"If anyone finds this, the experiment failed. DEMIURGE breached containment. The facility is lost. Do NOT enter sub-levels. I'm heading to the surface entrance. If I make it, I'll trigger the distress beacon. If you're reading this and I'm not there, I didn't make it. God help anyone who comes here. -Marcus Vey"
The timestamp is seventy years, three months, and seventeen days ago.
I stare at the message for a long moment. Then I look at Marcus's frozen corpse, half-eaten and terrified.
He didn't make it.
Whatever DEMIURGE is, it's still here.
And I'm about to go looking for that facility.
I start layering on the salvaged gear. The poncho first, thermal and bulky but warm. Then Marcus's jacket over it, torn side in the back where I won't see it. The scarf wrapped around my face and neck. The intact glove on my right hand, the damaged one solved on my pocket as a backup. The boots with extra fabric stuffed into it are decently warm.
I look ridiculous, I feel ridiculous. But I'm warmer than I've been since I woke up.
The ID badge goes on my chest, clipped where I can reach it easily. The datapad goes in my jacket pocket, wrapped in fabric to protect it from the cold.
I take one last look at Marcus Vey. At what's left of him.
"Thanks for the gear," I say quietly. "I'll try to make it mean something."
He doesn't answer. Obviously.
I turn toward the cave entrance and the red glow beyond. Time to see what kind of world I've been dropped into.
The wind hits me like a physical thing when I step outside. It's howling, a constant roar that drowns out everything else. Snow pelts my face despite the scarf, tiny needles of ice that sting any exposed skin. I have to squint just to see.
The sky is wrong. That's the first thing that I notice stepping out of the cave. It's not blue or even gray. It's a sickly grayish-green, like a bruise. There's no sun, just a diffuse twilight that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
And above me, hanging in the sky like a broken promise, is a ring of debris. Massive chunks of rock and ice, frozen in orbit, glowing faintly red where they catch the light. It takes me a moment realize what I'm looking at.
Part of the planet. A quarter of it, maybe more, just shattered and floating in space. The chunks range from house-sized to mountain-sized, a graveyard of a world that tore itself apart.
This is where the red light is coming from. Reflected off the ice and stone, diffused through the atmosphere giving the world a hellish tint.
I'm standing on a dead world.
The landscape stretches out before me in endless white. A tundra of ice and snow, carved into knife-edge drifts by the wind.
The snow isn't just white. There's something else mixed in, red glitter? Everywhere? Was this world was a glitter bomb to a god? The particles look crystalline in nature and it catches the light and refracts it immensely. It coats everything here.
The temperature has to be seventy below, maybe worse. Even with Marcus's gear, I can feel the cold creeping in at the edges, looking for gaps.
And there, maybe two kilometers away across the frozen waste, I can see it.
The facility.
It's massive. A brutalist nightmare of concrete and metal, multiple towers and structures jutting up from the ice like broken teeth. Several buildings have collapsed or are half-buried in snow. It looks like the compound died screaming. All this, and the central structure is still standing, a dark silhouette against the gray-green sky.
I can see lights in a few windows. Dim, barely visible, but there. Emergency power, maybe.
Something is still running in that facility.
Between here and there, scattered across the ice, I can see shapes. Dark spots against the white. It takes a second for me to realize what they are.
Bodies.
Dozens of them. Maybe more. Frozen mid-flight, running away from the facility. Some are piled against what look like sealed doors. Others collapsed in the snow, half-buried.
They were trying to evacuate. Seventy years ago. And they didn't make it.
Marcus was one of them. He made it the farthest. All the way to this cave. And whatever was chasing them must've caught up.
I look at the facility again. At the emergency lights still burning after seven decades.
That's where the answers are. That's where I'll find out what DEMIURGE was, what went wrong, and what killed over a thousand people.
That's also where whatever killed them probably still is.
I should turn around. Find another cave. Try to survive on my own. going to that facility is objectively the worst idea possible.
But I kind of have to. So I am going to go anyways.
