Chapter 3: Echoes from Unit 347

Chapter 3: Echoes from Unit 347

The string of text on his screen was no longer a clue; it was a command. ERROR: UNSTABLE_REFERENCE_U347. In the before-times, Kevin would have interpreted it as a corrupted pointer, a null reference in a sea of code. Now, it felt like a beacon, a single, flickering light in an ocean of purple-black madness. The woman, the glitch, the seven-eyed door—they were all symptoms. Unit 347 was the disease.

For the first time in 835 days, Kevin left the 47th-floor food court with a purpose that wasn't centered on acquiring lukewarm Sbarro. He walked past the Cinnabon, its cloying sweetness a familiar comfort he no longer needed. He bypassed the Pinkberry, where Gary was delivering a sermon on the doctrinal importance of sprinkles, his duct-tape eyebrows furrowed in concentration. None of it mattered. The predictable insanity of his prison was just background noise now.

The elevator ride down was a descent into a forgotten world. The residents of The Lucent had stratified themselves early on, the most volatile and detached claiming the upper floors, closer to the food court's daily miracle. The lower floors were a ghost town, a monument to a life that had been abruptly cut short.

The doors slid open on the 34th floor with a soft chime that sounded like a funeral bell. The air was different here. Colder. Stiller. The low, mournful hum of the void seemed louder, more personal. Dust motes danced in the emergency lighting that cast long, skeletal shadows down the corridor. Every door was identical, a monotonous line of dark wood and brass numbers, except for one.

Unit 347.

It was sealed. Not with crime scene tape, but with something far more primal. Thick strips of industrial warning tape, the kind with black and yellow diagonal stripes, were plastered across the door and its frame. The gaps were filled with a hardened, translucent epoxy, thick and amber like fossilized dread. In the center of the door, someone had scrawled a single word in black marker: DON'T.

This was the obstacle, both physical and psychological. The Lucent had only one unspoken rule, one sacred taboo that united even the froyo cultists and the CrossFit Coven: you do not go near Ted’s apartment. It was the place the world had ended. Breaking this seal was more than just opening a door; it was a profound act of heresy.

Kevin’s heart hammered against his ribs. His old self, the passive, cynical observer, was screaming at him to turn back. To return to the relative safety of his laptop and the predictable loop of his existence. But the image of the woman’s calm face, the impossible blink of those seven eyes, the clean logic of the error code—it was a hook he couldn't shake. He was done observing.

His action began with a search. In a fire equipment locker at the end of the hall, he found what he was looking for: a hefty steel crowbar. It felt unnaturally heavy in his hands, a tool for desecration.

Back at the door, he took a deep, shuddering breath and wedged the tip of the crowbar into the seam. He put his shoulder into it and pushed. For a moment, nothing. Then, with a sound like cracking bone, the epoxy began to splinter. The noise was obscene in the dead silence, echoing down the hall. He grunted, pushing harder, leveraging his weight. The yellow and black tape tore. The wood of the doorframe groaned in protest.

With a final, violent crack, the seal broke. The door swung inward a few inches, releasing a puff of stale air that smelled of ozone, burnt sugar, and something else… something coppery and ancient.

Kevin stood panting, the crowbar dangling from his hand. He had done it. He had crossed the line. There was no going back.

He pushed the door fully open and stepped inside.

The result was a visceral, brain-breaking wrongness. This was not an apartment. It was a wound in the fabric of reality.

The space inside was larger than it should have been, the layout shifting and reconfiguring before his eyes. The floor slanted at an impossible angle, rising to meet a wall that seemed to be breathing, slowly contracting and expanding like a lung. Where the window should have been, there was only a shimmering, heat-haze distortion of the purple void, twisted into a kaleidoscopic nightmare.

Arcane symbols, intricate and terrifying, were burned into every surface. They glowed with a faint, sickly green light, not sitting on top of the drywall and carpet but embedded within them, as if they were part of the dimension’s source code. One symbol, a complex geometry of intersecting circles and jagged lines, pulsed with a rhythm that was disturbingly close to a human heartbeat.

In the center of the room, the carpet was scorched black in a perfect circle ten feet in diameter. The air above it shimmered. This was the summoning circle. This was ground zero.

And in the very middle of that circle, lying open on the charred floor, was a book.

It was a grimoire, its black leather cover warped and bubbled from an intense heat. The pages were brittle, yellowed, and singed at the edges. On the cover, embossed in what looked like tarnished silver, was the same multi-layered circular symbol that pulsed on the wall. Kevin felt an instinctive, primal revulsion, but he couldn't look away. This was the source of the error message, the user manual for their damnation. He had to see it.

He stepped into the distorted space, his sneakers feeling strangely disconnected from the sloping floor. The thrumming intensified, a low-frequency vibration that resonated deep in his bones. He could hear whispers now, faint and layered, slithering at the edge of his hearing. One of the voices sounded like his own.

He knelt at the edge of the scorched circle, the heat still radiating from it after all this time. The symbols in the book were a maddening fusion of dead languages and complex mathematical formulae. He saw snippets of Latin, what looked like corrupted C++, and diagrams that defied Euclidean geometry. It was the work of a madman trying to hack reality.

His fingers trembled as he reached for the grimoire. This was it. The answer. The reason for the woman, the void, the endless, screaming loop of their lives.

As his fingertips brushed against the brittle leather, a shadow shifted in the corner of his eye.

The turning point was not a sound, but a sudden, chilling drop in temperature. He froze, his hand hovering over the book. He wasn't alone. The feeling was absolute, a cold certainty that washed over him and raised the hairs on his arms.

He slowly lifted his head, scanning the warped, shifting corners of the room. The whispers coalesced, weaving themselves into a single, coherent sound. It was the creak of a floorboard from a part of the room that, a second ago, had been a ceiling.

Then came the voice. It was calm, clear, and unnervingly familiar.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”

Kevin’s head snapped toward the source of the sound. Standing near the distorted doorway, half-hidden in a shadow that didn't seem to have a source, was the woman in the black hoodie. Her expression was the same as it had been in the food court: a mask of profound, unreadable neutrality. She looked at him not with anger or surprise, but with the mild, detached interest of a technician observing a malfunctioning piece of equipment.

“That doesn’t belong to you,” she said, her voice cutting through the thrumming of the room like a scalpel.