Chapter 5: Ghosts in the Machine

The initial shock of June’s revelation—the different doors, the musical lure—gave way to a cold, analytical dread in Michael’s mind. He was a systems guy. He understood networks, protocols, and pathways. The idea that this place, this Nomoon, had multiple, bespoke entry points was a terrifying paradigm shift. It wasn't a hidden server he’d cleverly accessed; it was a sophisticated, multi-pronged phishing attack for the human soul.

"Different roads, same destination, right?" June said, her voice a little too bright. She seemed energized by their proximity to the pulsating light, which was now close enough that they could see a structure at its base—a colossal, dark stage. "Who cares how you got the ticket, as long as you get to see the show?"

Michael didn't answer. He was starting to care very much. Every placid face in the shuffling crowd now seemed less like a willing pilgrim and more like a captured specimen.

As they drew nearer the stage, the landscape began to change. Strange, makeshift structures emerged from the black grass on either side of the wide path the crowd was treading. They looked like vendor stalls at a night market or a music festival—rickety tables made of scrap wood and corrugated metal, lit by the faint, sputtering glow of what looked like oversized, dying fireflies in glass jars.

An odor drifted from them, cutting through the clean, metallic scent of the air. It was sickly sweet, a chemical perfume of artificial fruit, burnt sugar, and something else he couldn't place, something sterile and antiseptic, like a hospital corridor.

People were manning the stalls, but they were wrong. Utterly wrong. Like the shuffling crowd, their eyes were vacant and unfocused, but their bodies were locked into tight, repetitive loops of motion. A man with a gaunt face endlessly wiped a dirty rag across a clean countertop. A woman in a floral dress repeatedly poured a viscous, glowing liquid from one beaker to another, her movements jerky and unnatural, like a corrupted animation. They were NPCs, human-shaped bots running a simple, endless script.

Some of the marchers were peeling off from the main crowd, drawn to the stalls. They would approach a vendor, who would ladle a cup of the glowing, syrupy liquid from a large vat and hand it to them. The marcher would drink it down in a single, thirsty gulp. As the liquid went down, the last vestiges of tension would leave their bodies. Their shoulders would slump, their faces would go utterly slack, and a slow, beatific smile would spread across their lips. Then, they would rejoin the shuffling procession, their steps even slower, their eyes even emptier.

"Looks like they've got the good stuff here," June murmured, her gaze fixed on one of the stalls. The promise of the chemical cocktail was a visible thirst in her eyes, a magnetic pull on the part of her that craved oblivion above all else. "A little something to get you in the mood for the headliner."

Michael felt a profound revulsion. "That stuff… it's not right, June. Look at them. It's like it's erasing them."

"Isn't that the point?" she countered, not with malice, but with a simple, devastating sincerity. "To get erased? Just for a little while?"

Before he could argue, a flicker of movement at a nearby stall caught his eye. It was the posture of the vendor that snagged his attention. A familiar, self-conscious hunch of the shoulders, the way he nervously pushed his non-existent glasses up the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture Michael knew intimately. It was a gesture he saw in the mirror.

No. It couldn't be.

He slowed his pace, his heart beginning to hammer against his ribs. The vendor was a young man, probably his age, with the same unkempt dark hair and thin frame. He was wearing a faded t-shirt for a band—Kinetic Collapse—an obscure industrial group they had discovered together in tenth grade.

Michael’s breath hitched. His world tilted on its axis. He would recognize that shirt anywhere. He’d been with him when he bought it.

"Eric?" The name was a choked whisper, stolen by the silent air.

He pushed past June, stumbling towards the stall. He had to be wrong. It was a hallucination, a trick of the light and his own guilt-ridden mind. But as he got closer, the details sharpened into an undeniable, impossible truth. The small, faded scar that cut through his left eyebrow from a fall off a skateboard in middle school. The worn-out pattern on his sneakers. It was Eric. His only friend. Eric, who had hanged himself in his parents' garage three years ago.

Yet here he was, standing behind a makeshift bar, ladling glowing poison into cups with dead, vacant eyes.

"Eric!" Michael shouted, his voice cracking. He slammed his hands on the rough wooden counter, the impact jarring his bones. "Eric, it's me! It's Mike! What is this? What are you doing here?"

The figure didn't react. It—he—finished pouring a cup and held it out, his arm moving with the clockwork precision of an automaton. His voice was a flat, synthesized monotone, devoid of all inflection. "Welcome to the celebration. Quench your thirst. Join the song."

Tears of rage and horror stung Michael’s eyes. "No! Stop it! Look at me!" He reached across the counter and grabbed the front of Eric's shirt, shaking him. The fabric felt real, the body beneath it solid and warm. "You're dead! You killed yourself! I went to your funeral, I… I carried your casket, you bastard!"

For a moment, nothing. Then, something flickered. Michael’s words, a blast of objective, painful reality from the outside world, acted like a line of malicious code injected into a closed system. The vendor’s programmed loop stuttered. His arm began to tremble, the cup of glowing liquid sloshing over the side.

The dead eyes blinked. And for one horrifying, soul-shattering second, they focused.

They weren't empty anymore. They were filled with a universe of agony. The placid mask of the NPC shattered, and behind it was Eric. The real Eric. Trapped. And he was screaming. No sound came from his mouth, but his eyes screamed with a terror so profound, so absolute, that it struck Michael like a physical blow. It was the look of a soul being burned alive, of a consciousness trapped in an eternal, looping hell.

Then, just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

The figure of Eric began to glitch. His form dissolved into a shower of sapphire and magenta pixels, his edges fraying like a corrupted image file. The stall itself flickered, its colors desaturating to static gray. With a final, silent implosion of fractured light, he vanished. The stall, the counter, the vat of glowing liquid—all of it was gone. All that remained was an empty patch of black grass.

Michael fell back, gasping, his mind reeling. The system had corrected the error. It had deleted the corrupted file.

The encounter ripped open a wound in his own memory, and the trauma came flooding to the surface. He wasn't in the field anymore. He was sixteen, standing in his own stuffy bedroom, the phone pressed hard against his ear. He was hearing Eric’s mom, her voice broken and thin, telling him what Eric had done in the garage. He remembered the last time he’d seen him, two days before. Eric had tried to talk to him, tried to say something important, but Michael had been too absorbed in some new piece of code, and had brushed him off. "Later, man," he'd said. "I gotta fix this bug."

The bug.

The weight of that memory, the crushing, three-year-old guilt, was what this place had latched onto. It hadn't just resurrected his friend; it had weaponized Michael’s deepest pain, turning it into a puppet. This dimension wasn't a refuge. It wasn't a secret party.

It was a parasite. It found the broken, despairing parts of people and it fed on them, using their real-world tragedies to build its beautiful, horrifying stage show.

A hand touched his shoulder. It was June. She was holding two cups of the glowing liquid, her face a mask of concern and confusion.

"Hey, you okay?" she asked, her voice soft. "You just freaked out. That guy and his whole stall just… vanished. Here." She held out one of the cups to him. "Maybe you just need to let go a little. Drink this. It'll help."

Michael stared at the cup. It glowed with a soft, inviting light, promising to wash away the fresh agony of what he had just witnessed, promising the blissful amnesia he saw on every face in the crowd. It promised escape. He looked from the cup in her hand to the colossal, pulsating stage on the horizon, the source of it all.

He now knew the truth. This wasn't an escape. It was a harvest.