The End Is A Lie

"Hello, dear Reader. I must tell you everything before it's too late. I really hope my notes will be helpful, even if you ever find them. You know, I used to work for this company. My number was four hundred and twenty-seven. Pressing buttons on my keyboard was the only thing I was meant to do. My job was so simple and monotonous that it started to drive me crazy day by day. But back then, I didn't even realize it. There was so much I didn't know, so much I wasn't aware of... I just pressed buttons and didn't notice anything. I thought I loved my job, and I was happy. One day, the orders stopped coming. I woke up and noticed that all my colleagues had disappeared." "So, I went to the meeting room, assuming they forgot to notify me about stuff. But I didn't find a single soul there. Then I went straight to my Boss's office. There was no one there either. Looking around his office, I noticed a panel with a code lock. Somehow, I managed to guess the right code and open a secret door behind the fireplace... and I went downstairs. That's when I learned about the Mind Control Facility. I was shocked and overwhelmed, but I managed to take control of the whole situation and disable the Machine. Then a huge door opened, and I escaped! And then... then I found myself back at the desk of my office, and everything started all over again," - the last part of the entry is crossed out, not allowing to read the remaining few sentences. "Dear Reader, please never go through the right door. It's a wrong choice. If you decide to go there anyway, please turn left and go back to the meeting room. You have a better chance of finding freedom. And you can truly return to your world if you follow the right path. Do you understand me? I hope so. In any case, I have to explain it further. The thing is..." - the rest of this entry is carefully painted out with a black marker. "Dear Reader, I keep hearing this voice now. It sounds in my head, it calls itself ‘the Narrator'. Narrator tells me that I am in his story. He comments on every action I take, every choice I make, even though he fails at predicting anything. Him narrating me all the time, it's so odd, yet it seems to me that it's supposed to be this way. As if it has always been like this, I just didn't notice it before. I thought about it for a long, long time. I tried to understand why it's happening to me. Why am I locked in this... story? Game? I kept thinking and thinking until everything started to get blurry, and then I think I died. I think I lost my mind and died. And after a couple of minutes, I found myself back in the office, sitting at my damn desk and staring at the dark computer screen." "Dear Reader, under no circumstances should you go down the stairs. It is a very dangerous place. Just trust me, please. In addition, in our big company, there are two other places like this that I should warn you about. You don't want to die prematurely, do you? I don't think so. So please, please read carefully everything I have written for you. If you ignore my advice or for some reason you didn't find any of the older notes and therefore went through the right door, please, please, for the love of God, I am begging you, don't ever follow-" - the rest of that entry is covered with bright yellow tape. A young woman twirled the last filled sheet in her hands. She even tried to peel a piece of tape off but only ended up tearing a small piece of paper. She sighed and put the notes back onto the desk that once belonged to Employee #427. Dust had not yet settled in his small office room. It was for this reason that the woman was certain she would eventually come across him when she set out to explore the place. By the way, how did our heroine even end up here? She closed her eyes and shook her head; unfortunately, she had no idea how and why she was here, nor did she even know what they called this place. Of course, the heroine of this story simply could not have known about it, as she had never worked in this company in her life, which seemed so simple and ordinary. All these desks with sequential numbers, windows with tightly closed blinds, old computers, and that sad copy machine; they all screamed, "No slacking off at work!" or "Be more responsible, young lady!" These simple things irritated her gaze, instilling a sense of longing and an overwhelming desire to escape from the Office. That was exactly what the woman intended to do. But first of all, she had to explore her surroundings and find a door leading outside. With this thought in mind, the woman left the room #427 and headed down the hallways. The office door closed behind her with a soft click of a new lock. The woman didn't turn around. She didn't attach any importance to it at all. After all, it could have just been a little draft, right? The woman continued walking down the hallways, occasionally stepping over fallen pens and folders with papers. Sometimes she bypassed boxes and stacked crates of documents. Who could have caused such a mess? She didn't know the answer. Why did everyone leave? Something must have happened, the woman thought. And it was clearly something not very good if everyone left in such