20 Feb The Blackout Experiment

PART I

I was told it would change the way we understood human consciousness. That was how Dr. Mercer pitched it to us, and for a while, I believed him.

The study was called the Blackout Exposure Experiment, though the official documents never gave it a name. The premise was simple: total sensory deprivation in controlled cycles to rewire the brain’s relationship with sleep. If successful, it would eliminate fatigue entirely—no more exhaustion, no more wasted hours lost to unconsciousness. A permanent waking state.

There were five of us. We had all been carefully selected—an ideal mix of scientific backgrounds, strong cognitive endurance, and open-mindedness. Miriam Patel, a molecular biologist, was the most pragmatic of us. Victor Petrovic, a software engineer, saw it as the next step in human evolution. Rebecca Clarke, our neuroscientist, was fascinated by how the process would rewire brain activity. Terry Holloway had once studied dream psychology before dropping out of academia. And me? Daniel Grayson—a psychology grad student who had no illusions about what I was getting into. At least, not then.

Dr. Silas Mercer was the kind of man whose reputation preceded him. Some called him a brilliant innovator, others a mad scientist. He had theories about human consciousness that were dismissed by mainstream academia. According to him, sleep was a biological defect, a leftover mechanism from an evolutionary stage we had outgrown. He was certain the brain could be trained to function without rest, without limitation.

His methods, however, were classified.

That should have been the first warning sign.

* * * * * *

We arrived at the facility in the early morning, taken by an unmarked transport van through a backroad in rural Montana. It had been raining, and the dirt road leading to the site was a mess of deep tracks and muddy puddles. When the van finally stopped, we stepped out in front of what looked like nothing more than a concrete wall jutting out of the hillside. There were no windows. No signage. Just a steel-reinforced door embedded in the stone.

A keypad beeped, a mechanical hiss followed, and the door swung open.

Dr. Mercer led us inside.

“This way,” he said.

Beyond the threshold, the air changed. It was as if we had stepped into a vacuum. The walls were made of bare concrete, smooth and featureless, stretching into a long, sterile corridor that descended at a slight incline. The further we went, the more it felt like we were stepping away from the world entirely.

“This facility,” Mercer explained as we walked, “was originally a military research station, abandoned before completion. Perfectly secure, completely cut off from external signals. No outside interference.”

“How deep are we?” Miriam asked.

“Nearly two hundred feet underground.”

Victor let out a low whistle. “That’s one hell of a bunker.”

Mercer gave a slight nod but offered nothing more.

We passed through a second reinforced door and emerged into the main chamber. The living quarters were more comfortable than expected—six rooms branching from a central common area, complete with a stocked kitchen, lounge, and an adjacent research lab. At the far end, a steel-reinforced corridor led to the blackout chambers—individual rooms designed for complete sensory deprivation.

“There are no clocks,” Rebecca noted. “No windows. How do we keep track of time?”

“You don’t,” Mercer said. “That’s part of the process.”

No one questioned it. We were here to push the boundaries of human cognition—and to do that, we had to let go of conventional frameworks. No external markers of time. No distractions.

“We’ll begin the first blackout session this evening,” Mercer continued. “For now, settle in. You’ll be here for a month.”

It wasn’t until he said it out loud that the reality of our isolation truly set in.

We started the first blackout cycle that evening. Each of us was assigned to a sealed chamber, where we would remain for six-hour periods of total darkness and silence. The rooms were small, featureless, and soundproof, with no light sources whatsoever. Not even the glow of a power indicator.

“Blackout exposure forces the brain to recalibrate its sensory processing,” Mercer explained before sealing the doors. “In time, your mind will adapt.”

The first session was uneventful. Lying in complete darkness, I felt like I was floating in empty space. No sound. No motion. No sense of time. The first hour or two, my mind wandered—and then it simply stopped. My thoughts became detached, my awareness drifting without structure.

Then, the session ended. The doors unsealed, the lights returned—and I felt fine.

Better than fine.

By the third day, we were all experiencing profound clarity. No one felt tired. No grogginess, no exhaustion. Our minds were sharp and focused. Even our moods were elevated.

