Consciousness returned not as a rush, but as a slow, seeping tide of wrongness.
Before sight, before thought, there was sound. A single, monolithic note that was not so much heard as it was felt, a grinding vibration that seemed to originate from inside his own skull. It was the sound of electricity, but a sick, cancerous version of it—a low, insistent hum overlaid with a high-frequency buzz that sawed at the edges of his hearing. It was the sound of a million dying refrigerators, of a faulty power station, of every bad fluorescent light he had ever heard in his life, all amplified into a maddening, omnipresent drone. Hum-buzz. Hum-buzz. It was the heartbeat of this new reality.
Next came touch. The rough, scratchy texture of industrial-grade carpet against his cheek. It was damp. Not just damp, but saturated with a stagnant, lukewarm wetness that had long ago surrendered to mildew. The fibers were stiff, unnaturally so, as if they had been soaked and dried a thousand times over.
Then, the smell. It coiled into his nostrils and settled in the back of his throat, a cloying miasma of old mold, of water that had been trapped for centuries, and something else… a sharp, sterile scent like wet ozone, the smell of the air after a lightning strike, but without the cleansing freshness. It was the smell of decay and electricity warring for dominance.
Alex's mind, still sluggish from the fall—the sideways, impossible fall—struggled to assemble these sensory inputs into a coherent picture. He groaned, a sound that was immediately swallowed by the oppressive hum. His logical brain, his most trusted tool, began its diagnostic protocol out of sheer, ingrained habit. Status report: Auditory anomaly. Tactile anomaly. Olfactory anomaly. Location: Unknown. Hypothesis: Head trauma. Possible drugging.
He forced his eyelids to peel open.
And the sickness began.
It was the color. A yellow so absolute, so suffocating, it felt like drowning in pigment. It was not the cheerful yellow of a sunflower or a summer dress. It was the jaundiced, bilious yellow of old nicotine stains on a smoker's wall. The yellow of faded legal pads left in the sun, of rot, of sickness itself. This mono-yellow wallpaper coated every vertical surface in sight, its pattern a faint, barely-there floral design that repeated with a maddening, artificial perfection. It was a pattern designed to soothe in some long-forgotten office or waiting room, but here, in this context, it was a visual scream.
He pushed himself up, his palm sinking into the squelching, musty carpet. The dampness seeped into the denim of his jeans. He was in a room. Or a hallway. It was impossible to tell. Walls stretched away from him in every direction, meeting at corners that felt subtly wrong, not quite ninety degrees. The space was partitioned by more of these yellow walls, creating an endless, illogical maze of office-like segments, all of them empty.
Above him, the source of the hum-buzz. Rows upon rows of fluorescent lights recessed into a stained drop-ceiling. They stretched into the distance, their perspective lines converging towards an infinite, unseen point. Some flickered erratically, casting twitching, nervous shadows that didn't exist. Most just shone with a steady, merciless glare that offered no respite, no corners of true darkness. The light they cast was as sickly as the walls, tinting everything—his hands, his clothes, the very air itself—with that same nauseating yellow hue.
Panic, a cold, sharp needle, pricked the edges of his forced composure. He was not in the basement of the Concordance Office Building. He knew that with a certainty that defied all logic. The fall… the wall dissolving… Leo's journal.
"A glitch in the texture of reality."
"No," he whispered, the word feeble against the hum. "No, no, no."
He scrambled to his feet, a wave of dizziness washing over him. He looked down one corridor. Endless yellow. He turned and looked down the other. Identical. There were no windows. No doors. No furniture. Just the walls, the carpet, and the lights, repeating forever. It was a computer-generated level from a nightmare, a procedural environment stamped out by a broken algorithm.
His IT-support brain screamed at him: This is not a system error. You are the error.
His hands, trembling, fumbled for his pocket. The smooth, rectangular shape of his phone was a totem of the real world, a link back to sanity. He pulled it out, its dark screen a stark contrast to the yellow world around it. He pressed the power button, praying for a cracked screen, a boot loop, anything that indicated normal, physical damage.
The screen lit up. The wallpaper was a picture of him and Leo, years younger, grinning on a fishing trip. The sight was a punch to the gut, a memory from a world that felt a million miles away. His eyes darted to the top of the screen.
Five bars of signal strength. All of them empty. Above them, the single, devastating word: No Signal.
