LightReader

Chapter 3 - Chapter 2 – Undefined. Instanced. Alive.

I didn't move for a long time.

Not out of fear, though that was definitely there, but out of instinct. Something about the red seam glowing faintly in the wall beside me felt like a trap. Not in the conventional, gaming sense, but in a real way. Like it would learn something the second I acknowledged it. Like it was waiting for a click, a nod, a name.

Instead, I pressed my back to the closest support strut and took stock of what I had.

Inventory: None.

Unless you counted a blood-soaked hoodie, a controller still stuffed in the pocket, and an old set of joggers Louise always said made me look like I was cosplaying fatherhood.

Health: Declining.

The gash in my hand wasn't bleeding fast anymore, but it still leaked. My legs were shaky. Stomach empty. Head pounding from what I guessed was dehydration and adrenaline.

Stamina: Gone. Already spent trying to make sense of the geometry.

This wasn't a game. Not with rules I recognised, anyway.

And if it was, I hadn't been given a role.

The seam pulsed again.

A low ripple, not light but data. The kind of shift you might feel when a code push goes live in production and the latency spikes. I didn't need a UI to know that something on the other side of that wall had been activated. Maybe not by me, but because of me.

The corridor behind me had changed again, subtly.

Angles adjusted.

Surfaces stretched.

It was like walking through a rendering pipeline while someone rewrote it in real-time.

I moved away from the red seam, careful not to let my shadow cross it. The moment I turned the corner, the floor texture changed. What had been a tarnished metal weave became something fibrous, like wet rope braided into carpet.

And beneath that, movement.

Something squirmed under the surface.

I kept walking.

The corridor bent left. Then right. Then again.

By the third turn I knew it wasn't looping by accident.

This place was watching me trace a pattern.

It was learning my rhythm.

Then the corridor opened into a chamber.

This one was larger than the others. The ceiling stretched higher, the walls smoother, the light darker, not by absence, but by design. It felt like it had been turned down deliberately, as though the space wanted me to squint. Wanted me to get close.

I stepped forward and immediately recoiled.

The floor was warm.

Not just heat, wet warmth.

I looked down.

The surface shimmered, and for just a second, I saw a face reflected back at me.

Not mine.

Lily's.

Mouth open in silent scream.

I blinked, stepped back, and the image was gone. Just rippling surface now. Metallic-black. Thick. Like oil that had been taught to hold its shape.

You're seeing stress echoes, a voice in my mind whispered.

Not memory. Not real. Just where the system fails to overwrite completely.

I wasn't sure if that voice was mine.

At the far end of the chamber, a console jutted from the wall.

Half-formed.

Covered in data vines and flickering UI panels that loaded and crashed in rhythmic loops. It looked like someone had tried to spawn a workstation in a corrupted game engine and only half the assets had come through.

I approached slowly.

The air felt heavier near it.

Thicker.

The moment I got close, a UI fragment flickered to life in the corner of my vision.

Not a system message.

Just… code.

Raw. Barely parsed.

[ // ENTITY: USER_00X ]

[ // CLASS: NULLPOINTER ]

[ // INTERFACE_LOAD: ABORTED ]

[ // FATAL ERROR: THREAD_NOT_DEFINED ]

It was trying to build me.

Trying to assign something.

But it didn't have a template that fit.

I reached out and touched the console, half-expecting it to burn me or vanish. Instead, it reacted. Gently. Like a machine recognising an administrator without credentials.

The panel unfolded, revealing a series of incomplete subroutines, menus that hovered just out of reach. I recognised fragments of interface logic, some from games, some from IDEs I'd used for coding. But none of it fit together.

It was like seeing a dream of an OS, broken down into suggestion.

[SYSTEM: UNABLE TO CLASSIFY USER]

[THREAD INTEGRATION FAILED]

[STACK TRACE: INFINITE REFERENCE]

[STATUS: OBSERVED]

[EXPOSURE LEVEL: 0.03]

That last line struck something cold inside me.

Exposure. It was tracking how exposed I was.

To what?

To whom?

To whatever the fuck was running this place.

I backed away, careful not to trip over the cables trailing behind the console.

They pulsed once.

Then went dark.

The UI collapsed.

Like it had gathered all it needed.

Behind me, the corridor shifted again.

This time not silently.

This time with sound.

Mechanical, wet, dragging sound.

I turned just enough to see the edge of something moving in the hall. Not fast. Not chasing. Just arriving. A long-limbed, stuttering shadow. Biomechanical. Wrong.

It didn't care that I saw it.

Because it already knew where I'd be.

I ran.

Not heroically. Not cleanly. I sprinted with no plan, no map, just fear and a wild determination not to let the first thing I met in this nightmare be the last.

The corridors blurred.

Walls shifted.

Something screamed behind me, no words, no voice, just the grinding noise of friction, like skin on wire.

A red seam opened in the floor ahead.

A hatch?

No.

A trapdoor.

I didn't hesitate.

I dove through.

The world twisted.

Not gravity. Not force.

Just code.

And for one awful second,

I understood everything about this place.

Then it took it all away.

More Chapters