“It’s like being hyper-aware all the time,” Victor said.

“I expected to feel some level of fatigue,” Rebecca admitted, reviewing our EEG scans. “But we’re seeing no drop in cognitive function.”

Miriam, always the skeptic, remained cautious. “It’s only been a few days. We need to see how this progresses.”

Terry, however, was the first to express discomfort. “Something feels off,” he said over breakfast on Day Four.

“You feeling side effects?” I asked.

“No. That’s the problem,” he said. “It’s not natural to be awake this long and feel nothing. We should feel tired. But we don’t.”

Victor scoffed. “That’s the point.”

Terry shook his head. “I don’t mean just physically. I mean… up here.” He tapped the side of his temple. “It’s like I lost something. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

Dr. Mercer dismissed his concerns. “Your brain is adjusting. Sleep is nothing more than an evolutionary flaw. You’ll realize soon enough how much better off you are without it.”

His words were confident, but something in his tone said otherwise.

On Day Five, Rebecca made an observation.

“Our EEG results are… unusual,” she said, frowning at her screen. “We’re all showing high activity in the theta range.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Theta waves occur during REM sleep. We shouldn’t be producing them if we’re awake.”

Victor leaned over. “But we are awake.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Somehow, our brains are processing as if we’re dreaming, but we’re fully conscious. That shouldn’t be possible.”

She turned to Mercer for an explanation. His response was simple.

“This is exactly what I hoped for.”

PART II

By Day Six, it was clear that we weren’t just adapting to the blackout exposure. We were thriving in it. The energy wasn’t fading. We weren’t experiencing withdrawal symptoms from sleep. If anything, we felt sharper and more aware. Even small details, such as sounds, textures, and colors, seemed heightened.

Miriam, who had been skeptical at first, admitted she was starting to believe the experiment might actually work.

“We’re maintaining full cognitive function without sleep,” she said during one of our daily check-ins. “And I don’t mean just staying awake—I mean we aren’t experiencing any negative side effects. No irritability, no lapses in focus. If anything, we’re performing better than before.”

Rebecca nodded, scrolling through our EEG data. “It’s like our brains have found a new operating state—one that maintains REM-cycle processing without shutting down the body.”

Victor grinned. “Mercer cracked it. He actually cracked it.”

Even I had to admit it was incredible—but Terry remained uneasy. At breakfast on Day Seven, he voiced his concerns again.

“Has anyone noticed… I don’t know… gaps in time?”

We all looked at him.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Terry rubbed his face. “I mean, I’ll be doing something, like reading or writing notes, and then suddenly I’m somewhere else. Like I lost time. But I know I didn’t lose time. I just don’t remember moving.”

Victor scoffed. “You’re overthinking it. We don’t sleep anymore, so your sense of time is adjusting.”

Terry shook his head. “No, it’s more than that. It’s like… I know I was sitting in the lounge, but now I’m in my room, and I don’t remember walking there.”

I glanced at Rebecca. “Have you noticed anything like that in the data?”

She hesitated. “No memory gaps. But our brainwave readings have been… strange.” She turned her laptop screen toward us. “We’re all showing theta wave activity—which, as I said before, only occurs during REM sleep. But the weird part? The spikes don’t line up.” She scrolled through the charts, pointing to anomalies. “Each of us is experiencing these fluctuations at different times. As if…” She hesitated.

“As if what?” Miriam asked.

Rebecca exhaled. “As if we’re dreaming. But not at the same time.”

There was a silence.

“That’s not possible,” I said. “We’re awake.”

“I know.”

Victor waved a hand dismissively. “It’s just the brain compensating for the loss of sleep. It’s adjusting.”

Terry shook his head again. “Or it’s losing something it needs.”

* * * * * *

That night, during the blackout session, something changed. I was in my chamber, lying still in the perfect darkness, when I felt a shift. Not a sound or a movement, but rather a change in the feeling of the room, as if the space around me had subtly rearranged itself. I couldn’t see or hear anything, but I felt it.

Then, I heard a whisper. It was so faint that I almost thought I imagined it, a distant murmur just outside the chamber walls.

