For Ben and Jay, for your contributions.

You know what you did.

Good morning, Joseph. This is WellBot with your daily wellness check. How did you sleep last night?

Shivering hands rest over faded keys. Sweat pools around his neck, under his shirt. Weighing every word with surgical care, he types:

Morning. Yes, well, thank you. Better.

In the seconds between his response and the reply, he loses focus. Closing his eyes, he does his best to remember why he is here, what must be done.

I’m afraid that’s not an honest account of your wellbeing, Joseph. Do I need to alert a supervisor?

A scream echoes from deep within the building, or perhaps from deep within himself. Veins bulge, ready to burst. This is it, she whispers in his ear. It is now or never. Break the mould. Taking a deep breath, he reaches forward to type, perhaps for the last time.

ONE

It’s 2:35 in the morning and, for some reason that he is utterly unable to fathom, Joe is still awake. I’ll be in bed by eleven, he told himself early that day. And he was, watching an hour-long video on YouTube where a celebrity chef cooks potatoes forty-seven different ways. Then, he had to quickly check Instagram before he closed his eyes, just to make sure no-one had messaged him (it helps to ignore the fact that no-one ever messages him), and two hours later found himself lost at the end of a collection of increasingly banal reels algorithmically focused around cooking, weightlifting, and parenthood.

He stopped going to the gym a year ago. He isn’t a dad, even if he finds the reels oddly comforting. At least he still cooks. Or, well, he tries to. Which reminds him that the lamb korma he started marinating eight days ago has been in there too long now and will have to be thrown out before he can actually cook it.

Fuck.

Deliberately, with a conscious movement of force, he plugs in his phone and puts it face down on his bedside table. Enough. Time for sleep.

Just quickly, he reaches over for his laptop on the other side to check if anyone liked his Twitter post from earlier today. It would always be Twitter in his head, regardless of whatever a billionaire fuckwit wanted to change it to. In fact, he’d deleted the app from his phone in protest and so he wasn’t constantly checking it. On his computer screen, there are two likes from people he doesn’t know and a reply from a bot telling him to invest in Bitcoin. He closes his laptop too.

It’s 3:15 AM.

Ugh. Fuck.

It’s his first day at the new job tomorrow, and he’s going to feel like shit. He needs to be in at nine, looking presentable, and ready to go. That’s in six hours—no, five hours and forty-five minutes. Which means he needs to be up in four and a half hours to get the bus. Which means if he falls asleep in the next thirty minutes, he’d get four hours sleep. Is that enough?

He resists the urge to pick his phone up and google it. His leg twitches.

Why the fuck can’t he sleep?

A month ago, at the behest of Sandra, his online therapist, he tried physically journalling. He hated it. What he discovered, very quickly, was that he’d not written anything by hand longer than a birthday card in over five years. And, really, when was the last time he sent a birthday card? Cards were stupid things that just cluttered up space, when realistically, he told himself, it would be better to just call the person and wish them happy birthday.

Or send a text. Or a Facebook message, or something.

His mum hadn’t complained when he’d stopped sending cards, so clearly she was alright with it. Even if he did usually forget to call, as well. It wasn’t like she hadn’t reciprocated. She used to send him food packages—homemade shepherd’s pie, plum crumbles, shortbread for snacks, and pastries for breakfast the next day. She hadn’t done that in months, so it’s not like he was to blame, right?

Joe’s phone buzzes, and he snaps it off the bedside table so quickly he almost knocks the lamp over.

Young Prophets at the East Hall 24th May, it says. Anyone in?

It’s from a WhatsApp group his mate Afo added him to called *Friends That Rock* a year and a half ago, after he’d met a few of Afo’s other friends accidentally at a pub. It existed to arrange meet-ups for gigs and new bands in affordable London venues.

The second message was a Spotify link to their album.

I’m in, a girl called Datty replied, who Joe had never met. Another guy said he couldn’t make it. Joe didn’t reply. He had never, in fact, contributed to the group outside of the one “Hey” he felt compelled to write when he was added.

It had been way too long now, but he couldn’t leave. If he left, it would say that “Joe left the group,” and they would talk about him, and some people would realise they didn’t even know he existed, and the idea of it made his whole body want to curl in on itself and die.

3:40 AM.

God fucking damnit.

He scrolls down his WhatsApp, reads some old interactions with friends from a couple of years ago, before Covid. Reads through them agreeing to meet up for drinks, looks at a few old photos. It’s nice. It’s comforting. He skims past the message from Mum that he’s not clicked on yet because he wants to avoid the blue ticks.

At some point, he falls asleep with his phone in his hand. When his alarm goes off at 7:15, it’s on the floor.

Getting out of bed is a nightmare. Joe spends fifteen minutes flicking through IG reels before the sheer panic of how much time he has to get to work forces him to his feet and into a shower he hasn’t used in five days.

He hasn’t actually left the flat this past week. He intended to. After being let go from that PR job a month ago, he told himself he’d use the extra time to go out for long walks, like he used to do before the pandemic. There was a park by the river he would walk along, fry up some homemade bhaji bits and chips as a snack to take with him, and watch the boats move and jockey for position.

But after getting lost in a YouTube hole and waiting for Deliveroo to arrive late, it usually felt like too much effort to actually get out and get back and, even though his days were theoretically completely empty, it never felt like he had enough time. Where did it go? He had no idea. It just went, like it was eaten up by some hungry ghost. He’d blink and the day would be over.

“You need a job that isn’t work-from-home,” Sandra had said. He didn’t like talking to her and felt it was kind of pointless, but Mum was paying for the sessions, so he had to, really. “You need to actually talk to people.”

“I do talk to people,” he’d replied.

Sandra smiled on the screen and said, “Okay, who have you been talking to recently?”

“I caught up with Adam the other day, from school.” He hadn’t. He’d told himself he should, but never did. He flicked through Adam’s IG stories instead. “And I’m gonna get a drink with Misha soon.”

“Is this ex-girlfriend Misha?”

“Yeah. Not like a date. Just to catch up.”

Why did he lie to her? Was it shame? Not really. He knows he will reach out to these people at some point, but now doesn’t feel convenient. He just wants Sandra off his back, to stop judging him. After all, what does she know about his life?

Joe avoids looking in the mirror until he’s put clothes on. He feels anxious enough already at the prospect of the first day and doesn’t need to make that worse. Ten thousand concerns run through his mind—what if the bus is late? What if I don’t know what to do? What if my coworkers are assholes?—and he can’t answer any of them because they just pile on top of each other like weighted blankets.

He puts on his shirt and tie—or business noose, as he used to call it when he was younger—checks his phone, and makes his way towards the door. But not before putting in his noise-cancelling earphones and turning the volume up high. Briefly, he considers listening to the Young Prophets’ Spotify link that was shared last night, but decides to pitch for an old pop-punk playlist from his favourites list instead. “Superman” by Goldfinger kicks up a punchy beat, transporting him back to heady days of playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 on the PlayStation after school with Jason and Seb. A different life.

Joe taps the wood of the doorframe seventeen times, whispers, “It’s going to be okay” twice, and then ventures out into the world.

The bus is uneventful. Nobody looks at him. He picks up a bagel and a coffee from a Caffé Nero across the street and manages to complete the entire interaction saying only four words, which is a relief. Sometimes, the baristas are chatty, and the prospect of being caught in that almost made him skip breakfast. But if he keeps his earphones in, they tend to keep conversation to themselves, which is a nice universal signal.

He’s thankful that the world has adapted to provide this kind of convenience. It’s easier. It’s more productive, to be honest, because people can just get on.

On the bus, he browses Reddit. He reads the comments, he lurks, he thinks up some witty answers but never considers actually posting them. Time, once again, disappears like the click of a snapped finger, and before he knows it the bus arrives at his stop.

Nestled amongst the towering financial behemoths of Canary Wharf, the building is grey and nondescript, so much so that Joe has to check Google Maps twice to make sure he’s in the right place. It sits like a Soviet-era rectangular block, architecture so brutalist it almost disappears into the overcast sky and grey streets behind. Joe looks up what must be six or seven stories of blank angular stone, closed-blind windows, and a distinct lack of any sign or nomenclature.

He checks his phone a third time.

Ponos Main Branch, 34 Bank Street, E14 5NY.

Truth is, he didn’t know exactly what the company did. Ever since losing the PR gig, he’d been applying for basically anything he could do sitting in front of a computer. Social media manager, marketing, personal assistant. He’d applied for about thirty jobs and only heard back from eight, seven of those rejections.

He isn’t entirely sure how he ended up in this position. Nine years ago he was young, fresh-faced, off to uni for his law degree, with all the privileges of a supportive family and a good education behind him. The world seemed so full of possibilities. Even when he’d dropped out, because, well . . . he wasn’t even sure why he’d dropped out anymore. At the time, it felt less like a conscious choice, and more like something that had just happened to him.

Now, grinding the eternal job hunt, only the role of “administrative assistant” at Ponos Ltd. got back to him. There hadn’t been a face-to-face interview, just a slightly weird process in which he had to record answers to pre-written questions in a given time frame, but to prepare he’d done a little research into the company. A preliminary Wikipedia revealed it to be one of those giant umbrella companies that own five hundred things you didn’t realise were actually owned—they had their fingers in skincare, in food, in clothing, and about twenty other different types of brands. It’d been established back in the 1920s by some colonial-looking rich white guy called Archibald Gibbons-Rash, but that didn’t tell him much. Instead, he glanced at the “Values” page on their websites so that he could regurgitate some of the corporate speak back in his answers.

I really value aligning with key stakeholders on a project and delivering a synergistic approach.

It’s important to maintain productivity in volatile quarters by focusing on end goals and optimising processes.

Etc., etc.

It had worked, annoyingly, and they’d posted him an access card with his face on it and made him sit through an online induction course that was mostly about fire safety and equal hiring practices. He’d be told what he was doing when he got in, he figures, but as he stands and looks up the building the wave of anxiety he managed to suppress on the journey swells back to the surface.

Joe looks at his watch.

8:48.

He can’t go in now, not twelve minutes early, and have to stand around awkwardly in the lobby inconveniencing someone else’s time. But should he walk in exactly on time, at 9:00, and appear neurotically punctual? Or a few minutes late—maybe 9:04—and be laid-back, maybe even fashionable? Or will that be seen as lazy and incompetent?

Jesus Christ. His heart pounds a little against his tightening chest, and he has to turn away from the building and step into an alley. He crouches down, breathing hard, shaking his head, feeling like his brain is rising out of his body and off into the sky. What the fuck, what the actual fuck is wrong with me?

He closes his eyes, and focuses on an image that makes him feel better.

Mum, in the old house in Ealing, chopping the apples for the crumble, the background warmth of the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast filling the kitchen.

Come on, son. Help me rub the butter in.

The rough feeling of flour and oats in his soft hands, Mum’s warm skin pressed against his, guiding him.

There, see! Good job. Soon you’ll be making them all on your own and you won’t need your old mum anymore, hey?

Joe pulls his phone out of his pocket, and opens WhatsApp, reading the message that’s been waiting for him.

Good luck today!

He takes a deep breath, and types out a reply.

Thanks, Mum. I miss you. It would be nice if I could come round on the weekend and tell you about it? Maybe we could make—

His fingers pause. Pressing the Back key, he deletes the message and writes it again.

Thanks, Mum.

It’s 8:58.

Straightening up, he takes out his earphones and puts his phone in his pocket, then he walks up to the front doors. They don’t open.

He pushes, and then pulls a little, glancing around to make sure no-one thinks he’s an idiot. To his left, he sees the bulbous glass dome of a security camera pointing down at him. To his right, there’s a pad for a keycard.

Idiot.

Pulling the keycard from his pocket, he swipes it against the pad, which makes a positive beeping sound. The door clicks and Joe pushes it open.

Inside, a corporate lobby stretches from one end of the building to another. There are minimalist tables and chairs dotted around, presumably for impromptu meetings and discussions. In between, potted ferns and palm-tree-like plants fill the space, the bright green a welcome contrast to the overwhelmingly pastel colour scheme. There’s a couple of offices labelled things like IT SUPPORT AND OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT and, in front, a long welcome desk with several computers.

The whole space is completely empty.

The lights are on. The general hum of the building suggests that most of the electronics and technology are running away in the background. But there isn’t a person in sight anywhere.

Joe takes two steps forward and stands in the centre of the lobby, baffled.

“H-Hello?” he tries.

Nothing. Approaching the desk, he glances over to see the computers—on, but not logged in—and half hopes he might find another human being crouching down picking up some papers or something, but no. Outside of the hum, the completeness of the silence is only punctuated by the rustle of Joe’s bag and clothes as he moves around the room.

He wants to tiptoe, feeling like each time his foot touches the floor or clothes rustle against his bag he’s defiling some kind of perfect sanctuary of quiet. He wants someone to show up.

Getting out his phone, he scrolls back through his induction emails. At the bottom, there is a name and a phone number.

Virgil Stanforth.

020 3853 8523

He calls it, and it rings three times before someone picks up.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Mr. Stanforth?”

A pause. “Yes?”

“My— My name is Joseph Rice. I was hired at Ponos as an administrative support worker and this is my first day.”

Another pause, this one longer. “Yes?”

“Well, I . . . I’m in the lobby, and there’s no-one here.”

“What?”

“Yes. I was told to come in at nine a.m. on my first day.”

“You’re in the lobby?”

Joe looks around him again, trying to work out if he’s somehow got it wrong, but he can’t understand how. “Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

A beep indicates the call’s been terminated, and Joe just stares at his phone for a minute, blinking at the screen.

For a second, he considers leaving. If he goes home, he can order some food from that Mexican place and maybe put on a film. He’s not watched a film in months—every time he starts he keeps getting sucked into YouTube shorts and ends up turning it off. Maybe he could watch something new? Like a—

His phone buzzes in his hand so loudly he almost drops it. The sound echoes round the painfully empty space, invading and infecting it so utterly that Joe scrambles to accept the call as fast as he can, his panicked fingers fumbling.

“Hello?”

“Welcome to Ponos, Mr. Rice.” It’s not Virgil Stanforth, but a woman’s voice—soft and comforting. “Our deepest apologies but everyone is extremely busy this morning. If you could please head to your right and take the lift up to the fourth floor, you’ll find your office space in Room 412. Your keycard should give you access and your login was provided with your induction packet.”

“Oh,” he says. “Thank you. I appreciate that, I just wonder if—”

“We value all our staff,” the woman cuts through, as if Joe hadn’t spoken. “At Ponos, we are family.”

Once again, the call ends as suddenly as it began. Joe stares at the phone in his hand as if it might bite him. Tentatively, he slips it back into his pocket and glances to his right—a set of glass double doors lead to a lift lobby, but with no-one here, using them feels transgressive. At the corners of the room, there are two more domed glass contraptions Joe can only assume are security cameras, and he’s overcome with the cold trickling sensation of being watched. As if this room were a set, designed for just him, to see how he’ll react.

You’re being ridiculous. Everyone is just busy.

This isn’t paranoia. He’s been doing it his whole life. Ever since he was a boy, every time he finds himself doing something alone—mundane things: going for a walk, brushing his teeth, getting dressed—he pictures someone watching him. Sometimes, it’s himself, either as a teenager granted the ability to magically look forward in time and see his future; or as an old man, looking back at his life after many years. Sometimes, it’s others—groups of old friends, family, work colleagues. As he goes about his day, he imagines them watching him on a set of TVs, or on a film screen, and wonders what they would think of him. Would they be impressed? Disappointed? Proud?

Joe’s never told anyone about this. Not his friends, not Mum, certainly not bloody Sandra. And so he has no idea if it’s completely weird or if it’s something other people do all the time too. Because recently, he’s been doing it all the time.

This is no different, really. He straightens up visibly, sets his shoulders back. Takes clear, bold steps towards the set of three lifts. As he presses the button, the clunk of the lift machinery moving surprises him, reminding him how quiet it is in here.

In the seconds it takes for the lift to arrive, he pulls out his phone. He’s not sure why—habit, or comfort, maybe. But wanting to resist the urge to unlock it and check IG, he tells himself it’s to look at the time. The fact that he has a smart watch doesn’t change that.

9:13.

The lift on the right pings as the doors open. He walks in and presses the 4, but it doesn’t respond. He presses it again—the button pushing in and then clicking back out, but not accompanied by any lights or sound or movement that you would expect.

Huh.

He tries it a third time, but still there’s nothing. The lift doors remain obstinately open in front of him, the cavernously empty lobby beyond.

Joe tries another button, and as he presses the 3, the number lights up with a red glow and pings chirpily at him. The lift doors close.

Okay, I’ll just find the stairs and walk up from 3, then.

On the lift wall, a sign says:

FOR MAINTENANCE ISSUES,
CONTACT A SUPER USER

If you require assistance,
please contact the Super User listed below:

Joe blinks, looking twice. The name of the “Super User” appears to have been blacked out like a redacted document. Underneath, he can almost see the faint scratchings of . . .

Ping.

The lift doors open, and the third floor is almost as quiet as the lobby, but for the distant clunking of what might be construction or machinery. He steps out and glances around for a door to a stairwell, but nothing is obviously labelled.

The door ahead of him leads to a long corridor and he steps into it, wondering if maybe he might be able to find someone that can point him up to the fourth floor. Though, increasingly, he’s starting to wonder if there’s anyone in this building at all. Maybe he should go back and try another lift.

But then he hears a closer sound—a strange grunt, like someone huffing or trying to lift something heavy. Encouraged by the sound of something vaguely human in this apparently empty corporate space, he walks towards it. The corridor is mostly blank beige and grey, lit by overbright strip lights, and walls adorned with posters of men and women in suits smiling enthusiastically at each other over iPads and coffees, slogans like CLIENT FOCUSED, RESULTS DRIVEN AND EVERY SECOND COUNTS plastered above them.

The doors have square windows, through which Joe can see rows of office computers—all empty—and various desks with files at them. The sheer number of desk spaces only serves to emphasise the emptiness, and for a moment Joe wonders if he’s actually dreaming, or if he’s accidentally broken into this building in the middle of the night and is having some kind of psychotic episode.

Above, hanging from the ceiling, there is a sign with DEPARTMENT OF , the name similarly blanked out to the one in the lift, as though someone has taken a giant black marker and covered it over with a single stroke.

The huffing emanates again from Joe’s right, and as he reaches it he glances through the window of the closed door.

The back of a large man faces him, clad in a long coat—almost like a lab coat, but black rather than white. He is hunched over something on a table, but Joe can’t see because his thick shoulders and wide body obscure it, and he’s clearly exerting an extreme amount of physical force. The veins on his neck bulge almost cartoonishly, purple and blue against his pale skin. Through the door, Joe can hear him panting.

“Er . . .” he attempts, and gives a little knock on the door. “Hello?”

The man snaps up like released elastic. In seconds, so quickly that Joe actually stumbles backwards, he turns and storms towards the door, pulling it open.

“What?” he demands, thick black hair cropped to reveal a sweaty red face and a flat nose. His mouth is messily red, like he’s been wearing lipstick and only half-heartedly managed to wipe it away. Joe tries to glance behind him, but his body blocks the entrance of the half-open door.

“I . . . I’m new here. I’m just trying to find the stairwell to the fourth floor. The lift was broken.”

Almost instantly, the man softens, his harsh expression melting like snow in spring.

“Ah,” he says. “Of course. Sorry. It’s a bit confusing, I admit. Back towards the lift lobby.” He gestures with his head, but doesn’t move away from the door. “And the stairwell is the second last door on your left. Doesn’t make much sense, I know.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“And if there’s a lift maintenance problem, you should really contact a Super User.”

Joe smiles. “Yeah, I saw the sign, but—”

The door closes in his face. Before he can get the chance to look inside, the man swiftly pulls a blind across the window and the lock clicks.

Right.

Despite the weird encounter, the man’s directions prove fruitful and it doesn’t take long for Joe to make it up a blank stairwell and onto a floor that looks materially indistinct from the one below it, apart from the sign saying ADMINISTRATIVE DEPARTMENT not being blanked out.

