Chapter 91: Back In Back

We tried the first door we came to. I wanted to say it was halfway down the last aisle, but realistically, the lights on our chests and phones didn’t reach either the corner we’d started from or the far end of the warehouse, so for all I knew, it might’ve stretched twice as far, or four times, or forever.

Either way, the door swung into those same unfinished hallways Donica and I had gotten lost in on our first visit.

“Ugh,” she said, when she saw the pressed-board walls tight on each side and the open ceiling with its rafters and wires and unlit bare bulbs.

Were there bulbs last time, outside of Third Eye? I didn’t remember.

“There’s still time to turn back,” I said.

Donica gripped the pocket watch. I got the impression she’d insisted on pressing on as much to prove Matt wrong as because she wanted to be done with the construction site once and for all. Both motivations I could get behind.

Lena poked me in the ribs. “If you want to chicken out, Cam, say it yourself.”

“I don’t –” I shook my head. “Maybe I do. But we’ve come this far.”

“Fair,” she said.

I pushed through the door and looked both ways.

Nothing jumped out at me.

Neither literally, like a monster, nor figuratively, like any sort of distinguishing features in the halls. They were just lines of doorframes that might or might not open onto anything and concrete floors even dustier than they’d been last time. No prints; Donica and I had entered through a door near the front of the warehouse, and whoever else had been here apparently had, too.

I let the door slip from my hand to Lena’s, from her’s to Donica’s, and finally to Zhizhi, who let it swing shut behind her. The door offered a few last glimpses of the warehouse before its counterweight dragged it to a stop.

“So,” Zhizhi said. “This is the place.”

“Yup.” I rubbed my hands on my jeans. “We’ll have to try every door to see if there’s anything interesting, but a lot of them aren’t real. Did you ever hear of somebody nailing up frames without cutting out the doorways first?”

That question went out to everyone.

“I certainly haven’t,” Erin said.

“It’s more than odd,” Miguel said. “That’s not how doorframes are usually put together. Normally, there would be a slightly larger aperture, with the frame cut to fit and then the door fitted inside of that. I can’t think of a reason to nail molding directly to the walls like this except to be confusing.”

“It sure manages that,” Donica said.

She walked up to the first frame we could see and shoved her palm into it.

The door swung open.

“Huh,” she said.

“Anything good?” Lena asked.

“It looks like an office to me,” Donica said. She leaned against the door to hold it open. “Come check it out.”

The room on the other side contained the usual mix of real furniture that shouldn’t have been on a construction site, a few collectible objects we could only see through Third Eye, and large swathes of unfinished concrete and board. Unlike the room I’d called the vet’s office, this one had no external windows or door either in or out of Third Eye. I still wished I could’ve gotten a look at the inside of that ‘Live Pets!’ magazine; I’d looked it up later and couldn’t find a real periodical with that title.

The only interesting detail in this room was another poster. Abstract design, four overlapping circles. A caption in runic characters covered part of the lowest, largest circle. We snapped a photo for possible translation somewhere down the line, but Lena and Donica seemed to have lost their taste for trying to guess what office cliche it would come out as.

“It’s probably just a coincidence that the first one we opened was a real door,” I said. “Right?”

“As opposed to what?” Donica asked.

“More rooms... opening, over time,” I said.

She tapped her finger on her phone case. “You mean like how the reality seems closer to the Third Eye version than we remember it.”

I nodded.

That remained just a feeling, but, whether because I was expecting it or because it really had happened, I felt it more strongly with each area we explored.

None of us seemed to want to dwell on it. I knew I didn’t.

Lena cleared her throat. “How we doing on time?”

“You’re experiencing significant discontinuities,” Erin said. “Your feeds have grown visibly choppy.”

Donica checked the pocket watch. “Looks like 8:25 for us.”

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“It’s 8:38 out here,” Matt said.

We didn’t lose a lot of time with each check, but it added up. If you counted our earlier trip onto the site, how many minutes behind were we? A whole hour? Half? I figured Donica and I had lost about two, maybe two and a half hours the first night, so we still had a ways to go to catch up to our record.

“Should we set a cut-off?” Erin asked.

“I think you know what I would say,” Matt said.

“In this case, I’m inclined to agree,” Miguel said. “Why don’t we shoot for you getting home before ten?”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” Erin said. “All my coursework is done for the day.”

“I meant the exploration team,” he said.

My earpiece crackled as she tried to cover her giggle.

“If we’re calling it at ten your time,” I said, “we better hurry up and find something interesting. No more speculation about the Materials we find. Let’s just photograph everything, collect what we can, and move room to room.”

Nods all around.

Lena paused at the door and took out a roll of hot pink packing tape. She tore a strip off and stuck it to the doorframe.

“Technically,” Donica said, “I think that might be vandalism.”

Lena rubbed the tape. “They’ve got my prints if they want ‘em.”