Then it grew closer—someone whispering my name. I jolted upright, but there was nothing. No door creaking open, no movement in the dark—just silence. The session ended shortly after, and I rushed out into the main corridor.

Miriam was already there, looking pale. “You heard it too,” she said.

I nodded. “A whisper. Someone saying my name.”

Victor and Rebecca exchanged glances. “I heard movement,” Victor admitted.

Terry stepped forward. “I heard my name, too.”

For the first time since the experiment started, Dr. Mercer looked concerned. He studied us for a moment, then gave a slow nod.

“The brain,” he said carefully, “compensates for the loss of sensory input by filling in gaps. It creates patterns out of randomness. You may begin experiencing auditory hallucinations, but I assure you, it’s expected.”

I wasn’t convinced.

Terry frowned. “Then why didn’t you mention this before?”

Mercer gave a slight smile. “Because it’s temporary. Once your brains fully adjust, the illusions will stop.”

None of us responded. Something was happening. Something Mercer hadn’t predicted.

* * * * * *

By Day Eight, the unease had set in. We were still functioning. Still hyper-aware, sharp, and energetic. But something felt wrong. Miriam described it as a “nagging sensation of displacement.”

“I feel like I’m in the wrong place,” she said at breakfast. “Like I’m not supposed to be here.”

Victor dismissed it. “That’s just the sleep withdrawal talking.”

But Rebecca wasn’t so sure. “I ran the numbers again,” she said, gesturing to her data. “And something doesn’t add up.” She pulled up our movement records—a system that tracked our location within the facility. “This is the common area,” she said, pointing at the logs. “This is our lounge. These are our sleeping quarters.” She tapped a point on the screen. “And this? This is nowhere.”

I leaned in. “What do you mean?”

She zoomed in. “These timestamps show us moving through a nonexistent location. A place that doesn’t match any mapped area of the facility.”

Miriam looked unsettled. “That’s not possible.”

“I know,” Rebecca said. “But it’s happening.”

* * * * * *

That night, I barely lasted five minutes in the blackout chamber before panic set in. The darkness felt different, as if the space itself had expanded around me. Then, the whispering returned. Not outside the chamber this time. No—this time, it was inside.

I bolted upright. “Who’s there?”

At first, there was no reply. And then—a breath. Right beside me. I scrambled for the door, slamming my fists against it.

“Let me out!” I screamed. Moments later, the hatch unsealed, and I stumbled into the corridor.

Victor, Miriam, and Rebecca were already there, looking shaken. All of us had heard it.

Then we noticed Terry was missing.

PART III

Terry was gone—vanished without a trace. At first, we assumed he was just somewhere else in the facility. Maybe he’d woken up early and wandered off, or perhaps he was waiting for us in the lounge. But when we checked every room, he wasn’t there. We searched the common area, the kitchen, the labs, and even the storage rooms. Nothing. His personal items were still in his quarters. His clothes, notebooks, and toiletries were all untouched. He was simply gone.

Rebecca pulled up the security logs. “This is the last recorded movement from Terry,” she said, pointing at the screen. The footage showed his chamber door opening at the end of the last blackout session. He stepped into the corridor, rubbing his eyes. A completely normal exit. But then—one frame later—he was gone. Not walking away or turning a corner. One second, he was standing there, and the next, the hallway was empty.

Rebecca’s voice was unsteady. “That’s… not possible.”

Victor shook his head. “Maybe it’s a glitch.”

Rebecca rewound the footage and played it again, with the same result.

Miriam exhaled sharply. “We should be panicking, right? I feel like we should be panicking.”

“We are panicking,” I muttered. “We just don’t know what to do about it.”

Dr. Mercer sat calmly at the table, watching us with carefully measured patience. He spoke only when we all turned to him. “There is no cause for alarm,” he said smoothly. “I’m sure Terry is fine.”

I stared at him. “Fine? Did you not just see what we saw?”

Mercer folded his hands. “Human perception is deeply flawed. The absence of a subject does not indicate an anomaly. It merely indicates an incomplete understanding of the system in which the subject exists.”

