The Lobby

TAPE 014 — SURVEY LOG, LEVEL 0

The carpet is damp again. It is always damp, in the same places, and I have stopped asking where the water comes from. The lights never turn off. There is a hum — the fluorescents, the ballast, whatever it is behind the ceiling tiles — and after a while you cannot tell whether the sound is in the walls or in your head. The camera picks it up. That is the only reason I know it is real.

I have been walking for what the timecode says is three hours. The wallpaper does not change. The doorframes do not change. I turn a corner I have already turned and it is a corridor I have never seen. This is the first thing to understand about Level 0: the grid is a suggestion, not a map.

---

THE GRID

Most of Level 0 is standard halls — mono-yellow wallpaper, that carpet, a drop ceiling of fluorescent panels every few metres. This is the baseline, and it is the most dangerous part, because it lulls you. You start to think you understand the geometry. You do not.

Two variations break the monotony, and both are worse than they look:

• The arch rooms. Pale, floor-to-ceiling wall slabs with rounded openings cut through them — an off-white arcade that does not belong to the yellow. You walk through the holes; there is no door. Nothing lives here. It just feels older than the rest.
• The pillar halls. Wide, open chambers where the ceiling lifts and a grid of columns holds it up. Sightlines run long here, which is a relief until you realise you cannot tell which column you passed a minute ago. Every one is identical.

---

ABERRATIONS

Some rooms are not rooms. The survey flags three, and every one of them will kill you if you are careless.

• Holes. Square openings punched straight through the carpet into a shaft below. The floor ends with no lip and no warning — just a flush ring of carpet and then nothing. There is no navmesh over a hole; even the thing that wanders here knows to path around them. You are the only one dumb enough to walk off the edge.
• Blackouts. A whole room gone dark. Not tinted — dark: rough grey concrete where the yellow should be, no fixtures, the light dying at the doorway. Inside, the hum drops toward silence. That silence is the tell. If the buzz falls away, you have crossed a threshold you did not mean to cross, and the surfaces only barely read as anything at all.
• Red rooms. Deep red wallpaper, red carpet, a low red glow. What makes a red room a red room is not the colour — it is the topology. Every entrance but one has been sealed. You will always be able to leave, because whatever built this room left exactly one door open. But it wanted you to have to look for it.

---

THE WORMHOLES

At the dead ends — the corridors that terminate in a flat wall — some of the walls are not solid. They ripple. Walk into one and you are somewhere else in the same building, facing out, mid-stride, no cut to black. Just a small lurch in the frame, like the camera flinched.

They come in pairs, and the pairings reshuffle every fifteen minutes. Some panels appear, others go quiet, partners get swapped — all of it from a clock nobody can see. The map marks the active ones with concentric violet rings, and I want to be clear: do not memorise them. The route you learned an hour ago now empties out into a corridor half the building away. Two of these panels are different — steadier, deeper. Those lead down. Out of Level 0 entirely, into the concrete.

---

SOUND

The hum is constant. Under it, if you stand still — which you should not — there are other things: a footstep that is not yours, arriving a beat late; a low electrical tick that slides across the stereo field and is gone; the sense, always at the edge of the frame, that something just left the room. The camera never catches it. I have reviewed the tape. It is never there. It is always there.

[TAPE ENDS]