The heavy metal door slid shut behind me with a deafening thump and a hiss of finality. The sound echoed in the narrow space, and with it, the last of the light from the Atrium vanished. I was plunged into a darkness so complete it felt like a physical weight pressing in on me from all sides. The air was different here, thick with the smell of grease, hot metal, and ozone. It was the scent of machinery.
I fumbled with my camcorder, my fingers clumsy and slick with sweat. I found the button to toggle off the custom HUD and switch back to night vision. The world resolved itself once more into grainy, monochromatic green.
I was in a tight corridor, much narrower than the service tunnel I'd first entered. The walls weren't concrete but solid, riveted steel, like the inside of a ship's hull. Thick bundles of cables, as thick as my arm, snaked along the ceiling and floor, held in place by rusted brackets. The corridor stretched forward into the green-tinted gloom, turning a corner about fifty feet ahead.
There was a new sound here, too. A low, constant hum of electricity, and beneath it, a faint, looping melody. It was a distorted music-box version of a cheerful carnival tune, the kind that would be charming in the daylight but was monstrously unsettling in this iron tomb. Each off-key plink of the digital chimes scraped against my nerves.
"Okay," I whispered, my voice hoarse. I was talking to the camera, to myself, to whatever void was listening. "Level 2. Some kind of… maintenance tunnel?"
I started walking, my footsteps echoing unnervingly off the metal walls. My flashlight beam danced ahead of me, revealing more of the same. It was a maze. A rat's maze. Every twenty feet, the corridor would branch, offering a choice between left or right. There were no signs, no distinguishing marks. It was designed to be disorienting.
I took the first right, marking the wall with a small piece of chalk I kept in my pack for mapping routes. A little bit of old-school urbex habit in a high-tech nightmare.
The carnival music grew slightly louder. As I rounded a corner, I saw the source of the mechanical noise. A section of the corridor was dominated by massive, interlocking gears, turning with a slow, grinding rhythm. They were enormous, each one the size of a car tire, their teeth meshing with hypnotic, crushing force. They blocked the path completely, a wall of relentless, moving steel.
There was a gap, however. A space near the floor, about three feet high, where the arc of the lowest gear lifted, leaving a temporary opening before it cycled back down. It was a timed puzzle. A classic video game trope brought to life.
My camcorder's HUD flickered back on without my prompting.
NEW OBJECTIVE: Navigate the Machinery.
NOTE: The Janitorial Staff is off-duty. Environmental Hazards are now active.
"Environmental Hazards," I muttered, watching the gear rise and fall. "Great."
I filmed the gears for a moment, explaining the situation to my non-existent, or perhaps all-too-real, audience. "The timing is tight. I have to crawl through that gap. If I mess it up…" I didn't need to finish the sentence. The grinding sound of the gears did it for me.
I got on my stomach, the metal floor cold against my chest. I held the camcorder in front of me, its night-vision lens my only eyes. The gear lifted. The gap opened. The music-box tune seemed to speed up, a frantic little melody urging me on.
Now.
I pushed forward, scrambling on my elbows and knees. The smell of grease was overpowering. I was halfway through when I heard a new sound, a high-pitched whine. A shower of sparks rained down from the axle of the gear just above me. The grinding noise deepened, grew labored, and the gear began to slow, its upward arc shortening.
The gap was closing too fast.
Panic seized me. I wasn't going to make it. I pushed harder, my backpack snagging on something. I twisted, trying to wrench myself free, but it was no use. The massive steel teeth of the gear were descending, casting a final, crushing shadow over me.
This is it. This is how it ends. Crushed like a bug in a machine for the entertainment of a faceless crowd. My life wasn't flashing before my eyes. There was only the grinding sound, the smell of grease, and a profound, hollow sense of failure.
CLANK.
The gear shuddered to a halt, inches from my back.
The grinding stopped. The whining ceased. Silence, save for the incessant, looping carnival tune and the frantic pounding of my own heart.
For a full ten seconds, I just lay there, convinced it was a trick, a final, cruel taunt from the system before it finished the job. But the gear didn't move. It was frozen, locked in place.
"What…?"
"You're welcome."
The voice was female, sharp and strained, coming from the other side of the now-stationary gears. It wasn't the synthesized announcer. It was a real person.
I scrambled the rest of the way through the gap and lurched to my feet, spinning around to face the direction of the voice.
A figure emerged from the shadows of a side passage I hadn't noticed. She was silhouetted against the green glow of my camera's night vision. She was holding something that emitted its own faint blue light—a tablet, thin and covered in what looked like custom wiring.
She stepped forward, and my flashlight beam caught her face. She looked about my age, maybe a year or two older. She had dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and intense, tired eyes that seemed to take in everything at once. She wore practical, dark clothing—cargo pants, a worn hoodie, and sturdy boots. She looked like she belonged here far more than I did.