Rebecca’s jaw clenched. “You’re saying this makes sense to you?”

Mercer smiled slightly. “I’m saying your expectations of space and time are limiting your ability to understand what’s happening.”

No one responded.

He stood up, adjusting the cuffs of his lab coat. “Continue the experiment. Everything is proceeding as expected.”

Then he walked out.

* * * * * *

Terry wasn’t the only thing missing.

By Day Nine, we began noticing small changes in the facility itself. The hallways felt longer. The door to the research lab was an inch to the left from where I remembered it. Miriam swore that a stainless steel countertop in the kitchen had been a wooden one the day before. Rebecca tested it by drawing small Xs in chalk on the floor at key locations. By the next morning, they were gone.

Victor tried to rationalize it. “We’re overworked. No sleep means faulty memory processing. We’re just misremembering things.”

I wanted to believe him, but it wasn’t just the environment that was changing. It was us.

On Day Ten, Miriam woke up screaming.

Rebecca and I ran into her room, where we found her standing against the wall, clutching at her arms.

“What happened?” I asked.

She turned to us, her face pale. “I looked in the mirror,” she whispered.

We followed her gaze to the small bathroom mirror above the sink. It was cracked, spiderweb fractures crawling across the glass.

I hesitated. “And?”

Miriam swallowed. “My reflection… it didn’t move with me.” She glanced at the mirror again. “It was half a second behind.”

Victor let out a nervous chuckle. “That’s ridiculous.”

Miriam’s voice was flat. “Then go look.”

Victor hesitated. None of us stepped forward.

That night, we heard the whispers again. At first, they were outside the walls, faint and muffled. Then, they were in the rooms.

This time, they weren’t saying our names—they were laughing.

* * * * * *

By Day Eleven, Rebecca had a breakthrough. She stormed into the common area, laptop in hand.

“I’ve been cross-referencing the movement logs with our brainwave data,” she said. “There’s a pattern.”

She pulled up a chart. EEG readings from all five of us. Four of them—mine, Miriam’s, Victor’s, and her own—looked similar. Spikes of unusual theta wave activity.

But Terry’s chart was different. It stopped. The last recorded spike was the moment he disappeared.

Victor frowned. “What does that mean?”

Rebecca hesitated. “It means… his brain activity didn’t just stop recording.” She pointed at the chart. “It stopped like he was never there at all.”

That night, I lasted all of three minutes in the chamber before something went wrong—before the breathing started, right beside me.

I shot up. “Who’s there?”

In response, there was a whisper, directly in my ear. “It’s cold here,” it rasped. “Daniel, where are you?”

I nearly choked. The voice was Terry’s. Before I could even react, it spoke again:

“I can see you, but you can’t see me.”

I lunged for the door, slamming my fists against it. “Let me out! Please, help!”

The hatch unsealed, and I stumbled into the corridor. As before, Victor, Miriam, and Rebecca were already there, and they’d all heard the voice, too—Terry’s voice.

This time, the doctor wasn’t with us. We found him in his office, staring at a monitor filled with static.

I stormed in first. “What the hell is happening, Mercer?!”

He didn’t look up. “Matter is shifting,” he said simply.

I clenched my fists. “What on earth are you talking about?”

Mercer finally turned. His eyes were calm.

“It means,” he said, “that this world is no longer stable for you.”

PART IV

Victor was the first to react. He grabbed Mercer by the front of his coat and slammed him against the desk. “What the hell does that mean? What do you mean ‘this world isn’t stable’?”

Mercer didn’t resist. He simply stared at Victor, his face utterly composed.

“The experiment is proceeding as expected,” he said.

Victor’s grip tightened. “Terry is gone. Our reflections aren’t moving right. The halls are changing. Nothing about this is ‘expected.’”

Mercer gave a slow, almost congratulatory nod. “That means you’re beginning to see it.”

Miriam backed away. “See what?”

Mercer exhaled, brushing Victor’s hands away and straightening his coat. Then, he finally spoke plainly. “The blackouts were never designed to eliminate sleep,” he said. “They were designed to sever your dependency on it. To break the cycle your mind has been trapped in for your entire life.”