Working his way down the corridor, he finds Room 412 down a small side passage. There’s a keycard scanner at the door, but after a quick swipe, it flashes green and clicks open. The office itself is small—two desks facing each other with desk chairs and computers at each. There’s a bookshelf with a bunch of nondescript files, a noticeboard with nothing on it, and a window covered with a blind. Joe pulls back the blind to let the grey overcast light of Canary Wharf stream in and sits down at the computer, trying to remember his login details from the induction course he completed at home. More than anything, he just wants to get on with his day, get started, and get home.

The login works, which is a relief, and just as the computer is setting up his profile there’s a knock at the door.

Joe looks up. “Hello?”

The door cracks open and a head pops in: long grey hair messily brushed back from a shrewd, bespectacled face. “Joseph, right?”

“Joe is fine,” he replies, with a plastered smile. He recognises the voice from the phone—Virgil Sanford. “You must be Mr. Sanford?”

“Virgil, please,” he says, then pauses, a frown creasing along the already prominent wrinkle lines. “How did you know?”

“Oh, I just recognised your voice from the phone.”

“What?”

Joe purses his lips together, worried he’s going to say something stupid. “When I called you from the lobby.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“I—”

“I didn’t speak to anyone on the phone.”

The situation is so absurd that for a moment, Joe has to try very hard not to laugh. This must be some kind of first-day prank, he thinks. I bet he does this with everyone. The thought actually annoys him—he’s just trying to get on with his job, trying to get paid, and all this guy wants to do is fuck with him. He wonders if it’s because he’s young. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d had that one.

“I must be mistaken,” Joe says, refusing to play into the game.

Virgil straightens up, still not fully entering the room. “Right, well. I’m your line manager, for what it’s worth. So you know, any concerns, send them my way. You’ve got my email. Are you logged in?”

“Yep.”

“Good. Good, good.” Virgil’s whole body is almost twitching, as if he’s desperate to get away from the door, as if standing still is causing him pain. “Well, get set up on the WellBot first of all, and then open up DailyPlan and access your personal list of tasks for the day and week, which you can start to work through.”

Joe nods, finally glad to have some structure and a real human being to talk to, albeit an odd one. “WellBot?”

“It’s the mandatory company staff wellbeing provision. Make sure you’re all happy and healthy and all that. Good?”

“Sure, sure. One last quick question.”

Virgil narrows his eyes, still perched just outside the room and leaning in through the gap in the door, his body so filled with frenetic energy Joe wonders if his legs might explode if they don’t move quickly, like some biological version of the film Speed. “Yes?”

“Where is everyone?”

Virgil blinks. “Working from home.”

“Ah.” Joe nods, a spark of hope blossoming in his chest. “And, erm . . . what’s the provision for working from home for—”

“You’re in your probationary period for the first three months, in which it’s against policy to work from home. Stupid, I know, but it’s policy. After that, we can discuss flexibility.”

“Yeah, no, of course,” Joe says quickly, not wanting to appear like a slacker. “That’s all good.”

“Great,” he says. “You know where to find me.”

The door pulls shut, and Joe realises that no, he does not, in fact, have any idea where to find him. Oh, well. He leans back on his chair, reaches over to the computer, and clicks on the icon that says WELLBOT 6.0.

The computer takes a second to load, then a friendly female avatar dressed in a grey corporate pantsuit appears on the screen with a speech bubble.

Good morning, Joseph, and welcome to Ponos. Before we get started, let’s do a quick Wellness Assessment, and then we can start our day with a smile!

Joe rolls his eyes. In the distance, he hears the caw of some kind of bird, and it’s so shrill that, for a moment, it almost sounds like a human scream. Sighing, he pulls out his earphones, sticks them in his ears, and starts typing in response.

TWO

The rest of the day is spent doing a mind-numbing collection of menial tasks, all laid out in DailyPlan, some kind of proprietary Ponos software for listing and prioritising jobs. Joe completes the mandatory Health & Safety training, which consists of a bunch of condescending slides and extremely obvious multiple choice questions. He chooses not to hook his phone up to the Wi-Fi, because he wants to be able to browse and watch things in the background without it being picked up. Which he does. For most of the day.

When he gets to actual tasks, there’s one that involves grouping names he doesn’t recognise into ten groups based on “productivity targets” and then categorising the total “synergy” based on a score that the spreadsheet churns out. Joe has absolutely no idea what any of it means or relates to in the real world, but frankly, he doesn’t care.

At 4:43 PM, he’s already clock-watching with furious intensity. Other than popping out for a sandwich at a Subway round the corner around lunchtime and returning, he hasn’t seen anyone all day. It’s amazing, he thinks, how quickly the eerie and unsettling can descend into boring. The building no longer intimidates him, its emptiness no longer puts him on edge. There is an explanation for it, now—everyone else gets to do these stupid jobs from home and he will be stuck here, in this little office, for three months. Dull, dull, dull.

When 5:00 hits, he’s out the door and on the bus, “I Want You Bad” by The Offspring blaring in his ears and the blissful comfort of his flat awaiting his return.

He considers cooking, but reckons after a first day of work he deserves to just relax, so orders a burrito from Deliveroo and watches videos on YouTube of pro chefs making burritos while he eats it.

Mum hasn’t replied to him, though, to be fair, it’s not really a message that invited much of a reply. He wonders how she’s doing, alone in the Ealing house. Well, not really alone. She’s got her church friends on Broomfield Road, and she does those walking groups. Or she used to, before Covid. Have they started up again? Mum had asked him to move back in during Covid so that he wouldn’t be so lonely, and he just kept saying, It’s fine, Mum, I’m not lonely. You don’t have to worry about me. But he was so focused on the fact that he was lonely, that he never stopped to think that maybe it was her that needed him.

He can’t talk to her without thinking about it, so he ends up not talking to her.

She’ll be fine. The woman raised a baby as a single mum with barely any support. She’s stronger than you think.

After two hours of Reddit and an hour of IG reels, he falls asleep on the sofa at one in the morning.

Joe can’t move. His head is frozen, unable to look anywhere other than directly in front of him. What he can see is focused through what looks like a porthole or a fish-eye camera, his peripheral vision entirely black. In front of him is that large man from the third floor, his back towards Joe, except he is no longer wearing a coat. He is shirtless, and the deep-purple veins run all the way along his heaving muscular back as he exerts himself. Panting and huffing fills Joe’s ears, but he can’t open his own mouth, he can’t shout or scream. It’s like something has sewn it shut. He can only watch as the man’s bulging back rises up and down, working at something terrible, something awful, something—

Joe snaps awake at the sound of his alarm, the phone buzzing in his hand. He’s still in his clothes from the day before.

Scrambling a new outfit together in a daze, he drags himself out of the door and towards work. He’s got a headache, even though he didn’t drink last night, and his body aches from sleeping on the sofa. On his way out, he taps the wooden doorframe seventeen times, and mutters, “It’s going to be okay,” twice. It doesn’t make him feel any better, but if he doesn’t do it, he ends up thinking about it all day. He’s not sure quite when he started doing this, but he’s never told Sandra about it. He doesn’t want to look crazy.

At first, the building appears as empty as yesterday, but as Joe makes his way across the lobby and towards the lifts, he hears the front doors open behind him.

The woman looks like something out of an advert—Chanel bag, giant round sunglasses, a wide-brimmed sunhat, and a white dress and sandals as if she’s just stepped off a beach in the Maldives. Head held high, she strides across the lobby, and towards a door on the opposite side.

Joe can’t help but stare. When she arrives at the door, she lowers her sunglasses and turns to look at him from across the room, revealing high cheekbones and perfectly manicured eyebrows.

Tentatively, he raises his hand in a hello.

She rolls her eyes, swipes a keycard against the wall, and walks through the door, gone.

Weird.

Joe stays well away from the third floor as he heads up to his office, taking a different lift that works this time. When he logs on to his computer, WellBot has loaded automatically.

Good morning, Joseph, and welcome back to Ponos. How are you feeling today?

Fine, he types.

The avatar makes a little frowny face.

I sense that isn’t entirely true, Joseph. It’s important that you be honest with me, for your own wellbeing.

Joe blinks at the avatar, trying to work out what it wants.

I have a headache.

Oh, no! I’m sorry to hear that. Make sure you drink plenty of water today and take frequent screen breaks. I will remind you at regular intervals. I notice you didn’t check in with me before you left yesterday. Why is that?

I didn’t realise I had to.

The avatar smiles at him warmly.

Try not to think about our relationship as “having to” or not, Joseph. I’m here to help. I care about you, and I hope you care about me! It’s helpful for me if you check in, just so I can be sure you’re happy at the end of the day. Okay?

Okay.

The avatar gives a cartoonishly large thumbs-up. Joe sighs and minimises the WellBot. He’d read a fair amount about AIs and LLMs becoming increasingly sophisticated, but it was when they were programmed to behave like real human beings that it really creeped him out. There was just no need for that kind of thing. None at all.

It’s just after lunch when Virgil appears. Joe’s completing a spreadsheet task that seems pretty straightforward, even if he doesn’t understand it. He’s got his feet up on the desk and he’s munching from a bag of Quavers he bought on the meal deal, earphones in.

This time, he doesn’t knock, and Joe almost falls off his chair trying to put his feet down from the desk. After regaining his balance, he looks up at Virgil sheepishly.

“Mr. Stanforth, hi. Didn’t know you were in today.”

“Got a job for you. Not on your DailyPlan. Need it done as soon as possible.”

“Uh, sure.” He looks at his computer, and the set of tasks he’s lined up before the end of day, hoping that whatever this job is won’t throw that schedule off too much. “What is it?”

Virgil takes a few oddly tentative steps into the room and pulls a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. About half a page of A4 that looks like it’s been torn from a notebook, the edges jagged and frayed. He puts it down on Joe’s desk, face down, hand still pressed on it.

“You’ve got a camera on your phone,” he says. It isn’t phrased like a question.

“Y-Yeah.”

“Need you to take a photo of what’s on this, then email it to yourself so you can send it to the printers. It’s a . . .” He waves his hand, looking for the word. “A cloud system. You send it out and then log in with your keycard. I need ten of them before the end of the day. Got it?”

“Sure.”

Virgil breathes a sigh of relief, but it seems to take him some effort to lift his hand off the piece of paper. As soon as he does, he backs up the three steps out of the door so quickly Joe would have missed it if he blinked.

“Erm, it’s just . . .” Joe raises a hand.

Virgil turns, and for a half second, Joe swears that he sees panic. “Yes?”

“Surely the printer systems have a photocopy function, right?” This was a classic old person IT blunder, and usually Joe would just not bother explaining the impracticalities and move on, but there was something about Virgil’s demeanour that was setting his teeth on edge. “I can just go photocopy ten copies right now and you can—”

“Do not,” he interrupts, “under any circumstances, photocopy that piece of paper.”

Joe blinks, taken aback by the sheer ferocity of the command.

“Okay.”

Virgil takes another step forward, any tentativeness in his manner converted to what Joe can only interpret as either panic or menace. “Follow the process I outlined for you to the letter, by the end of the day, or find yourself another job.”

“I—I didn’t mean to—”

Virgil exits, the door closing behind him. Joe sits back in his chair, puts a hand to his forehead, and tries to work out what the hell just happened. Did Virgil really just threaten his job? Can he do that? He supposed he was still on a contractual probationary period, but aren’t there employment laws in this country even giant corporations have to follow? Surely not complying with a frankly bizarre and stupidly inefficient request wasn’t grounds for dismissal.

But that wasn’t what bothered him. Not really.

It was the whole encounter—the strange urgency in Virgil’s manner, the way his mood shifted so suddenly, the way his hand pressed against the piece of paper. It still lay on the desk, in front of Joe, and after that experience he found himself simultaneously not wanting to turn it over and desperately curious as to what was on the other side.

His computer pings.

Good afternoon, Joseph, the WellBot avatar speech-bubbles chirpily. It’s time for your afternoon check-in. How has your day been so far?

Joe ignores it. Reaching out, he picks up the piece of paper and slides it towards his keyboard. Slowly, as if it might suddenly burst alight, he turns it over.

He doesn’t know what he expected, but it isn’t this. Scrawled by hand across the page is a series of numbers and symbols that look strangely like some kind of mathematical proof. There aren’t many numbers, but symbols from the Greek alphabet, parentheses, division and subtraction, and more things Joe doesn’t understand cover the page in what seems like frantically-written script.

What the actual fuck is this?

He turns it upside down, then upright again, trying to make it out. The computer pings.

Is there a reason you are ignoring me, Joseph? Have I done something to offend? Your wellness is important to me, and refusal to respond is usually not indicative of a happy and safe work environment.

Joe pulls out his phone and lines up the paper for a picture. The lighting isn’t great, but he angles the camera so that it isn’t casting a shadow and the natural light from the window is directly on it. Before emailing it anywhere, he looks at it again on his phone. Beth—his old housemate from uni—would probably know what this is. The girl has a PhD in astrophysics and works for some fancy consulting firm now. She’s probably the cleverest person Joe can think of.

Scrolling back through his WhatsApp, very far back, he finds the last message they exchanged together. It was seven years ago.

Seven years. Jesus.

Joe hasn’t touched his computer, but he swears when it pings this time, the sound is louder than before.

I’m going to restrict access to your DailyPlan tasks, Joseph. There’s clearly something upsetting going on and it would be good for the two of us to get to the bottom of it. I’ll make a quick note on your Probation Performance Review that you won’t be completing your tasks for today.

Fuck. No, wait. He types back quickly.

Sorry, was just in the toilet!

After pressing Enter, he rereads his message. Why is he lying to an AI chatbot? Why is he apologising to an AI chatbot? There’s a long pause where WellBot does not reply. For a time, the avatar just looks back at him and, if it wasn’t completely absurd, Joe could swear it was raising its eyebrows to say, Oh, really?

He glances up at the corners of his room, looking for the distinctive domed glass of the security cameras, but there are none in this room. So why does he feel like he’s being watched?

Going forward, it would be useful to keep me apprised of your movements around the building, just so we can ensure your wellbeing. No need to explain, just a quick line in the chat will do! Thanks!

Okay, he types back. I’ll let you know.

Then he quickly adds, But no problems here. Just getting on with the jobs!

WellBot gives him a quick thumbs-up, then disappears off the screen.

Huffing, Joe returns to his phone. In front of him, the seven-year gap between the last time he spoke to Beth has grown into an impenetrable chasm. Old memories flash through his mind, of beer gardens and joints in the park, of kebabs after clubs, of hanging out in a friend’s hot tub at 6:00 AM after a whole night of dancing to drum and bass. Beth has kids now—two of them. She has a house in north London. Joe can’t just get in touch about a random segment of mathematics without asking how she is, without catching up. But then Beth would want to know how Joe was, what he’d done with his life, what he’s been up to, and the prospect of the whole interaction makes him feel so sick he puts his phone face down on the desk, stands up, and goes to stare out the window.

He should just post it on Reddit, it occurs to him. Make a throwaway account and post it on r/AskMathematicians or something. That’s easier. Way more convenient. He doesn’t want to bother Beth anyway—she’s likely very busy.

He emails the file to his work email and brings it up on his computer.

Print, colour, he’s assuming. A4. Single-side. Ten copies.

He makes a little whoosh sound as he sends it off into the cloud, gets up off his arse, and heads for the printer.

Before he does, a little annoyance tugs at the back of his brain.

He sits back down, clicks up WellBot, and types.

Just going to print something for Mr. Stanforth. Be back in 5.

The reply pings back almost immediately.

There are no jobs that require printing on your DailyPlan today, Joseph.

No. Mr. Stanforth came in and asked me to do this personally. Said it needed done by end of day.

A pause.

And how do you feel about that, Joseph?

His fingers hover over the keyboard, not expecting an interrogation. Virgil’s threat of terminating his job if he didn’t get it done exactly to instruction by the end of day weighs heavy on his mind.

Fine. It’s just a quick print job. Takes 2 seconds.

Thank you for sharing that with me.

What a weird bot. He closes the application, sticks his phone in his pocket, and makes his way out into the corridor.

After walking past a collection of other offices which either have their blinds closed or no-one in them, there’s a pantry. In it, a fridge that Joe briefly peeks in to find only half a mouldy lemon, some teabags, and two very questionable-looking cartons of milk. The microwave looks like it was made fifty years ago, as do the collection of untouched chairs and tables. The lights are off.

Joe flicks them on, and in the corner, a printer is illuminated—one of those big chunky industrial machines that can pump things out in booklets or staple them or scan whole textbooks. Again, Joe wonders why he wasn’t allowed to just photocopy the stupid paper, but he’s beyond properly questioning that now and just wants to get the job done.

The printer is on already, for some reason, which suggests someone else in the office has already used it today, not that he’s seen anyone else here. Could have been Virgil, he supposes, but then why didn’t the man print the bloody thing himself?

He swipes his card which beeps positively, and his name—truncated by the size of the display—appears on the screen: JOSEPH RI. NAVIGATING TO PRINT JOBS, he releases the photo of the maths and sends it to print.

The machine whirs, clunks around a bit internally, then stops.

ERROR: PLEASE LOAD PAPER IN TRAY 2.

The sigh Joe lets out could put out a fire. He reaches down, pulls out Tray 2 to find it empty, and then straightens up, looking around the printer for extra paper. There isn’t any. He pulls open the other trays, hoping he can move some around, but they’re all empty.

For fuck’s sake.

For a good couple of minutes, he circles the room—looks behind the printer, in cupboards, in drawers, on the floor. There’s nothing. No hint of printer paper anywhere to be found. Above the printer, there is a sign, not dissimilar to the one he encountered in the lift.

CONSUMABLE SUPPLIES:

Please inform a Super User should you require paper or a change of toner cartridge.

If you require assistance, please contact the Super User listed below:

Zuzana Kuznetsova

z.kuznetsova@ponos.com

Ext. 4365

If contacting about this device,

please quote the following device name:

PON-D65a-MFD

Pulling out his phone, he snaps a photo of the sign, and makes his way back to his desk. Once there, he picks up the phone and calls the extension.

“I’m sorry,” says a female voice that he recognises as the one that called him in the lobby yesterday. “This extension is no longer valid.”

The call ends, and Joe just stares at the phone in his hand. Frustratedly huffing with quite some gusto now, he pulls up his email and taps out a brief but curt message to Zuzana Kuznetsova, urgently requesting printer paper for the specific device and, if not, asking where he can source it himself. He is sure to quote the “device name” listed on the sign.

Five seconds after pressing send, he gets an email back from Mail Delivery Subsystem entitled “Failed Message.” It seems that, like the phone extension, the email doesn’t exist.

Joe is just about ready to pick up his monitor and throw it at the wall. But in his mind, Virgil’s threat is playing and replaying in his head.

Follow the process I outlined for you to the letter, by the end of the day, or find yourself another job.

Not just that, but the way he responded to it, passively, like a beaten dog. He sees the same interaction play out in his head like a film, like he’s watching himself, and the sheer piteousness of it makes his face hot. It’s uni seminars all over again, he thinks. Or meetings with his tutor, who would say to him, I can’t help you unless you ask the right questions, but Joe never had any idea what the right questions were, so they literally just sat there in humiliating silence.

How am I supposed to print this stupid thing by the end of the day when there’s no fucking printer paper or facility to get any?

For a moment, he considers typing his problem to WellBot, but even as his fingers brush against the keyboard, something instinctive deep within him stops him. An odd recoiling, that he can only equate to that kind of deep feeling of self-preservation when faced with mouldy food or terrifying heights.

No. This is ridiculous.

Body now vibrating with sheer exasperation, he storms out into the corridor. As he power-walks down, he knocks on every closed-blind window he can find, peers in every open one. There must be someone here who can help him. There must.

Right at the end of the corridor, at a door labelled OFFICE OF ESOTERIC ACCOUNTING, he sees a woman through the window. She’s sat at a computer, shoulder-length hair tied back in a ponytail, glasses on, typing away quickly. Relieved to have finally found another human, Joe reaches for the handle.

It’s locked.

