There was no voice to answer them, no narrative to explain.
Ten strangers awoke abruptly, deposited onto a stretch of flat, open ground—a desolate gray circle carved into the heart of a silent forest. None could recall their arrival, the reason for their presence, or anything concrete about the others who shared the space. The quiet was absolute, yet unnervingly expectant; even the stillness of the earth felt like a held breath.
The first step outside the circle was, unwittingly, the first step toward an end. No one yet understood the mechanism, but the first man moved. His departure was only registered fully when the last spark of his vital signs ceased. A collective shiver went through the nine remaining figures as they realized the horrifying equation: action—mere initiative—could equate to death.
Shock quickly fractured into raw panic. Their gazes became frantic, the external silence filling with an internal shriek. Every mind began the frantic calculation, every heart hammered a primal rhythm, and every survival instinct clashed with a force more absolute than any law they had ever known.
A question, sharp and unanswered, hung in the sterile air: Why did they have to die?
The answer was present, already imprinted in the ground, yet it had not yet arrived.
The First Casualty
The man, a lean figure in an expensive but now mud-stained suit, made his decision instantly. He was a creature of decisive action, a man accustomed to control and finding the fastest way out. In his former life, this innate tendency had been his salvation countless times, an architect of his success. Here, it was lethal.
He moved with the practiced confidence of a general leaving a static position, his eyes scanning the tree-line, dismissing the immediate danger. The terrain appeared uniformly level. However, a shallow depression just beyond the unmarked perimeter of the safe zone—a slick, barely perceptible accumulation of rain-fed, quick-setting clay—was indiscernible from the rest of the soil.
He stepped over the boundary without hesitation, his foot sinking not into firm ground, but into a wet, yielding cushion. It was a bog, deceptively flat, concealed by its perfect surface tension.
There was no time for a scream, only a sudden, sharp inhalation cut short. The clay, thick and aggressive, seized his ankle and instantly dragged him down. The suction was immediate, the silence of the forest devouring the wet, muffled sound of his struggle. In less than three seconds, the man in the suit was gone, swallowed by the innocuous gray earth, the surface tension closing seamlessly above him.
The nine observers stood frozen, the sudden, complete erasure of their companion rendering any attempt at rescue an impossibility. The mud now looked like solid ground, indifferent and unbroken.
His decisive speed—the very trait that defined his success—had killed him within the confines of the circle. The pattern was horrifyingly clear: Why did the victims have to die? Because their deaths were a direct consequence of the behavioral patterns that had defined their lives, not a capricious external punishment. The machine was merely reflecting their core selves back at them, lethally.