Rebecca stared at him. “You mean our biological need for sleep.”

“I mean,” he said, “your connection to this reality.”

No one spoke for a long moment. Victor was the first to laugh—a short, humorless sound. “You’re telling me you’re trying to make us what, exactly? Exist without reality?”

Mercer tilted his head. “I’m telling you that reality is a construct tied to sleep, and that you have spent the past ten days unbinding yourselves from it.”

A silence fell over the room. I swallowed. “That’s impossible.”

Mercer’s lips curved into something resembling amusement. “Then why is Terry gone?”

A chill ran through me.

Mercer gestured toward Rebecca’s screen. “Why do your movement logs record you entering nonexistent locations? Why does your reflection lag? Why do the walls move?” He leaned in slightly. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Why do you hear voices in the dark?”

Miriam shook her head, backing up. “No. No—this is just psychological deterioration! Sleep deprivation. Your ‘experiment’ is making us hallucinate!”

Mercer smiled faintly. “That would be easier, wouldn’t it?”

I clenched my fists. “If you’re telling the truth, then why are you fine?”

“I’m not the one undergoing the experiment,” Mercer said simply.

Rebecca narrowed her eyes. “You haven’t been sleeping, though. Not once.”

Mercer met her gaze without hesitation. “I haven’t needed to for a long time.”

The way he said it sent something cold slithering down my spine.

We left his office after that, more disturbed than before.

Rebecca tried to find answers in the data. Victor paced endlessly through the halls, measuring the angles with a notepad and a ruler. Miriam barely spoke.

And I—I couldn’t stop hearing Terry’s voice. Every time I closed my eyes for even a second, I heard it: “It’s cold here.” “Daniel, where are you?” “I can see you, but you can’t see me.”

I started keeping all the lights on when I was in my room. I refused to enter the blackout chambers again.

Then, on Day Twelve, I woke up to something touching me.

* * * * * *

The room was pitch black when I jerked awake. It was too dark, more than it should have been.

And then—just outside my field of vision—I felt something move.

I lunged for the light switch, and when the glow filled the room—there was nothing there. But the blankets where I had been laying were still sinking, still shifting, as if something had just been sitting beside me. I scrambled back against the wall—and noticed the door to my room had moved. It was barely noticeable, just by a few inches, but I was sure of it.

By Day Thirteen, we were barely speaking to one another. Victor muttered about non-Euclidean structures and kept mapping the shifting hallways. Miriam avoided reflective surfaces. Rebecca spent hours staring at the security footage of Terry disappearing, rewinding and replaying it in an attempt to catch something she missed. As for me, I stopped looking into dark corners.

The whispers were louder now, and they weren’t just Terry’s voice anymore. There were others. I started covering my ears, stuffing paper towels into them just to dull the noise. It didn’t help.

On Day Fourteen, I found Victor talking to someone who wasn’t there. I had been walking to the lounge via the corridor when I heard him whispering, low and urgent, and froze.

“…and the angles are wrong, but I know what they mean now,” Victor was saying. “Two point seven degrees off, that’s the difference, that’s the ripping factor. But that’s the key, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

There was a long silence, and then he laughed—a quiet, knowing sound. “Those are the degrees of ripping,” he continued. “I understand now.”

Unbelievably, I heard someone whisper back—and my blood ran cold. It was distorted and broken, inhuman.

I took a step forward. “Victor?”

He turned toward me, grinning ear to ear. “I know how to get out,” he said.

PART V

Victor’s smile was wrong—the kind that didn’t belong on someone sane. It stretched too wide, teeth barely visible behind parted lips, and it didn’t reach his eyes.

“I know how to get out,” he repeated, his voice lighter this time. Almost gleeful.

I took a step back. “V–Victor… wh–who were you talking to?”

He tilted his head, blinking slowly, like I had just asked him something absurd. “Did you know that when you remove an essential structural element from an enclosed space, the space corrects itself? That it fills the gap with something else?”

A shiver ran through me. “What are you talking about?”

Victor turned his palm upward, as if presenting some invisible truth. “Terry left a gap. The structure had to balance itself again.”

