A square room—five meters to a side.
Three walls were covered in neatly arranged screens. There was no furniture.
Only one man stood inside, wearing a vertically striped shirt.
Across every screen: a massive fleet of warships flying in formation through space. Spectacular.
And the man watching it looked utterly lost.
Suddenly, the footage froze.
A voice asked, “Finished?”
“Finished,” Striped Shirt answered, turning his head, searching for the speaker.
“Don’t bother,” the voice said. “You can’t see me. Better spend your energy trying to remember who you’re.”
“Can’t remember,” Striped Shirt snapped. “Who am I? And who are you— AHHHH!”
Pain detonated in his neck. He collapsed, screaming, only then remembering the lethal metal collar locked around his throat.
“You forgot the rules again,” the voice chuckled. “In here, you don’t get to ask questions. I ask. You answer.”
“Let me out—please! This place—”
He bit off the rest of the sentence, terrified he’d triggered the collar again.
“Letting you out isn’t hard,” the voice said. “The moment you remember who you’re, you can leave.”
“I… I can’t. I can’t remember anything. Give me a mirror—maybe if I see my face I’ll remember.”
“There are no mirrors. But I can give you hints.”
“Fine. Talk.”
“You’re a character in the story you just watched,” the voice said. “Your job is to figure out which one. If you doubt a scene, a person, an event, you can come to this room and replay it. You can even access footage that wasn’t included in the story.”
As the voice spoke, the three walls began displaying different feeds.
“Left wall: any camera view inside Edean Tower—any floor, any time.”
“Right wall: Glimmer Caverns and Aurora Plateau—any outpost, any base, any time.”
“Front wall: a limited archive from orbital space and from inside certain ships. Not much. All of it—including the story you just watched—can be replayed as often as you like.”
The voice laughed softly.
“Fun, isn’t it?”
“You… are you the author?” Striped Shirt blurted—then immediately screamed as the collar punished him again.
“Ha! Still not learning.”
“Okay—okay,” he gasped. “Show me. Just… show me.”
“Hold on. I’m not finished.”
The voice hardened.
“Watching footage has a cost.”
“What—”
“We’ll start with a map.”
All the screens switched to the same top-down diagram.
“This is where you’re,” the voice said. “Five rooms. One large hall, four small rooms. I labeled them.”
“A: your bedroom. Toilet. Bed. Comfortable. Spacious.”
“B: the hall where you work. A wheel treadmill in the center. One lap earns one point. Points are important: you need them to survive, and you need them to buy video time for clues.”
“C: the room where you eat.”
“D: this room—video playback. You stay here until you remember who you’re.”
“E: the exit. Your favorite.”
“Rules,” the voice continued.
“Every day you must earn at least 200 points. Only then will the button by Door One in your bedroom work. Press it and your door will close for the night. In the morning it reopens automatically… and you’ll need to earn 200 again. Closing the door matters. I won’t explain why. You’ll find out.”
“Door Two: costs 300 points. One meal.”
“Door Three: costs 300 points. One hour of video access.”
“Door Four: costs 500 points. Inside, you speak your name. If you’re right, Door Five opens and you’re free.”
“If you’re wrong,” the voice added, almost cheerful, “it gets ugly. You come back out… and from then on you’ll need two laps for one point. After another wrong answer, three laps. And so on.”
“Understand now?”
“So I’ve to run five hundred laps every day just to not starve,” Striped Shirt said bitterly. “Eight hundred points just to watch a video. You’re messing with me.”
“You don’t have to play,” the voice said pleasantly. “I’m leaving. Decide for yourself.”
“Wait—what do you want from me?”
Pain exploded again. The voice laughed.
“Last advice: it’s two hours until nightfall. If you want to live, you’d better earn two hundred points before then.”
“Hey! Wait—don’t go!”
No response.
All the screens went dark at once.
Then the door behind him slid open, revealing Room B.
Striped Shirt stepped out cautiously. The moment he crossed the threshold, the door behind him shut.
In the center of the hall was the wheel treadmill.
“A joke,” he muttered. It looked like a giant hamster wheel.
On the wall near Door Four were two displays. One showed “0.” The other showed “120.”
A counter and a timer.
He looked up—and froze.
There was no visible ceiling. Bright lights illuminated the walls up to twenty or thirty meters, and then everything vanished into blackness, as if the hall were the bottom of a well with no rim.
“Hello?!”
His own echo answered him in a long, dying chain. The darkness felt like a stare.
When he looked back at the timer display, “120” had become “119.”
A countdown.
What happens at zero? He didn’t dare ask aloud.
He climbed into the wheel and started moving. It took effort to make it turn, but it was manageable. He ran one lap.
The counter jumped from “0” to “1.”
Of course.
He ran again. Again. The wheel began to roll smoothly.
At first he could manage three laps per timer tick. Then the wheel seemed to grow heavier. Slower. By fifty points, a single tick only bought him two laps. After that, he could barely manage one lap per tick—and sometimes not even that. He was reduced to trudging.
At 158 laps, his legs turned to jelly. The timer still showed twenty-six.
He stumbled into the only room he could enter—his bedroom.
The lighting inside was dim. A sink. No mirror. A narrow bed. A toilet. Beside the door was a palm-sized button, identical to the ones outside. He pressed it. Nothing. Not enough points yet.
He drank from the tap, then filled the basin and tried to catch his reflection in the water. The light was too weak. He touched his face—no wrinkles. Not old. He felt his scalp: no hair. He pulled off the striped shirt. His body was muscular, defined. And on the back of the shirt was a number: 14.
After a short rest, he forced himself back out.
The timer read fifteen now. But the hall was darker—the lights only reached maybe ten meters. The black ceiling seemed to have lowered.
The dark was creeping down.
He panicked and ran again.
One lap. Two. Three.
He tired faster this time. By 182 laps, he had nothing left. The timer showed eight. The darkness pressed lower; the light had the sick color of dusk.
A fear he couldn’t name wrapped around him. He ran like his life depended on it—because it did.
194. 195.
His breathing turned into a broken bellows. When the timer reached one, the digits turned red—then snapped to “60,” counting down fast.
59. 58. 57…
The temperature dropped abruptly. A cold wind poured down from above. In the darkness, something made a grinding, creaking sound—like a massive gate opening… or a prehistoric beast waking up and grinding its teeth.
197. 198.
His teeth chattered.
The timer hit zero.
And almost instantly—
A long, furious howl tore through the hall.
Heavy footsteps thundered from above, growing closer with each boom.
Something was coming.
He nearly collapsed. Instinct screamed at him to run for his bedroom, but he saw the counter—199.
Striped Shirt clenched his jaw, dug up his last spark, and ran.
“Two hundred!” he screamed.
He lunged for the bedroom door—
A colossal impact hit the floor outside, like an earthquake.
He slammed into the room. The button beside the door was glowing now. He smacked it.
A hidden slab slid out of the wall, sealing the entrance.
In the last sliver before it shut, he dared to look back.
A bull-sized shadow was charging straight at him.
BOOM.
The creature slammed into the door. His bed shifted across the floor from the shock. He was thrown down like a rag.
Everything went dark except his shaking breath.