Cold Relics

We made a mistake.

We dug too deep. Saw and experienced things we were never supposed to. And for what? We were just chasing ghosts, echoes, that could have vanished from this world without leaving a mark. Now it might be too late for us. The need for knowledge and answers has come at a great cost.

But… it did happen. There’s still a story to tell. Maybe our last one.

It began on April 1st, 2024. The day of fools. Naturally, I didn’t think any of it was real at first.

Our Hero, the one that started all this and the de facto leader of the “Kiddie Land Four,” had been doing some of that digging on his own without telling the rest of us. Kate and Jack were just trying to live out their lives, while I was busy twiddling my thumbs and keeping the Cold Relics website on life support. Sitting, waiting, for answers. Maybe hoping someone on the outside, like Isaac, would get in touch with us to share some new clue or story.

He, though… He’s tricky. He’s always claiming that he’s moved on, like Kate and Jack—even though we know they’re also liars. We’ve all accepted that we can’t leave this pit. We’re moths, and the embers of attraction to Neptune and their products, plans, and forgotten past are too bright. He just didn’t want to involve us, at first. Didn’t want to risk anyone else’s lives for his obsession.

But on April 1st, a sign of life. A loud heartbeat.

Out of the blue, he sends us an email. The following conversations are summaries, not direct transcripts.

“Guys. I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me. But I did it. It took years of trying, of proving to him that I am who I say, that I’m on his side. And then I got through. I spoke to him on the phone, heard his voice. Our best, maybe last connection to the stories. Neptune, the Umbrella Man, the nightmare toys, LIZ-4, all of it. The author of Nowhere Train. Isaac. He’s real, and he’s in hiding.

“I still had to convince him to let me help. Or, all of us, if he thought it’d be too much for one person. I told him I wanted to learn the full truth, for his sake, for his former partner and her kid, for a few aging millennials who can’t help but be drawn back to this over and over.

“Denver. Neptune is in Denver. He isn’t sure where, exactly, but I already had a few suspicions the moment I found out. In 1989, a nuclear train derailed outside of the city, and Isaac disappeared himself away from the wreckage. But there was something important that he omitted from his story.

“He had found out many years ago just where that seldom-used train track was heading. It was decommissioned and torn up by the end of 1992, but he’d made contacts in the city during his own investigation, and they kept an eye on the deconstruction process and learned what they could about the mysterious ‘Gray Line.’ It’s some shady conspiracy shit. Right up our alley.

“The track went underground and was used, at least officially, as some sort of cargo line, and its direction implies that it operated beneath a swath of Denver and terminated at the old airport, or someplace below it. The track was removed over the course of several weeks, in the middle of the night. Surprise, surprise, records of this work are scant to non-existent.

“Still looking into this and I don’t want to say too much right away before I learn more. Isaac is reluctant to talk. I understand; it’s his caution and wide berth from whatever’s left of Neptune that’s likely kept him alive this long. Be in touch again soon.”

Seeing as how he sent this out at two in the morning and I was probably the only other person awake, I was the first to get in a quick response before the real discussion happened the next day.

“Amazing work, man. Wish I’d known sooner what you were up to, but I’m all for keeping our talks to a minimum to limit exposure. As much as that sucks for my impatient nature. So, Denver airport, huh? Can’t say I’m surprised to see it playing a part in all this. Place is a hive of the strange and conspiratorial.”

He deservedly shuts me down in his reply.

“No, Ty. Not the current airport with the weird murals. I’m talking about Stapleton International, which had its last flight in 1995. Homes and businesses now occupy the space where it once was, but interestingly, the control tower still exists as something of a historical marker. Looks like there’s a restaurant inside it now. But anything touristy isn’t going to help us. If there still exists a way into the depths under where the airport used to be, where Neptune may have operated with easy access to anywhere in the outside world, finding that access point is going to be a challenge. If not impossible.

“But I feel like this is it. If there’s anything left, it’s there. Either as a sealed tomb, or broken concrete under collapsed rock.

“We don’t need to talk about this via email. Everyone, I’ll contact you with a link to a private, encrypted chat room where we can discuss this in real time. I might not be up again until tomorrow night, though. I haven’t gotten much sleep recently.”

The four of us had our chat the next evening, which was something we typically tried to do monthly. Keeping in touch as long-distance friends always felt a little therapeutic, as if we were a support group for traumatized survivors. I’ll condense the basics of what we talked about into the sort of conversation that we might’ve had in person, without all the back and forth and rapid-fire responses.

“I do agree with Jack, in wondering why this matters so much,” Kate began with her usual angle. “We all have a longing and urges to get to the truth, as if there’s a droning call pulling us towards it, but at the same time, we’re surviving, aren’t we? Weigh the risk against the reward of how much going into some shadowy group’s old haunt under Denver might improve our lives.”

“It will just be more ruins,” was Jack’s argument. “I feel like we’re close to there being nothing left, and that the world has moved on. Even though I suppose things have never been worse with Russia since the Cold War. But we’re in an era of connection. The battlefront is digital now, with information and disinformation out in the open. The world of spies and subterfuge is diminished compared to back then. We don’t know how things will end in Ukraine, but at least I got to see that strange testing ground before a Russian missile destroyed it. For better or worse, given the serious PTSD that the visit gave me.

