Chapter 6: The Cinnabon Tapes

Chapter 6: The Cinnabon Tapes

The cloying, weaponized sweetness of the Cinnabon was suffocating. Kevin’s lungs felt sticky. He stared at the object in his hands, a black plastic rectangle that felt heavier than it should, as if weighted with the gravity of a dead era. The marker on the label was crude, almost frantic. KEVIN B. - BACKUP. His own name, written by a ghost.

"What is this?" he whispered, his voice hoarse. His mind was still reeling from the bizarre victory at the Pinkberry, the image of Gary’s ecstatic face burned into his memory. Now, this. A relic from a past he could barely remember, found in the last place he would have ever looked.

Elara took the tape from him. She didn’t hold it like a memory; she held it like a piece of evidence, turning it over, examining the label, the small plastic tabs on the bottom. In her hand, clutching the processor from the froyo machine, was the key to their future. In her other hand was the key to his past.

"It's a magnetic tape data storage unit," she said, her voice a clinical assessment that completely missed the existential bomb that had just detonated in Kevin's world. "Obsolete technology. But the data density is stable over long periods if stored correctly."

"I know what a VHS tape is," Kevin snapped, his nerves frayed. "What I mean is, why does it have my name on it? Why is it here? What does 'backup' mean?"

Elara finally looked up from the tape, her dark eyes meeting his. "In any system, especially an unstable one, you create backups of critical data. Snapshots. Safeguards against total corruption. Before Ted triggered the rootkit and fractured this dimension, it seems he made a copy of one of the users."

The air went out of Kevin's lungs. "A copy? A copy of what? My… my files?"

"Of you," Elara clarified, her tone unnervingly matter-of-fact. "Your personality matrix, your memories, your core behavioral drivers as they existed at the moment of capture. It’s not a recording of you, Kevin. It’s a system image of your entire user profile. A ghost in a plastic shell."

Kevin staggered back, leaning against a display case full of fossilized cinnamon buns. The desire to understand this new mystery was a burning, painful need, but the obstacle was the horrifying implication of Elara's words. He wasn't just a prisoner; he was a data point, a file that could be copied, saved, and apparently, left on a dusty shelf in a defunct pastry shop.

"Why me?" he choked out. "Why would he back me up?"

"I can't know for sure," Elara said, her gaze turning inward, as if searching her own internal code for an answer. "Perhaps you were a key component of his ritual. A variable he wanted to be able to reset. Or perhaps… you were his failsafe. The one person he trusted to fix things if he failed."

The thought was a punch to the gut. Ted. The quiet, intense programmer from the 35th floor. Kevin had barely known him, just a few awkward elevator rides and a shared complaint about the building's terrible water pressure. To think that this man, in the final moments before he shattered reality, had singled him out…

A new, terrifying thought surfaced. "What would happen," he asked slowly, "if we played it?"

"The playback device would execute the data," Elara said. "It would initiate a restoration protocol. The 'Kevin B.' stored on this tape would be… reinstalled."

"Overwriting me," Kevin finished, the words tasting like ash. "The person I am now, the last 835 days of… of this… it would all just be gone?"

"Your current iteration is a product of a corrupted environment," she stated, as if that made it any better. "This backup is a clean install. It contains everything you knew right up to the moment of the event. Knowledge of Ted's plans, his research, the full parameters of the ritual. It could tell us what he actually summoned. It might tell us how to use this." She held up the processor, the stabilizer.

There it was. The choice. A brutal, impossible decision. He could remain himself, the cynical survivor who had adapted and endured, and they could try to figure out the stabilizer on their own, blind. Or, he could sacrifice the person he had become for a ghost's knowledge. He could press 'reset' on his own soul, hoping the man who emerged would have the answers they needed to save everyone. It was the ultimate act of faith in a man he barely knew: his former self.

"We need a VCR," Kevin said, his voice hard. The decision was made in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The passive observer was dead and gone. He would do what was necessary.

Their action was a new, desperate scavenger hunt. A VCR was an artifact, a fossil from a forgotten age. Their best bet was the mall level, the foundation upon which The Lucent had been built, a place most residents avoided. They made their way to the main escalators, moving with a new sense of urgency. Gary and his newly mobile faith could be anywhere now, proselytizing to the CrossFit Coven or declaring the Sbarro's meatball stromboli the new holy vessel.

The ground floor was a tomb. Dust lay thick on the glass storefronts of long-dead brands. An eerie silence reigned, broken only by the distant, ever-present hum of the void. They found it at the end of the main concourse: a RadioShack. Its red-and-black sign was faded, the doors chained but not locked.

Inside was a graveyard of obsolete technology. Wall-to-wall shelves of unsellable phone cases, tangled cords, and dusty components. It smelled like dead plastic. In a back corner, on a display with a sign that read CLEARANCE, they found it. A floor model VCR/DVD combo, still in its box. Beside it, a 13-inch CRT television.

"Power," Elara stated, looking at the dead outlets.

"Not a problem," Kevin said. His old life as a Geek Squad tech felt like a phantom limb, but the muscle memory was still there. He located a maintenance panel, pried it open with the crowbar he'd retrieved, and, after a few tense moments of rerouting circuits, a flicker of life returned to the forgotten store. He jury-rigged a connection, and the small television crackled to life, its screen a blank, grey void.

They carried their prize back to Kevin's apartment on the 42nd floor. It was his neutral territory, his sanctuary. It felt wrong to bring the VCR and the ghost tape here, like inviting a virus into his last clean hard drive.

He set the television on his small kitchen counter and hooked up the VCR. The machine whirred, its mechanical noises sounding ancient and profound. Kevin held the tape in his hand, his thumb stroking the handwritten label. This was it. The point of no return.

"If this works," he said, looking at Elara, "the person you're talking to right now will be gone. The man who comes back… he won't remember you. He won't remember any of this."

"I will remember him," Elara said. It was the closest thing to reassurance he had ever heard from her. "The objective remains the same."

He took a deep breath. He thought of the moaning void, of Gary's manic grin, of the seven polite eyes blinking on a janitor's door. He thought of the alternative: a slow, inevitable dissolution into cosmic static.

He pushed the tape into the VCR.

The machine clunked and whirred, pulling the tape into its guts. Kevin pressed the play button. The grey screen flickered, then resolved into a sea of hissing, dancing static. For a moment, he thought it was a dud, a final, cruel joke.

Then, an image bled through the snow.

The turning point was the sudden, sickening lurch of recognition. He was looking at Ted’s apartment, Unit 347. But it wasn't the warped, pulsating hellscape he had just escaped. It was normal. Clean. There were stacks of books on the floor, a half-eaten pizza on the coffee table, and the San Francisco skyline, vibrant and alive, was visible through the window. It was the world before the end.

The camera, held by an unsteady hand, panned across the room. It settled on a figure sitting on the couch, looking nervous. He was younger, his face unlined by 835 days of weariness, his eyes holding a spark of ambition Kevin had long since forgotten.

It was him.

Then, a voice from behind the camera, laced with a frantic, obsessive energy. "Okay, Kevin, you ready? Don't worry, it's perfectly safe. Just keep an eye on the containment circle. The really important thing to remember is, whatever happens, whatever you see or hear… don't go near the Burger King."

On the screen, Kevin’s younger self nodded, oblivious. The tape hissed. The image distorted, then cut to black. The surprise wasn't just seeing himself. It was the final, chilling, and utterly insane instruction. The Burger King. The one place in the food court everyone, by some unspoken agreement, always avoided. Ted's warning echoed in the silent apartment, reframing the entire landscape of their prison around a single, terrifying new epicenter.