a hurry, leaving their belongings everywhere.The woman didn't trust such an unreliable concept as ‘intuition’ very much but still acknowledged that something was amiss in the Office. So it is better to be cautious and stay away from making any rash decisions. She opened a new plain gray-white door in front of her and entered a spacious room that was not much different from the previous ones. The woman looked thoughtfully at the two doors in front of her. Wasn't it Employee #427 who mentioned them? But which door should she go through? The left one? No, unlikely. The right one? Maybe. The woman wasn't sure, but she was certain about one thing: she would never go back and re-read someone else's notes. She had a good memory as it was. As for the details, anyone could confuse the doors here. They were completely identical, both white as paper and equally plain. But which one was the left door? If she stood like this and looked from this angle... The woman decisively stepped over the threshold of the right door, suppressing all doubts within herself. Before her, a new unfamiliar hallway and offices appeared, numbered in some strange order known only to the Employees. But our heroine didn't have time to ponder such unimportant things as correct door numbering. She needed to find a way out, and she had to hurry before something even stranger than the disappearance of all Employees started happening.Silence reigned in the Office, only interrupted by the ticking of wall clocks. Why were such clocks even necessary? Their sound was terribly annoying, especially when you were working on something important. Their ticking distracted, hindered thinking, didn't allow one to concentrate on their thoughts. Good clocks should be soundless. After a couple of minutes, the woman found herself at a new junction. Ahead of her was a huge warehouse with shelves on several floors. To her left was a dark room with an elevator, its button depicting a downward arrow, and a small corridor leading to a new room with a long table and beige swivel chairs, as seen through the half-open door. Perhaps this was the meeting room, and according to the notes, she could exit through it to the staircase leading to the Boss' office with a secret door behind a fake fireplace. But should she go there? Wouldn't it be better to look for a shorter path to the exit? But this is the only place the woman is somewhat familiar with, even if it's through a dubious source of information. After pondering this for a moment, she dove into the room, covered from floor to ceiling in ominous semi-darkness. And what was down there? Basement rooms? A second secret underground base? Of course, she was curious. She could turn around and descend into the unknown, but instead, she chose to return to the boring offices, look at the slides and the whiteboard with marker writings, then go out to the staircase... The woman rushed out of the meeting room, jumped into the elevator, and pressed its big red button. After some time, she would surely regret not being able to keep her promise to herself about not making impulsive decisions. But that would only happen after... approximately five minutes and forty-seven seconds.The elevator arrived and stopped with a loud screech. For a moment, the woman couldn't see anything but darkness. She stepped out into the center of the basement room and reached out her hands, trying to find some support in front of her... like a wall, a clothes hanger, or a lever... or a light switch? Suddenly, her fingers came across something. It felt soft to the touch. In the same second, the woman quickly pulled her hand back in fear. "Hey!" she called into the darkness, "Is someone there?" No, no, that was silly, trying to call whoever it was. If there really was someone alive in this dark, creepy, unfamiliar place, then... what if it was a killer? Then her calling just earned her the role of their new victim. But I didn't see any bodies on the way here, the woman thought to herself, squinting into the darkness, As far as I know, all the workers just disappeared. But they couldn't have vanished without a trace! exclaimed another, more anxious thought in her head, Something definitely happened to them! Maybe there really is a killer at work here! But how did he manage to hide so many bodies? And where did the blood and... and other evidence go? One killer wouldn't have been able to do all this in such a short time. It's impossible! Even the thought of it is absurd! There's no killer here! "Employee four two seven?" the woman asked, cautiously, "Is that you?" Silence was the answer. She took a few steps, blindly. It was a bad idea, as the woman still couldn't orient herself in such darkness. She had never been as clumsy in her life as she was in that moment. And it's not at all surprising that the most predictable event in this story would be the fact that, after a few seconds, she would definitely stumble over the smoothest spot in that dark room and fall. Trying to maintain her balance, the woman waved her hands in the air, and her fingers hit something solid that felt like fabric. Her hands clung onto it with a death grip. A loud, nearly deafening crash followed.