And we had an unambiguous way of knowing where we’d already been.

She left a strip of tape on each doorframe we passed, in or out of Third Eye. The next two turned out to be fake, so maybe it really had been a coincidence we found a real room on our first try. In retrospect, I wished I’d thought to bring a different color of packing tape so we could easily differentiate between real and fake doors. Maybe a third that we could slap on only in places where Third Eye had added extra frames.

It continued to do so. In fact, viewed through it, the hallway looked almost as dense with doorways as Lena’s old apartment building.

With what we’d learned tonight, I wondered if I had a simpler explanation for how her specific apartment had seemed unoccupied. Could Third Eye add extra space in the middle of a residential building?

If so, why did I consider that simpler than Third Eye Productions renting out an apartment specifically to keep it empty?

I supposed I preferred either a wholly natural or wholly supernatural explanation to one that mixed and matched.

Regardless, we followed the curve of the hallways around the corner – Lena marked the floor with more tape to indicate our right turn – and found ourselves facing a line of doorframes and intersections, stretching past the limits of our lights.

“Absurd,” Miguel said, not for the first time. “I’m still trying to map for you, for what very little good it does.”

“Thanks, man,” I said. “Between all these hallways and the warehouse, this wouldn’t even physically fit on the site, would it?”

He sighed. “It would not.”

The first doorframe around the corner was a fake. The second opened onto another office. This one lacked even a poster, and contained only a couple of end tables that only existed in Third Eye. Some Iron for the legs, some Wood for the surfaces.

The very next door opened onto another office.

“I know this is a different part of the building than we explored before,” Donica said, “but the rate of real doors to fakes is just so much higher now.”

“Agreed.” I could think of mundane explanations, but I found it hard to take them seriously.

I looked around the new office. Chairs, a desk. Through Third Eye, two smaller desks crowded awkwardly against the opposite wall, and a room divider kind of like the one Lena and I had.

Lena hugged Bernie and leaned against the swinging door.

I drifted over to her and laced my fingers through hers. “What’s up?”

“This place is finally starting to give me the creeps,” she said.

Zhizhi glanced our way, and Donica’s eyes snapped to us.

“Why?” the latter asked.

Lena shuddered. “All these hallways and little rooms. They make me think of having to work in an office.”

She tried to laugh and managed to snort. Zhizhi and I, and Miguel over our headsets, chuckled.

Donica shook her head.

It was forced laughter, hollow, and it echoed weirdly through the halls. Still laughter.

That was more than we’d had last time.

I squeezed Lena’s hand and smiled at her.

Then we collected our Materials and moved on.

Five more doors, two more offices, another intersection. Our inventories burst with new Materials and our XP totals ticked steadily up, but for the first time since I’d started grinding Third Eye, it really felt like a grind.

Maybe Lena was onto something about the office work. If you took out the weird environment, took out the lingering fears from our first visit, this almost seemed – dull?

Better that than terrifying.

At least, I tried to tell myself so.

Hall. Door. Fake. Door. Real. Office. Materials. Hall. Repeat.

“8:59.” The voice over the coms was so pitch-shifted, it took me a second to recognize it as Matt’s.

I didn’t know if we’d lost time because of discontinuities, or because the exploration process seemed so mind numbing.

“This is bullshit,” Donica muttered.

“Not that I don’t agree,” Zhizhi said, “but which aspect specifically? Is it the part where I follow you through a bunch of basically empty rooms, filming you ‘collecting’ things that I can’t see and neither can my camera?”

“How can you object to that?” Lena asked. “It’s must-see TV.”

Zhizhi chuckled.

Donica didn’t. “This place. The only time it’s not frightening is when it’s boring? I could collect Materials this fast if I just cruised around town, trading off driving and scouting.”

“For all the reasons to criticize the developers of Third Eye,” Miguel said, “and believe me, those reasons are legion, I don’t think it’s fair to blame them for failing to make this an interesting enough environment in which to trespass.”

“That’s all fine and well,” Donica said, “but they shouldn’t have left a trail of signs drawing me here.”

“Signs?” Erin asked.

“You saw some of them,” Donica said. “Remember when we went scouting near my house? The signs continued along the path to this lot. I traced them later.”

I found it hard to tell with her voice sped up, but I thought Erin hesitated. After a beat, she said, “I didn’t realize that was how you found this place.”

“After Cameron and Lena posted about that tunnel –”

“You mean,” Lena said, “after we posted how basically the whole game runs on memes?”

Donica only acknowledged her with a glare, and that seemed half-hearted. “– I followed the signs all the way to this construction site. That’s when I saw that the lobby looked empty in reality but finished through Third Eye.”

Another beat. Erin’s voice grew quieter. “Donica... the signs you and I saw weren’t leading us here.”

Donica frowned. “Well, not directly, but there was a whole trail of them.”

“Of stop signs. And one-way street signs,” Erin said. “All of which pointed away.”