I swallowed. “Victor—”

“They told me how to get out,” he interrupted. “It’s inside us. We just have to cut deep enough.”

Then he plunged his fingers into his own abdomen.

* * * * * *

I screamed before I even realized I was doing it.

Victor didn’t. He pushed his hand deeper, twisting his fingers through his flesh like he was searching for something. Blood soaked his shirt, dripping down onto the floor in heavy splatters. His face remained eerily serene, eyes flicking up toward mine as he dug deeper.

I staggered back. “Jesus Christ, Victor—stop!”

But he didn’t stop.

His smile widened. “I can feel it,” he murmured. “The doorway.”

I turned to run—to get Rebecca, Miriam, or Mercer—but as I did, I heard him gasp. Not in pain, but in relief.

“I see it now,” he whispered.

When I looked back—he was gone. Only the pool of blood remained.

Miriam and Rebecca found me standing in the corridor, shaking. I barely remember how I explained what had happened.

Rebecca refused to believe me until she saw the blood on the floor.

Miriam, however, turned pale. “He was—he was just talking to me an hour ago.”

“Not anymore,” I rasped.

We stood in silence for a long moment. Then Rebecca turned and marched toward Mercer’s office.

She slammed the door open without knocking. Mercer was exactly where we had last left him—sitting at his desk, watching the static-filled monitor. He didn’t look surprised.

“Where did he go?” Rebecca snapped.

Mercer slowly turned his chair toward us. “Where did who go?”

Miriam’s hands balled into fists. “You know who. Victor.”

Mercer leaned back slightly, exhaling. “This is what happens when a subject attempts to force an exit before full transition,” he said.

The casual way he said it made my skin crawl.

Rebecca took a sharp step forward. “You mean he’s dead.”

Mercer shook his head. “Not dead. Just… elsewhere.”

Miriam trembled with anger. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? You knew what this experiment really was from the beginning!”

Mercer was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded. “I told you,” he said. “Sleep is an anchor. You have been severing yourselves from reality. And now, reality is severing itself from you.”

“How many?” Rebecca whispered. “How many test subjects came before us?”

Mercer smiled faintly. “None that you would remember.”

I felt sick. I backed away from his desk, my vision tilting slightly as my balance wavered. I hadn’t eaten in two days. Hadn’t slept. Hadn’t dreamed. I felt disconnected, like my limbs were moving out of sync with my thoughts.

Miriam noticed. “Daniel?”

I blinked at her. She looked too far away—like she was standing across an impossible distance, even though she was only a foot from me.

Mercer watched me carefully. “You feel it now, don’t you?” he murmured. “The shift?”

I didn’t answer—because I did. I felt it. The wrongness of the space around me. The sensation that I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. And for the first time, I knew—I knew—that I wasn’t going to leave this place.

None of us were.

* * * * * *

We didn’t return to our rooms that night. We stayed in the common area, huddled in silence, too afraid to be alone. Mercer didn’t stop us. He just watched, his expression unchanged, like he had already seen this unfold before.

The lights flickered once, twice. And then, I swear to God—the walls moved.

Miriam shuddered. “We have to get out of here.”

Rebecca turned toward me. “Daniel.”

I looked up. Her face was tense.

“Victor was wrong,” she said.

I swallowed. “About what?”

She hesitated. Then, quietly, she said, “It’s not inside us.” She glanced toward the hallway, at the blackout chambers. “It’s in the dark.”

PART VI

I don’t know how long we stayed there, huddled in the common area. An hour? Twelve hours? Time had lost its meaning. All I remember is that at some point, the entire facility seemed to shudder, like an earthquake running beneath our feet, except there was no quake—just the sensation that reality itself was tearing.

Miriam trembled, hugging her knees. “We can’t just sit here,” she whispered.

Rebecca’s hands tightened around a crumpled sheet of data. “Then what do you suggest?”

My throat felt raw, as though I’d been screaming for days. For all I knew, I may have been.  “We need to get out,” I replied. “Maybe… maybe we can force the doors open.”

