he'd said suddenly, squatting beside the console. "Look at the wires. Red, green, yellow, white, blue, black."
Gareth had remembered it perfectly. Matt had grinned, gestured at the rows of lab beakers with the same colours arranged on a distant shelf, and then motioned toward the scent coming from the nearby vent.
"Colours correspond to chemicals. The toggle sequence has to follow the synthesis formula on the clipboard."
No one had noticed the clipboard until then. Martin had laughed when they found it hanging behind a coat rack, folded like a used lunch receipt. The code had been written in chemical notation. C₆H₁₂O₆.
"Glucose," Gareth had said. "And that's our order."
It had worked. The console lit up. The cabinet unlocked. They moved on.
In the corner of my vision, a prompt flickered—then vanished.
Not system text. Not from Nullspace.
Just a memory, surfacing briefly, then withdrawing like a fish beneath dark water.
[RECOGNITION PATTERN // FLAGGED]
[RELEVANT STRUCTURE: LOGIC REPLICATION]
[STORED FOR LATER USE]
I didn't react.
I couldn't.
The third memory was already rising.
Flashback
The third puzzle had come near the end. The room had been cracked open by then—panels removed, clues uncovered, the final lock just one riddle away from yielding.
But the riddle didn't play fair.
It wasn't written in code or numbers. It wasn't scribbled on a wall or hidden inside a fake drawer. It came from the room itself. A recording. Motion-triggered. The lights had dimmed the moment they'd activated the final console, and a voice—neutral, digitised—filled the space.
"The lock cannot be forced.
It opens only when silence is shared between four.
But five have entered.
What must you do?"
The team had gone quiet. For a moment, no one moved.
Then Martin, always ready with a smartarse comment, had said, "Easy. Someone shuts up."
That had earned him a chorus of sarcastic replies.
But Gareth had stood still, arms crossed, staring at the console.
"No," he'd said. "It's not about talking. It's about presence. It said silence shared between four. But five are in the room."
"So?"
"We have to remove someone."
Colin blinked. "Wait—you mean leave?"
Gareth nodded. "Only four can share silence. The fifth has to step out."
It had felt wrong. The game master hadn't said anything about leaving the room. But Gareth had walked back to the starting zone, crossed the proximity sensor threshold—and as he did, the console lit up.
A loud click echoed through the walls.
The others whooped, laughter echoing after him as the final door opened.
Later, over beers and gloating, someone had said it was Gareth's moment.
That weird logical leap.
That instinct to read between the rules.
The memory unravelled softly, its edges dissolving like ash in water.
My breathing slowed. My body finally relaxed against the curve of the Nullspace wall. The scent of ozone and metal faded, replaced by the sterile chill of the artificial room. I opened my eyes.
Patch was still there.
Still pressed lightly against my leg, the faint hum of her systems now as familiar as my own breath. Her plating had dimmed to a low neutral tone, the damage visible but no longer worsening. She hadn't moved. Not while I drifted. Not while the memory flickered.
For the first time in hours, I felt warm.
Not safe.
But grounded.
I reached down and touched her head. She leaned into it, just slightly, and made a sound that was half-purr, half-audio distortion. Familiar. Beautiful in its brokenness.
We didn't speak.
Not for a while.
There wasn't anything left to say.
I sat with my legs drawn in, one arm resting across my knee, the other now gently draped along Patch's back. She didn't object. She didn't move. Her breathing—or what passed for it—remained steady. I watched the rise and fall of her plating, faintly aware that the sound she made when resting had changed. It was subtler now. Less mechanical. Less defensive.
More… content, maybe. Or just tired.
The silence in the room had changed, too.
It wasn't the loaded silence that came before horror.
Not the breathless wait of an ambush.
This was quieter. Hollow, but not threatening.
Like the system itself was observing from a distance, taking notes.
Processing what had just passed through the boundary of its threads.
I didn't know if it understood what the fragment had meant. Or if it cared. But it had let us rest.
For now.
Somewhere far above us—impossible to measure, impossible to see—a faint shimmer passed across the surface of the ceiling. Not light, exactly. Not movement either.
Just a ripple.
Like the skin of Nullspace had acknowledged our presence again. Like it had finished watching the memory run its course, and now it was deciding what came next.
Patch stirred gently. Her head lifted. Ears twitching.
"I felt that," I murmured.
"So did I."
"Do you think it's… done watching?"
"I think it's curious," she said, "why you're still alive."
I huffed a breath through my nose. "Yeah. Me too."
We sat together for another minute. Maybe more.
Then I slowly leaned forward, placed my palm flat to the floor, and pushed myself upright.
Every joint ached. My ribs flared. My hand burned.
But I stood.
Patch followed.
There were no doors in the room. No prompts. No signals. Just that ripple—that faint shimmer in the ceiling, like a question waiting to be answered.
"Let's go find out what it wants," I said softly.
Patch nodded once.
Then took the lead.