The corridor exhaled.
Not literally—but it felt like it. The walls pulled back just slightly, like something granting breath. The air thickened—not from heat, but pressure. I stepped forward slowly, Patch at my side. Behind us, the entrance vanished without a sound. No animation. No mechanical whir. Just gone. The floor curled slightly at the edges where it sealed behind us, like the lid of a sarcophagus locking shut.
Ahead, the corridor pulsed.
Not with light.
With rhythm.
Patch's claws clicked against the tiles with deliberate control. Her posture was low—ready. Not defensive, but cautious. I adjusted my stance, distributing my weight with care. The floor was strange—slick, but not wet. Textured, but too soft. It gave slightly beneath my boots, like carpet laid over forgotten wiring.
The hallway bent left. Then right.
Then opened.
We stepped into the next room.
And it was wrong.
It looked like a laboratory. Or at least, the echo of one. The space was too symmetrical—unnaturally precise. Frosted glass walls separated rows of biopods, each pulsing faintly from within, yet offering no light to the space around them. Some of the pods held warped silhouettes—lumps of suspended muscle, broken animalistic shapes floating in liquid. One had no clear occupant at all, just a tangled mass of wires knotted like nerves inside a ribcage.
It twitched when I looked at it.
Then the smell hit.
Metal. Salt. Burnt copper. But beneath it all—rot. That sweet, chemical reek of something preserved too long. Something treated like data instead of tissue. I stopped walking. My gaze caught on a display along the back wall—rows of glass panels containing preserved organs. Heart. Kidney. Lung. And something that looked like a deflated sack of teeth.
"What… is this?" I whispered.
Patch scanned the room with a mechanical sweep of her head. "It appears to be a medical research facility."
"I've never been anywhere like this."
"You remembered a lab," she said. "The escape room. A puzzle space."
I blinked. That memory stirred. Lee's birthday. The puzzle with the mislabelled chemicals. The fake biohazard setup. This... this was its reflection. A hallucinated echo rebuilt from corrupted recall—rewritten by a system that didn't know the difference between simulation and vivisection.
Patch stepped closer to one pod and sniffed at its base. Her tail flicked once, sharp. "There is logic here," she said. "Buried beneath the horror. But consistent."
Then the console at the far end lit up.
Clean UI amidst the rot. A prompt followed:
[SAMPLE TRACE // ORGAN VALIDATION REQUIRED]
[MATCH 3: LIVER / OCULAR CORE / UNDEFINED]
[TIME REMAINING: 13:37]
[WARNING: INCORRECT INPUT WILL TRIGGER ENTITY RESPONSE]
I inhaled sharply. "Oh good. A timed puzzle."
Patch's voice didn't flinch. "We should begin."
I moved toward the console. It flickered again, refining itself, edges sharpening. The timer was already ticking down in the top-right corner. No ticking sound—just numbers, falling silently like pressure in my chest.
[13:33]
Patch padded away across the lab, inspecting the biopods. Her new voice—crisp, calm, precise—was holding steady, but I could feel tension in it. A quiet strain, like thread pulled too tight.
"Prioritise the trace request," she said. "If it's time-bound, it likely dictates local physics."
"You think the room will collapse?"
"I think it will collapse us."
Fair.
I turned toward the display wall, scanning rows of sealed canisters, each holding some preserved organic mass. The labels jittered when I focused—letters flickering, numbers trying to resolve. I reached toward one of the nearest containers, and a glyph shimmered beneath it:
[OCULAR CORE // STATUS: TERTIARY // ID: 4F1-RED]
I reached closer.
The canister twitched.
Just slightly.
Like whatever was inside it didn't want to be touched.
I swallowed hard and opened the case.
A soft hiss escaped—maybe gas, maybe just a cue. Inside: a grotesquely large eyeball, the size of my clenched fist. Its optic nerve trailed into a long, tapering filament. It pulsed—just once—like it saw me.
Then the console chirped.
[OCULAR CORE: MATCHED]
"Good," Patch said calmly. "Keep going."
"That was the easy one?"
She didn't answer.
I moved on.
The next row was worse. Livers—at least, I hoped. Some had extra lobes. One had bone threaded through it. Another throbbed in its jar, like it knew I was watching. I hesitated, then reached for one tagged:
[LIVER // CORRUPTED ENTRY // PROB: 78% MATCH]
The jar was heavier than expected. As I pulled it from the shelf, the mass inside sloshed—and then thudded against the glass. I froze.
Then it moved again.
I recoiled slightly. "It's still alive."
"No," Patch replied. "It's being rendered in real-time."
"Based on what?"
"Likely… you."
I didn't like that answer.
I placed it gently on the examination tray. A soft glow pulsed beneath it.
[MATCH CONFIRMED // 2/3]
Patch moved beside me. Her ears flicked. "Final input is undefined. It may be non-standard."
I glanced at the remaining canisters. The rest were even worse. One held a too-jointed hand. One looked like a coiled tongue. Another was a stitched pair of lungs wired together like a puppet.
Then I saw it.
In the far corner, behind a cracked cabinet and warped steel struts, was something smaller.
A plastic toy block.
Blue and yellow.
Melted at one edge.
I stepped forward slowly. Patch followed, silent.
The block sat in a puddle of half-coagulated fluid. Not blood. Not oil. Just… wrong. The surface shimmered as I knelt beside it.
I reached out. Touched it.
And everything changed.
The lights dimmed.
The console beeped.
[ECHO ARTIFACT DETECTED // MEMORY FRAGMENT COLLISION POSSIBLE]
[REWRITE? Y/N]
Patch moved closer, shoulder brushing mine. "You don't have to trigger it."
"I think I already did."
I lifted the block.
It was heavier than it should've been. Not in mass.
In meaning.
A weight that pulled me backward through time, anchoring itself somewhere behind my ribs.
The system responded instantly.
Not with static.
Not with error.
With memory.
The lab faded.
The console vanished.
The walls dissolved.
I was back in the garage.
Chris and Lily were on the floor, surrounded by scattered blocks, crushed juice boxes, and bright-coloured chaos. Lily held the blue-and-yellow one—the one with the melted corner. She lifted it up toward Chris with a grin.
"It's the rarest one," she beamed. "I found it in the vent!"
Chris rolled his eyes. "You can't even build with that. It's broken."
"Doesn't matter," she said. "I'm keeping it."
And just for a second, I saw myself—leaning in the doorway, smiling. Watching. Remembering when things were simple. Before deadlines. Before integration. Before everything broke.
Then the garage folded inward.
Juice boxes rotted.
Blocks melted.
Lily's eyes turned white.
And the memory shattered.
I dropped to one knee, clutching the block tightly with both hands. It was slick now—coated in something that wasn't blood, wasn't oil. Just wrong. The lab returned, but it didn't feel the same.
It felt rendered.
Wrong.
A message flickered across the console:
[MEMORY CONFIRMED]
[FRAGMENT IDENTIFIER: BLOCK_SHELL // NODE 1/4]
[SUB-PUZZLE COMPLETE]
[CODE SEGMENT: _0xB4]
[FINAL SEQUENCE BUILDING…]
The console rebooted in silence.
A low hum settled into the room—more felt than heard, like a distant heart monitor falling into standby.
I sat back on my heels, bloodied fingers still wrapped around the corrupted block. Patch stepped beside me and leaned in close, pressing her shoulder against mine.
"First node complete," she said.
I glanced at the timer.
Still ticking.
[TIME REMAINING: 11:58]
"It's still going," I muttered.
"No entity."
"Not yet."
Then—thirty seconds later—deep behind the far wall—
Something clicked.
Not in code.
In bone.