The panic had burned itself out, leaving a cold, hard ash of resolve in its place. Alex knew from years of troubleshooting crashed servers and blue-screened computers that blind panic was the enemy of progress. You didn't fix a problem by hitting the machine. You fixed it by observing, testing, and methodically eliminating variables. This place, this impossible yellow nightmare, was the ultimate system failure. He had to treat it as such.
He got to his feet, his body aching from the fall and the subsequent huddle on the damp floor. He took a single, precious sip from his water bottle, the lukewarm, plastic-tasting liquid a sacrament from a forgotten world. He screwed the cap on tightly. Rationing was Rule One.
Rule Two: Navigation. In a space with no landmarks, you had to create your own. He fumbled in his pockets, his fingers brushing against the folded page from Leo's journal. He ignored it for now. His keys. He pulled them out, the familiar jangle a small, reassuringly solid sound against the omnipresent hum-buzz. He selected the smallest, least-used key on the ring—the one to a long-lost filing cabinet—and knelt down. With grim determination, he began scratching at the base of the wall where he stood.
The wallpaper tore easily, but the plaster underneath was unnaturally hard. He had to put his weight into it, gritting his teeth as the key bit into the surface. After a minute of work, he had carved a crude, but unmistakable 'X' into the wall, a few inches above the carpet line.
"There," he said aloud, his voice a defiant intrusion into the hum. "This is Point Zero."
He stood and faced one of the four identical corridors leading away from his mark. He pulled out his dead phone, the compass app still frozen on the screen from the moment it died in the basement. It was useless as a compass, but its straight edges were a guide. He aligned the top of the phone with the perceived direction of the hallway. He would walk straight. He would count his paces. He would be methodical.
He began to walk.
"One, two, three…" he counted under his breath, his voice a low metronome against the hum-buzz. His boots made their squelching, rhythmic sound on the sodden carpet. He kept his eyes fixed on a point far down the hallway, trying not to be distracted by the endless repetition of the floral wallpaper. The yellow was a constant, oppressive presence, a color that felt like it was actively trying to suffocate him, to bleach out his thoughts and replace them with its own blank, buzzing madness.
One hundred paces. The corridor remained unchanged. He passed intersections, left and right turns leading into identical yellow abysses. He ignored them. Straight ahead. That was the plan.
Five hundred paces. His legs began to ache. The dampness from the carpet had seeped through the soles of his boots, and his socks were now unpleasantly wet. The air, thick and stagnant, was hard to breathe, and a film of clammy sweat coated his skin. The hum-buzz was a physical weight on his shoulders. He was beginning to understand what Leo meant by perceptual dissonance. His brain, so accustomed to the subtle variations of the real world—a crack in the pavement, a different shade of brick, the slant of sunlight—was being starved of new information. It was like sensory deprivation, but with an overload of a single, maddening stimulus.
One thousand paces. By his estimation, he had walked nearly a mile. A full mile in a straight line inside a building. It was impossible. He should have hit a wall, a dead end, anything. But the corridor stretched on, an infinite yellow throat. He paused, leaning against a wall to catch his breath, his heart hammering. He looked back. The corridor behind him was identical to the one ahead. Had he made any progress at all? Was he simply walking in place while the scenery spooled around him like a movie backdrop?
He shook his head, pushing the disorienting thought away. Stick to the plan. He turned and kept walking.
Two thousand paces. His mind was starting to play tricks on him. In the periphery of his vision, he saw movement—a flicker of shadow, a twitch in the wallpaper's pattern. But when he snapped his head to look, there was nothing. Just the endless, static yellow. The hum-buzz seemed to shift in pitch, sometimes dipping lower, sometimes sharpening to a piercing whine that made his ears ache. He was hallucinating. The combination of stress, fear, and sensory monotony was eroding his sanity.
He stopped again, his body trembling with exhaustion and adrenaline. He had to test the space. He had to know if the rules of geometry still applied. At the next intersection, he broke his own rule. He took a deliberate right turn.
He walked another hundred paces.
Then he took another right turn.
Another hundred paces.
A third right turn.
Another hundred paces.
A final, fourth right turn.
If reality was behaving, if this was a normal grid of corridors, he should now be standing exactly where he had started this four-turn maneuver, facing the direction he had been walking originally. He looked at the base of the wall.
There was no 'X'.
A cold dread, deeper than any panic he had felt before, settled in his stomach. It wasn't just a big space. It was a broken space. Non-Euclidean. The laws of geometry were a suggestion here, not a rule. Four right turns didn't make a square. They just led you somewhere else. Somewhere deeper.
The crushing weight of his loneliness intensified tenfold. He wasn't just lost in a physical sense. He was adrift in a sea of broken logic. He was a piece of data in a corrupted file, utterly alone and without a frame of reference. The hope of finding an exit, of finding his brother, felt like a childish fantasy. How could you find anyone in a place where direction itself was a lie?
He stumbled onward, abandoning his count. His methodical walk devolved into a desperate, shambling wander. He took turns at random, hoping for some change, any change. He passed through vast, empty rooms that felt like deserted ballrooms or conference halls, their scale all wrong, their ceilings impossibly high. He navigated through tight, claustrophobic warrens of partitions that forced him to turn sideways to squeeze through. But always, it was the same. The same yellow, the same carpet, the same lights, the same hum.
Hours passed. Or minutes. Time, like distance, had lost all meaning. His thirst became a raging fire in his throat. His hunger was a dull, gnawing ache in his belly. His world shrank to these three sensations: thirst, hunger, and the maddening hum-buzz.
He slumped into a corner, the intersection of two perfectly wrong angles, and pulled out his phone again. The 100% battery mocked him. He opened his photo gallery, the sudden burst of color from his old life a physical shock. Pictures of his parents smiling at a barbecue. A blurry selfie of him and an old girlfriend. A photo of his dog, long since passed. And dozens of Leo. Leo with a goofy grin, Leo flipping him off from across a dinner table, Leo holding up a fish, Leo looking serious and thoughtful as he stared out a window.
Each photo was a dagger. This was what he had lost. This was the world that had been stolen from him, or that he had blundered out of. He wasn't just Alex Ryder, IT Technician anymore. That person was a ghost from a photograph. He was now just a wanderer, a solitary inhabitant of an infinite, empty dimension.
He let the phone drop to his lap. He was so profoundly alone, it felt like a physical state, as if his very molecules were crying out for proximity to another living thing. He would die here. He would starve, or dehydrate, or simply go insane from the soul-crushing monotony. He would become another mystery, another file in a cold case cabinet, just like his brother.
He closed his eyes, the yellow still burning behind his lids. The hum-buzz seemed to swell, filling the space where his thoughts should be. He was a mile from his starting point in every direction, and still at the very beginning. He was nowhere. And for the first time, he truly understood that he might be nowhere forever.