Like most people who spent time hiding in building supply rooms when they were supposed to be working, Sean spent a lot of time watching videos on the internet. His favorites were speed-running videos. And, among those, the one he spent the most time on was where one guy was playing a Mario game, warped through a platform, and changed the shape of what was possible to do forever. His glitch cut seconds off the time it took to beat that particular level.

There was only one problem, really. Nobody could duplicate the glitch. Oh, they tried. People built robots that played the level again and again, trying slightly different angles and timings for hundreds of hours, but it never happened again. The leading theory was, no joke, that a solar flare had hit the guy’s console just right and flipped a bit at the right moment to cause endless angst among a very specific set of nerdy guys.

Nobody would ever know, but when Jeff plugged the machine back into the wall, something very similar happened to Sean. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to know, or that they couldn’t figure it out. But the machine exploded when it was fed more power, and that turned out to be more than enough to hide any evidence of what had happened.

As interesting as Sean might have found the fact that he was now in a real-life glitch, in the moment, he couldn’t care less. For him, the machine didn’t explode at all. From his perspective, it just disappeared from under his hand, like it had never existed at all. He gasped in surprise, only to realize he couldn’t breathe. His lungs tugged helplessly at the atmosphere around him, but somehow failed to move any air at all.

People who dove into water had the benefit of taking a deep breath first, Sean didn’t. From his first failed attempt to breathe, he started to panic. The feeling that something had gone wrong was made much worse by the bizarre nonsense his eyes were feeding him. The machine was gone, but it didn’t end there. The lights in the room took on a strobe-like quality, flickering off and on at some incredibly fast speed. The room’s tile turned dark for a moment, before flashing into a different style and color of linoleum an instant later. The color painted on the wall changed, then changed again. The tiles yellowed, then replaced itself, then disappeared entirely, leaving the floor bare and just concrete.

And then, without warning, a wall of glass sprung up in front of him. At the same time, metal walls sprung into being on his sides and back, closing him up in some kind of tiny enclosure. Then, when he thought he couldn’t be any more afraid, the lights cut out.

He stood choking in the dark for just a few moments before his consciousness decided that this was enough to take, and cut out like a burned-out light bulb.

—

Sean woke up in a fetal position. He was in the dark, and taking long, terrified gasps of air in a metal-and-glass box so small that he could barely even twitch. Levering his legs upwards, he painfully scraped the metal side of the cell to stand to his full height. Nothing was good yet, but he was alive. And he could breathe. That was a start.

Shit, he thought. How long was I out?

He peered out the window, looking for signs of Jeff. With how weird everything had been, he was worried. Jeff was old and if Sean was resting in some weird box while a shock-induced heart attack took out one of his few friends, he wasn’t sure he could live with it. He couldn’t see much, since the cell only had a dark window on one side, and the only light in the room seemed to be a dull red glow coming from inside the enclosure itself. But Jeff had been behind him when things went wacky, and if he was anywhere, he was probably still there.

Sean needed to get to him, and the first step was getting out of the box. Squeezing his arm up, he got one of his elbows above his head and smashed it into the glass. He wasn’t surprised when it didn’t break, since he couldn’t get much force into the blow from that angle. But he still expected something to happen, if only a crack in the glass or rattling in the frame. Instead, it didn’t even make a noise. He slammed it several more times, with the same unsatisfying lack of reaction. Whatever kind of material this window was made of, he wasn’t even getting close to breaking it with the amount of force he could generate.

Whatever was going on, it was fucked up. And that was before the lights in the room came back on, flickering a few times before whatever power source they were drawing from stabilized and brightened enough for him to see what was going on. And, for better or worse, it was a bizarre view. The floors were still concrete, but since he had lost consciousness, someone or something had stripped the walls, leaving him surrounded by concrete and cinder block. The basement room was also filthy now, or at least very dusty, like the wind had been carrying dust here for years and nobody had bothered to clean it up.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The room’s transformation was weird, but the contents were weirder. Somehow, the same steel table that had indirectly caused his troubles had survived whatever had happened and had been moved to the other side of the room. All the lab materials that had been on it before were now gone. Replacing them was a collection of three items, the most normal of which was a leather coat, one that looked like it would come down slightly past his waist if he put it on. The second, and only slightly more unusual, was an oversized chef’s knife, covered in dust and small spots of rust.