Miriam lifted her gaze. “What if we confront Mercer directly and demand he open the exits?”

I thought about it. What other choice did we have? We had seen what happened to Terry—and then Victor—and we knew something dark was prowling the halls. Something we couldn’t see but could feel.

“All right,” I said. “We go to Mercer.”

* * * * * *

He wasn’t in his office. The static-filled monitor was still there, buzzing faintly in the otherwise silent room, but Mercer’s chair was empty.

Rebecca checked every corridor, muttering under her breath, “He has to be somewhere. He wouldn’t just vanish.” Her voice quavered, betraying her fear.

We turned one corner and found a door that hadn’t existed before—a heavy, bolted steel barrier with no handle, set in a stretch of concrete wall that used to be featureless.

Miriam stared at it. “We’ve been down this hallway a hundred times. This door… it was never here.”

Rebecca pried at the edges. “It’s locked. Or sealed.”

I put my ear to the cold metal. No sound from within. Yet somehow, I knew Mercer was behind it.

A flicker of motion caught my eye—the corridor was lengthening before my eyes. The far end seemed to recede, like a rubber band stretching. I blinked hard. It didn’t stop.

“That’s it!” Miriam whispered, stepping back. “I’m not doing this anymore!”

“Miriam—” I reached out to her, but she yanked her arm away. She spun around and strode off in the opposite direction, her footsteps echoing oddly in the distorted hallway. Rebecca and I exchanged looks, then hurried after her.

We found her in the kitchen, rummaging through drawers, until she seized a large butcher knife. She held it in trembling hands.

“I’m not… I’m not doing what Victor did,” she said, voice shaking. “I won’t.”

I took a step forward, hands raised in a calming gesture. “Miriam, put the knife down.”

She shook her head rapidly. “No. No, I’m not gonna… cut myself open. That’s insane. But if that thing—whatever’s whispering, whatever’s moving the walls—if it comes for me, I want something to defend myself with.”

Rebecca nodded, still breathing heavily. “Fine. Just… be careful.”

We could all hear it: a soft, distant laughter rising and falling, as though just beyond our vision. I couldn’t tell if it was down the corridor or inside my skull.

Miriam lifted the knife. “I want to find Mercer. I want him to face us, and tell us how to fix this.”

We forced ourselves to head deeper into the facility. The halls were alien now—longer and curving in impossible ways. Angles that should have been ninety degrees felt skewed, and the overhead lights seemed dimmer, even though we hadn’t touched the switches.

Rebecca clutched her notebook to her chest. “Stay close. Don’t let the corridor split us up.”

I led the way, my hand skimming the concrete wall for stability, my mind buzzing.Everything felt unmoored, as though the laws of physics had started to slip.

We passed the door to the research lab. It was ajar. A faint light spilled out.

Inside, we found Mercer.

He was standing by a console that displayed oscillating waveforms. His back was to us. For a moment, the overhead fluorescents flickered, and it looked like Mercer’s outline was flickering, too, out of sync with the light.

Miriam raised the knife. “What did you do to us?”

He didn’t turn around. “I completed the process.”

Rebecca moved to the side, trying to circle him. “What process? Severing us from sleep? Or—severing us from reality?”

Mercer inclined his head, but still didn’t fully face us. “You misunderstand. Reality is not a monolith. It’s a framework, sustained by your need for rest. Sleep is the anchor. By removing it, you have the freedom to exist beyond those boundaries.”

I tried to steady my breathing. “That’s not freedom. We’re trapped in… this.”

He finally turned, and I saw something strange in his eyes. Something like a reflection of myself, but it was at the wrong angle, as though the inside of his pupils contained a warped mirror.

“You’re only trapped because you still cling to the idea that this place is real,” he said. “Terry, Victor—they realized it first. They tried to break through.”

Miriam swallowed, the knife quivering in her hand. “What is this place, really?”

Mercer’s expression almost softened. “A husk. A transitional shell that crumbles once you stop believing in it.” He gestured to the undulating hallway behind us. “It’s already unraveling.”

Rebecca advanced on him, fists clenched. “How do we stop it? How do we go back?”

