Chapter 3: You Blinked

Chapter 3: You Blinked

The walk back to the control room for his second shift was a journey through enemy territory. Every buzz of the fluorescent lights sounded like a whispered threat. Every shadow in the corner of his vision seemed to shift and writhe. He stopped at the spot in the corridor where the message had been. The concrete wall was pristine, unmarked. The wet, bare footprints were gone. There was no trace that anything had ever been there, which was somehow more terrifying than if the words had remained. It meant the facility wasn't just watching him; it was tidying up after itself, erasing the evidence of its own malevolence.

He sat in the chair, the familiar cold seeping into him. The six screens flickered to life, and the weight of the last twelve hours crashed back down. His previous confidence, his belief that this was all an elaborate psychological test, felt like a lifetime ago. He was no longer a cynical observer trying to outsmart a system. He was prey, and he was learning the rules of the trap.

His goal for the night was simple: absolute, mindless obedience. He would be a perfect cog in their machine. He would follow the ten rules as if they were commandments etched in stone. He would survive.

He reached for the logbook, the solid weight of it a small comfort. Procedure. Routine. That was the key. He flipped it open to a fresh page, pen poised. But his eyes caught on the previous night’s entry. His own neat, blocky handwriting detailing the scheduled anomaly and the light fluctuations. It all looked normal, until he saw the note.

It was tucked at the bottom of the page, written in the margins, a frantic scribble in what was unmistakably his own hand.

Log entry for Inmate 6’s introduction protocol failed. Recommend memory wipe for Observer 7.

Liam’s breath caught in his chest. He stared at the words, his mind refusing to accept them. Inmate 6? There was no Inmate 6. The sixth cell was empty, the sixth monitor dark. Introduction protocol? And Observer 7… that was him. He hadn't written this. He couldn't have. He would remember writing something so bizarre, so terrifying. He traced the shape of the letter ‘L’ in his name. It was his. The slight, upward flick at the end was a habit he’d had since high school.

The control room, which had felt like a cage, now felt like a part of his own skull. The threat wasn't just outside anymore. It was inside his own memory, his own actions. The physical laws of the room were becoming unstable, and so was his own mind.

A cold dread washed over him as his eyes darted to the monitors, specifically to Camera 2. As if on cue, the inmate, who had been facing the back wall, began to turn. It wasn’t a sudden movement like last night. It was slow, deliberate, a fluid rotation that seemed to defy the grainy, low-frame-rate feed. Her head came around, and her eyes locked directly with the camera lens. With him.

There was no smile this time. Her expression was a blank mask, but her eyes… they were bottomless pits, radiating an intensity that felt like a physical pressure. She was initiating something. A challenge. And Liam knew, with a certainty that defied logic, that this was a test of Rule 5: Under no circumstances are you to divert your gaze from the feed of Camera 2 for more than five consecutive seconds.

The rule wasn't a passive instruction anymore. It was an active command. Don't you dare look away from me.

A new, terrifying layer of the game was revealed. He was being engaged directly. His fingers gripped the edge of the console, knuckles white. He would not fail this time. He would not give it the satisfaction.

He stared back.

The world dissolved into the black-and-white pixels of the screen. The other four monitors became a meaningless blur in his periphery. His eyes began to burn, the lack of blinking sending stinging tears to their corners. He fought the urge to wipe them away, to look down for even a fraction of a second. The woman’s face remained perfectly still, a static image of pure, focused will. It felt like she was trying to see past his eyes, to crawl through the screen and into his thoughts, to find the part of him that had written that impossible note about Inmate 6.

One minute passed. Then two. His vision swam. The buzzing of the lights faded into a dull roar in his ears. His entire consciousness was focused on this single, agonizing point of contact. He could feel his own pulse thumping in his dry, aching eyeballs. He would not blink. He would not look away. He would win.

Then he heard it.

A sound from behind him.

It was soft. A wet, dragging scrape.

Scrrr…ape.

Rule 7. Ignore any and all auditory phenomena originating from behind you.

His mind screamed. It was a trick. The same trick as the pen, but crueler, more targeted. It was designed to break his concentration. It was designed to make him fail. He knew it. He knew it was nothing. But the memory of the wet, bare footprints flashed in his mind. The scrape sounded like a damp cloth being dragged across the concrete floor. Closer this time. Much closer. Right behind his chair.

His logical mind battled his screaming instincts. Ignore it. It’s not real. It’s a test.

Scrrr…APE.

Louder. Sharper. It sounded like it was directly over his shoulder.

He couldn't help it. It was a reflex, an involuntary spasm of pure animal terror. His head jerked a fraction of an inch to the side. His eyes, for a split second, broke contact with the monitor.

He blinked.

It was a single, desperate, moisture-seeking blink. But it was enough.

When his eyes snapped back to the screen, Camera 2 showed an empty cell. The woman was gone. A wave of nauseating vertigo washed over him. He had failed.

He spun his chair around, heart hammering, expecting to see… something. Anything. But the space behind him was empty. The concrete was bare and dry. There was nothing there. There was never anything there.

A shaky, hysterical laugh bubbled up in his throat. He had lost. He had lost the staring contest, and he had broken Rule 7 all over again. He turned back to the monitors, bracing for the consequence. He scanned the room, then the walls, half-expecting some new horror.

And he saw it.

To the right of the monitor bank, on the stark concrete wall, new words had appeared. They weren't glistening and wet like before. They were etched into the surface of the wall itself, thin, black, spiderwebbing cracks that formed letters.

YOU BLINKED.

Liam stared at the accusation, his blood turning to sludge. The facility was talking to him. It was marking his failures on the very walls of his prison. He felt a profound sense of despair, a feeling of being a rat in a maze designed by a god.

His eyes fell to the master clock on the console, then to the individual timestamps on each camera feed. They were all in perfect sync. 9:47:12 PM. 9:47:13 PM. 9:47:14 PM. All except one.

The timestamp for Camera 2 read 9:47:10 PM.

He stared, his brain struggling to compute. He checked again. The other clocks ticked over to 15 seconds, then 16. The clock for Camera 2 ticked over to 11, then 12.

It was four seconds out of sync.

The blink hadn't just been a failure. It had a tangible, impossible result. It had broken time. He was no longer just watching the past. He was watching a past that was falling further and further behind his own reality, one second at a time. The control room wasn't just a prison. It was an engine, and his mistakes were its fuel.