“Lazlo, our guide over there, is moving west again, by the way. We talk often. I hope he doesn’t lose any family in the conflict. Almost unimaginable to think war of that scale can still happen.

“I always say, let the past die. But if I can be convinced to fly halfway across the world looking for nightmares, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up agreeing to one more crazy idea.”

“How do we even find this lair?” I asked the others. “Denver could have hundreds of strange underground places. We don’t know what we’re looking for, and you’d think anything connected to the airport would have been demolished decades ago. Assuming the city knew about it.”

“Don’t underestimate our small but wide community that supports us,” the hero boy reminded us. “Boris and I have already been in touch with a few of our forum members that live in the area, and they’re out asking around and hunting for any sort of unusual entryways into subterranean Colorado.

“I have no idea what we might find, if anything. But if we learn the truth about Neptune and where they came from, maybe we’ll finally be able to put all this to rest. Have normal dreams again. Connect with people in ways it’s hard for us to right now. I’m tired, guys. I’ve lost too many years of my life, even before I was in a coma. I don’t want to spend another decade thinking about these stories, but my childhood and memories still feel… haunted.”

“I’m telling you, Neptune came from an alternate reality,” I reiterated. “One where a nuclear war happened in 1983. They escaped on a train that can travel to different branches in time, and arrived in our 1960s.”

“Not this again, Ty,” the other three all said in their own ways, ganging up on me. “We read your theories, and they’re just too out there, even for us.”

They were still waiting for another explanation, some more grounded idea that could rationalize everything we had read, researched, and experienced so far. They didn’t want to accept the possibility that all of this could have started in another world entirely. In any case, my own logical summation of the Cold Relics events wasn’t really going to change any plans when it came to finding and exploring another location lost to time.

Only about a week after our chat, we got a possible hit. I was still upset that I was asked to stay “topside,” but at least I wasn’t let on as the group had told me early that it was best for me to help with the search but to then help from a distance, for two reasons: if the compound had any running memory-altering hardware like the kind that shoved Kiddie Land into our heads, it would be beneficial to keep on hand a “control subject,” someone who had been mind-molested only one time and could be compared against later. Like this was your standard science experiment. And, secondly, should I not hear from the three explorers for over forty-eight hours… I’d be tasked with the rescue mission. I admit, there was some sense in not putting all four of us in the same place if it could be helped, and I was already used to holding down the fort.

Selfishly, I did want to be there if and when our holy grail was found, and fully expected them to hog all the glory somehow. But I also imagined the respect I’d finally earn from the crew if I had to show up in shining armor and save them. I mean, I am the weird one, the proverbial quirky runt of the group.

I didn’t expect, or fully plan for, exactly that to happen.

Our Hero, Kate, and Jack booked their flights to Denver and left in the middle of April. I was asked to watch over them from afar, and not include the location of the possible entrance in this story. I will, however, tell you that our best candidate was an unmarked door at the bottom of an underground parking garage’s stairwell, in the vicinity of where Stapleton used to be.

On their first day there, they sent me dozens of photos that made them look like visiting tourists. None of them having been to Denver before, they hit up the hot spots and ate at a few nice restaurants. When it came to actual detective work, all they did that day was try to find any remnants of the old rail line and research local civil projects of the past. Nothing was discovered, of course. Neptune, or the part of the government that hid their existence, was almost comically good at scrubbing the breadcrumbs.

They got an early start the next morning—though thankfully not so early for me, since my post is two time zones ahead of them. The parking garage is this run-down, barely used place only three floors deep. It’s still in use, but its time is running out, as most of the businesses in that area of town have closed up. Another few years, and who knows what might happen to the garage and some forgotten sealed door at the bottom of it.

They found the door, no problem, and sent me pictures. It was rusted, had peeling gray paint, lacked any handles or hinges on the outside, and as previously described, was visibly welded to its surrounding frame. Based off of their knocks on it, they knew it was heavy. The only way inside would be with an acetylene torch and a crowbar, and probably not asking permission first. Like every urban explorer knows, you save time by breaking in and paying the fines later. After a quick visit to a hardware store to borrow the equipment, they returned to the door and gave me live video of their progress.

They looked so determined. Kate especially. We try to move on, but each time we make a discovery, you can see the fire in our eyes rekindle.

They cut the door free, pried it open with the crowbar, and carrying backpacks full of masks, flashlights, snacks, batteries, and assorted survival items, they began to descend, lighting the way for both themselves and the phone camera providing sitrep to the one person at the operations desk.

Behind the door, other than blackness, was a continuation of the garage’s stairwell—only in better shape, given that it hadn’t been used in decades. My friends proceeded downward, carefully, keeping mostly quiet outside of some light commentary and the reverb of their shoes.

And then the feed on my end lagged and cut out. It wasn’t unexpected. They were going underground, after all, and the signal wasn’t great to begin with. I figured they’d be back shortly to give me an update on what they saw from some sort of entrance, and then let me tell them to be careful before they went back for their full exploration.