Mercer studied her in silence. Then, with that same uncanny calm, he said, “You can’t. You’ve already begun to slip.”

I felt something in my chest tighten. “There must be a way.”

Mercer tilted his head. “There is one. But you won’t like it.”

Miriam took a step forward, eyes flashing. “Tell us.”

“You have to force yourselves into unconsciousness,” Mercer said plainly. “You must sleep, however briefly. That’s the only way to anchor yourselves again. But your brains have been trained to reject it. They no longer remember how.”

“How do we force it?” I asked, my voice trembling.

Mercer stepped aside, revealing a locked medical cabinet on the far wall. “Sedatives,” he said. “I prepared them just in case.”

Rebecca lunged for the cabinet. It was locked, but she grabbed a nearby metal stool and smashed the glass. Inside, we found vials of a clear fluid and a box of syringes.

Miriam looked at Mercer suspiciously. “If you wanted us to stay awake, why even have these?”

He shrugged. “Call it a failsafe. Or mercy.”

I watched Miriam carefully draw the sedative into a syringe. The knife was on the counter now. Her hands were still shaking, but I saw a determined light in her eyes.

“Daniel, are we really doing this?” Rebecca asked, her voice thin.

“Do we have a choice?” I whispered back. “If we stay here… we’ll disappear like the others.”

She nodded grimly.

Miriam tested the plunger. “All right, who’s first?”

I met Mercer’s gaze. “What about you?”

He just smiled. “I have no need for sedation.”

I gritted my teeth. “Fine.”

I lay down on the exam table. Rebecca helped me roll up my sleeve, and she injected the sedative. I felt a brief, sharp sting, and then a cold wash spreading up my arm. Instantly, the world tilted. Light and shadows stretched, and the corners of my vision blurred.

I heard Mercer’s voice. It sounded muffled and distant, as though he was underwater. “Hurry. The facility won’t remain stable much longer.”

Miriam drew up another syringe for herself. Her eyes flicked to me as my vision began to darken. I saw her lips move, but her words were lost in the roar of my own heartbeat.

Then the world rippled and fell away.

* * * * * *

I woke in a hospital bed, gasping, drenched in sweat. My lungs burned, as though I’d been holding my breath for days. A bright light glared overhead. I spotted white ceiling tiles. Smelled antiseptic smell of disinfectant. Somewhere, on the periphery, machines beeped softly. I blinked, disoriented. A nurse rushed in, checking my vitals and placed a hand on my forehead. She spoke to someone in the hallway, her voice urgent but muffled.

A wave of relief mixed with panic surged through me. Was this real? Could it be real?

My throat felt sandpaper-dry. “Where—” I croaked, voice barely above a whisper.

“Easy,” she said, pressing a plastic cup of water to my lips. “You’re in a hospital in Helena. You were found in an abandoned bunker, severely dehydrated and malnourished. You’ve been here for several days.”

I gulped the water. “Did you… find anyone else with me? A woman named Miriam? Or a woman named Rebecca?”

The nurse’s brow furrowed. “You were alone. Nobody else was there.”

I stared at her. “What about Dr. Silas Mercer?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.”

* * * * * *

Days passed. My parents arrived, weeping with relief, though they refused to talk about the details. The local authorities had apparently found me by chance. No official records of any research project were ever discovered. Nor were there any signs of other participants.

And, of course, there was no sign of Mercer.

My doctor told me that my body was under extreme stress from prolonged sleep deprivation, and that I’d likely experienced vivid hallucinations. But sometimes, at night, when the lights are low, I swear I hear footsteps in the corridor, or faint whispers drifting through the ventilation. I force my eyes shut, telling myself it’s just remnant trauma.

It never helps.

Three weeks later, they discharged me, and my parents took me home. Since then, I’ve tried to settle back into a normal routine, but something is missing. Every time I try to sleep, I linger in a half-awake state, listening for any sound.

Sleep never truly comes.

One morning, I worked up the courage to look in the mirror. My reflection stared back at me, and for a few seconds, everything seemed fine.

Then, my reflection blinked too late.

And now I wonder—did I ever really wake up at all?