Chapter 83: Distance

The door swung shut behind Lena and I panicked.

It was stupid – maybe it was stupid – but I felt absolutely certain that when I ran through that door, I wouldn’t find her on the other side. The warehouse would swallow her up and I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again.

Run I did. I slammed into the door as it swung back into the shop. It was heavier than it looked, and it looked pretty damn heavy. I shoved it out of my way.

I don’t know if it was stupid or not. But it was wrong.

Lena had taken a few steps inside and was glancing over her shoulder as I staggered to a stop, breathing hard, the door swinging back and forth behind me until its counterweight dragged it to a stop.

She raised an eyebrow. “Miss me already?”

“Always.” I tried to smile.

She waved me over and let me give her a little hug. Maybe not so little.

“No more breaking line of sight,” I said. “Every step of the way, each of us has eyes on the next, so it’s a chain.”

“Seems like you left the other two behind,” she said.

“Yeah, well.” I let go of her to shrug.

She snorted.

The door swung open again and Donica and Zhizhi joined us.

“Wow,” the latter said. “This place is huge.”

She wasn’t wrong.

I’d been so relieved to see Lena, I hadn’t stopped to take in the sight of the warehouse. Once again, I was faced with row after row of empty shelves, at least a grocery store’s worth.

Was this space bigger than the Kmart it had overwritten? I had no way of telling. I tried to trace the lines where the oppressively low ceiling met the pressed board walls, but long before I reached a corner, my light petered out in the gloom. Through my phone screen, I saw dim, flickering overhead fluorescents, but the sameness of them made them seem to go on forever in both directions. The fixtures were in place on the ceiling IRL, but there were no bulbs in them and, presumably, no power.

“Now this place is creepy,” Lena said.

“Isn’t it, though?” Donica hovered near the door we’d come through, one hand in contact with it, like she was afraid that if she let go, she’d fall.

“Can you give me an estimate of the space?” Miguel’s voice crackled in my ear and I tried not to jump. “I’m still trying to map it.”

I’m pretty sure I forgot to press my hand to my headset, too. So much for the video. “I can give you a guess, but not an estimate.”

Frankly, I wasn’t even sure I could guess.

“Try measuring the distance between the shelves on each aisle,” Erin said. “Then all you have to do is count the number of aisles.”

I nodded. “Makes sense. We have to go up and down them if we’re going to look for stuff to collect, anyway.”

Lena and I separated and we started walking.

“You coming?” Zhizhi asked.

I knew she wasn’t talking to either of us. I looked back and saw Donica still standing near the door.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she snapped. “Sorry. I just... Erin, how are our feeds looking?”

“More discontinuities than in the lobby or that little shop,” Erin said. “It seems fairly consistent between you. Joon Woo tells me he’s looking into video editing software that will have the tools to count the dropped frames exactly, so we may get some more data from that.”

“Are you feeling unwell, Donica?” Miguel asked, which was probably the more relevant question.

“No.” Donica flexed her fingers. “I’m just letting this place get to me. It’s stupid.”

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“It’s not,” Miguel said. “As the only person we know who’s been hospitalized by Third Eye phenomena, please take my advice when I say to remain cautious.”

“Right.” She looked around. “I think the shelves here are different, too. And were those light fixtures in place last time? In reality. I know they were there in Third Eye.”

“Sorry, I just don’t remember,” I said. “The shelves do look more... fleshed out, I guess? I thought they were just frames. I’m not going to commit to it without a photo, though, and as for the lights, I don’t even know if I looked up.”

She eyed the ceiling, then looked at it through her phone, then dragged her gaze over to us. She dragged her feet, too, but she did join us two aisles down. “Let’s just get this over with. If we map the place out, maybe it won’t seem so... endless.”

“That’s the hope,” I said. “Keep us posted if the discontinuities get worse, okay, Erin?”

“Mmhm!”

Donica took a tape measure from her pack. She and I stretched it across the floor between two aisles. The distance didn’t sync up evenly to any number of inches, but it was exactly one and a half meters. Tight for a store, and, from what I remembered from my youthful dalliance with retail work, way too tight for a warehouse. Could you even squeeze a forklift down these aisles? They might work fine for mom-and-pop shops, but this large a space had to have been intended to hold stock for stores that sold larger items, didn’t it?