Minutes passed. Then hours. I could barely sleep that night, and woke up to no updates. Not a single text. Boris pestered me for news I couldn’t give. Even Lazlo, just busy surviving in Ukraine, wanted to know what was happening. But, nothing. Those forty-eight hours inevitably went by, and as much as I couldn’t believe it… I knew I’d have to go after them. I’d either fall into the same trap they did, or somehow pull off a rescue.

I’m curious, but not brave. Still, there was no chance I’d just leave them down there and go on with my life. On autopilot the whole way, I packed, did my best to explain things to the girlfriend, booked a last-minute plane ticket, and flew out there, leaving the warm safety of my home for the unknown.

It was a cold, overcast, windy day when I arrived, and I hadn’t even bothered to reserve a hotel room. I got an Uber ride straight to the old parking garage straight from the airport, and within an hour of landing, found myself staring at the door at the bottom of a stairwell under flickering fluorescence.

The area hadn’t been touched since they vanished into the depths. The door was still cracked open a few inches, the darkness beyond it reaching out to me. The torch was on the floor next to it, and the char marks on the doorframe were fresh. They must’ve taken the crowbar with them. I wondered if it would do any good against… anything possibly moving around down there.

I stepped into the forbidden stairwell, parallel to the regular one but pitch-black. My flashlight couldn’t hit the bottom, so I cracked a glow stick and dropped it down. It shrunk into a tiny speck of light and dully bathed the distant floor in a green glow.

Without too much second-guessing or thinking about the dangers, I grabbed the torch in case it might come in useful, propped the door all the way open with a spare can of soup—the heaviest single object I had on me and all I could think of to use—and headed down into the abyss.

The air changed as I descended. It became cool and dry, like a cave. There were no other stops on the way; nothing but the sharp right angles of the longest series of stairs I’d ever climbed. The walls had lights, but they must have burnt out long ago. The railing still had a thick coat of paint to protect it from rust. There was no trash or debris anywhere.

It was strange that no one had been down here for many years, until just recently. How do so many people just ignore a door, no matter how obscure its location, that no one has claimed to have opened? And in a major city?

Tumbling down hundreds of steps would hurt, so I walked carefully and took my time, arriving at the bottom after twenty minutes or so. I left my glow stick in place, and noticed that next to it was another one, already used and spent. It must have belonged to the others.

There was only one way forward: another gray door that looked just like the first at the top of the stairwell, its light now no longer visible. It felt like this spot was the loneliest place on Earth. I was only maybe two hundred feet down, but I might as well have been visiting the Challenger Deep.

I faced the next door. This one was closed, but still had a handle. There was no sign of my friends, and it was time to make a conscious decision to go ahead, or to run back home with my tail between my legs. Well, you all know what I did, but the thing is, the instant I made the choice to proceed…

I was suddenly in a subterranean conference room. Like I’d been teleported there. I’m looking at an uninteresting door, then in the next moment, I’m confused, lost, and sweeping my beam of light across a large metal and slate table flanked by dusty office chairs that look straight out of the 1980s. Some are neatly aligned, others, toppled.

Like a pet dropped into a stranger’s home, I lack any situational awareness, and spend the first minute standing in place, taking in my surroundings, and trying not to alert whatever might be lurking nearby.

How in the hell had I gotten there?

I gather myself enough to remember that I have a watch, and I check it to reveal that I only have around five minutes of lost time. But that time is a black hole in my memory.

That’s right… Memory… Remember Kiddie Land.

Neptune knew how to manipulate, erase, and inject memories. Their technology’s abilities bordered on rewriting one’s entire reality.

None of the overhead lights show any life, but something here is still running. If my arrival into the bunker had been erased from memory, then a piece of powered hardware had done it. This place remains active, if barely.

First things first. Before I go looking for them, I have to secure our exit. Before I forget, or search too far inside, I have to…

Wait a minute. Obviously, I don’t know where the entrance is. But that’s okay—only five minutes had gone by. It had to be close. Maybe I left footprints? The place is dusty, after all. If I left a trail, it’d be faint, but should still be noticeable.

I waved my light across the floor, and barely made out shoe impressions. Too many of them, unfortunately, to tell which ones were mine. It looked as if the others had already wandered about and paced this room too many times for the prints to be useful. And if they couldn’t find the exit after all this time, what chance did I have?

All right, so I shift priorities. Find them first, then add my brainpower and work together to get out. This place isn’t going to be a honeypot pitcher plant that devours us. Stay positive, stay focused. If a few of Neptune’s employees managed to get out of here, so could we.

This central conference room, I imagine, was where the company’s people met and spoke daily, trying to stay unified despite having different visions on how to save this world from itself, or… how to exploit it. Whatever their individual intentions, their discussions and ideas were lost to time, just as they were. All that was left were the chairs, silent witnesses to a final meeting and positioned where they had been when it was concluded.

A film projector hangs from the ceiling, aimed towards a barren concrete wall. On second glance, I see that it isn’t completely empty; it features their “logo.” A giant rectangle, surrounded by a thick black border, and empty aside from one small word in the lower right corner. Neptune. The people who prided themselves on being so quiet, hidden, and far away, like the ice giant. Yet still always there, in orbit around the sun, lingering, waiting, watching…

They came so close to getting away with all of it and disappearing into the night, until a few kids and kids at heart stumbled upon the last specks of their story. For what purpose, who can say. Maybe just to ultimately die in the shadows like they did.

