Chapter 2: The Sublevel Glitch**

Chapter 2: The Sublevel Glitch

For two more days, Camera 12 was Liam’s obsession. The empty hallway in Sublevel 3 became the focal point of his waking hours, a silent, grey stage where he felt certain a play was about to begin. He rationalized it as a symptom of the isolation, a simple fixation born from profound boredom. His pragmatic mind, the one honed by years of sifting signal from noise, tried to dismiss it. But the feeling, that cold prickle of being watched that had started a few days ago, intensified whenever his eyes settled on that particular screen. It was as if the watcher wasn't in the room with him, but on the other side of that specific lens, looking out.

“Four thousand a week to stare at concrete,” he muttered, the words sounding flat and dead in the sterile air of the control room. The mantra was losing its power. He ran a routine diagnostic on Camera 12, just for something to do. As expected, all systems returned green. Optimal signal strength, perfect packet delivery, zero latency. It was, by all technical measures, the most stable feed in the entire station. It was perfect. Too perfect.

He leaned back in the command chair, forcing his gaze away, letting it sweep over the other seventy-seven images of pristine emptiness. The pristine medical bay, the silent cafeteria, the wind-scoured helipad. All normal. All boring. His eyes, as if drawn by a magnetic force, snapped back to Camera 12.

And it went dark.

It wasn't a flicker. Not a slow fade to static or a distorted signal. One moment, the feed of the expectant, grey corridor was there. The next, the screen was a perfect, depthless black. A void on the wall of light.

For a second, Liam felt a surge of relief. “Finally,” he breathed out. “Something to fix.”

He cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the silence. This was his territory. A problem with a clear, technical solution. He swiveled in his chair, his fingers dancing across the keyboard, pulling up the master control interface. He navigated to the camera controls, selected C-12, and initiated a remote reboot sequence.

INITIATING REBOOT: CAM-12 ... ... ERROR: DEVICE NOT FOUND

Liam frowned. Unusual, but not impossible. A hard crash could take a device offline entirely. He switched to the network command line, his movements swift and sure. He’d just ping the camera’s static IP address, see if it was still on the network at all.

ping 192.168.3.12

The cursor blinked for a long, agonizing moment.

Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out.

It wasn't just offline; it was gone. Vanished from the network as if a physical wire had been cut. His training took over, pushing the flicker of unease aside. The next logical step was to check the network switch logs, see which physical port the camera was wired into. Maybe the port itself had failed. He pulled up the logs for the main server room. Seventy-eight active ports, each meticulously labeled. He scrolled down the list.

C-01, C-02, ... C-10, C-11… C-13…

He stopped, his fingers hovering over the trackpad. He scrolled back up. C-11. Then C-13. There was no C-12 listed. No port assigned. According to the network switch, Camera 12 had never been connected.

“No,” he whispered, the sound swallowed by the room’s hum. “That’s not right.” He had been watching it for days. He had just run a diagnostic on it not ten minutes ago. His own system logs would prove it. He pulled them up, the text scrolling rapidly down the screen. And there it was, clear as day: 18:32:04 - DIAGNOSTIC INITIATED: CAM-12 - RESULT: NOMINAL.

A wave of vertigo washed over him. The system was contradicting itself. A camera was sending him data, data he had logged, from a network port that didn't exist. He felt a bead of sweat trace a cold path down his temple. The simple, broken-wire problem was spiraling into something twisted and illogical.

“Okay, Liam, think,” he said, his voice a little too loud. “New plan.” Physical trace. He needed to know where the wires for this phantom camera were supposed to go. If he could find its physical location, he could figure out the rest. He just needed the facility blueprints.

He opened the station’s document server, a repository of every technical manual and schematic. A few clicks brought up the master file: AEGIS_STATION_BLUEPRINTS_FINAL.pdf. A crisp, complex vector drawing of the facility filled the main screen.

“Alright, show me Sublevel 3,” he commanded the empty room.

He saw the floorplan for Sublevel 1, the level he was on, with the control room, living quarters, and labs clearly marked. Below that, the schematics detailed Sublevel 2: the massive generators, the water purification systems, the central server farm—the guts of the station. He scrolled down, looking for the next layer, the level that housed Corridor 7.

The document ended.

There was nothing below Sublevel 2 but bedrock, marked with geological survey lines.

His heart began to hammer against his ribs. It had to be an error. A missing page. He used the document’s search function, typing with stiff, sudden movements.

SEARCH: SUBLEVEL 3 The response flashed instantly. ‘SUBLEVEL 3’ NOT FOUND.

He tried again. CORRIDOR 7. NOT FOUND. C-12. NOT FOUND.

He leaned back, a low, strangled noise escaping his throat. A cold dread, far purer and more potent than simple fear, was seeping into his bones. He was a man who believed in systems, in schematics, in the predictable flow of electricity through a wire. His entire life was built on the foundation that every problem had a logical, verifiable cause. And that foundation was now crumbling beneath him.

For days, he had been watching a live feed from a camera that wasn't connected to the network, located in a hallway that did not exist, in a facility he was supposedly the sole guardian of.

His hands began to shake. It wasn't a violent shudder, but a fine, barely perceptible tremor, a high-frequency vibration that started in his fingertips. He looked at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger.

He stared at the wall of monitors, at the seventy-seven glowing rectangles of an empty, orderly world, and the one gaping, black square of impossibility that had just consumed his reality. The oppressive silence of the Aegis Station no longer felt empty. It felt watchful. The screen for Camera 12 wasn't just off. It was a hole. A hole in his world. And Liam had the terrifying certainty that something was on the other side, looking through.