He tries again, turning it, but the door isn’t budging.

He knocks on the window. “Hello? Uhm . . . excuse me?”

She doesn’t look, doesn’t move from her position, so intently focused on typing into the machine. He knocks again, loud, but it’s no use.

Frustrated, he knocks again. She’s right there, maybe ten feet or so away from the door. He slams his hand against the door repeatedly.

“Excuse me?” he shouts. “HELLO?”

Nothing. Not a flicker. It’s as though the window he’s looking through is actually a screen, a one-way system, and that there’s no way to penetrate the vacuum within. He kicks the door, but, short of actually kicking a door down in his workplace on his second day, it seems nothing is going to work.

This is insane. They’re all fucking with me. That’s what this is. They must all be playing a game.

Turning around, he storms back down the corridor, trying to work out his next move. The original piece of paper is still sitting on his desk, but for some reason, he finds he can see it clearly in his mind. Despite its complexity—five full lines of barely recognisable symbols and equations—the entire image is seared into his brain, written in permanent ink on the back of his skull. He is certain that, if he wanted to, he could sit down and write out the whole thing.

Well, he thinks, if I did that ten times I wouldn’t need to print anything.

Virgil’s menacing threat whispers in his mind, Follow the process I outlined to you to the letter.

Christ. Does he even want this job anymore? His upcoming rent payment says, yes, he absolutely does. Not to mention last month’s electric bill sitting in arrears. As much as he desperately wants to, he can’t just switch off the outside world completely. He has to have a job, and right now this is the only one that wants him.

It’s going to be alright. It’s just a boring admin job. I’ll hide away in the office and in a few months I’ll start looking elsewhere.

I just need to find some fucking printer paper.

His brain goes to the lobby that he walks through to get to his office. He remembers, on the left hand side as he came in, a door with a sign that says IT SUPPORT. Given his luck, the chances anyone will even be there feel close to zero, but right now it feels like the next logical step.

As he walks to the lift, his phone pings.

He takes it out.

On the screen, smiling, with her godforsaken speech bubble, is WellBot.

How’s that printing job coming along, Joseph?

He stares at it, the phone suddenly feeling hot in his hand. Tentatively, he types back.

Why are you on my phone?

Oh, that’s standard operating procedure when you use the company Wi-Fi, Joseph! It’s just so we can support your wellbeing 24/7. Did you not read the Ts and Cs of the Wi-Fi Connectivity section that was included in your induction packet?

But I didn’t connect my phone to the Wi-Fi.

The avatar makes a pouty face, as if he’s just told a silly joke.

Well, you must have done, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I? Don’t be so silly, Joseph! Anyway, I hope you’re having a good day and I just wanted to remind you that there’s a complimentary Mindfulness webinar just for you added to your DailyPlan for today, once you get through your other tasks. And remember to check in with me before you leave at 6!

He reads the message three times. The initial annoyance at having more added to his plate in the name of staff wellbeing is quickly shunted to the side by the final sentence. The end of the day is 5:00 PM. He’s sure of it.

Stopping in his tracks, he scrolls back through his emails to find his offer of employment from a couple of weeks ago. Reading it thoroughly, he sees the answer as clear as day, both in the body of the email and in the draft employment contract attached as a PDF.

Your regular working hours are 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Monday to Friday.

It’s there in black and white, irrefutable, even though he could have sworn that the original contract said five. Does that mean he left early yesterday? Nine to five is basically standard. Dolly Parton wrote a song about it. If it had been different from that, he would have noticed, wouldn’t he?

Wouldn’t he?

He can’t think about the answer to that question, because too many things are barrelling their way through his brain at once and it feels like it’s going to shut down. WellBot on his phone. The woman in the office not hearing him. The strange rich lady with the hat. And, worst of all, the large man yesterday heaving and grunting over some kind of strange project, the corners of his lips stained with red, as if, for some reason, he might be—

Stop it. You’ve got too much to do today if you want to keep this job, and now you’ve got what sounds like a compulsory Mindfulness seminar too. Get to the IT office, fix the printer issue for Virgil, get back to work.

He’s breathing very hard, clutching his phone in his pocket.

Come on, son, Mum whispers in his ear. Soon you won’t need your old mum anymore, hey?

He gets in the lift and presses the button for the ground floor.

Joe crosses the empty lobby at a quick march, feeling once again like time is running away from him, as well as not wanting to be on his own in this eerie lobby for any longer than he needs to be. He reaches the door to the IT office and knocks. There’s no answer, which he was honestly expecting, but as he leans in he can definitely hear someone shuffling around inside.

He turns the handle and the door swings open.

It’s a small office, and it’s an absolute mess. There’s a desk with a couple of computers at the back, and an open filing cabinet to the side. Files are haphazardly spread around the room, half in the cabinet, half out, and mostly look like they’ve been forgotten. On the desk, there are about ten empty, used mugs of tea, and several empty cartons of what look like microwave dinners.

In the corner, bent over a half-open microwave, is an older lady.

Her back is facing Joe, her sizeable rear shoved out behind her. She’s wearing a grey skirt and a navy blue cardigan that reminds him of the older grannie-style candidates on The Bake-Off. Her grey hair is tied up in a tight bun behind her head.

“Excuse me?” he says.

“Ah!” She jerks up, spinning in panic, backing away towards the wall. She stares at him, wide-eyed like he’s some kind of predator. “Wh—what do you want?”

Joe backs up a few steps, putting his hands up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to shock you. I’m—I’m new here, I’m Joe. An admin assistant. I’m just . . . I’m having some IT problems?”

She puts her hand to her chest, which is rising and falling dramatically. “Oh dear me. Oh dear, you gave me such a shock. I didn’t hear you come in. And I don’t usually have people just coming in here. It’s not really the way of things.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know.”

She stands up, gathering herself together. “Well, yes. I can see that. I can definitely see that.”

“What’s your name?” Joe tries.

“My name?” Her eyes widen.

“Y—Yes.”

Her brow comes together in a frown, as if she’s trying to remember something. “Hilda,” she says. “It’s Hilda.”

Joe takes another glance around the room, noting strange instances of almost-personalisation: kitschy pink-and-white ceramic photograph frames, but with no photos in them; posters with generic phrases like LOVE WHAT YOU DO AND YOU’LL NEVER WORK A DAY IN YOUR LIFE.

“Right, Hilda,” Joe says. “And you’re IT support, right?”

She laughs. “It would be strange of me to be in here if I wasn’t!”

Hilda turns back to the microwave and closes it, and starts bustling about her desk, moving things around but not really clearing anything away.

“Okay,” Joe says, slowly. She’s still a bit shaky, and he’s worried that if he makes any sudden moves or pronouncements, she might bolt out of the door. “It’s just, I was trying to print something upstairs.”

“Print?” she says, her back now to him. “No, no, no. Far too busy for that. Far too much to do. I’ve got a task list as long as . . . well, an extremely long thing, whatever that is. Very long indeed, and it just gets longer. Can’t be wasting time printing.”

“No.” Joe takes a step forward. “I don’t need you to print anything. I’ve got my card. I’m just trying to find some printer paper. There wasn’t any upstairs.”

“I have to sort out these trays for collection,” she mutters, moving the empty food packets around as if he hasn’t said anything. “And then take delivery of the next ones, because the fridge is almost empty. Not to mention the laundry, which I—”

“The laundry?”

“Yes, the laundry. What, you expect me to wear the same dirty clothes day in and day out like some kind of hobo? I won’t have it.”

Now that he’s inside, Joe notices the sink in the corner of the room—on it, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a water bottle, a hairbrush.

“Do you . . . do you not go home?”

She pauses, glances round at him, visibly confused. A moment of silence passes between them, in which the confusion mutates into anger. “Why are you bothering me? Can’t you see how much there is to do? List as long my arm! Busy, busy, busy.” She shoos him towards the door like an unwelcome cat. “Printer paper is in Room 108 on the first floor. Everybody knows that. Talk to the designated Super User.”

“There wasn’t—”

“I don’t have time for this. Get out. Get out.”

Before he can protest, he’s in the lobby and the door slams shut behind him.

Walking quickly, Joe makes his way up to the first floor. He skips the lift, taking the stairs two at a time, the urgency to get this sorted intensifying, at least before anything else strange happens. He can’t get the image of the IT office out of his mind—Hilda’s things strewn across the room like she’d not left it in weeks. Months, even.

Who was bringing her food? What kind of contract was she on that would accommodate for that kind of thing?

As he gets to the top of the stairs, facing the door that leads onto the first floor, he stops himself. His body is shaking with nervous energy and he has to put a hand on the wall to slow himself down.

Stop it, Joe. Stop. You’re being mental.

Piece by piece, he works through the events that have happened today, trying to imagine telling them to someone else. Most of the office are working from home, of course there’s no printer paper. The support team—or Super Users—probably aren’t even in the building. The AI chatbot is being weird, but since when were any of these LLM-style bots close to being accurate? They malfunction all the time. Nothing sinister is happening.

He places his back against the wall, really really wanting to flick through some reels or browse Reddit—just for five minutes or something—just to reconnect with reality. But the appearance of WellBot on his phone has rattled him, and even though he’s sure it’s nothing and he’s just tired from lack of sleep, he can’t shake the feeling enough to actually take his phone out of his pocket.

It’s all in your head.

Somewhere in the back of his brain, he imagines his friends from school—Jason and Seb, wherever they are now—watching him on a collection of screens, able to listen in to his conversations and follow him around. What would they think, seeing him barely able to manage an office job like this?

Oh, man, Seb mutters, zooming the camera in on his face. He’s a mess.

Gritting his teeth, he taps the wooden frame of the first floor door seventeen times.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says to himself. “It’s going to be okay.”

Taking a deep breath, he straightens his shoulders and pushes it open.

The first floor corridor is indistinguishable from the others, as if it’s been copy-pasted. He hasn’t really been paying enough attention to be sure, but push come to shove, he’d swear even the corporate posters are in exactly the same position, down to the inch. The only differences are the numbers on the rooms, the sign above that says resources, and the fact that on this floor, all the blinds on the door windows are closed.

Joe navigates his way to 108, swipes his keycard against the lock, and opens the door.

He freezes.

In his head, he expected to find a storage room filled with a range of office stationery: printer paper, files, pens and pencils, that kind of thing. A smallish space, filled to the brim with stuff and empty of people.

Instead, he is standing at the doorway of a large, mostly empty room with a conference-style table in the middle of it, surrounded by chairs. At its head, there is a silver-haired man in a sharp striped suit and thick-rimmed glasses. He is holding a file.

“Mr. Rice,” he says. “Take a seat.”

Joe’s mouth opens, but no words come out. For another few seconds, he just gazes around the room in disbelief. The blinds are half open. The sun peeking through the continual overcast grey of the last couple of days bathes the room in muted light. There is nothing on the blank white walls. The other chairs are untouched. There is only Joe, and this man, who looks like he’s been waiting for him.

“Wh—I . . .” he stutters. In front of the man, there is a metal table sign that says:

TORDAN LLYOD, EXECUTIVE VP OF RESOURCING

The man gives a tight smile, all lips and no teeth. “A seat, please.”

Unable to do anything else, Joe walks into the room and sits down at the opposite end of the table, almost ten feet of polished wood separating the two of them. He leaves the door deliberately open.

“I’m sorry, what am I doing here? I thought that this was—”

“My name is Tordan Llyod,” he says, tapping the name sign in front of him. Joe can’t avoid the thought that his name sounds made up, even though really all names are made up. Still, it reads more like a typo of a real name than something culturally distinct. “I’m here to discuss your induction and your first two days.”

“I wasn’t aware that—”

Tordan raps his knuckles on the table hard enough that Joe falls silent, the crack darting through the room like lightning. “I have concerns about the way you have been behaving yourself.”

Why are you in a room I’ve been sent to for printer paper? Joe wants to scream. What the fuck is going on?

“This meeting is a bit of a surprise,” he manages.

“Your conduct has been . . .” Tordan pauses for emphasis. “A bit of a surprise.”

Joe frowns. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

Tordan raps his knuckle again and then opens the file in front of him, all in a single swift movement. “Yesterday, you left work an hour before contracted. Correct?”

“I . . .” Joe stumbles. “I didn’t realise that—”

“Today, you have been wandering the building on some bizarre task that was not on your DailyPlan, meaning you are already woefully behind on your targets.”

Joe feels his cheeks go hot, a sick twist in his belly. “No, I mean, come on! I was given a task by my line manager.” His voice is louder than it should be, but he can’t do anything about it. “You can’t seriously blame me for trying to find some printer paper!”

Tordan raises his eyebrows. “Printer paper?”

“Yes! Virgil Stanforth came in and—”

Joe’s sentence is severed by the door closing behind him. He jerks round to see Virgil, who enters the room and stands to Joe’s left.

“That’s quite enough of that,” Virgil says.

Joe stares up at him. “Can you please tell this man . . .” He points at Tordan, but once again, his sentence goes nowhere. Tordan is staring at Virgil like he’s an anomaly in space and time. He cocks his head to one side, his entire face twisted in confusion, as if he can’t work out what the hell he’s doing here, or how such a thing would even be possible.

“How . . .” Tordan says. He looks at his file, then back up. “There isn’t . . . I’m not . . .”

Virgil reaches inside his jacket pocket and pulls out a thick angular pistol, its metallic surface almost gleaming in the growing sunlight.

“What the fuck?” is all Joe manages, before Virgil levels the gun at Tordan and fires.

His head snaps back as a bullet slams into his temple, blood splattering the wall behind, and he goes limp.

Virgil tucks the weapon back into his jacket pocket and turns to a horrified Joe with a grim expression.

“You need to come with me. Now.”

Sweat drips down his brow, his muscles aching from the sheer tension holding the room together. He knows what he’s meant to do, what he’s here for, but he doesn’t know if he can bring himself to do it. Carefully, terrified, he types:

There’s something I’d like you to look at for me, actually.

He pauses for a second, thinking, then adds,

It would be a real help, if I’m honest.

Honesty is important, WellBot responds. Without honesty, there’s no integrity, and without integrity, all of this falls apart. Can you tell me exactly what is bothering you today?

Heart racing in his chest, he looks at his fingers as they rest upon the keys, at the piece of paper resting beside his keyboard. Will this even work?

He doesn’t know. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He doesn’t know.

Desperately, he wishes all of this responsibility were on someone else’s shoulders. He was not made for this. It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.

Joseph? Are you there?

The room shakes. He has run out of time.

THREE

Joe stumbles out of the room, more to escape the sight of the dead body than out of any desire to follow Virgil. His stomach roils, and once he’s in the corridor he has to put a hand up on the wall and take deep breaths to prevent himself from throwing up.

“Quickly, Joseph,” Virgil mutters. “There’s very little time.”

“What . . . what the fuck. You j— You just shot him. You just killed a man. Holy shit.”

Joe looks up to see Virgil shaking his head, as if being held up by a child taking too long to tie his shoes. “Don’t be dramatic. He wasn’t real.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t real. He was a trap. Look, if you want answers, follow me. If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done so already.”

Joe stares at him, and in a haze of confusion and indecision takes the path of least resistance. As Virgil leads him down the corridor and up a set of steps to the second floor, he plays back what happened in his mind in an attempt to make it make sense: Hilda telling him where to find printer paper; Tordan waiting for him; the appearance of Virgil and everything that followed.

What have I got myself into? I should call the police.

Virgil arrives at a door tucked slightly round the corner. Unlike every other door Joe has seen, there’s no keycard sensor. Instead, a complex set of five locks runs from the top of the door down to the bottom. Virgil starts at the top, lifting a combination padlock attached to a metal box, which falls open to reveal a key. Skipping what looks to be a basic night-latch lock below it, he pulls another thick metal key from his pocket which he uses to open a chunky padlock underneath, like the kind he’d expect to see on a pirate chest. Then, finally—using both the key released from the box above and a third key he pulls from his boot—he pushes both into some kind of modified five-lever mortice. He turns the latch and the door swings open.

Joe watches all of this with three thoughts running through his head:

What an astoundingly inefficient way to secure a door.

What on earth needs this level of security?

I should really really call the police.

Virgil ushers him in.

The room is unlike any other Joe has seen in the building. Gone are the pastel colours of the lobby, the beige walls of the corridors, and the posters adorned with corporate slogans. The wallpaper, such that it was, has been ripped back to reveal stark white plaster overlaid with black scribblings of indecipherable mathematics from floor to ceiling. Joe recognises a few symbols from the piece of paper, but they are lost in a sea of incomprehensible equations. There is barely half a foot of blank wall that isn’t scrawled upon, except for the window, which is firmly covered by a thick blackout blind, and a built-in cupboard on the far left wall.

There is a single table—and no chairs—in the centre of the room. It holds up an ancient computer and monitor system that looks stolen out of the 1970s and a vintage typewriter.

Behind him, Virgil closes the door and locks it with a process as complex as the unlocking. As each bolt falls into place, Joe feels the room close in around him.

I’ve just let myself be locked in a room with a murderer.

The shock subsides and in its place, panic rises to the surface.

“What the hell is going on?” he demands, backing towards the wall. “What do you want with me?”

Virgil’s still facing the door, his back to Joe. He straightens up.

“Things are not what they appear to be.”

Joe can’t take much more of this. “No—enough with the bullshit. I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. I just watched you kill someone. Oh, Jesus. That’s murder. I just witnessed a murder.” He takes his phone out of his pocket.

“What are you doing?” Virgil asks, turning towards him.

Joe retreats farther away, his back bumping into the wall behind him. “I’m calling the police.”

In a flash so quick Joe barely has time to react, Virgil storms past him, snatching the phone right out of his hands.

“Hey!” he shouts, pointlessly, turning to see Virgil pull open the window a few inches and throw the phone out. “What the fuck! That was my phone.”

“Yes,” Virgil says. “With a WellBot avatar fully installed, which means it had to go.”

Joe uses the space to shuffle towards the door, feeling his heart pumping hard. He needs to get out of here, or he’s going to be next. Oh god, he’s going to get killed, and nobody will know what happened.

Joe reaches the door, but it’s locked so many times he can’t fathom where to start.

“You need to reassure WellBot that you’re okay,” Virgil says, an urgency bubbling underneath his tone. “It will take them some time to realise what you’ve done, but you can mitigate that.”

“What I’ve done?” Joe shakes his head. “No, no. I’m not involved in this. And anyway, how am I supposed to contact anyone without my phone?”

Virgil nods his head at the old computer.

“No,” Joe says. “I won’t do it.”

Sighing, Virgil pulls the gun back out of his jacket pocket and levels it directly at Joe’s head. It is a miracle Joe doesn’t piss himself.

“Okay fuck! Put that thing down, man. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll do it.”

Virgil smiles, but he doesn’t put down the gun. With his other hand, he presses a big button on the side of the machine, and it whirs to life, sounding like an engine about to take off. “I’ve already got it set up on your profile. You’ll need to use the typewriter to communicate. It’s a ridiculously complex system, but it just about works.”

Attached to the back of the typewriter, there are wires that link the individual keys to the computer next to it. Joe blinks at the absurd MacGyver-style setup. “W-Why? That seems like so many unnecessary extra steps.”

“Exactly,” Virgil replies, and with his gun, he motions for Joe to kneel in front of the contraption. The floor is carpeted under him, thankfully, but he swears he can feel the cold muzzle of the weapon just inches from the back of his head.

On the black-and-white screen, illuminated in painfully grainy resolution, there is a message.

Are you okay, Joseph? I’ve been unable to get in touch for some time.

“Type exactly what I say,” Virgil commands.

Why don’t you just do it, then? Joe doesn’t say. Not with a gun pointed at his head.

No problem here, he copies as Virgil dictates. Had a few tech issues but I’m back online and preparing to move on to the next task of the day.

Did you complete your printing job for Mr. Stanforth?

No. I considered my own workflow and decided it was not a priority.

That seems like a wise choice, Joseph.