"You're Player 001," she said. It wasn't a question. Her eyes flicked down to my camcorder. "Aiden Cross. CrossExposures. You're even less impressive in person."
My jaw, which had been hanging open, snapped shut. "Who the hell are you? How do you know my name?"
"I know it because I've been monitoring the network traffic since this place came alive," she said, tapping the screen of her tablet. It glowed with scrolling lines of code. "When a new player packet was initialized, it wasn't hard to trace the source ID. Your channel isn't exactly encrypted." She looked me up and down. "You almost got yourself turned into paste. You owe me."
"You stopped the gears?" I asked, still trying to process the fact that I wasn't alone.
"I didn't stop them. I just introduced a recursive loop into the motor's control logic. It's caught in a logic bomb. It won't move again until the system reboots the sector." She spoke with a casual confidence that was both intimidating and deeply reassuring. "You've got about five minutes before it does. We should move."
She turned and started walking down the corridor without a backward glance, clearly expecting me to follow. I hesitated for a second, then hurried to catch up.
"Wait," I said, falling into step beside her. "Who are you? Are you another player? What's your number?"
She gave a short, humorless laugh. "I'm not a player. Not an official one, anyway. I'm a glitch. A ghost in their machine. My name is Mia."
"A glitch? What does that mean?"
"It means I'm not on their broadcast," she explained, her eyes constantly scanning the corridors ahead. "I piggy-backed on a system diagnostic protocol to get in. I'm running silent. As long as I keep spoofing my data signature and stay out of the direct path of any 'scripted events,' the system's automated security sweeps mostly ignore me." She gestured back the way I'd come. "Your arrival made a lot of noise. Lit this whole sector up like a Christmas tree."
We walked in silence for a moment, the only sounds our footsteps and the ever-present, maddening music. My mind was reeling. A hacker. She'd hacked her way into this nightmare.
"Why?" I finally asked. "Why would you come here on purpose?"
Her pace didn't falter, but her jaw tightened. "My brother," she said, her voice flat. "His name is Leo. Or it was. Online he was 'LeoTheLion,' big-time streamer. Way bigger than you. He was obsessed with this place, the legends. He came here to do an exposé three weeks ago."
My stomach dropped. "The disappearances…"
"He's not a runaway," she said, a fierce edge to her voice. "He was meticulous. He left a breadcrumb trail for me in a dead-drop server. Encrypted data packets. They stopped three weeks ago. The last one pinged from a geo-signature inside this mall." She stopped and turned to face me, her eyes boring into mine. "He was the first. He was Player 000. But they weren't broadcasting then. This was all in beta. He was their test subject."
The pieces clicked into place. The legends, the disappearances, this elaborate, deadly game. It wasn't a ghost story. It was technological. Man-made.
"So you came to find him," I said softly.
"I came to get him out," she corrected. "And to find the bastards running this thing and burn their entire network to the ground."
Her intensity was a force of nature. For three days, she'd been surviving in here alone, navigating this hellscape with nothing but her wits and a custom tablet. I'd been here for less than an hour and had almost died.
Before I could ask another question, the synthesized voice of the announcer filled the corridor, louder and clearer than before.
"Unexpected variable detected. A new contestant has entered the game."
Mia swore under her breath, her eyes darting around wildly. "It sees me. I'm on the broadcast. Your proximity must have flagged me."
On my camcorder's HUD, a new notification popped up.
CO-OP MODE ENGAGED
PLAYER 002: MIA
"This is a thrilling development, audience!" the voice boomed with synthetic excitement. "An unscheduled co-star! The narrative possibilities are endless! To celebrate this new dynamic, we are introducing a new scoring metric."
The HUD on my viewfinder expanded. Alongside the 'Viewer Rating,' a new line of text appeared:
EMOTIONAL RESONANCE: 0
"Points will be awarded for displays of teamwork, trust, sacrifice, and conflict," the announcer explained cheerfully. "Your bond is now our entertainment. Work together. Fight with each other. Protect each other. Betray each other. It's all content. And content is king."
I felt sick. It wasn't just about survival anymore. They were going to score us based on our relationship. They were turning our very humanity into a statistic for their viewers.
"They're trying to pit us against each other," Mia said, her voice a low growl. "Don't let them."
"And now, for your revised Level 2 Objective," the voice continued, ignoring her. "The Grand Carousel has been dormant for too long. It's time for a ride. Reactivate the primary power grid. Three Circuit Breakers are required. They function much like your beloved Static Shards. Find them. Install them. And give our audience a show."
As the voice faded, three new markers appeared on my HUD, scattered across a simplified 2D map of the area that had just materialized in the corner of my screen. They were designated CB-01, CB-02, and CB-03.
"Circuit Breakers," Mia muttered, looking at her own tablet. "They must have updated the objective parameters. Okay. According to this map, the first one is just ahead, through that service hatch."