The third thing, and by far the weirdest, was a medium-sized plexiglass stand that looked like it had been stolen from a bookstore display and contained a medium-sized, homemade-looking book. Beyond that, a handmade cardboard sign was taped to the wall above the table. In bright, colored paint, someone had scrawled a message.

The fact that the message was for him was, oddly, not something he questioned.

EXPLANATIONS AND HELP! READ IMMEDIATELY, SEAN! Big, handwritten words were placed above several poorly drawn arrows pointing directly at the book.

In normal circumstances, the book would have looked like a trap set by a mentally compromised serial killer, and he wouldn’t have touched it for a million dollars. But for Sean, at that moment, it looked like a lighthouse of guidance and hope shining incorruptibly out of the dark. To him, it was perfect and beautiful. He had to have it.

Despite the long list of things Sean would have done to have it in his hands, it was still only the third-most interesting thing in the room. The second-most-interesting thing was something inside his prison-pod, a small red button near the edge of the door that he had missed before. He assumed and hoped that it opened the door. It probably did.

The only other thing that it might do is turn off the reddish lights in the pod, and if that turned out to be the case, he thought he might as well just give up on getting out entirely. He had seen some real sadists among the various dead-end jobs he worked after he dropped out of studying physics. At least one of them had the genius to plan that kind of emotional-double-cross.

The most interesting thing in the room, however, was not the button. On the floor in front of the pod, and winning the objects-of-immediate-concern contest hands down, was a pile of large, spiked lizards. Sean didn’t know if lizards actually did this, but they looked like they were huddled together against the pod for warmth. And they were, as lizards go, incredibly massive. Each one would fit into a large moving box, and only if you ignored the inevitable holes in the box from the line of eight-inch spikes that ran backward from their head, along their spine, and all the way to the tip of their tails. They weren’t quite Komodo dragons, especially not with sharp spikes spaced a couple of inches apart down the length of them, but they were definitely a close cousin.

There were four of them, all asleep, and all terrifyingly lethal-looking. Sean didn’t know a lot, but he knew he didn’t want to tangle with those lizards, especially in his current ultra-confused mental state. But there were two very important factors working against him.

The first was that while he wasn’t exactly claustrophobic, that didn’t mean he was comfortable being stuck in a small box that he could barely squat down in. He could normally manage tight spaces just fine if he mentally prepped himself for them, but the events of the past few minutes had blown away any chance of that. He wanted badly to be outside of that box, and would have done just about anything to get there.

Even so, the lizards would have been enough of a deterrent to keep him from pushing the button if it wasn’t for one last terrifying fact. He was running out of air. At first, he didn’t notice the fact that he was breathing heavier and his heart rate was off the charts. But with the wisdom of a few more seconds, he realized that the physical reactions were more than just an effect of the intense, chaotic state of terror he found himself waking up to. With each breath, the pounding of his pulse and the burning in his lungs pointed to the simple truth that the pod itself was not ventilated. If he stayed in it, he’d die.

Slowly and carefully, he squeezed his arms back down to chest height and prepared himself to push the button. With any luck, the front of the box would open straight up and quietly enough that it wouldn’t wake the lizards. He could sneak out and get the stuff off the table. If Jeff were there, he’d scoop him up too. And then he’d get the hell out of dodge.

Slowly and deliberately, he let his thumb depress the button until he felt it finally catch on to whatever internal mechanism made it go. With exactly zero delays and a negative-number display of subtlety, the door suddenly revealed that instead of opening upwards with a hinge, it was rigged to open violently outwards. It exploded off the pod as if it were meant to be a fighter jet canopy getting out of the way of an ejecting pilot, and scattered the lizards across the room like figures in a ragdoll-physics explosion.

Sean stepped out of the box, fully intending to run and grab the knife before the lizards realized what had happened. Before he could, he was momentarily staggered by the sudden influx of oxygen in his lungs. He kept his feet, but barely. His world went belly up, and his eyes went from seeing the world to only pure black. It took a second or so for his head to clear. When it did, his eyes refocused on the worst possible scenario.

The lizards were awake. The four he could see were all now more or less lined up between him, the weapons, and the door that led out of the room.

And judging by their hisses, aggressively raised tails, and the fact that they were slowly advancing on him, they were pissed.