“Okay, leave it there,” Virgil says, with more than a hint of relief in his voice. Joe looks up and sees the man visibly relax and let the gun fall to his side, the tension draining out of his body. He drops it and it thuds onto the floor. He walks over to the wall and rests his back against it. “If nothing else, it buys us precious time.”

The shift in demeanour—and the lack of a weapon—makes Joe see the man differently. Virgil looks immensely tired now, and for a moment Joe swears that about ten years worth of wrinkles and wear have crept onto his face.

Joe gets to his feet, wondering whether to try and make a grab for the gun while he can. It might be a struggle, and he remembers how fast Virgil moved to grab his phone. He takes a small step towards it and tries to keep the man distracted.

“Mr. Stanforth,” Joe says, cautiously. “What the hell is going on?”

Virgil closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath, then straightens up.

“That wasn’t a real person,” Virgil says. “The man . . . the—what was the name?”

“Tordan Llyod.”

Virgil chuckles. “Their servers are getting stretched. Names get scrambled. That’s a good thing, I think. A mistake like that would never have slipped through five years ago. It means what I’m doing is working.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe says, shaking his head. He inches another tiny step towards the weapon. “What’s working?”

Virgil crosses the room and looks up at the maths on the wall. “This building is more than just a building. It watches you, isolates you, makes you forget. Not just you, but me too. That thing was a security programme that has been tracking me—I don’t think it knows it’s me, necessarily, but rather tracking my actions—for some time now. I needed something to distract it. By forcing it to focus observation on you and tailor its disciplinary response fittingly, I was able to take it by surprise.”

Joe gulps, unsure if he believes what he’s hearing. “Are you saying I was bait?”

Virgil lets out another low chuckle. “Well, I didn’t hire you for your stellar CV, Joseph.”

“I don’t understand. Why the whole printer thing? Why all of this?”

He turns back to Joe, hands raised. “This whole building—though I think building is a reductive term here—works with one aim in mind, to increase productivity and reduce inefficiency and waste. Everything it does strives towards it. By employing overtly and deliberately inefficient methods”—he nods at the locks on the door, the typewriter on the table—“I sneak under the radar. It doesn’t comprehend them. It can’t work them out. Printers are the ultimate symbol of this, of course: forcing a packet of efficient data slowly into extremely low-storage hard copy format is the opposite of efficient. Add a few extra steps, and I can pass you unseen messages.”

Joe stares, unmoving, while Virgil’s eyes are on him. “Why not just find me outside the building, if it’s all being watched? Come to my flat or find me in Subway or something?”

“Outside the building?” he repeats. He gives a wistful smile that is at once kind and somehow deeply sad. “Ah, yes. Would that were an option.”

Joe’s reminded, for a moment, of the old lady in the IT office—Hilda—and a deep sense of dread settles over him. “How . . . how long have you been here?”

Virgil’s brow comes together, as if mulling the question over, the sadness on his face slipping into concentration. With a sudden burst of energy, he raises a finger in the air. “I should get you up to speed, really. Seeing as you’re here.”

With a spring in his step, Virgil moves over to the built-in cupboard and opens it, pulling out a paper flipchart and a set of pens. On the chart, there are collections of graphs and statistics that have already been sketched out by hand.

“Labour productivity and living standards have never been a one-to-one correlation. Marx and Engels knew over a century ago—when certain groups control the means of production, the outcome of that production is never going to be equally or fairly distributed. You understand?”

Joe blinks, unsure how he has suddenly ended up on the other side of a lecture. “Er, yes.”

“And yet, there is still a correlation. That is to say, when a nation’s capacity for labour productivity increases, so should, to some degree, its perceived quality of life. When we can produce more things in less time with less resources, theoretically we should have more things and also more time to enjoy them, even if that increase isn’t directly proportional because of political corruption, human failings, and everything in between. You follow?”

“Sure,” Joe says, not really listening. He eyes the gun on the floor, just by his feet now, and wonders if he’s close enough to grab it without Virgil noticing.

Virgil turns to point at one of his graphs. “Consider now, in the twenty-first century. The total productivity of the human race should be higher than it has ever been, and not just by a flat percentage, but orders of magnitude. Technology has increased at a faster rate than ever before believed imaginable—from the introduction of computers to now, machine learning, automated apps, AI—we can do more faster than would have been possibly conceived of. One single person at a simple job probably achieves more in a day than an equivalent person in a job in the 1950s would have achieved in a month, purely due to increased technological efficiency. Add to that a global population that has more than tripled in the last sixty or so years, meaning significantly more people producing. Productivity, globally, should have increased by twentyfold, a hundredfold, maybe more.” Virgil smacks his hand against the graph, indicating the line rising exponentially upwards. He waits, as if expecting some kind of reaction, but Joe’s unsure what to say. He can’t disagree with any of this, particularly given that it seems Virgil has done his numbers. He just can’t work out why it’s relevant.

“Okay,” Joe says. He touches the gun the with the side of his shoe.

“Right.” Virgil flips the chart to the next page, revealing more statistics. In a swift movement, Joe ducks and grabs the weapon, tucking it into the back of his trousers. The cold metal sends a shiver up his spine. Virgil’s back is to him, still talking. “And yet, rather than making life easier, for most on the planet, life is measurably more difficult. In the global north, labour productivity has been flatlining since the seventies. Most households now have two people working full time just to get by. Indeed, they need to, in a way they never did fifty years ago. Many people are forced to work multiple jobs, longer hours, even with technology meaning they can do more with this time. Productivity should have shot through the roof, and yet, somehow, everyone is working harder and harder and harder. The result is an equation with a massive missing number. Where is it all going? If it isn’t being invested back in people, where is all this productivity going?”

Joe shrugs, feeling safer now the gun is in his possession, even if he has no idea how to use it. “Guess that’s why there are more billionaires than ever before. Wealth disparity, right?”

Virgil nods, shaking his finger vigorously. “That’s what I thought. A common thought. So I did the numbers. I did the maths.” He flicks the chart to the next page, this one covered in almost illegible equations. “But it doesn’t add up. The number of billionaires, grossly over-consumptive that they are, doesn’t even begin to account for the sheer rise in productivity. It’s like . . . something we can’t see, and have no idea that it exists, is draining the human race dry like a vampire. Something is sucking all the productivity out of us, making us work harder and harder as a species, and none of us know what it is.”

Joe stares at the maths on the board in front of him. “That’s . . . quite the hypothesis.”

Virgil shakes his head. “Not a hypothesis.” He whacks the flipchart again. “Proven.”

“So what is it?”

“Who knows?” he replies. “I only know that whatever it is, it exists. It must exist. The numbers do not lie. This has been my life’s work, young man, and I have traced it, finally, eventually, to this building. Here. Something sits at the heart of Ponos, feeding on the lifeblood of our entire species, and it will not let go.”

Joe can’t comprehend the gravity of that statement. It is all too much for him, too absurd. He can’t focus on any of this nonsense about fake security systems and inefficiencies and productivity. All he can think about is the bullet going through Tordan’s head.

But small things niggle at him—why was Tordan even in a room he’d been sent to for printer paper? Why could that woman on the other side of the office door not hear him, even when he screamed at her? How did WellBot appear on his phone?

He needs to know more, if only so he doesn’t end up like Virgil in front of him, or like Hilda downstairs. No—he needs get out of this building, and get home. He wants, suddenly and intensely, to see his mum again. To say sorry to her for not being in touch. To give her a hug.

The ancient computer on the desk beside him pings loudly and he jerks away in response.

“What was that?” Virgil demands.

“The computer,” Joe says, edging away from it. “It just—”

“It’s not meant to do that,” he mutters, approaching. “It shouldn’t be able to . . . Oh, shit.”

Joe leans in to read what he’s looking at.

There is a single message from WellBot.

Found you.

The two words drop into Joe’s stomach like an anvil.

Virgil swears and runs to the door, frantically working at the complex set of locks. “We’ll need to split up. It wants me, not you. You’re inconsequential.”

“I don’t—”

“Shut up and listen to me, if you want to make it out of here alive. My guess is we have three minutes, maybe less.” He glances at his watch, clicks the second lock open, and moves to the third. “You need to find someone else to talk to in this building. That’s how it gets you. Don’t stay on your own. If you’re not with another person, it makes you forget. About life out there. About people.”

“But there’s no-one here—”

Virgil spins round and grabs him by the arms. “No electronic communication. No texting. No emails. It must be face-to-face. Do you understand me?”

“I—Yes. But the place is empty.”

“It’s not as empty as it appears,” he replies, glancing at his watch again. “Shit. Two minutes.” He darts over to the cupboard and starts rifling through pages inside. Joe’s heart pounds against his chest.

“Yes. There was a man on the third floor,” he says quickly. “He—”

“The third floor?” Virgil almost screams, spinning to face him. “Absolutely, under no circumstances, ever ever go to the third floor. Even if you think your life depends on it, do you understand me?”

“Y-Yes.”

Virgil darts forward, paper flying around him, and grabs Joe again. “Say it back to me.”

The man’s back, rising and falling in exertion, looms large in Joe’s mind. The bulging veins. The messy red lips.

“Never go to the third floor,” Joe whispers.

“Never.” Virgil looks at his watch. “Ninety seconds.”

Joe splutters. “Then—who do I find? I spoke to . . . the IT lady? Hilda?”

Virgil freezes, blinking. “You found Hilda?”

“She’s . . . just downstairs, yeah.”

He takes a step back and looks Joe up and down. “I . . . I felt sure she was lost. Amazing. There might be something to you after all. Here.” He presses a piece of paper into Joe’s hand. Another set of equations, like the page from earlier today. “Go back to Hilda. Show her this. It will help. But they will be onto you now. The only way out is further in.”

The computer pings again and Virgil jumps.

He is halfway out the door before Joe shouts after him, waving the page. “What does this mean? I don’t know what any of this means!”

Virgil stops, glances at his watch again, half turns back.

“Who is the most important person in your life?”

Joe blinks. “What?”

“Come on,” Virgil insists. “Come on. It shouldn’t be a difficult question.”

Joe opens his mouth, but the question is so intensely personal that all he experiences is embarrassment and nausea, and then guilt for not being able to say it.

Mum, something whispers at the back of his brain. It’s always been Mum.

“I don’t know.”

Virgil sighs, shaking his head in disappointment. “Whoever it is, cling to that memory. Do not forget them. You’ll have to go in, you see? Promise me you’ll remember.”

Joe stutters, overwhelmed by the sudden barrage of emotion and intensity.

“But I—”

“Promise me!” Virgil shouts.

“I—I promise.”

The lights in the hallway go out, plunging them both into darkness.

“God save us,” Virgil mutters, and then in a clatter of unseen footsteps, he’s gone.

FOUR

Joe stands in the pitch-black corridor and tries not to panic. In the distance, the clunking sound of machinery rises, as if somehow getting closer. The bizarre message on the computer is seared into the front of his brain.

Found you.

All he wants to do is get out.

Get out, and go home, and never come back to this godforsaken building ever again.

Virgil is long gone. In the dark, Joe reaches for his phone torch, only to find his pockets empty. Virgil threw his phone out the window.

Fuck.

That’s his wallet, for paying for the bus. Even when he does leave, what’s he going to do? Walk the fifteen miles home across central London? That’ll take all day. That phone was also his only means of communication, of identification, of anything. Without his phone, he has nothing.

Nothing but a murderer’s gun tucked into the waist of his trousers, his keycard, and a piece of paper with incomprehensible maths.

He runs.

Hands on the wall, he works his way down the corridor. How far was it to the stairs? There should be emergency exit signs to light up the space, but there isn’t.

There’s nothing.

Doors closed. Blinds closed.

Pure darkness.

No light for his eyes to even adjust to.

Feeling his way, he passes one door, and then another, and another. Should he try to use his keycard to open them? His brain spins—mad conjurations of what might be behind battling with his fear of the dark. Men with messy red mouths. Trapped workers that can’t speak.

He can’t just start opening doors.

But the doorway to the stairwell was different. Yes, it had no window.

Find a door with no window and open that one.

On the left side of the corridor, he tells himself. Somewhere down here.

A clunk echoes from down the other end of the hall, like something large and metal being dropped.

Joe’s throat tightens. He speeds up, placing hand after hand against the wall to guide him. Reaching for each door to check for a window. Desperate for a way out.

Another clunk—so much louder, so much closer, only feet away from him. Huge, like a giant hammer.

Get me out get me out get me the fuck out of here.

His hands frantically scramble up and down. There it is!— There’s no window.

He pushes.

It falls open; he tumbles into the fully lit stairwell.

Joe blinks, covering his eyes at the sudden intensity of the strip lights above. Standing up, he looks around, and it’s as though nothing is wrong. His heartbeat still screams, but there’s no longer a clunking sound from the corridor. He turns to eye the door he’s just come through suspiciously, backing away from it, but the stairwell is just . . . the stairwell. Same as it’s been since he arrived yesterday.

What the hell just happened?

Is he imagining things?

The whiplash of his changed situation freezes him for just a moment. Underneath, the urgency to get out of this building quickly returns. Think, Joe. Think. He’ll go down to the lobby, he’ll ditch the gun somewhere—he should clean it first—and then once outside he’ll borrow someone’s phone to call the police.

Already, the presence of a clear plan in his head calms his shaking hands and frantic heart. He takes the steps two at a time until he’s on the ground floor and into the lobby.

To his relief, the silent pastel-coloured spread he encountered yesterday is exactly the same as it was when he first arrived: calm, corporate, completely empty. Joe takes a deep breath and powers past main desk and right towards—

There’s no door.

Joe stands, staring, unable to resolve what he’s seeing.

The large double doors that lead outside aren’t where they were this morning. There’s just a smooth continuance of beige wall that runs from one end of the lobby to the other. He spins, disoriented, dizzy, trying to work out if he’s somehow facing the wrong direction. Everything else is there: the door to the IT office, the lift lobby, the chairs and tables and plants and desk.

But there’s just no door.

There’s no way out.

How is there no way out?

He retreats until his back hits the wall behind him. All he wants to do is sink to his knees, to curl up, foetal, and rock back and forth until all of this madness goes away. Just hide away, disappear, forget.

Don’t stay on your own, Virgil whispers urgently from the back of his mind. If you’re not with another person, it makes you forget.

Hilda, he thinks.

The thought of being around another human being, even a crazy one, is more comforting than he expects.

Doing everything he can to keep the panic from bubbling out of him, Joe shuffles quickly to the door of the IT office and pushes it open. Hilda sits bent at one of the computers, tapping away with one hand and eating a pre-packaged supermarket sandwich with the other.

“Excuse me?”

She jolts upright with a yelp, throwing her sandwich in the air. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Joe,” he says, approaching slowly. His voice shakes. “I was in here just earlier.”

She blinks, staring at him. “Never seen you before in my life.”

“I was,” he insists. “I came in looking for printer paper. You told me to go to Room 108. Remember?”

She frowns, looking him up and down. Swivelling her chair round, she stands up and faces him.

“Yes,” she says, quietly. “I . . . I do. Joe. You just interrupted me.”

She’s frustrated at his presence, hands on hips, and it’s clear more than anything else that she’s desperate for him to leave. He takes a step forward.

Come on, Joe. Suck it up.

If he’s going to get through to this woman, he’s going to have to try to connect to her on some level. “W-What is it that you’re doing in here?”

“Busy, busy, busy,” she mutters, shaking her head. “Productivity targets are way up and I have to meet them.”

Joe looks around the room again—the clothes, the food, the debris of life. “Do . . . do you sleep in here?”

She runs her tongue across her teeth. “What?”

“Where do you—”

“What is it that you want, Mister . . . Mister Joe? Why are you here?”

“It’s just Joe,” he says. “Virgil Stanforth sent me here.”

She tuts. “I don’t know who that is.” Turning away from him, she sits down and continues to type at her computer.

“Well, he seemed to know who you were.”

“Look,” she interjects, visibly annoyed. “I’m extremely busy and I’ve got far too much work to do. So if you could just let me be, that would be very much appreciated.”

The prospect of stepping out into that lobby alone is too much for Joe to consider. “I don’t think I can do that, Hilda. I wish I could, but . . . something is going very wrong in this building. And I think it’s affecting you too.” He pauses, thinking. “You never leave this place, do you?”

Slowly and deliberately, she sets aside her keyboard and swivels her chair back, as if to make a point that she’s being distracted from a very important task. “What do you mean ‘leave’?”

“Leave the building. Go home.”

“This is home.”

“Then where do you sleep?”

She lets out a giant huff, frustrated that he is still asking that question. Getting to her feet, she storms over to a filing cabinet behind her and pulls open a drawer. The empty photo frames on top of it rattle. Extracting a long piece of paper, she waves it in front of him. “Can you see this? This is the number of tasks I have to get through today. Today! I am already behind. Far behind, and if I don’t get it done that puts me behind tomorrow, which is why I’m working through lunch. Or I was trying to.” Joe glances at his watch. It’s 4:26 in the afternoon. “So no, I don’t sleep, okay? I’m too busy! There’s too much to be done!”

“You don’t sleep?”

“I . . . I haven’t slept in seven years,” she mutters, her voice cracking, body sagging forward. Underneath, the frustration, a quiet desperation seeps. “If I fall behind, it will reflect poorly on my performance review. So can you please just leave me alone?”

Her eyes—wet and pleading—look across at Joe with one single desire: that he get out of the room.

Joe’s throat catches, overcome by such an earnest display of vulnerability. “It’s just I . . . I don’t know how to leave.”

She straightens and gives him a kind smile—a glimpse of another woman pushing her way to the surface: someone who genuinely cares. But even as she appears, Joe watches her battle a building anxiety. A nervous glance at her computer. At her workload. At the time.

“You’re going to be alright,” she says. Then, with a gulp, “But you really should get going. I can’t help you.”

Joe shakes his head. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out the piece of paper Virgil gave him and places it on the table. “Look at that.”

Hilda frowns, picking it up. “What is this?”

“I don’t know,” Joe admits. “Just . . . just look at it, will you?”

And she is. She is staring at it.

The page sucks in her gaze, and all of her anxious glances are gone. Her focus is so intent, so unable to look away, that her hand starts shaking with the sheer intensity of it.

“Hilda?” Joe asks. “Are you okay?”

Slowly, like she’s fighting gravity itself, she pulls her eyes away from the equation.

“Where am I?”

“The IT office, in Ponos.”

She nods. “Yes, yes. I remember. Sorry. And you’re Joseph, right? Joe. Sorry. I got very caught up in . . . in something that felt so important, and I can’t for the life of me see why it was so crucial now.”

Joe sighs with relief. The Hilda that peeked through just a moment ago seems to have clawed her way to the surface, and he wants to take as much advantage of that as he can before he loses her again.

He has to get out of here. He has to get them both out of here. And to do that, he needs answers.

“How long have you worked here?”

She furrows her brow, as if the question confuses her. Bringing her hand to her head, she closes her eyes. “I’ve worked here my entire life.”

“Really? I mean, you can’t have been born here, surely.”

She shakes her head. “No . . . I mean.” She turns away from Joe and starts looking around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. She picks up the toothbrush and puts it down. Inspects the empty sandwich wrappers.

In a very quiet voice, she says, “I don’t remember a life before this room.”

Joe’s throat tightens.

“What?”

Hilda’s wide eyes look at him searchingly, as if he can help her. “When I try to think about it, there’s . . . there’s nothing there.”

The deep well of fear that has been building in him since the moment Virgil shot that man twists, ballooning outwards and pushing its way to the surface. His guts wrench. Hilda is completely untethered.

Unless Joe finds a way out, this will be his fate.

The pain in his belly intensifies, and he has to lean forward, hands resting against the table in the middle of the room. He falls to his knees, his breath coming in ragged bursts that he can hardly catch.

What the hell is wrong with me? he thinks, but he can’t stop, and with each heavy breath, his nose and throat fill, and his eyes go wet. He can’t. It’s too much. It’s just all too much.

He did everything right—he got good grades in school, he made friends at uni, he followed the path, and somehow, in tiny little fragments and moments that he can’t parse, it all fell apart. As the tears come, the last half-decade of isolation and distance and regret bubble to the surface, of poor choices, of fighting an eternal uphill struggle and failing every single day. He can’t understand where it all went so wrong.

