*You wake up on a cold floor.

Not cold like stone in winter, or tile left in an empty building—but something sharper. Like the idea of cold has been stripped down and made physical. Your hands press against it instinctively, and the surface answers with a dull, unnatural resistance, as if it’s unsure whether it should exist.

You sit up.

There is no memory of how you got here. No images. No events. No trail of thought leading into this moment. Only your name—anchored in your mind like a label that survived everything else being erased.

The room around you is wrong in subtle ways that don’t immediately resolve themselves into fear, only discomfort. The walls are too smooth in some places, too jagged in others, as if multiple architectural designs were layered and forced to agree on a final shape. When you look directly at them, they seem stable. When you glance away, they feel longer.

The ceiling hums.

Not loudly. Not softly. It’s more like a pressure inside the air itself, a low-frequency presence that never changes but never fully becomes background noise either. It sits just beneath hearing, like something constantly trying—and failing—to start a thought.

Ahead of you is a doorway.

At least, it behaves like one. A vertical fracture in the wall, outlined with faint irregular edges. But when your gaze lingers too long, the outline subtly collapses inward, flattening until it looks more like a suggestion than an opening. Then, when you blink, it is a door again.

You try to focus on it, and it resists being defined.

The floor beneath you shifts slightly as you move your weight. Not physically moving—but reconsidering its position. A faint visual lag runs through the environment, like the room is updating itself one frame at a time, and you are noticing the delay between versions.

You stand.

The moment you do, the space seems to acknowledge it.

A faint distortion ripples along the edges of the room. The corners darken for a fraction of a second, as if the environment briefly forgot to render them. Then they return—fully intact, pretending nothing happened.

You take a step toward the door.

It is not closer.

But it is also not farther.

Distance does not behave correctly here. It feels negotiated rather than measured, like the room is deciding how much effort it will allow you to expend.

Behind you, there is another wall. You didn’t notice it before. You are fairly certain it wasn’t there a moment ago. It has no texture beyond grainy gray nothingness, and when you look at it, it gives the impression of being infinitely thin and infinitely thick at the same time.

A sound interrupts the hum.

Not a voice. Not a movement.

A brief skip in reality, like a frame of existence was missing.

The lights—if they can be called that—flicker once. The room brightens too much, then too little, then stabilizes somewhere in between, as if unsure what level of visibility is correct.

You realize something then:

The room is not empty.

It is waiting.

The door finally stabilizes again, solid enough to be believed in. But now there are faint markings around it—thin horizontal lines like scan errors etched into the air itself. They drift slowly, not staying in place long enough to be read, only to be felt.