I ponder all of this only briefly. It’s my way to soak in being here and making it to the apparent end of a journey, even if I didn’t escape to tell anyone. I gather myself, try to calm down, and look around at the available paths.

The doors are heavy slabs of metal without knobs or handles, but they are at least inscribed with helpful words. Mess Hall. Labs. Living Quarters. Crypt. And Power. That last one seems a good place to start. I’d have a chance to see if this place had a generator, something that could be turned on or rerouted.

The doors may have all once been automatic, or had power-hungry gears that aided in their use, as I needed all my strength just to push them open. Worse, they swing shut on their own, erasing one’s hard work afterward. I don’t exercise much, so this place was going to be a pain in the ass.

The power plant room isn’t too impressive. About the size of my bedroom back home, it is little more than a few columns of faded tritium lights—if there was any doubt I was in Neptune’s territory—and an RTG about twice as large as your standard fridge, feeding some level of energy to… somewhere, and warming the room as it hums dutifully. There is a control box with circuit breakers, but it requires a key to operate that is nowhere in sight.

A radioisotope thermoelectric generator produces power using plutonium, basically making the thing a big old radioactive battery similar to those inside space probes. I don’t stick around long. Even if it isn’t leaking by this point, after spending countless hours researching the Cold War and atomic tech, I prefer to avoid any irradiation risks.

I go into the living quarters next, since it’s a logical place to find the others, or anything they might’ve left behind on or near the beds.

What I find instead, other than a few bathrooms and showers, is a small barracks style area, purely utilitarian, with only a dozen bunk beds. In a place this size, there was no way everyone had their own bed if they all had the same schedule. What miserable accommodations.

Grimly, there are human shapes under each of the plain white blankets. I roll back one end of some covers, catch a glimpse of old bone to confirm what was already obvious, and promptly leave the chamber. There is no way my friends would’ve stayed in this room more than a few minutes.

And, damn, I wasn’t prepared to see corpses, even if they were decades old and desiccated. Even though I should’ve expected it. We had to get the hell out of here.

As if the dusty and still atmosphere, the darkness, being trapped, and the bodies aren’t bad enough, I start to hear incoherent whispers in the back of my mind. Something calling out to me in this tomb, growing louder. I can’t tell what the voices are saying, but some are angry. Others have a tone of despair. Luckily, I brought my earbuds and I’m able to drown them out for the time being, just by keeping some music at a low volume.

I won’t bother building up suspense; I find the others in the next place I check, the mess hall. In a room no bigger but far more depressing than the cafeteria back at my elementary school, the three had made camp. Sleeping bags, spent soup cans, and food wrappers cover the long tables.

They are hungry, weak, and cold, but alive. In the dim glow of their LED lamps, they greet me by asking if I remember how I’d gotten in, in hopes I’d know the way out. It is a pertinent question, and it isn’t like this could be called a rescue just yet. Kate does give me a hug, though. The softy.

I don’t hesitate to share some of the water and food I have on me, which they down quickly. With no running water in the compound, they figured they had two or three days left, and regret not preparing better. I don’t feel that way, since it’s not like anyone would expect to be down here a week or more.

“We go looking for the exit all the time,” Jack tells me. “But, no luck. It has to exist, but it’s like we can’t perceive it. We’ve seen nearly every inch of this hellhole. The worst part is, Neptune didn’t even leave anything behind. Their file cabinets are full of ash, their computers are destroyed. All we found was a metaphorical empty coffin.”

“Nearly every inch? What haven’t you explored yet?” I ask them.

“Everything except the crypt,” Kate answers.

“And the exit,” Jack contributes his dry wit.

The door to the crypt, they explain to me, wouldn’t budge, even if with all three of them pushing against it. It is the last possibly accessible place they hadn’t seen yet, and there is still some lingering hope that there might be a way out in that direction.

“Maybe we can cut it open?” I suggest. “I brought the torch that you guys left up in the garage.”

They look at me like they had completely forgotten about it, and some life returns to their eyes. It could be that I’ll end up saving them after all.

“Good job, Ty,” our moral compass says to me. “I was kicking myself for leaving it behind earlier on. Until all I could think about was dying down here.”

“It’s out in the main room. So, should we get to work?”

He hesitates, then replies, “Yeah, in a minute. There’s something you really need to see first. Trust me—you’ll never forgive us if you miss out.”

With the four of us reunited in person for the first time in a long while, I am guided into the laboratory section of the facility, where all of those burnt-out file cabinets and broken 1980s computers remain frozen in time.

They really had left nothing behind, and there is no telling what they had worked on here. Still, it’s easy to assume that this was where inventions like the engine were created, and at least the ideas for the hardware that followed were thought up. It’s now a small space of work stations and lab tables, but was once bigger, as evident by the door leading to the “B Wing.” A second door had led to the “Trains.” In the present, both went to nowhere but piles of collapsed rock and concrete, anything past them crushed under earth.

However, there is a third entrance, and its metal door is still intact. The words above read, “Remote Operations.” My friends stop by it and turn to me, as if this door went to a sacred place that would be best to experience alone.