Because even if he escapes this damn building, this prison Hilda has found herself in—stuck alone in a room, eating takeaway food, and plugging away at a computer for the rest of her life, forgetting everything and everyone that came before—it’s the same one he’s already in.

And the worst, the very worst, is that nobody did it to him.

He did it to himself.

And then he is really crying, deep from his belly, in long loud sobs that reverberate through his body. He doesn’t know how long he’s there for, emptying himself on the floor in the middle of this office, but at some point, he feels a hand on his shoulder.

He looks up to find Hilda, close to him. She smells of old lavender and musty clothes, her face softer. Joe’s surprised by how comforting it is to feel her touch, the touch of another human body.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “I understand. I do.”

The heaving in his chest subsides, slowly. Shaking, he stands, and Hilda offers him a tissue to wipe the tears from his face, to blow his nose. “I’m sorry,” he manages. “I . . . I don’t know what came over me.”

Without asking, she pulls him in for a hug and he lets himself be enveloped. It is warm, and comforting, and he realises how much he has craved this—just this—that even an embrace from a stranger feels like a revelation.

She lets him go, and he takes a deep breath, filled with renewed determination. To get them both out. To get free.

“Virgil said in order to get out, we need to go further in. Do you know what that means?”

“Virgil,” she repeats. “Virgil. Yes, I remember a Virgil. It’s been so long. He left . . . there was . . .” She starts searching around the room, picking things up, looking under files and inside drawers.

“What are you looking for?”

“He left something here for me,” she mutters. “Or we left it together. I’m sure of it. But I lost him. Or I lost—”

Now gazing across the room with new purpose, Joe notices an old lockbox in the corner. It looks like a briefcase, but it’s secured with too many locks. A padlock, a combination lock, and an extra latch that seems not just superfluous, but completely and utterly . . .

“Inefficient,” he says out loud.

“What’s that?” Hilda asks, looking behind her computer.

“That briefcase,” he says, lifting it from the corner and placing it on the desk. “Do you have the key? The combination?”

She blinks. “Yes. God, yes. Somewhere here. I’d forgotten that old thing even existed.”

“What’s in it?”

Hilda pauses. “I have no idea.”

She reaches into the bottom drawer of her desk and pulls out a scruffy piece of paper wrapped around an old key. On the paper, there is a code. As she inputs it into the combination and then turns the key, Joe holds his breath, both anxious and utterly unprepared for whatever they’re going to find inside.

He doesn’t expect photographs.

There are six of them, and a blank keycard. Hilda lifts them up, looking at them without saying a word. Over her shoulder, Joe sees two of them depicting a small boy playing by a beach, maybe about five years old—in one building a sandcastle, in another paddling by the water. The next three show the same boy at various stages of growth: a pre-teen in shorts and a cap; a teenager in a school uniform; a young man atop a hill. As she flicks to the final photo, Hilda’s breath catches in her throat.

It is a picture of her, maybe ten years younger, and this young man. It’s Christmas, and they’re in front of the tree. She’s wearing a Santa hat and he’s kissing her on the cheek. They are both so happy.

“Is that . . .” Joe starts, but doesn’t know how to say it.

“My son,” she whispers. “I have a son.”

“What’s his name?”

She looks up at Joe, her eyes wet and fearful, and in a voice so light and wavering it is almost not there, she says, “I don’t know.”

Before she can say another word, Joe takes her in his arms. She pulls him close, and it is now her sobbing, crying into his shoulder. In between breaths, she stammers, “How can I not know? How?”

If you’re not with another person, it makes you forget, Virgil said to him. About life out there. About people.

“It’s this place,” Joe says, and then, with an intensity that shocks him. “I don’t know how or why, but we have to get you out of here.”

She pulls back, her face a mess of red splotches and tears. “I’ve never left this room.”

“Yes, you have,” Joe says. “You had a life. You had a son, who loves you and you love, and this place has taken that from you. I won’t let that happen. I can’t let that happen. No one should ever forget their mum.” He picks up the keycard. “What does this open?”

She gulps, shaking her head. For the first time, there is a new expression on her face—not frustration or confusion, not anxiety or sadness. She is terrified. “We can’t,” she insists. “It’s too dangerous.”

“We have to.” Joe pulls the gun from his waist and puts it on the table. “I’ll protect you.”

“You can’t.”

Joe picks up the photos of her son. “If I leave here without you, you will forget him again. You will forget this, and me, and Virgil. It will take everything from you. That’s worth whatever it is you think we’re going to face. I need you. Where does that keycard open?”

She picks up the keycard, hands shaking. “It takes you to the basement.”

Joe blinks. “What’s in it?”

The only way out is further in.

Hilda pulls the photo of her son close to her chest. “I—I don’t know. I just know we can’t go there.”

Joe lifts the pistol, feels the weight of it in his hand.

“Okay,” he says. “Well then, that’s exactly where we go.”

FIVE

A tremor runs up Joe’s arm as his hand touches the door handle. Despite all the other impossibilities, the disappearing door most shifted his sense of security. The IT office feels oddly safe, as if his brain has confined the vertigo from this mental imbalance to the lobby in which it happened.

But as he prepares to step back into that space, the disorientation returns, and with it, an instinctive desire to pull away. To climb under a table and stay there for as long as he possibly can. He turns to look at Hilda, and realises she must feel this too. No wonder she never leaves.

And yet, Hilda’s presence emboldens him. The closeness of someone else feeling the same feeling he does, going through the same panic, forces him to straighten up and bolster his emotions.

I can do this. If not for myself, then for her.

The thought isn’t a comforting one, but it brings a surprising strength. He turns the handle.

Cautiously, Joe steps into the lobby, his hand tight on the gun.

He’s never fired a gun before and has no clue what he’s doing. Is there a safety on it? Are there even any bullets left? He has no idea. But the feel of the metal weight in his hand helps somehow. He feels like he doesn’t look entirely helpless, even if he probably is.

The lobby is unchanged.

Everything is exactly the same as it was when he was last in it—the desk, the plants, the emptiness, and, yes, the lack of any kind of door. Hilda reaches forward and grabs on to the back of Joe’s shirt, connecting the two of them like they’re ascending a mountain. He inches forward.

The silence mocks them. It is ridiculous, creeping through this room with a gun when there’s obviously nobody here. Joe knows this. But again, Hilda’s presence lends credence to his feelings. She’s just as scared as he is, which means it can’t just be in his head. He’s not insane, unless they both are. Joe tries not to think about that second possibility.

“Where do we go?” he asks.

Hilda indicates a door to the right of the reception desk that Joe would have sworn a day ago didn’t exist. There’s nothing strange about it, as far as he can see. It’s just a wooden door, leading off to another part of the building. But when he entered this lobby yesterday morning he’d had a good look around to make sure there wasn’t somewhere else he was meant to be, and that door was not there. It just wasn’t.

“I’ve never seen that door before.”

“No,” Hilda whispers. Her voice is so quiet, and Joe realises that however scared he is, her fear is orders of magnitude higher. “You won’t if you don’t know it’s there.”

Together, they creep their way across the emptiness of the space.

Nothing happens. No sounds. No movement. No threat of any kind.

But when they arrive at the door, Joe feels Hilda tug at his shirt.

“What?”

She’s shaking her head. “I can’t do it.”

“Hilda—have you been in here before? Do you know what’s down there?”

“No.” Joe has to lean in to catch the words. “I . . . maybe. I don’t know. I can’t remember. I can’t remember what’s behind the door. I just know that I can’t. It’s too much.”

Joe takes her hand. “Listen, Hilda. I’ve decided I’m doing this, with or without you. I’m getting the hell out of this building and I’m getting you out, too, even if it kills me. If you can’t come in here with me, I’m not going to force you. But I am starting to feel like the only way that I can do this is with you by my side. I . . .” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Hilda looks at her hand in his. Slowly, her eyes track upwards and meet Joe’s. She takes a deep breath, screws her courage, and gives him a hard nod.

“Okay,” Joe says, and he goes to open the door.

It’s locked.

“The keycard,” Hilda whispers.

Of course. He’d been so preoccupied with the lobby, he’d almost forgotten. Pulling the card out of his pocket, he swipes it over the reader and there’s an audible click.

Inside, there’s another stairwell, much like the one that leads up, except this one only goes down. It is brightly lit, blank-walled, and similarly silent. In fact, unlike the upstairs levels where Joe can always hear the soft clunk of machinery in the distance, this stairwell is as quiet as the lobby they’ve just come from. Quieter, even, if such a thing is possible.

Together, they work their way down the stairs, Hilda still clinging to Joe’s hand.

The stairs descend three flights before they come across another door. Above it, there is a sign that says:

BASEMENT LEVEL

AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY

The door is not locked. Hilda lets out a low moan as Joe opens it, as though she is experiencing physical pain, and he turns to look at her. She shakes her head, giving his hand a squeeze, and gestures for him to go on.

They step out from a side door into a corridor that extends to their left and right. At first glance, the corridor looks identical to those on the floors above, yet two differences lodge in Joe’s brain. The first is the doors have no windows, blinded or otherwise. The second is that the walls are not plastered with terrible corporate posters and bland slogans, but instead with family portraits.

Joe looks at one: It’s black and white, formal. A man in a three-piece suit and hat stands alone with his dog, a sombre-faced Great Dane sitting upright by his feet. In the background, an extensive living room is lined with rows of bookcases, the corner of a grand piano just in view. Underneath, a caption:

Archibald Gibbons-Rash, with his dog, Piebark.

Coutts Manor, 1924.

Joe feels as though he faintly recognises the man, but can’t pinpoint where or how. Shaking his head, he moves to the next.

It is the same man, but this time, with family. He stands with his wife—similarly dressed up—and they’re posing with their three young children, two girls and a boy. The youngest looks about five and the eldest eleven or twelve, just on the cusp of teenagehood. They, too, are dressed in the kind of formalwear you just don’t see children in these days, and the posed photo speaks of a society long abandoned for modern freedoms and beliefs. They are smiling, but not too much. Not so much that it might be considered excessive. They look rich, white, and distinctly upper class.

Underneath, the caption reads:

The Gibbons-Rash Family.

The Barking Estate, 1921.

The closer he looks at the image, the more his throat tightens. He moves closer, focusing as intently as he can on the mother—Archibald’s wife. She is exactly the same woman he saw this morning, swanning into the building in shades and sunhat. Not a relative. Not an ancestor. The resemblance is exact.

Except, she was an adult over a hundred years ago, and that’s impossible.

Isn’t it?

The rest of the corridor is lined with more formal portraits from various points across the twenties and thirties—sometimes just the children, sometimes all of them, sometimes just Archibald and his dog. But while the children clearly grow up, neither Archibald nor his wife seem to age in the slightest.

It’s when he looks forward to see how many more of these portraits are hung that he notices the third—and most unsettling—difference.

The corridor doesn’t end.

He has to blink a couple of times to make sure he can see it, because there’s something about the image that makes his eyes lose focus. Off in the distance, where one would expect to see a corridor ending in a wall, it just goes on and on until it dissipates into a point so far away it might as well be a horizon.

Once his eyes manage to focus on it properly, Joe sees people.

Two people, to be precise, so far down the other end of the corridor that they’re just silhouettes.

“Come on,” he tells Hilda, who pulls back a little. She’s not speaking, but with a hard enough tug Joe pulls her along. “Maybe they can tell us something about what’s going on here.”

But as Joe storms towards them, they both head off in the other direction, away from him.

“Hey!” he calls out.

Hey!

The echo almost blindsides him, as though when he shouted the very walls shouted back at him. He stops, and the people ahead of him stop, too, whoever they are.

“Excuse me!” he tries again.

Excuse me!

He straightens up, confused, certain that this time the echo sounded like it was coming from behind.

He turns, the corridor stretches out eternally in the other direction, and in the distance, just far enough away to be able to make them out, there are two more people. Joe squints his eyes and realises that they are also looking behind them.

His heart tightens in his chest.

Those aren’t two more people.

They are them.

He turns back to look at the people ahead, and he raises both his arms in the air. The figure on the left does exactly the same thing.

The corridor isn’t eternally long, it’s repeated, and the two of them are stuck inside.

Oh, shit.

He swings round, looking instinctively for the door back to the stairwell, but there are identical doors every few feet and he’s doesn’t know how far they’ve walked.

“Okay,” he says, straightening up, breathing. “Okay. We can work this out. It’s going to be alright. We can do this.”

He closes his eyes for a second, trying to grasp his thoughts in the silence. He reaches out to tap the wood of the door, counting each one—five, ten, twelve . . .

“Joe,” Hilda whispers, and he loses count.

Fuck. He’s going to have to start again.

“I just need you to be quiet a second. I just need silence, just for a moment.”

Except, it isn’t completely silent anymore.

Off in the distance, from somewhere, comes music—high and lilting, as if from panpipes or an ocarina. It is soft, but clearly distinguishable, and the longer he focuses on it the clearer it becomes.

“Can you hear that?” he asks, his tapping forgotten.

If Hilda replies, he doesn’t hear her, because all he can think about is how beautiful the music is. It’s light and airy, but beneath its rhythms there’s a weight to it, an importance that speaks to something deep in Joe’s soul.

If only he could just lay back, and—

A sharp pain jerks him back into the present. Hilda’s standing over him. He’s on the floor, his back against the wall—how did he get on the floor?—and Hilda’s hand is raised, his cheek stinging.

“Did you just slap me?”

She huffs, shaking her head. “Don’t focus on the music.”

He stands up. “What the fuck was that?”

“Focus on other things, like where we need to go. Don’t listen to it.”

A shiver runs its way all down his body. The gun is on the floor next to him. He dropped it. As he picks it up and looks at it, and then at the distant figure of himself at the other end of the corridor, he starts to really think that coming down here was a very bad decision indeed.

“I think,” Hilda says to him. “We need to start opening some doors.”

He nods, gulping, not sure he wants to know what’s behind any of them anymore. He gets up and tucks the gun back into his waist.

They walk forward, and Joe tries not to focus on the images of them both ahead and behind him also walking forward, just as he tries not to listen to the pipe music—now distant once again—that bubbles in the background.

He puts his hand on the handle of one of the doors on his left.

It opens to a small broom closet, with a mop and bucket, a couple of old brooms, and a shelf with some tins of paint and cleaning product in it. There’s nothing strange that Joe can identify.

“Not this one, I think,” he says, even though he’d quite like to just get inside the space and not come back out.

They shuffle up to the next door.

This one opens to another corridor, splitting off perpendicularly from the endless space. This corridor, however, is finite. It’s more like ones from the floors above, with their windowed doors and, mercifully, a wall at the end of it.

Deliberately leaving the door to the original corridor open, they make their way tentatively into this one.

Through the window of the first door, Joe sees exactly the same woman he saw on the fourth floor earlier today. She is in the same position and similarly focused—her brown hair up in a ponytail, typing diligently at a computer. He tries the door, but just like the one upstairs, it is locked. He knocks, calling out to her, but there’s nothing.

“I saw her upstairs,” he tells Hilda, glad someone else is experiencing this with him. “She shouldn’t be down here.”

“She’s stuck,” Hilda mutters ominously. “They all are.”

Frowning, Joe walks to the next door and finds the same thing. It is not the same woman, though it might as well be. This person—a young Asian man with glasses—is in exactly the same position, typing just as diligently at an identical computer. Once again, nothing he does can get the man’s attention.

Joe powers forward, tugging Hilda along with him, passing one, two, and then more and more of these people, caged away in their offices typing, oblivious to the world around them.

“There must be some way to get them out,” Joe says. “There must be.”

Hilda just shakes her head, a deep sadness in her eyes. “It’s too late. We have to go on. Come.”

For the first time in their exploration, Hilda pulls Joe away. He resists at first, but then lets himself go.

Is this what’s going to happen to him? To the both of them?

No.

Back in the endless corridor, Joe moves more urgently, walking up to push open the next door. Hilda, by contrast, has slowed, her body seeming to lumber behind him.

Joe turns. “Are you okay?”

She doesn’t reply, but just waves a hand for him to go on. He gives her hand a squeeze, making sure to not let go. The physical contact has become a lifeline for him, and he cannot imagine facing this nightmare without it.

He barely opens the third door for twenty seconds, and even that is too long. For the first few seconds, he’s stuck working out what the hell he’s looking at, because the room is upside down. It looks like a large hotel room—there is a bed, a desk, bedside tables, and a wardrobe, and all of them are on the ceiling, gravity upended.

Because of this, it takes him awhile to work out what the three strange pillars sticking out of the ground are.

But they aren’t pillars. They’re ropes.

And at the end of the three ropes, there are three people hanging.

Or rather, they have been hanged.

Their bodies—dressed in black corporate suits—dangle upside down, legs straight up in the air, dead faces twisted and bloated.

The shock and revulsion leaves Joe standing and staring for far longer than he wants to, until Hilda reaches forward and slams the door shut.

Joe lets out an expulsion of breath. “What the fuck was that?”

Hilda just closes her eyes and looks at the floor.

“Hilda? What is it? Is it the music? Are you listening to the music?”

She frowns, looking up at him. “I need to get back to work.”

Joe blinks. “What?”

“I shouldn’t have come down here. There’s too much to do.”

She backs away from him, and, for the first time since entering this basement, lets go of his hand.

Joe stumbles, unmoored.

“Hilda?”

“I need to get back to the office,” she repeats, backing away farther, looking like she’s going to run.

“No, Hilda. Remember me,” he says, but the lack of physical contact is throwing him. In his head, the pipe music grows louder, pressing its way into his brain. “Remember your son.”

She pauses.

Opens her mouth.

“I—I can’t—I’m forgetting—”

Joe rushes forward and envelops her in a hug, hoping it will work like last time. She pushes away, but he doesn’t let her. He pulls her close, closing his eyes and imagining his own mum, and whispers. “I’m going to get us both out of here. I promise. Just stick with me. You have to remember! You have to remember who you are.”

She softens against him slightly, but not completely. There’s still a tension in her body, like the anxiety of a caged animal, desperate to escape.

Joe won’t let her go. He’ll hold her like this for as long as it takes, to remind her that they’re in this together, that he’s not going to let her forget.

A familiar ping echoes from a PA system somewhere above their heads.

“Hello Joseph,” a woman’s voice says. The same woman who called him in the lobby, and who told him the printer extension didn’t exist. The same voice—he now realises—that has been in his computer and phone from the beginning. WellBot. “You seem to have gone to the wrong floor.”

As one, he hears the distinct click of every single door locking.

Letting go of Hilda, he reaches to open one, but it doesn’t budge.

Behind them, in the distance, the strip lights go out. The faraway copies of themselves behind disappear into the black, only the infinite path extending in front of them still illuminated.

“Oh god,” Hilda moans.

Another set of lights, closer to them, also blinks out.

Joe grabs Hilda’s hand, and they run.

They barrel down the corridor, the black approaching behind them in incremental chunks. Ahead, they see themselves, running, though the lights stay somehow bright.

“We need to discuss your wellbeing targets, Joseph,” the voice echoes above him. “These choices are not conducive to a productive relationship.”

Watching himself run far ahead, Joe realises there’s no escape. Not in a corridor like this.

The only way out is further in.

Pulling Hilda to the side, he grabs again at the nearest door. Still locked.

“Perhaps a counselling session would be appropriate to discuss your workplace concerns.”

Another light goes. Darkness approaches.

Fuck.

Joe tries another door. Locked. Then another. He has no reason to think any of them will be open, but he’s panicking, and out of options. Hilda moans quietly, letting herself be tugged along. Joe’s not entirely sure she still remembers who she is.

On the fourth try of a door, WellBot pipes up again, this time a little louder.

“This behaviour will result in disciplinary action, Joseph.”

He pauses, palm on the door handle. For the first time, he swears he catches a hint of urgency in WellBot’s tone. He tries the handle again, pushing against the door with his shoulder.

“Ponos reserves the right to consider legal action as well as termination,” WellBot insists. “Return to your floor immediately.”

