Chapter 6: The Predecessor's File**

Chapter 6: The Predecessor's File

Desperation is a key. It unlocks parts of a person they never knew existed. For Liam, it unlocked a cold, burning rage that cauterized the edges of his fear. He was going to die here. That was a near certainty. But he refused to die ignorant. He wouldn't be a confused animal slaughtered in a pen; he would be a man who understood the shape of his own cage.

The humming was his constant companion, a physical presence that vibrated in his teeth and rattled his bones. The dreams of the stained hallway came every time he closed his eyes, each one ending with the figure taking another slow, scraping step closer. He was being worn down, eroded, tuned. The word echoed in his mind with the same relentless frequency as the drone from below. If this was a process, a deliberate series of events, then there had to be a record. There had to be a manual.

The station’s digital memory was a treacherous, self-healing lie. He couldn't trust it. He needed something analog. Paper. Ink. A dusty file in a forgotten cabinet.

His mind, sharpened by hunger and fury, seized on a new objective. A supervisor. There was no way a facility this complex, this expensive, ran without oversight. Somewhere in this concrete tomb, there had to be an office.

He stumbled back to the control room, the seventy-seven silent feeds a gallery of his failure. He ignored them, focusing on the console. He pulled up the station blueprints again, the ones that so defiantly omitted Sublevel 3. He wasn’t looking for impossible floors this time. He was looking for a chain of command. He scanned the layout of Sublevel 1, his eyes tracing the labels: ‘Dormitory A’, ‘Mess Hall’, ‘Med Bay’, ‘Control Room’… and there, tucked away in a small corridor near the main entrance, was a room labeled simply: ‘Station Supervisor’.

He hadn't noticed it before. It was just another box on a map full of them. Now, it was a beacon.

The walk there felt like a pilgrimage. The humming seemed to intensify as he moved away from the control room, as if the station was displeased with his initiative. The door to the supervisor's office was locked, its electronic keypad dark and unresponsive. In his first days here, this would have been an impassable barrier. Now, it was just another obstacle to be destroyed.

He returned to the empty supply depot, the monuments of styrofoam a testament to the station’s deceit. After a few minutes of frantic searching, he found what he was looking for: a heavy steel crowbar, likely part of a standard emergency toolkit, left behind in a crate that was, for once, not entirely empty.

Back at the supervisor's door, he jammed the flattened end of the crowbar into the gap between the door and the frame. He put his shoulder into it, grunting with the effort. His body, weakened by meager rations of protein bars and water, screamed in protest. The metal of the frame groaned. He pushed again, a raw, ragged yell tearing from his throat, fueled by rage at the silent figure in his dreams, at the lying pilot, at the humming that was shaking him apart. With a sharp crack, the lock mechanism shattered. The door swung inward.

The air inside was stale, but different from the rest of the station. It held a faint, lingering scent of old coffee and something vaguely chemical. The office was small and impersonal: a metal desk, an ergonomic chair, a blank datapad. But against the far wall stood what he was looking for. A heavy, four-drawer filing cabinet, its grey paint chipped at the corners. It was a relic from a pre-digital age. An analog backup. It was also locked.

The crowbar made short work of it. With a screech of tortured metal, he wrenched the top drawer open. Inside, neat rows of manila folders greeted him. He pulled one out. ‘HVAC Maintenance Schedule Q2’. Useless. Another: ‘Procurement Orders - Lab Consumables’. Garbage. He worked his way through the drawer, his trembling hands making the papers rustle loudly in the quiet room. It was all mundane, bureaucratic nonsense, likely just as fake as the supplies in the depot.

He was about to give up, to slam the drawer shut in frustration, when his eyes caught a different label at the very back. It wasn't typed. It was handwritten in stark, black ink: ‘Personnel - Active/Archived’.

His heart hammered. He pulled the thick folder out. It was heavy. He opened it on the desk, and the first file he saw made the air freeze in his lungs. It was a standard employee intake form. His own. CARTER, LIAM. His photo, a grim shot from his contractor ID, stared back at him. Attached was his psych evaluation, highlighting his military background, his technical proficiency, and his "high degree of psychological resilience and logical self-reliance." They hadn't just hired him. They had selected him.

He pushed his own file aside, his hands shaking so badly he could barely grip the next one. The name on the tab read: VANCE, ELIAS.

This was his predecessor. The man who must have sat in the same chair, stared at the same screens. The file was almost identical to his own. Same lucrative contract, same isolation clause. The psych evaluation was eerily similar: ex-NRO analyst, highly intelligent, rational, skeptical of non-empirical data. They were looking for a type. They were looking for men who would try to reason their way out of a trap built from madness.

He flipped through the pages. Standard weekly check-in logs, all nominal. Then, about six weeks into the contract, the entries changed. They were no longer typed reports but scanned, handwritten notes from Vance himself, his script growing increasingly erratic.

Day 43: Began perceiving a low-frequency auditory phenomenon. Source indeterminate. Station diagnostics show no anomalies.

Liam’s blood ran cold. The hum.

Day 48: Auditory phenomenon persistent, increasing in amplitude. Experiencing significant sleep disturbance, vivid and distressing nightmares. Recurring theme: a stained hallway.

He felt a kinship with this ghost, a terrifying empathy that transcended time. Vance had walked this exact path. He had heard the hum. He had seen the hallway in his dreams. He was the subject before Liam was the subject.

The final page of the file wasn't a log from Vance. It was a different document altogether, printed on crisp, official letterhead bearing the Aegis logo. It was a clinical observation report, authored by someone identified only as ‘Primary Investigator’. The date was from three months ago, just before Liam was hired. The final two lines were written in a cold, precise font that seemed impossibly stark against the page.

Observation: Subject has developed sustained psycho-somatic tremors and exhibits signs of auditory-visual hallucination consistent with projection parameters. Electrical activity in the limbic system indicates successful entrainment with sub-harmonic frequency.

Conclusion: Subject has achieved baseline resonance. Initiate Phase 2.

Liam stared at the words, his mind struggling to grasp their monstrous implication. Baseline resonance. The feeling of being tuned. It wasn't paranoia. It was a stated goal. He was not the first. Elias Vance had been brought here and systematically broken down by the hum until his mind "resonated" with it. And then… Phase 2.

What was Phase 2? A new wave of terror, colder and more profound than any before, washed over him. He was a rat in a maze, and he had just found the notes from the scientist studying the rat that had come before him. The experiment had a name. It had stages. And he was right on schedule.

The humming from the floor seemed to rise in pitch, a low, triumphant thrum that vibrated up through the desk, making the dead man’s file tremble in his shaking hands. It knew he had found it. It knew he understood. The confirmation didn't bring clarity. It brought a new, unspeakable dread. He was no longer just fighting for his life. He was fighting against his own designated purpose.

Characters

Liam Carter

Liam Carter