Needing no further instruction, I push my way inside and venture in by myself. I don’t know what to expect. But at the same time, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised.

In contrast to the brutalist architecture of the rest of this lifeless place, this room is circular, its single curving wall painted in a shade of white. It has parquet wood floors, fake potted plants, shelves full of books, several very old television sets, a kitchenette, and a small bed. Someone had been living here, likely beyond whenever the rest of the place was emptied and abandoned.

In the middle of the room is a large halo-shaped desk covered with dusty terminals and computers, some of them ancient and from the late sixties while other machines are more modern. There is organized chaos among the storage and peripherals on and under the table, everything from reel-to-reel hardware, floppy disk readers, server racks, keyboards, and phones and modems. Too many wires to count of all sizes and colors climb up and into the ceiling like clusters of vines.

And the room’s sentinel, a skeleton in a wheelchair. It is the first time I’d ever seen a body in real life, and this one is nothing but bones. It’s weird, like I don’t know what I’m looking at for a few seconds. It’s also… smaller than I’d expected. Making the sight more surreal, thick wiring is coming out of the back of the skull, disappearing into the ceiling like the others.

This person had lived his life as an organic computer. He had remained when all of his friends—or his prison guards—had left, to do a job until the end. His dusty repose is peaceful, and yet a piece of his skull is missing. A handgun rests near one of the chair’s wheels. And under one of his arms is a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At long last, after over thirty years since he last spoke to someone, and only through text, we had found him.

“Hello… Central,” I say quietly, averting my eyes out of some form of respect, I’m not sure.

So… the bio-computer that monitored the north’s early warning stations had worked with or been used by Neptune all along. It may have also been his job to activate machines around the country that would alter or erase memories, either to pacify the masses before the end, or give them a reason to persist afterwards.

Only, he never got a chance to do all of that, as such a system was never completed. All he could do was broadcast a “message from the White House” that reached a single person in the barrens of Alaska. What a meaningless life, one that never fulfilled its purpose. It was easy to pity him, but still… his existence was one of the main reasons we were here now.

More whispers. And now I’m seeing shadowy figures in the corners of my vision. I don’t want to linger any longer than the thirty seconds or so I had been in the room. I expected I’d be seeing his ghost soon enough if I stayed.

I turn and leave, and we close the door to the sarcophagus, letting Central return to his rest. I don’t know. I apologize if I’m making this awkward or cringey. I don’t deal with death and dying very well and I feel like I never say the right things. I’ve been that way since I was a kid.

“That was… him…” I say to my friends waiting in the lab.

“Yeah,” Jack replies just as minimally.

“I’m hearing and seeing things. Whispers, and shadows. Does it get worse?” I ask them, assuming I wasn’t alone.

“It will,” Kate answers. “We’re seeing the same hallucinations at the same time, but they’re all fragmented and don’t make any sense. Like we’re having a collective fever dream. If there’s an engine down here, it can’t generate something solid like Kiddie Land; it’s glitching reality, not creating a new one.”

“It’s either malfunctioning or running on low power. Pumping weird shit into our heads,” Jack surmises.

“There has to be one, since something’s hiding the exit from us,” I agree. “We need to find and destroy it. It’s probably the only chance we have.”

But we don’t try to get into the crypt right away. Without planning for it, we find ourselves regrouping in the conference room and mulling over everything at the big table. I feel like we’re just hesitating and trying to postpone our raid on the crypt. I get it, though. We’d all seen enough horror and suspense movies to know how screwed up the big reveals can be.

We need a little time to prepare and decompress first from everything else. So, we sit around and fill up on the rest of the snacks I had brought.

“It’s crazy that a post on an old forum I ran in the early 2000s about weird toys would lead me to a place like this, all these years later,” our pensive leader thinks aloud. “Feels like the world’s going to hell up there right now, and we’re down here in a place that was around when it was even worse.”

“This has to end,” Jack sighs. “Even if we don’t find anything to put an end to, we can’t keep doing things like this. We’re getting too old for it.”

“Tyler, do me a favor,” our leader asks of me. “Stop calling me the hero in your stories. I’m not one. I’m just a guy. In fact, don’t even bother giving me a fake name at all. It’s kid stuff and we’re fooling ourselves if we think it’s helping us hide from anyone. Besides, we’re all already too deep in the shit.”

“You… want me to put your real name into this one?” I reply shakily.

“Assuming we survive and you write it, yeah. I’m done with all that. I don’t care about scary stories anymore, or things that happened in the distant past. We’re here to find a bit of truth and maybe destroy something, and then our lives can finally resume. It’s time to leave the pseudonyms behind.”

You can’t hear it on my recording, but I remember Kate smiling with newfound confidence before she responds, “I like this new attitude. Sounds like we’re ready to charge into the breach.”

“Okay. Liam,” I tell our friend, with some newfound bravery of my own. “Maybe we should spout off classic movie lines, like ‘let’s finish this.’” The others don’t take me up on the offer, but it still feels like we’d never been so determined to take action and stop living in a scary story full of techno-horrors. I pick up the torch and ask, “So. Who’s the best with this thing?”