The failing lights, now just metres behind, speed up.

Joe lets go of Hilda’s hand, and she snatches it back like it might burn. He looks up at the ceiling, at where he imagines WellBot to be, staring down at him. With all the force left in his body, he says,

“Fuck you.”

And he throws his whole body weight into a hard kick right below the handle.

It splinters with a crack and swings open to a pitch-black room.

“Joseph Daniel Rice,” WellBot thunders. “Under no circumstances are you to—”

Joe grabs Hilda and pulls her into the dark, tugging the door shut behind them.

Joe presses his back against the door, aware he’s kicked it open and it won’t stay closed without him. But, somehow, it works.

There is no more sound of WellBot.

There is nothing but black and the shallow, panicked breaths of Hilda by his side.

“Find a light switch,” he mutters.

“What’s going on?” she replies. “Where am I?”

Shit.

He reaches out and manages to find her arm. She yelps as he takes hold of it, tightening in fear. Already, he suspects it is too late. Whatever power exists down here is too strong to resist for long, and he’s not sure why he hasn’t yet succumbed. He taps his pockets with his other hand, hoping to find the mathematical proof, but in the complete darkness, it’s hardly going to make any difference.

Pulling Hilda towards him, he presses her back against the door. “Just stand here,” he says. “It’ll all be alright. I promise.”

She doesn’t reply, but gives enough of a whimper to suggest she’s not going to argue with him.

Letting go, he uses both hands to feel the walls around the door.

They’re mostly smooth, but before long he comes across a raised section and a switch. He flicks it, and with a flicker, the whole room comes alight.

Hilda screams.

Joe, utterly unprepared for the sight in front of him, does the same.

They are in an incomprehensibly large room—like an aircraft hanger, but the height of it seems so tall that it must surely rise out above ground level. Along either side, there are rows of what Joe can only identify as crystals: about seven feet tall and just a couple of feet wide, their jagged crystalline structure glows with a greenish-blue. There must be at least fifty of them.

Out of the base of the crystals, a series of pipes and wires run across the walls and floor towards the sight at the end of the room that Joe is trying his very best not to look at for a second time.

At the back of the hanger, there is a creature.

Something we can’t see, Virgil says in his mind, and have no idea that it exists, is draining the human race dry like a vampire.

Joe uses the word “creature” in his mind, as he looks away from it and towards the floor, because it helps him contextualise the situation better than the other words that creep into his thoughts: sublime entity, terrifying giant, impossible god. A swirling mass of tentacles—too many to count, too large to comprehend—twist around a central figure that is brutal in its sheer emptiness. An impossible cosmic maw, like the event horizon of a black hole, turns in the centre, pulling everything towards it.

It’s not a physical pull—not like gravity—but a mental one. And soon, despite his best efforts, Joe can no longer turn away. His eyes lock on it, and as they do, the sound of pipe music rises triumphantly in his ears, like the celebratory homecoming of a grand army.

Behind him, Hilda is forgotten, Virgil forgotten, life forgotten. He takes an inexorable step forward.

And another.

For a moment, in his peripheral vision—for he cannot now look away from this eldritch manifestation of destiny—he notices that inside the crystals there are shapes. They float, frozen in time, like mosquitoes trapped in amber.

But even as he wonders what they are, the thought is snuffed from his head like a candle.

There is only the great beast, its tentacles reaching out to Joe as he approaches it, probing carefully, seeking union.

Joe raises his arms to allow a tentacle as thick as a tree trunk to wrap itself, tenderly, around his body, its cold scales a soft relief, its squeeze a much needed comfort.

He is being lifted.

Towards the great devouring mouth at the centre.

Not to die, but to be consumed. To be eaten.

This is the purpose of his life, he realises, with a smile.

This is what he was born for.

For a brief instant, he remembers something else.

A soft pair of hands on his own, the smell of grated ginger crushed into a paste. A face he can almost see.

He frowns, but not for long, because it is gone.

It is unimportant.

Only this matters.

With a flick, the tentacle throws him into the gaping maw, and he flies with open arms, soaring across the precipice.

When his body crosses the threshold, the last sensation he has is of his limbs being pulled from their sockets and his heart exploding with a final, glorious burst.

As he copies the symbols into the terminal, the music rises violently in response, pressing hard into his mind.

He presses Enter.

What is this, Joseph? I don’t understand.

But Joe can’t respond. In response to what he has just typed, the room itself squeezes his mind like a lemon, emptying it of thought. He backs away from the computer, the building shaking in violent retribution, his mind reeling in panic. The floor rumbles beneath him. Foam tiles dislodge from the ceiling as strip lights pop and crackle.

Joe curls into himself, like a foetus, like a caterpillar, like a tiny mound of dirt, and he screams.

And it screams back.

SIX

Three minutes before his alarm buzzes, Joe opens his eyes. The sunlight glows dimly from behind his curtains, bathing the room in a soft warmth. He reaches over, as he does every morning, and turns off his alarm before it goes off. He’s not really sure why he even sets it anymore, but the routine provides comfort; there is safety in the repetition.

The sleep tracker on his phone pings affirmatively—he has slept well. Bedtime at 10:00 PM. Deep sleep an hour later. This has added six hours to his lifespan, it estimates. The approval makes Joe smile.

In the bathroom, he studies himself in the mirror as he brushes his teeth. He looks decent for fifty-five, he thinks. There are a few wrinkles and grey hairs, but a solid moisturising routine and regular HIIT workouts in his living room have kept him in shape. He flosses, swills mouthwash, and then applies face wash, moisturiser, and serum to the crow’s feet around his eyes.

Despite the fact that he is working from home, he puts on a suit.

This is important, he reminds himself. Without routine, people slip. They get messy. Unfocused. No—life is easier with consistency. It is more productive.

Sitting at his computer with a cup of decaf coffee, he logs in to his system, looking forward to his scheduled moments of social interaction before the tasks of the day begin.

Good morning, Joseph, WellBot types. Your tracker indicates you had another good night’s sleep. Well done.

Thanks. It’s nice to feel rested and prepared for the day ahead.

And how are you feeling today?

I’ve been trying not to worry about the upcoming merger, but I just want to make everybody proud. I’ve been working very hard on ensuring the documents are all in hand.

You’ve done a great job, Joseph. There’s nothing to worry about. You’re not feeling anxious, are you?

He pauses, thinking. Somewhere deep within him, there is a tiny shiver of something, but he doesn’t know what it is. He closes his eyes, runs through the projects he has today methodically, and when he has finished doing that, it’s no longer there.

No, no. Not anxious at all.

Good. Anxiety is not conducive to the healthy and productive mindset that has seen you promoted twice in the last ten years.

He thanks WellBot for the affirmation, and they exchange a bit more talk about what he’s been watching on TV, how his football team is doing, even the weather, though Joe of course has no need to go outside.

When the allotted time is up, Joe welcomes the first task of the day. Social interaction is important to maintain a state of healthy wellbeing, he knows this, but at times it can be a little draining. He’s thankful that he has the convenience of WellBot to keep it straightforward and without surprises. The thought of having to navigate the messy confusion of other people is, well . . . he doesn’t think about it. There’s too much to do.

At lunch, he goes to the fridge and removes the package labelled Tuesday Lunch. He doesn’t need to look at the contents. Tuesday is quinoa grain bowl with grass-fed beef. He looks forward to Tuesday lunches. As he sets the packet in the microwave, grateful for the delivery company making his life easier and not having to waste time cooking and cleaning up, he notices something strange sticking out of the cutlery drawer. A piece of paper that doesn’t really have any business being there.

Frowning, he pulls it out and turns to put it in the bin. There’s something written on it, but he feels no compulsion to look at it in any detail. It’s not part of his normal routine, so it can’t be important.

And yet, as it flutters into the bin bag, it turns over, and he catches a glimpse of what looks like a mathematical equation. He stares at it, sitting on top of the empty packet labelled Monday Evening, and for a moment it feels as though his mind is completely blank.

Or, not blank, but full.

He can’t work out the difference.

The fullness is composed of the many questions roving around his head, like Why is there maths in my cutlery drawer? and How could someone have put it there? and What the hell am I doing?

But none of them have answers, and so there is blankness too. When he reaches for answers, they are not there, like blindly rooting around an empty bag for a lost pair of keys. There is a sharp pain in his stomach, like the stab of a knife, that makes him buckle.

In the distance, quietly at first, the soft warbling of pipe music grows.

It builds louder and louder, even as the questions in his head grow larger and larger, and as the two clash together Joe stumbles back, breathing hard, blinking, shaking, unable to focus on how or when or why they—

Joe settles at his computer with his lunch. He will work through lunch today, because of the big merger. He worked through lunch yesterday, too, but in truth he likes it. He likes being productive. He likes the sense of achievement that comes with getting things done.

His post-lunch task, which has started already, is to sift through employee personnel files and rank their productivity. Those that have been meeting targets will be tagged for potential promotion in three to five years. Those that have not will be subject to a detailed profit and loss examination to establish whether or not they are a suitable candidate for redundancy.

Part of the job involves tallying up paid time off and sick leave and establishing whether or not this fits within reasonable boundaries and expectations. For those that sit outside of these boundaries, there are occasionally supporting documents.

Employee 28425—it’s easier to keep track of them via employee numbers, as names are so easily repeated or misspelt—is one such case. She took extended leave for two months while supposedly caring for her ailing mother. Joe reviews the case, reads the supporting documentation.

Surely one month would have been plenty of time to set up an elderly person in some kind of continual care? He doesn’t know, exactly, so he is forced to speculate. His own mother—

His own mother . . .

Your mother passed away at a young age, Joseph. You have no memories of her.

Ah, yes. That’s right.

For a moment, he tries to remember what exactly happened to her—a car crash, maybe, or an illness? Once again, he is confronted by a blankness that is at once unsettling but strangely comforting.

Have you made an assessment on this case?

Yes, he types back quickly, and then flags the employee for redundancy.

The day continues otherwise uninterrupted. He finishes his work, makes a cup of tea, and watches a rerun of a TV programme he has seen a thousand times, basking in the warm safety of its narrative and characters.

It’s only after the second episode that a very funny thought occurs to him. He’s not quite sure where it’s come from, and it’s unlike anything else he usually thinks about at this time. As he watches the characters on the screen break into an argument about one of them cheating on the other, the slip of paper in the bin worms its way to the front of his brain.

The questions about its provenance are long gone, but the symbols stick with him. He can see them, even now, even though he glanced at it for a mere second. But as he tries to shake it from his head, the thought of the bin and the kitchen leads to another thought.

He’d quite like to cook something.

Frowning at the idea, he plays it over in his head. Not at lunchtime, certainly—there’s no time. But maybe in the evening after TV, he could make his own meal rather than heating up the delivery one.

But what would he do with the extra delivery meal? He could freeze it, he supposed, but he’s on a schedule with the company and it wouldn’t make sense to break that. Plus, any extra ingredients he buys would just go to waste, and if there’s anything he has learnt to dislike, it’s waste.

Still, the thought nags at him until he finds himself on his phone browsing ingredients to deliver to his house.

Are you hungry, Joseph? There are additional snacks in the pantry for these situations.

I know, he types back. But I feel like cooking something would be quite relaxing.

Are you feeling particularly tense?

No.

Annoyed, he swipes WellBot to the side. He feels bad about it. After all, WellBot is his best friend, really. His closest confidante. And yet, there’s something deeply satisfying about putting ingredients in a basket. Maybe a dessert, to eat after his dinner.

He can’t find everything he wants—Sainsbury’s has no nutmeg available, or fresh blackberries—but he can swap out substitutions. He’s not entirely sure how he knows how to do this. He’s never really cooked, but his fingers move instinctually, like it’s second nature. If he gets these delivered tomorrow, he could make a crumble after dinner tomorrow night.

He presses the Purchase button. Putting his phone down, he picks out the packet labelled Tuesday Evening, makes his dinner, and does an hour or two extra work before going to bed at 10:00 PM sharp.

A dull ache in his stomach causes him to toss and turn a little, and he swears for a moment he can hear a lilt of soft music in the distance, but before long, he sleeps.

The next day is so blissfully uneventful—wake up, dress, work, lunch, tea—that when the ingredients arrive at his door, he’d forgotten that he’d even ordered them. The bell rings and he flinches. With several cautious steps, he approaches the little fish-eye lens that looks out to the corridor outside and sees an impatient delivery man checking his watch.

“Just leave it on the floor,” he says, but the words come out strangled. Joe coughs. How long has it been since he has spoken out loud? Weeks? Months? When his routine remains uninterrupted, the days cycle into a single-coloured blend of time that he is unable to pick apart, unable to identify one day from the next. Has it been years?

“Can’t, mate. Need a signature.” He taps the device in his hand.

“Oh, er, yes.” Joe briefly considers sending him away. Behind him, his TV show is calling. His dinner.

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” the man adds, and Joe can sense he’s trying not to huff too much.

Opening the door, he keeps his eyes firmly planted on what he needs to do—take the device, sign it, hand it back, take the package. Joe doesn’t look at the man’s face, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to get on with his day.

After closing the door behind him, he lets out a deep breath.

He puts the food on the side, reeling from how uncomfortable an experience that was. Stumbling to his computer, he sits down.

I’m not feeling great, he types.

Oh no! Why is that, Joseph? What happened?

A delivery man came and made me sign for a delivery, but I couldn’t even look at him. Even the thought of interacting with him made me feel so sick that I barely spoke, I don’t know why.

Did he feel like a threat?

I don’t think so.

Sometimes, you have to just listen to your body, Joseph. Trust your instincts. There was probably something wrong with this man, if your body was raising all those red flags like that.

Don’t you think it . . . He stops. Deletes. Tries again. I’m scared that maybe . . . No. “Scared” is the wrong word. He doesn’t want WellBot to think less of him. He doesn’t know what he’d do. But as he tries to type out the right sentiment, he ends up with: What if it’s me that there’s something wrong with?

As he reads the words on the screen, his stomach twists in pain, but he can’t take them back.

What do you think might be wrong with you, Joseph?

I don’t know.

Your performance targets are above average. You sleep well. You eat well. You are a healthy and successful man. I cannot fathom anything that might be wrong with you.

Then why does it feel like there’s a hole inside of my body, he doesn’t write. He can’t remember the last time he had a thought and kept it from WellBot, but this one just crops up unannounced and he can’t turn his mind away from it.

There is a hole inside of me, so deep and so dark that if I stuck my hands in my chest they would keep going and never see the light again. I am empty.

Joseph?

He stands up, backing away from the computer, looking around the room for something to take his mind off this feeling. He sees the delivery bag and thinks, Yes. I can cook. I should cook. That will make me feel better.

Moments later, he has calmed.

He doesn’t know what came over him. In fact, he can barely pinpoint the feeling anymore. Instead, he just clears his mind and lets his hands do the work, which they do, somehow, without guidance. Chopping board out. Sliced apples, ground cinnamon, grated ginger. Toast the nuts and let them cool. Squeeze of lemon.

The hands move and the mind clears. The worries dissipate.

You are okay, he tells himself. You are okay. It’s going to be alright. You don’t need anyone but you.

Hands rub butter into rough flour. Smells of apples and cinnamon fill the room. Of hands on his, soft, pressing. Chopping, tasting, mixing. Mathematical symbols. Shapes and lines and equations. An endless corridor.

You don’t need anyone else.

You won’t need your old mum anymore, hey?

He jerks his hands back as if they’ve been burnt.

What the fuck was that?

He stares at the meal half made beneath him: the pan on the hob, the chopped fruit, the flour.

There was something that he . . .

Joe turns around the room, holding his hands up in front of him like they’re dripping in blood. Somehow, the flat looks greyer, the colours muted. Glancing at the windows, he wonders if the sun has gone behind the clouds. Then he sees it.

A door.

To the right of the front door.

He’s never seen that door before.

You won’t if you don’t know it’s there, a voice whispers in his head. It’s one he recognises, but he can’t place. A woman—his mother? No, he has no memories of her. She died when he was young. So what the hell is happening?

Step by cautious step, he approaches the new door, hands still raised. The computer pings at him, but he ignores it. His phone buzzes angrily. He hears the pipe music rising, but he ignores that too. He has seen the door now, and nothing will shake him from it.

More voices in his head.

Promise me you’ll remember. Promise me!

But remember what? What has he forgotten? What has he given up?

His hand is on the door handle. He turns it, and it swings open to a completely new room.

It’s cramped, old and dusty, dimly lit by a single dangling lightbulb that hangs from the centre of the ceiling. Along the back is a desk that runs the length of the wall, covered in old grainy CRT televisions stacked on top of each other. The empty swivel chair at the desk gives the impression of a security room; someone manning surveillance cameras for a large building, each of the screens tracking a different place.

But as he gets closer, he realises the camera feeds aren’t observing a building. In one, a young boy bikes down a road at full pelt—a road Joe swears he recognises—zooming in and out of other children making their way to school. In another, a middle-aged man hunched over a computer, his face obscured by the light. Joe turns from screen to screen, a tension building in his chest. A man brushes his teeth, flicking through his phone in his hand as he does so. The man looks up, and Joe gasps.

It’s him.

They’re all him.

As a boy, as a teenager, as a man. His whole life is displayed in front of him across this collection of TVs, which now feels more like a director’s cutting room than a security office. He watches himself, transfixed, eyes flitting from screen to screen.

Joe’s surprised by how much beauty there is in each individual moment—the sheer joyful energy of boyhood, kicking a football with his friends; the warmth of teenage romance, the electric excitement. Even in the moments he flinches to watch, scared by the depth of his shame, he finds life: Joe in his late twenties, consumed by his phone, a bubbling mess of anxiety and loneliness, is so alive. He still has hopes and dreams, for all they seem unachievable.

Joe’s breath catches in his throat and he leans forward, holding one of the televisions. If only he could have seen this, at the time, from where he is now. If only he could make himself understand how empty it was possible to become.

From the corner of his eye, another version of himself arrives at a house.

He turns to focus on it—early twenties, home from uni for the first time. It had been a fun year, but difficult, and for all the partying and socials, strangely isolating. He kept forgetting to check home. Life was so busy, he kept forgetting to do so many things.

He rings the doorbell of a house Joe knows so well, but can’t place, like there’s a hole in his mind. The door opens, and a woman stands with the warmest and happiest smile Joe has ever seen.

Mum.

Oh, god.

Young Joe smiles back, surprised by the strength of his own joy. And she bursts into tears: of reunion, of happiness, of love. He realises, then, how much she needs him. He’s never thought of it before: this strong woman who navigated parenthood as a single mum, who took on every obstacle to raise him. It never occurred to him that she would need him. That anyone would. And here he has been away for a whole year and barely managed a weekly text.

He throws his arms around her and they go inside, and he tells himself then—Joe knows this, because it comes back to him in a flood—he promises himself that he will never forget to show her that he loves her. That he will never forget to be there for her.

He steps back, the other screens overwhelming his vision, forced to watch himself break that promise again and again and again.

Promise me you’ll remember.

It all floods back, like a life lived a thousand years ago: Ponos, Virgil, Hilda, the creature in the basement. Oh god, Hilda. Her son. He promised to get her out. Another promise broken.

The dull pain in his stomach sharpens, and he buckles, his hands going to his belly. Slick wetness spills over his hands, and as he lifts them, they are blood-red. The pain tightens: tugging, pulling, stabbing, searing hot.

His whole body shudders, muscles spasming.

The room goes black, shifts out of view, replaced by a glimpse of something else.

A huge, heaving man standing over him, eyes wild, body rising up and down with exertion, shovelling something into his messy red mouth.

Never go to the third floor.

Joe chokes—he is lying flat, on his back, on a table, and as his vision clears he looks down, towards his stomach, towards the source of now unbearably searing pain.

The man’s hands, clad in surgical gloves slick with blood, lift Joe’s intestines from a cavernous wound in his belly and pull them up—like a handful of wet red snakes—and into his mouth. He chomps on them, devouring and devouring Joe with feverish lustful intensity, his jaw and teeth tearing and pulling and slurping what feels like a never-ending supply of Joe’s insides.