Because I'm standing on a frozen hellscape in salvaged gear with no food, shelter, and no plan. The facility has power, it might have supplies, and it will definitely have answers.
I'm tired of not knowing what's going on.
I've spent the last six months at SungSoft being pushed around by deadlines and condescending senior devs who treated me like I was stupid because I was new. I died on a sidewalk because some asshole decided it was my day to die, and woke up in an ice cave next to a corpse on an alien planet with a shattered sky. This isn't what I thought "paradise" was going to be like.
I adjust the scarf over my face, check the datapad to make sure its secure, and start walking.
The first hundred meters are manageable. The snow is deep but not impossible, the wind is brutal but I'm angled into it, head down. My boots crunch through the ice crust with each step.
The second hundred meters are harder. The cold is finding gaps in my gear and it gets very chilly very quickly. My fingers are starting to lose feeling again.
At the halfway point, one kilometer in, I stumble. My foot catches on something buried in the snow and I go down hard. Some snow finds its way into my boot and have to use my left hand to stabilize myself. The snow instantly starts soaking through my jeans. The cold is shocking, aggressive, like it's been waiting for this moment.
I push myself up, leg screaming. Actually, everything is screaming at this point but I can't dwell on it.
I want to stop, rest and just get a minute to recover. But I know what that leads to: you sit down, close your eyes for a second, and you never get back up. The only difference between me and what I tripped on will be the look on our faces.
So I keep moving. One step, another, another, another. and I have to count to keep myself focused.
One *crunch*
Two *crunch*
Three *crunch*
Just have to stay focused, don't think about the cold.
Four *crunch*
Five *crunch*
Six *crunch*
Its closer now, I'm sure it's only a couple more steps.
I pass another body around fifteen hundred meters. It's face down in the snow, half buried. I don't stop, because looking ahead, this is only the first of many.
I pass another, and another. They're everywhere as I get closer to the facility. So many that I have to be careful not to trip over them. A trail of the dead, frozen in fear forever.
The facility looms larger now. I can see details. Automated turrets mounted on the walls, dormant and frosted over. Massive bulkhead doors, sealed tight. Shattered windows. Blast damage on one tower.
There's no way in through the front. The doors are sealed with bodies piled in front. It doesn't look like I would be able to force it open either.
But there, on the easter side, I can see a collapsed section of wall. A gap where the structure gave way, partially buried but accessible.
The last 500 meters are pure grit. I can barely see, my thoughts are drifting, and I can barely feel my legs.
246 *crunch*
312 *crunch*
467 *crunch*
I am just counting at this point, not steps, maybe breaths? Anything to stay awake. I am almost there. Almost.
I reach the collapsed wall and dive through the gap without thinking. I roll into the darkness, out of the wind, and finally out of that brutal cold.
Inside.
I lie on the ground for a moment, thankful that I am alive. Every second hurts, I am shivering with a fervor known only to motors. But I'm inside and alive. That's worth something.
The lights flicker on, maybe for the first time in 70 years. Motion sensors mustve turned them on. A dim red illumination bathes the space ina hellish light. I can see I'm in some kind of storage area. Equipment lockers line the walls. Crates are stacked in corners, covered in frost and dust.
It's warmer in here, but not by a lot. I'm out of the lethal cold at least. Maybe 20 below instead of 70? I crawl a little bit further inside and lean against a wall, too exhausted to move further. My hands and legs are so cold they might fall off as I am.
That's when I hear it.
Faint at first. Distant. Coming from somewhere below me, or maybe above? The acoustics in this place make it impossible to tell.
step.
A wet impact. Heavy, wrong.
Draaaaaaaaag...
Something scraping across ice, or metal on stone. The sound sets my teeth on edge.
step-Draaaaaaaaaaag...
Rhytmic. Deliberate. Patient.
step-Draaaaaaaaaaag...
It's not getting closer. Not yet.
But the lights are still on. The motion sensors announced my arrival like a dinner bell.
And whatever's making that sound?
It knows im here.
Welcome to your new life, Ethan Kang.
Try not to die. Again.