Within a minute, Kate is at the door to the crypt and slowly cutting it open with a bright flame, wearing sunglasses in lieu of a bulky welder’s mask. I think we really are getting pumped, as if we were a bunch of college kids again in their prime and about to kick some kind of proverbial ass.

She cuts the door horizontally, and once there’s a molten line from end to end, we use the crowbar to pry off the top half of the heavy metal. Flashlights beam into the room beyond, revealing the reason we couldn’t get the door open.

It is full of industrial metal caskets on shelves, and one of those shelves had collapsed, bringing down several coffins and blocking the door from swinging inward. Once the fresh slice has cooled, me and Jack climb over the door and work together to shove the corpse containers out of the way—though it takes a good deal of effort. The things are damn heavy.

Once everyone is inside the crypt, we sweep our lights across the chamber and find that it is unexpectedly expansive, about the size of a small warehouse. There are at least a hundred occupied caskets lining the rusting shelves, and they aren’t of your everyday variety.

Each one of them, except those that had fallen against the door, is plugged into a wall socket. They are well-sealed and locked, and small windows in their metal exteriors reveal the mummified bodies inside.

“The hell are these things?” Jack asks what is on all our minds. “They look like cryostasis pods or something. They must have lost power long ago.”

“Yeah, but cryostasis doesn’t work outside of science fiction,” Kate reminds us. “Freezing cells destroys the body. And who were all these people? They couldn’t have all worked for Neptune.”

“Maybe they were all packed on the train at some point,” I suggest, without getting too deep into my otherworldly theories. “They could’ve been important people. Politicians, the rich, generals…”

Ones from an alternate universe, I want to add.

“There has to be something else in here,” Liam exclaims impatiently as he waves his light up and down the dark, long, narrow corridor of sarcophagi. “Wait, what’s that? You all see that? Turn off your lights a sec.”

We reluctantly do so, leaving us in pitch-blackness. Or, almost.

Once our eyes adjust, we see it: a dim crimson glow at the end of the hall, on the floor and ceiling. My courage can only hold out so long, and going in the direction of that red light is the last thing I want to do.

“Come on,” Liam pushes us forward and reactivates his flashlight. “Guys. You know we have to.”

Jack follows him first, and after Kate tries to offer me some reassurance, the two of us join them. It feels like a long walk.

The whispers become louder and more chaotic as we get closer.

When we are around fifty feet away from the source of the light, the voices transform into the laughter of children. A lot of children, their demented giggles layered on top of one another. I mean… screw this shit, right?

“Get out of my head, get out of my head…” I mutter repeatedly.

“I know,” Liam says. “I hear it, too. But if something’s trying to scare us away, that’s where we have to go. If we weren’t trapped down here, maybe things would be different. Whatever we need to shut off might be just ahead.”

We stop at the double metal doors at the end of the hall—the only pair we’ve seen in the place. They are shaped as if they lead into a church or other sacred place. And above them is the word… “Sanctum.”

Speaking over the cacophony of whispers and demonic kids laughing in our heads, Jack remarks, “What the hell could be in there?”

Liam flatly answers with his guess, “The heart of darkness?” He steps forward, touches the doors, and gives them a test push. They audibly budge, if only slightly. He then turns back to us. “I’m not going to make any of you go inside. But I think I need your help opening them.”

I study the red light coming from the seams above, below, and between the doors. It is fairly steady, but does still waver a bit. There is a life to the light, as if it comes from a burning fire, or an active monitor.

Jack nods, and starts pushing with Liam. Kate hesitates a moment longer, then joins them. The doors groan and begin to bend inward. I put my hands on them and contribute what little muscle mass I have. The light spreads, and…

Something happens.

We are suddenly no longer in the crypt. We aren’t even in the bunker.

We’ve just done a hard cut, a bad edit in a movie, straight back to the parking garage stairwell, under the dying fluorescent light.

We must’ve blacked out, and now we’re all waking up at about the same moment. Everything aches. My legs, arms, chest, neck—even my eyes. I have a wicked migraine, and based off of the groaning around me, I’m not alone.

Among the mutterings of expletives, slurred speech, and cold concrete drunken floor shuffling, I dig into my pocket to check my phone, to look for texts and the current time. The crowbar and torch are gone, but we still have our flashlights, backpacks, and phones on us.

Thing is, our phones are dead.

We will find out later that their batteries no longer hold a charge, and while they can still turn on when plugged in, their data had been erased. Their flash memory is completely gone, effectively bricking them.

But that discovery comes later. A few others come first.

Most worryingly, we are soon examining the dried blood on our faces as we struggle to stand, which is easy to see in the, well, black mirrors of our broken phones. We’re all a mess, and yet the floor is almost absent of any red spots, so the bleeding had mostly stopped before we arrived here and collapsed. Where the blood is coming from is more concerning.

Our noses, ears, and disturbingly, our eyes. It’s no wonder our heads are pounding. For all we know, something had just tried to explode our brains.

That’s the other problem. None of us have any idea what happened to us. Just like our arrival into the bunker, the very moment we resolved to go through the sanctum’s doors, our memory got wiped. How much time had gone by?

Luckily, Jack still wears an old analog watch that wasn’t affected by whatever took out our phones, so we learn that it is just past midnight. Assuming that an entire day hasn’t gone by, we have some combination of lost time and time spent unconscious of around nine hours.