Of course. He'd expected that. He was underground. Or… somewhere else. But then he saw the other icon, the one in the top right corner.
The battery symbol. It was full, a perfect, solid white block. And next to it, the number: 100%.
Alex stared. His blood turned to ice. That was impossible. Utterly, fundamentally, physically impossible. When he'd left the house, his phone had been at maybe forty percent. He'd used the flashlight, the compass. It should have been nearly dead. A phone doesn't spontaneously charge itself to full capacity. It doesn't happen. It violates the laws of thermodynamics.
That single, impossible number was more terrifying than the endless yellow walls, more frightening than the oppressive hum. The walls could be a set. The hum could be a hidden speaker. But the 100% battery was a quiet, personal miracle delivered in a place that promised only damnation. It was a sign that the rules weren't just bent here; they were shattered and rewritten by an unseen, unknown, and uncaring intelligence.
The dam of his composure broke. A raw, animal terror he had never known surged through him. His breath came in ragged, panicked gasps. The yellow walls seemed to press in, the floral pattern swimming before his eyes. The hum-buzz intensified, drilling into his brain, vibrating in his teeth, shaking the very atoms of his being.
He had to get out.
He picked a direction—it didn't matter which—and he ran. His work boots slapped against the wet carpet with a heavy, rhythmic squish, squish, squish. The sound was obscene in the sterile drone of the hum. He ran past partition after identical partition, his chest burning, his lungs screaming for air that wasn't thick with the taste of mold.
He ran for what felt like minutes, but the scenery never changed. The same yellow wallpaper. The same damp carpet. The same merciless lights. It was like running on a cosmic treadmill, designed by a sadist. The space wasn't just big; it was actively mocking his effort to traverse it. He risked a glance over his shoulder. The spot where he had woken up was gone, but the hallway behind him looked exactly the same as the hallway ahead. There were no landmarks. There was no progress.
A sob of pure frustration and fear ripped itself from his throat. He stumbled, catching himself against one of the unnervingly smooth walls. He pounded his fist against it. It was solid. Unyielding.
"HELLO?!" he screamed, his voice raw. "IS ANYONE HERE?!"
The sound was wrong. It didn't echo. An echo requires distance and surfaces for sound to bounce off. Here, his voice traveled a short distance and then was simply… absorbed. The hum-buzz swallowed it whole, leaving a ringing silence in its wake that was more profound and terrifying than the noise itself.
He was alone. Completely and utterly alone in an infinite, yellow hell.
He slid down the wall, his back leaving a damp smear on the sickly floral pattern, and landed in a heap on the sodden floor. He pulled his knees to his chest, burying his face in his arms, trying to block out the light, the color, the sound. But it was impossible. The hum-buzz was inside him now. The yellow was burned onto the back of his eyelids.
This was it. Level 0. The Lobby. The words from Leo's journal came back to him, no longer the ramblings of an obsessed teenager, but a chillingly accurate field guide. His brother had known about this place. He had studied it. And he had come here anyway.
The immense guilt that had driven Alex for a year—guilt over their argument, over his dismissal—was suddenly eclipsed by a new, towering emotion: terror-laced awe. Leo hadn't been chasing ghosts. He had been a cartographer of madness, an explorer of a broken dimension.
And Alex, in his grief and cynicism, had followed him right through the looking glass.
He stayed there, curled on the floor, for a long time, as the panic attack raged and subsided, leaving him hollowed out and trembling. The tears stopped. The hyperventilating slowed. In the empty space left behind, a tiny, cold spark ignited. It was the last remnant of the man he used to be. The problem-solver. The IT technician.
He lifted his head, blinking against the oppressive yellow glare. Running was useless. Screaming was useless. Panic was a luxury, a waste of energy and focus he could not afford.
Okay, he thought, the internal voice shaky but clear. Run the diagnostic. You're in a system you don't understand. The rules are unknown. The hardware is alien. But there are rules. There have to be.
He had light. He had air, however foul. His phone had a full battery. He had his mind. He had the half-empty water bottle still clipped to his belt. He checked. It was still half-empty. A small, comforting piece of normal physics.
He was a system technician trapped in the ultimate broken system. Leo had come here looking for answers. Alex was just looking to survive. The first step was the same as any trouble ticket: establish a baseline. Observe. Document. Understand the error.
The mono-yellow sickness was the environment. The cure, he realized with a grim, terrifying clarity, was to understand it.