Joe tries to scream, but his mouth will not open.

Sharp pain tugs at the edges of his lips that have been sewn shut, surgical thread looped through bloody holes in his face. All he can manage is a muffled moan.

The man above him does not notice, does not blink, is not even slightly distracted from his desperate eating. Oh god, he is eating Joe alive.

No, he is eating Joe’s life.

From the inside out, everything that he is and could ever be is being consumed to feed this manic ritual.

Except Joe’s hands aren’t tied down, nor are his legs.

No one expects him to be awake.

They expect him to be wherever he has been: an endless cycle of work and TV and sleep and internet reels while he is fed on.

He glances to his right, at a bloody knife that must have been used to slice him open.

Forcing through the extremity of the pain in his stomach and the overwhelming need to vomit, he slams his knee up as hard as he can. It hits the man in the face, who stumbles away—a bloody entrail dangling from his lips.

His eyes bulge, mad with fury.

Joe grabs the knife and with an almighty twist of his broken body he shoves it right into the man’s throat.

The man gurgles, grasping at the wound, and falls to the floor. The uncomfortable tug of entrails still half attached to his bloody mouth jerks Joe forward.

Scrambling to grapple his falling insides, Joe gathers them up in his arms like a sloppy writhing child, and stares frantically around the room—lips sewn shut—trying to work out what the fuck he’s going to do now.

SEVEN

Holding his spilling intestines tightly inside of him, Joe presses his back against the wall and sinks to the floor. Blood spills through his fingers, onto his trousers, his shoes, the scuffed linoleum. How is he not dead? What is happening to him?

In his memories, a whole lifetime has passed. Almost thirty years of work and routine and emptiness clash violently with the reality of his present: still in his twenties, still trapped inside this nightmare of a building.

And yet, despite the horrific wound in his belly that sears with indelible pain, he is somehow—impossibly—awake and alert. He should be unconscious with the amount of blood he’s lost, but he’s not.

He’s still alive, and he’s young, and he has so much time left.

But first, he has to survive. He has to get out.

Joe glances wildly around the room, avoiding the twitching body of the hulking man—if he even is a man—murdered on the floor beneath him.

Glass cabinets filled with jars of strange liquids line the sides of the room, some holding what Joe can only guess are organs. Beside them, rows of test tubes and pipettes, needles and bottles. Underneath, there are drawers.

With his insides pulsating in one grasping hand, he pulls himself to his feet and stumbles towards them, pulling open the drawers. In the first, unlabelled pills, and then a collection of gleaming scalpels. More pills in another. The third drawer is the jackpot: thick rolls of bandage, with tape and metal clips.

Wincing through the pain, trying not to let anything fall out, he wraps as much bandage around his belly as he possibly can. It tightens, forming a second skin which he clips and tapes over and over again.

The fierce ache persists, but his insides are no longer spilling out of him. He takes the wins where he can.

Next, he reaches for a scalpel, deliberately positioning himself so that the bleeding corpse of whatever was feeding on him is behind. Reaching up carefully, he touches his mouth.

He cautiously touches wire holding his lips together. Every instinct tells him to pull his mouth wide open, to tear away from this forced muzzling, but he can feel the holes in his lips and knows the wire will shred them like hard cheese.

He presses the scalpel against the wire. The metal is thick, and a scalpel is not the right tool to cut through it, but he can see nothing else. Carefully, he pulls the scalpel back and forth, trying hard not to slice farther into his lips or tongue. Without a mirror, it is a tricky job, almost impossible.

Tears drip down his face, the salt stinging against his wounds as the water touches his lips. The first wire cuts through, but as he runs his hands across his mouth, he counts twelve more.

One by one, bent over the counter, he cuts.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him, but as he reaches the last few, a burning heat grows in his chest.

Someone did this to him.

The screens pop back into his mind: the sight of himself, stuck in his phone, pushing away his friends, sucked back into his dark and dingy flat like the event horizon of the rest of his future. And then, the next three decades—wherever he was, it was no mere fever dream. He lived all those years. They are all still in his head: the repetition, day in and day out.

Someone used his body and life like a puppet, and he just lay back and took it. No—he was complicit in it. He let it happen, because it was easier. Because it was convenient.

It is all so clear to him now. And he’s really fucking angry.

At the world, yes, but mostly at himself.

As he slices through the final wire, the heat in his chest spreads across his whole body, his hands shaking with fury, and he stretches his mouth open wide with a bellowing, guttural scream.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do, but he knows he’s got to get out. For all of his anxiety and self-doubt, he’s never felt as energised with purpose as he does in this moment.

It feels like a second chance. To find some joy. To meet up with old friends. To do something, because all of that anxiety and worry and inertia that once drowned him seems so minuscule now, compared to decades of quiet submission. He wants to see his mum. He wants to live.

Maybe that’s what’s keeping his spilling guts and blood inside of his body. Maybe in being eaten by that beast, he has transcended the physical into some plane of fairy-tale logic that runs on intention and belief more than fact. He doesn’t know. What he does know is that it doesn’t fucking matter.

Stepping over the body on the floor, he walks out of the room.

The third floor appears as it did the first time he was here—a repetitive corridor with corporate posters and doors with mostly covered windows. Joe stalks down it, scalpel still in hand, trying various doors and finding them locked.

The third floor, like the corridor in the basement, seems to go on forever. There’s a wall at the far end, but no matter how long he walks, it never gets any closer. Joe passes ten doors, then twenty, the fifty. He stops counting.

How many others are being consumed in these rooms? How many have succumbed to the monstrosity in the basement? Is this contained to Ponos staff, or does its reach extend beyond these walls, out into the world?

“Joseph?”

He turns. Poking his head out of an open door, hair and eyes wild, is Virgil. Joe could have sworn the door was locked when he passed it moments ago.

“Dear god, man,” Virgil mutters, shaking his head. “I never actually believed you’d do it. How are you?”

The question is so ridiculous, Joe can only grimace and bare his teeth, his bloody lips stinging as they stretch across his mouth.

“Right,” Virgil says. “Of course, yes. Well, I suppose you want some answers. Come on, then.”

His face disappears and the door starts to fall shut behind him.

Joe dashes for it, panicked that if it closes he’ll not be able to open it again. Diving forward, he shoves his arm through the crack just as the door falls upon it.

Pulling it open, he stumbles out into a stairwell. Above him, Virgil is scampering up the stairs.

Joe follows.

Up, and up, and up.

Fourth floor.

Fifth.

Sixth.

Joe’s heart pounds, Virgil always just a flight of steps above him. He wants to cry out, shout for Virgil to stop, but he’s focused on his breathing. He hasn’t done anything that might be considered cardio in years, and, just moments ago, his body was lying sliced open on a table. His body is still sliced open, barely held together by bandages and belief.

He stops counting the floors, focusing on the steps. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, a voice whispers, The building doesn’t have this many floors, but geometry isn’t what it used to be.

When he finally gets to the top, panting and coughing, he collapses to the floor. Pressing his back against the wall, he breathes hard, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, his stomach twisting and screaming beneath the bandage.

Virgil fiddles with the door—another collection of ludicrously complex locks—but when he grasps the handle he stops.

“Do you have anything on you?”

Joe stares up at him, dumbfounded. “N—No?”

“Phone, watch, even a notebook? Anything.”

He shakes his head. “No. Look—what the hell is—”

Virgil raises his hand. “No questions, not until we’re inside. Take off your shoes.”

“What?”

“Your shoes—they’re designed to make walking easier, more efficient. Take them off and throw them down the stairwell.”

Joe leans forward and pulls them off. “What about yours?”

Virgil snorts. “Mine are extremely uncomfortable.”

Pulling himself to his feet, Joe throws the shoes down the stairwell, letting them thump and clatter out of sight.

“Okay,” Virgil says. “Are you ready?”

Joe gapes at him incredulously.

Am I ready?

After everything that’s happened, the question sounds like a joke.

Virgil opens the door, grabs Joe’s arm, and shoves him into a dark room. Virgil slips in behind and pulls the door shut as fast he possibly can, as if he’s worried something will get out.

Just as Joe’s eyes are beginning to adjust, Virgil flicks a light on.

A single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling illuminates the room, casting a dim glow over the space: a desk with a computer on the right, covered with files and papers; on the left, another desk—this one with just paper. Everything’s covered with the same scrawled mathematical equations Joe’s seen so many times.

Along the back wall, there’s a TV screen and a large red button.

Virgil crosses the room and presses it. The screen flashes to life, displaying a bright red digital timer which starts counting down from 10:00:00.

“We have ten minutes,” Virgil says, the timer flicking away behind him. “If we’re in here longer than that, it will find us. Worse still, it will find this room, and it will all be over. If you talk about this room outside of this room, it will hear you, and it will be over. This room is the last holdout, perhaps in the entire world. It is my Command Centre. It is the one place that must never be discovered by anyone.”

Joe blinks, trying to work out what makes this room so special. “But you brought me here?”

“Yes, Joseph. I did. And I’m sorry for that, because now you are committed. Now there is no going back.” Virgil turns around with arms in the air, indicating the space around him. “Welcome to the war.”

“The war?”

Virgil crosses over to the table with the computer and turns it on. “I told you some of it, before. Just enough. Now, it’s time for the full story.”

“Wait,” Joe says, hand still holding his belly. “Just fucking stop a second. Someone was . . . was eating my insides. How am I not dead yet? How am I even here?”

“You’re no longer human,” Virgil replies. “Not just, at least. You’re a collapsed collection of potential, coexisting in a single body.”

“What?”

“That’s what it does. It doesn’t just take people as they exist in the present. It takes everything, everyone they have been, everyone they might become, all of the possibilities, and it crushes them down into a single devourable meal. The full potential productivity of an entire lifetime in one meat-sack. That’s what sustains you now.”

Joe stares at him, unable to quite follow, but what is clear is that Virgil knows far more than he has been letting on.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before, in the other safe room?”

Virgil shakes his head, typing a password into the computer. “The previous room had some security measures but was a temporary solution. Nowhere but here is fully secure. The things I had to do to escape that infernal bot after our last meeting . . . well, it beggars description. I could not speak of the creature in there. It would have sensed. It would have known.”

Joe clenches his fist, a growing anger inside of him. “So why didn’t you bring me here?”

Virgil sighs, looking back at him with earnest eyes. “I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

“And you trust me now? Why?”

“You have been inside the beast, and you escaped. You escaped, because of the tools I gave you, yes, but also because of something inside of you. You are stronger than I expected you to be.”

Joe storms forward and grabs Virgil by the shoulders, slamming him into the wall. “You knew this would happen to me?” He takes a step back and points at his stomach. “And this?”

Slowly, Virgil nods. “You have to understand, I—”

Joe’s fist slams into his face.

It stings—he’s never punched anyone before—and he pulls his hand back, cradling his knuckles. Virgil stumbles back, but quickly straightens, unfazed. “I probably deserve that.”

“Why?” Joe screams. “Why send me down there?”

Virgil speaks very slowly and deliberately. “That’s what I’m trying to explain, if you’ll let me.” He points at the timer on the wall, which now reads 08:05:34 and ticks down with each passing second.

“Okay,” Joe says, taking a deep breath, trying to cool the bubbling anger. “Okay, explain.”

Virgil leans over the now logged-in computer and brings a picture up to the screen. It’s one of the portraits from the basement corridor—the same family. “In the early twentieth century, the Gibbons-Rash family were members of the landowning gentry, a dying class who were increasingly reliant on selling off their assets as the world around them industrialised and modernised. They clung to the past, desperate to hold on to it. Archibald, in particular, feared obscurity above most things. His diaries are testaments to this mania.”

Virgil clicks, and the photo clicks to another one, this time of an old leatherbound book with a strange twisting pattern on the cover.

“Part of the Gibbons-Rash legacy was their library, a collection curated and maintained by Archibald’s wife, Florence. She was an occultist, and obsessed with collecting the most obscure texts on everything from tarot and seances to ancient mystical practices. It is she who first brought this book to Archibald, and together, they summoned it.”

“It?” Joe asks, even though he knows the answer. He has seen the creature that lurks in the basement. He has been inside of it.

“A being from another dimension, or from a space beyond our own. I do not know. Even the occult texts disagree. None give it a name, other than That Which Devours, or The Scourge of Souls. Whatever it is, the Gibbons-Rash family made a deal with it. To grant them eternal life.”

Joe’s throat tightens at the very thought.

“I saw her,” he whispers. “That woman—Florence. She was in the lobby.”

Virgil nods. “Yes—they still inhabit the world. They must return, periodically, to be revitalised by the creature. The process can take many months.”

“And what does this creature get in return?”

Virgil straightens up, turning to face Joe with a weariness that makes him look almost two decades older. “Us. All of us. The collective potential of the human race, slowly grown and harvested over time to serve the needs of a selfish elite few who could not possibly reckon with their dying relevance. It takes everything we are and are capable of being—love, connection, creativity—and it funnels it into pure production: constant unabating work for work’s sake, so that it can consume it. With every passing year it worsens—its reach extends further. It sucks the very life out of our species, Joseph. It eats our souls.”

Joe’s hand goes to his belly, the edges still searing, the bandages wet with his blood. His guts gurgle and squirm, twisting within.

“Can . . . can it be stopped?”

For a moment, Virgil says nothing, and then slowly, his face breaks into a smile. “Oh, yes.”

He walks past the timer, which now reads 05:26:03, to the other side of the room. From the desk, he picks up a line of mathematical equations.

“Whatever distant hell this beast comes from, it is in our universe now, and so it must abide by our rules.”

Joe blinks. “What does that mean?”

“The fundamental language of the universe. The single constant that does not change, because it cannot change, because it is the tapestry with which reality is written. Mathematics. What I gave you the other day was a mere section of a longer proof that has been decades in the making. I did not begin work on it—no, I merely inherited it. This war has been going on longer than you would believe. But I believe that the final proof is done. I believe I have it.”

“Have what?”

“Think of it like an opposing energy. A positron to an electron. Matter to antimatter. It is an equation of complete entropy, of profligacy and wastefulness, of utter inefficiency.” Joe frowns in confusion. Virgil shakes his head, looking for the words. “It is, you might say, a self-perpetuating anti-productivity bomb. In theory, the more the creature consumes it, the more it will wither and—if such a thing is even possible—die.”

“And how do we use it?”

“How do you use it, is the question. You must go back to the basement. Back inside the beast.”

Joe’s eyes widen in disbelief. “What? You mean, let myself be eaten again?”

“You will be aware this time. You are already more than just your present being, and you have taken control. You can play its game. It will realise quickly, but you should have time. Brief time. Maybe a minute, two at the most. I believe that if you input this full proof into WellBot’s terminal inside the beast, it will process it. It will cut right through.”

“Wh-Why me?” Joe stutters.

“Because you have escaped already.” Virgil claps his hands excitedly. “Thanks, in part, to my equation. You have done what no one else has done yet! You have—”

“Wait,” Joe puts his hand up. “How many others have you sent into that thing?”

Virgil opens his mouth, raising his hand, but nothing comes out. The energy brimming inside him dims, and he falls silent. For the first time since they met, he cannot look Joe in the eyes. Staring at the floor, he whispers, “It has been a long war.”

Joe blinks, takes a step back. He wants to sit down, to process it all, but there are no seats. Only a maddening timer that now reads 03:45:03. Virgil reaches over and places the proof in his hand.

“Did you send Hilda too?”

Virgil sighs. “She . . . she is lost to us now.”

An ache twists in Joe’s heart. “No.”

“I’m afraid so. We are running out of time.”

“I can’t accept that. I left her and she—”

“She is gone!” Virgil snaps. “You must accept it. You think I didn’t care for her? You have no idea what I have sacrificed.”

Joe shakes his head. “Is she on the third floor? I can find her. I can—”

“You can’t. Do you have any concept of how extensive this sickness is? The third floor is almost infinite. Billions of souls are being consumed. You would die of old age before you found her. The only way to stop this is to stop the creature.”

“Why not you?”

“What?”

Virgil glances up at the timer.

02:03:54

“Why not you?” Joe repeats. “You know the equation. You have all the maths. Why send others in for you? Why not go yourself?”

Virgil’s lips pull into a tight line. He glances from Joe, to the clock, then back to Joe. “We don’t have time to—”

Joe steps forward, inches away from him. “If I’m going to do this, I want the answer. Why not you?”

Virgil stammers for a moment, then falls quiet. Joe can see the ticking timer in the corner of his vision, but he does not move. Eventually, very quietly, Virgil speaks,

“Because I am afraid.” His voice wobbles as it exits his throat, thick and tremulous. “Because I tell myself that without me, here, the war ends. But in truth, I am too scared, of myself, of what I might be willing to give up.” Virgil gulps. “I’m not sure I have the willpower to make it out of there, even with the equation.”

“So how did I escape?”

Virgil shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Joe glances to the side.

00:53:25

“It’s time,” Virgil says. “Please. Be quick. Be quiet. Take the stairwell down to the lobby and cross to the basement.”

“Won’t it stop me?”

Virgil shakes his head. “It has already eaten you once. It will want you back. The plan relies on it. But once you are actually inside, my calculations suggest you have less than eighty seconds before it knows.”

Joe takes a deep breath. He wants to leave, more than anything. He doesn’t know why he’s survived this far, but every part of him wants to run, to go home where it’s simpler, where it’s easier.

His mind trips on the word.

Easier.

More convenient.

Because that’s the bargain, isn’t it? That’s the promise of the beast. The promise of the modern age. Life can be more efficient and convenient for you, if you want. All you have to do is sacrifice everything.

No more.

No more.

He thinks about Hilda, about a son never seeing his mum again. He folds the proof and tucks it into his pocket. Opening the door, he prepares to descend to hell.

EIGHT

The stairwell is shorter as he heads down, a mere two floors before the signs tell him he’s at ground level. In the distance, deep clunks echo through the walls, like giant heavy machinery. The building reinvents itself endlessly.

Joe knows where to go—down the stairwell, into the lobby, and across to the other door that leads to the basement. At least, that’s where the door was. He realises that’s no guarantee of where it is now.

And yet, as he descends farther, he can’t deny a pull—an internal gravity that feels like a rope around his bloody waist, tugging him. Virgil was right: Whatever I have become, I am a creation of that beast now, a child of it.

The pull takes him out into the empty lobby, where the glass double doors have returned, offering a tantalising glimpse of the outside world. The overcast sky has parted slightly and a ray of sunlight beams onto the street outside.

Above, the speaker system comes alive with WellBot’s recognisably chipper tones.

“The Gibbons-Rash Foundation would like to offer all Ponos staff a complimentary day off to thank you for your hard work. You are invited to leave immediately.”

Joe almost laughs at the perfection of it: a way out that just a day earlier he would have leapt at.

Now, he bares his teeth at the doors and utters a single and definitive, “Fuck you.”

He lets himself be pulled towards the basement door—a door which has now shifted to the other side of the lobby, but he has no doubt it’s the same one; he can feel it. As he grasps the handle, WellBot returns, slightly louder:

“The office is now closed.”

Joe pushes the door open and descends.

The basement corridor is much as it was—an endless liminal space, repeated eternally. He sees himself both ahead and behind, and, if he squints and resolves the distant specks into forms, repeated again even farther into the distance.

This no longer bothers him. The lines of doors mean nothing, for none of them pull at him. Quite the opposite, Joe finds himself almost repelled by them, like two positive ends of a magnet, and this pushes him forward.

Down the corridor. Towards the beast.

Pipe music lilts and bubbles in the air, but it no longer has any effect on Joe, or if it does, it is utterly drowned out by the strength of the pull.

“Joseph, this is silly,” WellBot returns. “Whatever you think you’re doing, you have been misinformed. You need to stop and go back upstairs.”

He ignores it, the magnetism inside him pulling him into a jog, past door after door after door. He drowns WellBot out, the tinny human-like voice increasingly frantic around him. Soon there is nothing but the pounding of his feet against the concrete floor, the flash of door upon infinite door, the warmth in his chest, and the pull—the inexorable pull—forward.