She pointed to a low, square hatch in the wall I hadn't even noticed. It looked like it hadn't been opened in thirty years.
"We do this together, we get out of here together," I said, looking from her to the hatch. "You find him, we find a way out, and we expose these psychoes. Deal?"
Mia studied my face for a long moment, her expression unreadable. I could see the conflict in her eyes. Three days of solitude and self-reliance fighting against the sudden, unwelcome need for a partner.
"Fine," she said finally. "Deal. But you slow me down, I leave you behind. Got it?"
"Got it," I said.
She nodded once, then knelt by the hatch. It was sealed with four heavy bolts, rusted solid. "No way to force this without making a ton of noise." She set her tablet down and pulled a small, multi-headed screwdriver from her pocket. She didn't attack the bolts. Instead, she found a small panel next to the door, pried it open, and exposed a mess of wires. "This hatch is on an old magnetic lock system. If I can bypass the primary actuator…"
While she worked, her fingers moving with practiced speed, I stood guard, my camera sweeping the dark corridors behind us. The looping carnival music was starting to drill into my skull.
"It's not just the traps," I said quietly. "In the Atrium… there were mannequins. They moved."
"Animatronics," she corrected without looking up. "Controlled by the same system. Simple patrol and attack routines. They're predictable. The environmental hazards are worse. They're tied to the game master's direct input. They can be… creative."
There was a soft click and a green light on the panel flickered on. The magnetic lock on the hatch disengaged with a heavy thunk.
"I'm in," she said.
We pulled the heavy steel door open. It led into a cramped space filled with humming machinery and the smell of hot dust. In the center of the room, suspended in a cage of arcing electricity, was a large, industrial-looking lever with a crystalline shard embedded in it—the first Circuit Breaker.
"Okay, that's a problem," I said. The electricity was jumping wildly between two conduits, forming an impassable barrier.
Mia was already typing on her tablet. "It's on a 15-second cycle. The field will drop for exactly three seconds. Not enough time to get in, grab the breaker, and get out."
"So one of us has to hold the override, while the other one goes in?" I guessed.
"There is no manual override down here," she said, pointing to a diagram on her screen. "But the power cycle is regulated by that junction box." She indicated a box high on the opposite wall, covered in warning labels. "If someone can get up there and manually sever the red and blue connections, I can use my tablet to force a temporary system shunt. It'll reroute the power for about thirty seconds, long enough to grab the breaker. But whoever does it is going to be right next to an active, high-voltage transformer when the power kicks back on."
We looked at each other. The first test. The first choice designed to earn them 'Emotional Resonance' points.
"I'll do it," I said before she could argue. "You're the one who knows how to work that thing. You need to be ready to create the shunt. I'm better at climbing anyway."
She hesitated, chewing on her lower lip. "Fine. Be careful. This isn't like the rusty bolts on the mall entrance. This power is very, very real."
I found handholds on the surrounding pipes and machinery and began to climb. The metal was slick with grease. Below, Mia had her tablet ready, her eyes fixed on a power-flow schematic on her screen.
"Okay, I'm at the box," I called down, my voice tight. I pulled a multi-tool from my pack and opened the pliers. "Which wires?"
"The thick red and the thick blue one," she said. "Cut the red first, then the blue. You have to do it in that order, or it'll short the whole grid and probably fry you in the process. Tell me when you're ready."
I took a deep breath, positioning the pliers over the red cable. "Ready."
"Okay. Cutting red… now!"
I squeezed. The wire snapped with a pop, and a few harmless sparks shot out.
"Now blue!" she commanded.
I shifted my grip and cut the second wire.
Down below, the cage of electricity crackled and died. The humming sound ceased.
"The shunt is active! Go!" she yelled.
I didn't wait. I scrambled down the pipes, landed on the floor with a thud, and sprinted into the now-safe area. I grabbed the heavy breaker lever and pulled. It was stiff, but it came free with a groan of metal. The shard dissolved into my hand, just like the others.
CIRCUIT BREAKERS: 1/3
My HUD flashed.
TEAMWORK BONUS: +150
EMOTIONAL RESONANCE: +50 (Trust)
VIEWER RATING: 8.1/10
"I've got it!" I yelled, running back out.
"Get clear!" Mia shouted, her face illuminated by the frantic glow of her tablet. "The shunt is failing! Power coming back in three… two…"
I threw myself out of the machine housing just as she finished her countdown. With a sound like a thunderclap, the electrical field roared back to life, more intense than before.
I lay on the floor, panting, the adrenaline making my entire body buzz. Mia knelt beside me, her expression a mixture of relief and something else… calculation.
"That was close," she said.
"Yeah," I breathed, pushing myself up. "Two more to go."
We looked at each other, no longer just two strangers, but unwilling partners in a broadcast from hell. We had passed their first test, earned their points. But it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like we had just given them exactly what they wanted. And I had a sinking feeling that the next two circuit breakers would be much harder to get.