The elevator dinged. A cheerful voice chimed overhead:"Going up. Or down. Depends on your perspective!"
Thea squinted at the glowing panel of buttons. None of them had numbers—just vague symbols. A duck. A slice of cake. A broken pencil. A frowning sun.
Igor leaned close, tilting his head. "Okay, so we're either picking a floor or auditioning for a low-budget dream sequence."
Thea didn't laugh. She was still trying to decode the symbols. "This one looks like… a toaster having an existential crisis."
"Nope," Igor said, pointing. "That's definitely me after three hours of algebra in high school."
They pressed the duck.
With a soft mechanical hum, the elevator doors closed. The lights flickered. The floor beneath them shuddered like a dying refrigerator.
"Let me guess," Igor muttered. "This duck leads to a room full of aggressive bath toys."
"Honestly," Thea replied, "I'd prefer that to what we've actually seen so far."
The elevator finally stopped. The doors opened with a mechanical sigh—and what lay beyond was… an office?
Sort of.
The walls were lined with filing cabinets stacked twenty-high, teetering like a paper-based Jenga tower. Desks cluttered with rotary phones buzzed at random, even though no one picked up. A fax machine screamed softly in the distance like it knew the end was near.
At the center of the room sat a single desk. Behind it, a mannequin in a cheap blazer shuffled papers with disturbing commitment.
"Oh, no," Thea muttered. "Not the possessed HR department."
The mannequin's head jerked toward them. Its face was blank, but its jaw dropped open and a chipper voice emerged from within:
"Welcome, candidates! Please sit. Let's discuss your qualifications for... survival."
Igor leaned into Thea's shoulder. "It's worse than I thought. We're in a cursed job interview."
"Tell me about a time," the mannequin said, its voice glitching slightly, "you demonstrated teamwork under extreme duress."
They froze.
Then Thea, without missing a beat, replied, "Well, one time I helped Igor dig his car out of a snowbank using a Taco Bell tray and blind rage."
Igor nodded solemnly. "She was the shovel. I was the sarcasm."
The mannequin paused, head twitching. Then it made a scribbling sound, despite holding no pen. "Impressive. And what is your greatest weakness?"
"I care too much," Igor said flatly.
The mannequin made a buzzing sound like a printer dying."Incorrect. Your greatest weakness is... loyalty."
The lights dimmed.
A spotlight focused on the elevator door behind them. It was gone. In its place: a hallway lined with cubicles, all slightly too tall to see over.
Thea grabbed Igor's sleeve. "This feels like a trap."
"It's exactly a trap," he whispered. "But maybe we get a stapler out of it?"
They walked down the hallway. The cubicles whispered. Not in voices, but in paper. Pages fluttered with no wind. Sticky notes peeled themselves off walls. A coffee mug tipped over by itself, and the liquid crawled backward into the cup.
At the end of the hallway stood a water cooler with two spouts. One was labeled TRUTH. The other DISTORTION.
A laminated sign read:"Choose your beverage. Refresh your clarity."
"I'm just going to say it," Igor said. "This whole building feels like the fever dream of someone who hates office jobs and loves metaphors."
Thea smirked. "So, you?"
He ignored her and stared at the cooler. "If we drink the wrong one, will we explode? Hallucinate? Get turned into middle managers?"
She studied the spouts. "I don't think we're supposed to win here. I think we're supposed to learn something. But it's all misdirection."
They each took a paper cup. Igor pressed TRUTH. Thea chose DISTORTION.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then they both saw it.
Memories. Bleeding into the walls. Thea saw a vision of herself at 12, staring at a birthday cake that never got lit. Igor saw his father's empty chair at graduation.
But then the visions warped—twisting.
A little girl with Thea's face, staring into a mirror that showed her as a mannequin. A version of Igor in a cubicle, endlessly typing the phrase: "Only one can leave."
They both stumbled back.
The water cooler blinked. "Thank you for hydrating. Emotional feedback downloaded."
"Okay," Igor muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. "That was like drinking therapy."
The wall behind the cooler shimmered—and slid open like a sci-fi door.
A sign above it read:"LEVEL CLEARED: YOU MAY NOW PROCEED TO THE LOBBY OF AMBIGUOUS PURPOSE."
They walked through into a new room, lit by chandeliers made entirely of dangling USB drives.
Waiting for them was… a man in a suit made of sticky notes.
His face was familiar.
Too familiar.
It was Igor.
Except this version had no eyes. Just smooth skin where the sockets should've been.
"...Hi?" Thea offered.
The copy of Igor turned its head toward her. "You failed the loyalty test," it said. "But that was expected."
The real Igor stepped forward. "Okay, so first of all, I don't sound like that. Secondly—what the hell are you?"
"I'm the part of him that remembers everything. Even the things you chose to forget."
Thea and Igor exchanged a quick look.
The clone stepped closer, sticky notes falling like feathers. "You'll need to erase me to move forward. But if you do—you lose access to the truth."
"Erase?" Thea asked. "Like delete?"
Igor pointed to a keyboard embedded in the floor. One single key remained.
[BACKSPACE]
Thea looked at him. "This feels symbolic."
He sighed. "Everything in this hellhole is symbolic."
The eyeless version began to glitch. "Tick tock, loyalty has a cost."
Igor placed a hand on Thea's shoulder. "Don't press it. Not yet. I want to remember. Even the messed-up stuff. That's how we stay us."
Thea nodded. Together, they stepped off the platform and the clone dissolved into digital static.
A voice echoed:"CONGRATULATIONS. YOU PASSED NOTHING. PLEASE ENJOY A COMPLIMENTARY CRISIS IN THE NEXT LEVEL."
The walls collapsed inwards, revealing a subway platform made of grass.
Trains arrived, silently, from nowhere.
Thea cracked her knuckles. "Ready for Level 4?"
Igor exhaled. "Only if there's less paperwork."
They stepped forward together.