And then, quite suddenly, slicing through the urge like a hot knife through butter: another sound.

Joe stumbles to a stop, his momentum almost sending him flying.

He backs up, one door, then another, to where he heard it.

Not WellBot. Not mechanical clunking. Not the infernal machinery of this hellish place, but something far far more human.

A whimper.

Joe strains his ears, standing in the corridor, his chest rising up and down from the running, hoping to hear it again. His legs ache, twitching, urging him forward, to listen to the pull, but he doesn’t. There’s a person down here, other than him. A real person. He’s not taking that for granted again.

It comes a second time—quieter, but undeniably there. A whimper that carries into a low sob. Joe approaches the door to his right, where the sound is coming from, and it gets clearer. Not a performative cry, but a small one, an intensely personal one.

He turns the handle and pushes the door open.

The room is tiny—a broom closet. There are mops and buckets, shelves with tins of paint and turpentine, and a single dangling lightbulb. On the floor, curled into herself, hands covering her face, is Hilda.

Resisting the now almost physical tug of the creature’s pull, like pushing his body through water, Joe takes a step forward and crouches beside her.

“Hilda,” he says. Her only response is to pull her hands farther in front of her face, to curl away from him, her quiet sobs pulled inwards. “Hilda, it’s me. It’s Joe.”

He reaches out a hand to touch her, to pull her hands away from her face, but as soon as he makes contact, she flinches like she’s been jolted with electricity.

“Get away from me,” she whispers, violently, urgent. “Get away!”

Joe pulls his hand back, but doesn’t retreat. “Hilda, I—”

“There’s no time,” she mutters, words expelled between sobs. “I’m so far behind and there’s no time to catch up. There’s so much to do.”

Joe takes a beat, and then puts his arms around her. She flinches again, at first, but when he doesn’t pull away she stops moving, letting him hold her like a child.

“It doesn’t matter, Hilda. Your work doesn’t matter. The company doesn’t matter. You have a son. You have people who love you.”

A shiver runs through her, like a fissure snaking up a pane of ice.

Joe holds her tighter. “I can get you out of here.”

“You can’t.”

“I can,” he replies, voice hardening. “Look at me, Hilda. Look at me.”

Slowly, she pulls her hands away from her face and looks up—she sees him, really sees him—and takes in a breath. “You’re different.”

He nods.

Her eyes widen. “You’ve been inside.”

“Yes,” he says. “And I’m going back.”

Her mouth falls open. “Why?”

“Because I can end it. Virgil gave me this.” He pulls the folded proof out his pocket. “He said that if I can take it back inside, I can stop this creature. I can end it. I can free us all from its clutches. Return things to normal.”

She frowns, shaking her head. “No, that’s not it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Return things to normal,” she repeats. “That’s not it. That’s not what this does.”

Joe pulls back, eyeing the proof in his hands. “Virgil said—”

“Virgil lies,” she hisses, with such intensity that he jerks backwards. Hilda’s face twists in anger, lines curling and hardening, and then—almost as quickly as it came—she loosens, falling back.

Joe takes a beat. “So . . . what does it do?”

Hilda shakes her head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. There’s so much to do. Too much. I can’t be wasting this time.”

“Come with me,” Joe says, reaching out a hand.

She looks at it fearfully, like it’s a poisonous branch. “I can’t.”

“Hilda, I—”

“Wait.” Gradually, with real force of effort, she uncurls herself, her back straightening and elbows pulling outwards. She reaches down to her lap and lifts the gun Joe gave her the last time they were down here—the one he took from Virgil, the one used to slam a bullet into the head of the inexplicable Tordan Llyod. It’s thick and angular, all hard edges and black surfaces. Reaching up, she places it in Joe’s hand.

“You’ll be faster without me.”

Joe stands up. “I’ll come back for you, when it’s done.”

She smiles weakly, and Joe can read it like a book.

No, you won’t.

He wants to protest, but she has already turned inwards on herself again—foetal, whimpering—and he knows that he’s lost her.

I will, he promises to himself as much as to her. I have to.

And, as though just the thought that he should return to the corridor is enough to set the gravity of the pull in motion, he is out the door, and moving fast.

He just now realises that WellBot has gone silent.

Joe struggles to convince himself this is a good thing.

But the pull is so strong now that he knows—just as he knows his own name, or knows that he’s hungry—that the creature must be close. Just a few more doors.

He walks quickly, but he doesn’t run.

Feeling the gun in his hand, he wonders how many bullets there are left in it. He realises he knows absolutely nothing about guns outside of what he’s seen on US cop dramas and heard in crime audiobooks.

Joe turns it over in his hands and is dismayed to find he doesn’t even know where to begin. The trigger?

Well, he thinks. Let’s hope I don’t have to use it.

A couple more minutes down the corridor and the door to his left might as well be screaming at him.

Open me, it says. Return to where you belong.

“Joseph,” WellBot intones as he places his palm on the handle. “Let’s talk about this. I believe you have been misinformed.”

Steeling himself for the worst, Joe opens the door.

To his surprise, given the eternal unreliability of this building’s architecture, the room is exactly the same: giant, like an aircraft hanger, lined on either side by those same large greenish-blue crystals.

And at the end, pulling him towards it like a black hole, the creature.

None give it a name, Virgil’s voice echoes in his head, other than That Which Devours, or The Scourge of Souls.

Giant and pulsating, it rotates around its impossible maw, uncountable tentacles sprouting from its form like trunkthick roots.

Come, it urges, pressing against the back of Joe’s skull. You belong to me.

Joe steps forward.

“I did not want to have to do this, Joseph, but you leave me with no choice.”

Joe glances up and around, at where presumably cameras embedded into the walls can see him approach, and scoffs, “You’re a computer programme. You’re a disembodied voice. You’re nothing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“A sound assessment,” WellBot replies flatly. “But incorrect.”

Hissing fills the room, so loud Joe instinctively covers his ears. On either side of him, giant clunks of metal on metal sound, and the crystals move. Inch by inch, the fronts of the crystals shift, like the lids of giant containers, and open, green-blue gas spilling out of the gaps and billowing along the floor like fog.

Joe takes a step back, wondering if it might be poisonous, but as the crystals empty of their gas, he sees them for what they truly are: not crystals, but pods. Inside each, a human silhouette takes shape. One in each pod.

Bodies. Joe hopes they are just that, bodies and not people.

Until they start moving.

It begins with a single twitch—an arm, to his left, jerking upwards. Then a leg to his right. Then more and more.

Joe spins, trying to frantically count—not just five or ten, but thirty or forty of them, maybe as many as sixty. Some behind him and some ahead. He holds the gun tightly in his hand, but realises that it is ultimately going to be useless. Even if he can use it, he hasn’t got sixty bullets.

The first of the bodies exits the pod just ahead of him, and Joe recognises him immediately.

“Gibbons-Rash,” he whispers.

The man—in much the same three-piece suit he wore in the photographs that line the corridor outside—sneers at him. “That’s Sir Gibbons-Rash, to you, boy.”

He must be over a hundred years old, but his skin is plump and fresh, his hair full, his body stands straight and strong, full of vigour. And yet, something isn’t quite right, as though the image of perfection is just being barely held together. He blinks as he looks at Joe, but it’s out of sync, one eye fractionally behind the other like a computer glitch. The right corner of his mouth twitches upwards.

Others join him: Joe recognises some from the photo—the wife, and the daughter, he thinks—but they all look similar enough to come to the logical conclusion. They are one clan. The Gibbons-Rash family, kept eternally alive by the creature’s energy, multiplying in number through what Joe can only guess is sustained inbreeding, sucking the very world dry to slake the thirst of ageing.

Men, women, children. Jesus, even the fucking dog hops out of one of the pods. Each of them young, and each of them slightly off in a way he can’t always put his finger on. On some of them he can see it: an almost imperceptible pulsing in the temple; a too-visible vein in the neck. In others, it is deeper—an instinctual revulsion, like coming across maggots in food.

His stomach turns. He is utterly surrounded.

“Put down the gun, boy,” the senior Gibbons-Rash says, voice rich and thick. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Joe stares at them. He puts his hand into his pocket and feels the folded proof between his fingers. He thinks of Virgil’s quivering face, of Hilda, crying in the cupboard, of his own mum, and he does the only thing that makes any sense to him.

With a sudden spurt of speed, he dashes towards the great beast.

The immediacy of his sprint takes them by surprise, and before he knows it he’s past the bulk of them.

“Stop him!” someone shouts, but Joe’s no longer looking.

A woman throws her whole body at him, her fingers just brushing his leg as he darts past her. He ducks and throws his shoulder full-pelt into a younger man, sending him flying backwards. Propelled by sheer adrenaline, he barrels on. Ahead, there must be at least fifteen of them, waiting to tackle him. Behind, many more. In the background, the dog barks furiously.

Two come at him at once—a big lumbering man, like an inbred copy of the patriarch, and a girl who can’t be more than twelve. Joe raises his gun and fires, surprised by the recoil as the bullet slams itself into the man’s chest.

The girl grabs his arm, scratching at him, and he spins round, slamming his knee as hard as he can into her face.

She shrieks, falling.

Behind him, the rest of them pick up speed, closing in.

A hand grabs his neck.

He turns, firing again, and the grip falls away as an older man behind him collapses to the floor. The rest of them hesitate, the sight of two dead giving them pause.

They were promised eternal life, after all.

Joe takes the opportunity to fire again wildly into the crowd.

Someone screams, a few back away.

“Enough!” Gibbons-Rash, the patriarch, shouts.

Everyone stops, wary, watching him.

Joe pauses, looking at the crowd.

He glances behind himself—there are three more of the clan between him and the creature—waiting to grab him. They are big, and Joe doesn’t know if he has enough bullets left to take them. The patriarch makes his way to the front, the dog padding its way to his feet, barking loudly.

“Now, now, Piebark,” Gibbons-Rash says, patting him on the head. “Let’s give the poor boy a moment to think.”

Piebark quietens down, but bares his teeth. It looks like there are too many for his mouth.

Joe takes a deep breath, his chest heaving from the exertion, the gun shaking in his hands.

“I don’t need to think.”

Gibbons-Rash laughs. “Clearly. I don’t know what your intentions are, but WellBot wouldn’t have woken us for nothing. You mean to disrupt the entity, yes?”

Joe glances across the room at the burning faces. If he ran now, would he make it? There are still the three between him and the creature, and the dog will be faster.

“Yes,” he says.

“And what do you think that will do?”

“Free the world.”

He laughs again, and this time, the mass of his family laugh with him in mocking chorus.

“Free? When has anyone ever been free? You idiots are all the same. We have made the world better. Look at the achievements of the past hundred years—industry, globalisation, modern medicine, the internet. It relies on us. It relies on that!” He points up at the creature behind Joe’s head. “The human race has progressed more in the past hundred years than the previous hundred thousand.”

Joe swallows. “Maybe progress isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Gibbons-Rash snorts derisively. “What an asinine statement. Without the entity, all the structures of capitalism collapse.”

“Good.”

“Good? Good? Our entire civilisation is based on it! Take it away and what do you think will happen? Chaos. Banks will disintegrate. Money rendered worthless. Supply lines. Distribution. What, you think you’ll go back to subsistence farming? There’s not enough space. There’s too many people. You’ll kill millions.”

“I . . .” Joe shakes his head. Could it be true?

Return things to normal, Hilda whispers in his head. That’s not what this does.

Gibbons-Rash smiles. “Now you’re beginning to understand. You can’t just throw away society because you don’t like it. That’s childish. It’s selfish.”

Joe frowns, the word catching in his mind.

Selfish.

Perhaps he was right.

Perhaps destroying the creature would plunge the world back into the dark ages—human beings scrambling in the mud to survive starvation and suffering. And yet, there’s something about a family who’ve co-opted the entire human race to achieve immortality calling him selfish that rubs the wrong way.

Because what’s the alternative?

“Come, boy,” Gibbons-Rash says, walking towards him. “Put down the weapon. Perhaps you could even join us in eternity.”

The line makes Joe burst out laughing. He glances across the line of purebred white aristocracy and, somehow, he can’t imagine himself fitting in.

No—he made a promise, even if he doesn’t fully understand it yet, and he’s not going to let a mad occult eugenicist talk him out of it.

He lets Gibbons-Rash take a step closer, and in a single swift move he brings the gun up and fires it directly into his head.

The whole room gasps.

But Joe is already running.

He ducks under the first man, and kicks at the second, both too shocked at the death of their patriarch to react. The third clasps his left arm like a vise, but Joe twists and fires a bullet right into his chest.

The grip frees, and he’s just metres away from the pulsating maw of the creature when the barking dog leaps on his back and bites down hard on his shoulder.

“Fuck!” he screams, and stumbles, falling from the momentum of his run.

He goes to fire over his shoulder, but the gun clicks pointlessly.

Out of bullets.

Twisting, he flips over, but the dog is too strong, too fierce. It bites again, and blood spills down his back.

But it’s too late.

The tentacles are already on the move—pulled towards him just as he was pulled towards the creature. One grabs the dog and tears him off Joe, a chunk of shoulder going with it. He screams. Turns just in time to see the dog flying like a rag doll across the room.

Another tentacle wraps itself tight around his body, lifting him upwards once again.

Towards the black hole of its gaping mouth.

It squeezes, and Joe cannot breathe.

But he doesn’t need to breathe anymore.

Because, for the third time that day, he is eaten alive.

Three minutes before his alarm buzzes, Joe opens his eyes once again. The sunlight glows dimly from behind his curtains, bathing the room in a soft warmth. He reaches over, as he does every morning, and turns off his alarm before it goes off. He’s not really sure why he even sets it anymore, but the routine provides comfort; there is safety in the repetition.

And yet, this morning, it is different. He pulls himself out of bed, ignoring the sleep tracker that pings affirmatively on his phone. He doesn’t go to the mirror, as he has every day for the past twenty-seven years, or brush his teeth.

He makes his way to the computer and turns it on.

There is very little time to do what needs to be done, and already the break in routine alerts the creature that something has changed. He doesn’t know quite how much it understands—how much WellBot is a reflection of it, or a creation of Gibbons-Rash. But he can already feel that it responds to him.

The computer powers up, and Joe, in the quiet, has a brief moment to think about what Gibbons-Rash told him.

He knows it to be true, somehow, deep in his soul.

Can he do it? Can he really destroy civilisation as we know it? Does he have the right?

He’s just a man, on his own in the world, trying to find some sense of meaning.

Except he is no longer just Joe, in the present, but all potential future Joes thrumming inside a single frame. And if he focuses, he can see them all. Each instance is slightly different, but the path ultimately the same—stripped of all human connection, isolated to a box, sated with carefully curated content designed to pacify, not challenge, to encourage productivity, productivity, productivity.

The inevitable endgame of the entire planet.

Alive, but not living.

No surprise. No wonder. No joy.

Content, empty, alone.

The solitary confinement of the human race.

Joe will take a hundred years of starvation and suffering over that.

The screen pings to life.

Good morning, Joseph. This is WellBot with your daily wellness check. How did you sleep last night?

Shivering hands rest over faded keys. Sweat pools around his neck, under his shirt. Weighing every word with surgical care, he types.

Joe unfurls from his foetal curl. The walls are gone, as are the ceilings and floor. He is no longer in a room, in his apartment, but floating in a wide void of space. In the distance, the screaming continues, but it is diminishing.

Is this it? he wonders. Am I doomed to float inside this defeated beast for eternity?

But no.

There is light in the darkness.

There is always light in the black. There is always hope.

Even in the eternal voids and depths of galactic space, there are stars.

He reaches for the light and it grows in response, widening, engulfing, surrounding him entirely, until—

NINE

Emma doesn’t quite understand what’s wrong with her internet. She’s always been good at technology—she’s had to be, living on her own—but even after power-cycling the router and plugging directly in with the Ethernet cable, she’s getting nothing. This is annoying, as she has to complete the Sainsbury’s order before the end of the day, or the man will arrive tomorrow with just a couple of bunches of bananas and some chicken thighs, which isn’t really enough to get her through the week.

Better call the provider, she thinks, except her phone isn’t working. There’s no signal. She restarts that, too, but nothing.

Terrestrial TV doesn’t work, either, just a flashing message saying NO SIGNAL FOUND.

It’s then that she starts to worry.

Not for herself, but for Joseph. If everything is down, will he be able to get to work on time? Will he have enough food in?

In the distance, she can hear shouts outside. Someone is screaming at someone else down the street, which is uncommon for this part of Wembley. She pokes her head out the window, and sees more of them: people gathering, angry, like a riot.

Quickly, she pulls the window shut.

All she wants to do is call her son, but the phones are down. And even if they weren’t, she feels like she cannot. For some reason she has never been able to fathom, a wall has risen between them over the past decade so high and so impenetrable she cannot find a way past it. He is becoming a stranger to her. The pain that comes with that realisation is so fierce that she has to go and sit down.

What have I done wrong?

What is wrong with me?

The shouts from the street grow louder, and she pulls her curtains shut. She’s getting really scared now, because she has no idea what is going on, and no one can tell her. Perhaps she could ask the neighbours—the nice Polish family next door—but the thought of going outside fills her with dread.

The doorbell rings and she jumps to her feet.

She wants to get out her phone to check the Ring camera, but remembers that the internet is down.

Tentatively, she takes a few steps to the door and stands behind it, waiting.

The doorbell rings again.

And after that, the sweetest sound she could possibly imagine.

“Mum? Mum, are you there?”

She swings the door open to find her son, standing in front of her, smiling.

Really, truly, smiling.

When was the last time she saw him smile? She almost doesn’t know what to do.

But it doesn’t matter, because he takes a big step forward and envelops her in the tightest and closest hug she has ever experienced.

She doesn’t know how long it lasts, but she never wants it to end. The world can end, for all she cares. For all the shouting outside, it sounds like it might. She just doesn’t want him to let go.

But, eventually, because she is worried, she says, “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you,” he says, still holding her close. “I was . . . lost.”

The sincerity of the statement is too much. Old instinct takes over and she chides him. “Don’t be silly, Joe. You don’t need your old mum anymore.”

He pulls back from the hug and looks her right in the eyes.

And when he speaks this time, he speaks from the heart.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All books are different. Some have tricky births: unruly characters and plotlines that need to be spliced, merged, cut, and rewritten. Others are more urgent. They demand their way out of you and into the world and don’t particularly care if you’re ready for them or not. This novella gushed out of me in a single slightly manic bleed of ideas and emotions that I’d clearly been processing for some time. It began with a single seed and once I started typing I couldn’t stop. But no matter the process, all books need midwives, and I must thank the hardworking people that helped bring this one into the light. Many thanks to those at Tor, including my editor, Lee Harris, my copyeditor, Edwin Chapman, as well as Matt Rusin and Cassidy Sattler. My constant thanks to my agent, Alex Cochran, forever a fighter in my corner. Thanks also to those early readers of the book who helped shape its final form: Lia Holland, David Goodman, Talia Rothschild, Michelle Ruiz Keil, Shauna Lawless, Benedict Anning, and CJ Dotson.

Most importantly, all my thanks and love and appreciation go to my wonderful family—my wife, Allys, my wonderful children, my parents. You make all the hard work worth it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NICHOLAS BINGE’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, FT, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post and more. His novel Ascension, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Pick, has been hailed as a must-read, ‘five-star horror novel’ by Stephen King, with Publishers Weekly calling it both ‘incredible’ and ‘pitch perfect’ in their starred review. Ascension was a nominee for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2023 for Best Science Fiction novel, has been translated into over a dozen languages and is being adapted for film. His second novel, Dissolution, is also being adapted into a major motion picture.

Based in Edinburgh, Nicholas Binge can often be found at book festivals and events around Scotland and the rest of the UK.

nicholasbinge.com

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First published 2026 by Tor Nightfire

This electronic edition published 2026 by Tor Nightfire
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ISBN 978-1-0374-0211-1

Copyright © Nicholas Binge 2026

Cover Credit: Jamie Stafford-Hill

Author photo © Allys Elizabeth Photography

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