Well, it was hardly the weirdest thing here.

The shelves themselves were two-sided, and exactly sixty centimeters deep.

“This whole place seems to be metric,” Lena said. “Who’s up for saying it’s about seven feet per aisle and handwaving it?”

“I’d rather use metric, personally,” Erin said.

Lena narrowed her eyes. “Madness.”

“Two point one meters per aisle,” I said.

She puffed her cheeks out. “Traitor.”

“I just don’t want to get lost in here.”

“Is a person who succumbed to the metric system truly not already lost?”

“You always ask the deepest questions, Lena,” I said.

“You know it.” She twirled around and pointed into the distant gloom. “Let’s get counting!”

I pinched my nose and tried not to smile. Zhizhi chuckled. Donica shook her head, but I could tell she was at least more annoyed than afraid now.

We hung a right and began our mapping project. I started counting out aisles aloud. Zhizhi nodded along with me, although I didn’t keep any kind of a regular rhythm.

We checked each one we passed. Well, I say checked. I mean we shone our lights into each and peered up and down the shelves through Third Eye. No goods we could collect, or even ones we couldn’t, the same as last time. I’d sort of wondered, when it seemed like the place had changed, if these shelves would become populated with merchandise over time, either from the devs or someone else manually filling them or from some phenomena of their becoming more real.

I supposed it didn’t make any sense, though. Just wishful thinking. Their process of becoming more real, if it was even happening, would end with them looking identical whether you had Third Eye open or not. They remained empty both ways.

On the plus side, we didn’t see anything stalking up and down the aisles, either.

The first four we passed, we saw footprints that matched the boots Donica had worn on our first visit. I noticed just then that, while she had another heavy pair on, these looked less like construction boots and more like winter ones. Probably more comfortable, and even if we couldn’t tell the difference in the prints on the fly, it might be useful when analyzing video.

Too bad I didn’t have a second pair of boots, and wouldn’t have thought to wear different ones even if I had.

From aisle five on, we stopped seeing the prints. This must’ve been as far as she got before I called her over to the shopping carts. How long had we wandered around? It had felt like a long time, probably the longest of any of the stretches while we were at the construction site.

“More discontinuities,” Erin said. “I don’t have the software running yet, but I can see you’re dropping a lot of frames. Does it look that way to you, too, Miguel?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“If it keeps getting worse, let us know,” I said.

We pressed on. Ten aisles. Fifteen. Twenty. And this was just in one direction! Definitely bigger than the old Kmart.

A few doors led back to the shops, and presumably, the lobby, but they were spaced awfully far apart. We made it twenty-two aisles deep before we finally reached the far wall. The sight of the ugly pressed board, identical in and out of Third Eye, almost came as a relief after the sea of shelves.

“Should we finish the circuit,” Lena asked, “or do you want to go back?”

Donica sucked down a breath. “Go back.”

I chewed my lip. It was a waste of time and breath, technically, compared to just circling around. But Donica’s jaw was tight, Zhizhi was frowning, and even Lena had run out of jokes for the moment. Keeping our morale up wouldn’t be a waste.

“Go back,” I agreed.

“It’s probably a good idea,” Erin said. “We can check if those discontinuities seem to have caused any harm, and maybe even get a more accurate measure of if you’re losing time relative to us.”

“Should’ve just raided the shops,” Donica muttered.

“If all you want is Materials, sure,” Lena said. “You just know the mysterious stuff is going to be further back here, though. Including a Reactant for you.”

“That does seem plausible,” Donica said, which you could mistake for agreement if you weren’t paying attention.

We began the march back.

Twice more, Erin and Miguel broke in to report on our frame drops. Even though I’d asked for it, their intrusion annoyed me. I’d like to say I realized my reaction was irrational and rose above it, but mostly I just shut up so I could try to concentrate. I wanted to keep the tally of aisles we passed in my head so we could leave through the same door we’d come in by, and their voices made me second guess myself.

Still, I was almost sure I had it right.

Until I hit aisle twenty-two, pushed my hand against the outer wall, and felt unyielding pressed board instead of a swinging door.