The muscle pain was also worrying at first, but it cleared up within a few days. We would later attribute it to simply running up the absurdly tall staircase in one long, hard burst. We may have been running for our lives from… something. Had that something taken our memory, or was it the same unseen device that disguised the entrance in the first place?

Either way, at the time Liam remained unbelievably determined. Despite our exhaustion, hunger, and injuries that include bleeding from six of our seven head holes, he steps right back through the formerly welded-shut doorway for a second, last chance to “uncover the truth.” We call him crazy, and yell at him to come back. Halfway out of my own mind, I throw in a comment about how a horrific creature was just waiting down there to cut him apart.

He comes back, within another five minutes or so. Not because of us, but because he couldn’t get close to the bottom again. The entire stairwell was hot, and by the time he was only a few flights down, it was “burning like an oven.” Yet, he didn’t see any flames or their light. Only the searing darkness. Placing our hands near the door does let us feel a rush of escaping heat.

Not going to a clinic is out of the question, so we get a ride share—I’m sure the driver just loved us and thought we had all overdosed on something—and visit the nearest 24-hour emergency care center. We get examined, cleared, cleaned up, grab some pain-killing meds, then collapse in the hotel room they had gotten and sleep another twelve hours, give or take for all of us.

Do this kind of thing enough times, and you get used to a little brain damage and passing out. Liam compares it to his night at Boris’s with the evil electric rabbit haunting and taunting him, but not quite as bad.

We promise each other to get our heads scanned when we get home, which isn’t cheap or something you can just have done right away in most cases. We get new phones at the local dealerships and head our separate ways, not totally knowing if we’d see each other again. Hell, we aren’t even sure if we accomplished anything down there. Is this how things are going to end? Would we find out that there was something wrong with us?

Following the migraines, I feel fine, for a little while. But so do some people who just got a lethal dose of radiation.

The first sign that I may have been afflicted by a health concern happens on the flight home. My cloud backup didn’t have time to download onto my new phone yet, and with nothing else to do, I end up nodding off and have one of those especially nonsensical dreams you can get during a light sleep or nap.

I don’t remember what it is about, or if it had a plot. What I can recall is that it is the first time, and certainly not the last, that I see the red glowing person. It has no eyes, no facial features. It just stands there, as big as any adult, glowing in crimson… and my dream self seems to ignore it.

The entity isn’t really acknowledged, nor does it shock me awake. I just kind of accept its presence and wake up as we descend. The being is the only thing noteworthy about the dream, and I think little of it at the time.

It… would only get worse.

I didn’t have recurring nightmares, nothing that would jolt me up in bed in a cold sweat, but I would wake up in the morning increasingly perturbed by my dreams. The entities multiplied over the next week, up to the point where half or more of the characters in my nightly sleep stories were featureless red things. They’d move around and act out their roles, and I would interact with them, but at the same time the conscious me never heard them say a word.

And then the following week, as I counted the days to my brain scan, the red beings spread like a virus into my waking hours, as well. I don’t know how else to put it. They were slowly, but surely overwriting my memories of real people, infiltrating my priceless internal film reels of past events and places. It was methodical, precise, and malevolent.

Whenever they erased someone, they were gone from every memory, and replaced by a shining red husk devoid of personality. They took one of my childhood friends from me, a favorite teacher, random people I just so happened to remember meeting at work or in a store. They’d vanish from any point in time before or after the first instance of their replacement emerging.

It was terrifying, and I’d eventually try to stop thinking of any memory involving my parents, every other family member, or my friends made over the years, out of fear that I’d lose them next. As everyone knows, it’s impossible to actively try to avoid thinking about something. And there were no assurances that my memories were safe by burying them.

I was self-medicating just to keep my thoughts muted and muddled during the day, and the only people I could talk to about the infestation spreading in my mind were the other three, who were also experiencing it. Alzheimer’s is one of the most feared diseases for its insidious power to erase our memories and personalities. This was comparable, and it made us feel hopeless. If every single person we knew was replaced in our mind, would we lose ourselves? Would we forget everything they ever told us? And would our perception of loved ones within the present be targeted in the next phase? Was all of this terminal? There wasn’t going to be a cure, but we still clung onto the possibility of a treatment, some way to slow the advancement. The problem would be in getting diagnosed and prescribed something actually useful.

At the very least, we had to fill in the blanks and remember what happened to us. But our old phones were useless, never having a chance to back up to the cloud any videos or pictures we took from that deep underground. The only thing that gave us any record of the night in Denver was my old school audio recorder, which wrote to a microcassette. Unfortunately, the audio fades into static as we approach the sanctum, and by the time we open the doors, it becomes nothing but a mess of noise, and then silence until the tape runs out.

Not everything was working against us, though. The brain scans, as costly as they were, actually did end up buying us an indefinite period of time.

All four of us had similar results. Our lobes showed signs of hyperactivity, and we each left our individual machine technicians perplexed and concerned. Based off of what they saw, we should’ve all been having a seizure while we were being scanned. And yet that hadn’t even been one of our symptoms. If this activity was going on 24/7, it’d account for our newfound constant hunger.

Kate, training to become a nurse, prepped us beforehand on what to say and describe to get some meds that had the best chance of being effective. The unexpected scan results had to have helped our cases, as well. We all ended up getting put on a regimen of anti-seizure and antipsychotic pills, along with a few other milder prescriptions tailored to each of us individually.

The drugs helped instantly. The side effects were worth it to suppress the “virus of the consciousness” we had all caught. The pills did nothing for the people in our memories we had already lost to the red-glows, but their progression was greatly slowed.

Our time still remained limited. The damage could only get worse. And the desperate reach out for any possible solution.

Boris was the next person to offer us a lifeline. He contacted us in our server, and without getting into specifics, revealed that he’d been toying with his collection of Neptune’s engine hardware, using the wisdom he had earned from the rabbit and Pennsylvania radio signal incidents. He claimed to have reverse-engineered the engines, somewhat, and could better control how they messed with and implanted memories.

Importantly, he had learned how to use the technology to reveal what has been forgotten. He thought it possible that they could also unlock both repressed and suppressed memories. Our own may have been the latter.

He offered no guarantees, but invited us to try it out at his garage lab in Buffalo, New York—the same one that Liam had visited. Just before everything went to hell for him and he fell into a coma for several years. Unsurprisingly, he was reluctant to return.

We all met once more on a weekend in early May, about three weeks after Denver. The warm weather, Liam told us, was in stark contrast to the blizzard conditions he had experienced on his previous trip. And, with any luck, Fun Bunn wasn’t around and in the mood for round two after ten years.

As an aside for me, getting to see Boris’s lab a second time was worth the flight. It’s full of so many old and obscure gadgets, including the super-rare VCR game system prototype itself. Unplugged and locked away, of course. We weren’t here to play with some post-apocalyptic animal friends today.

“I started on this project while Liam was comatose in the hospital,” Boris explained to us. “I wanted to learn how the rabbit was sending signals through the wires in my walls. Maybe even figure out a way to wake him up.”

“And what if we end up in the hospital next?” Jack fretted.

“I have safeguards in place, and what we’re about to attempt has nothing to do with the rabbit or his game. It’s closer to what me and Kate tried in Pennsylvania, but not nearly as dangerous. Well… you could still consider looking at something your mind might be trying to keep locked up dangerous, I guess.”

“Whatever happened to us, already happened,” Liam stated. “It can’t make our situation any worse. We just have to know.”

With that, Boris took us to an old room in his house proper. An emptied small guest room, it looked like. He had turned it into his new and improved giant Faraday cage, with interlaced copper along the walls, floor, and ceiling. And the walls themselves, past the cage, were soundproofed for the hell of it. It was impressive. If not also expensive and a little on the insane side.

“I’ve cut the power to this room,” Boris continued. “Once you close the door, no electrical signals get in or out. Don’t take your phones in with you. The engine cluster will be battery powered. Without any other signal piggybacking on its waves—no external commands or programs getting in the way—it’ll be just you and the hardware. Meaning that your mind will only have one place to go. Deeper into itself.”

It made sense to us, as much as any of this could. The room would become, in essence, a sensory deprivation chamber. Just us, and our thoughts.

“Oh, and you should do it together,” Boris suggested. “Gradually raise the signal strength and whisper your shared memories to each other as they emerge from the fog. I’ve been testing this for a while, and it works, but… it does take a mental toll. So, take breaks, stick to ten-minute sessions at most—that’s about how long each battery lasts, anyway. And, Liam, if you-know-who is still in there and starts coming after you, you can hit the big power switch on top. Think of it as a panic button.”

Boris wheeled in his invention on a handcart: a bundle of exposed wiring and circuit boards, connected to a big backup battery system like you’d use to keep a computer running in a blackout. Already recalling some bad memories, Kate looked at the array of five engines with trepidation. All I saw were a bunch of PCBs pretty much duct taped into an old hard drive rack.

Accompanying the always ominous engines was an amplifier and a large dial to feed more power into it, with Sharpie’d numbers from 0 to 20. When we asked Boris how high he had gone during his tests, he told us that by the 12^th notch, the headaches became too much for him to endure.

“But at level ten, I was seeing moments of my childhood that I didn’t realize I still had. It just can’t recover entirely forgotten memories. I mean, if it could, you might be able to use it to remember literally every second of your entire life. It’s still amazing technology. But… be careful. Some things are better off forgotten. So, take it slow. Remember, Neptune created this hardware. And who knows if it could ever be replicated.”

“What are we doing, exactly?” one of us wondered.

“Concentrate on recollection, like any other time you’re trying to bring out a faded memory. Gradually increase power if nothing’s coming to you. Focus on the bunker and what you saw down there. I find it helps to piece events together backwards and let the memory rebuild itself. Don’t push too hard—let your subconscious do some of the work. Think of it like… when you’re trying to remember a dream you just had, how sometimes when you recall one element of its story, synapses fire and more of the dream suddenly comes in clearly.

“Take your time, be patient, plan breaks. And during downtime, talk about what’s coming to you and work together to find your truth. Good luck.”

After assuring us that he’d be just a few rooms away all day, Boris closed the door, which also had a segment of the cage attached to it. Once we were isolated from a world full of invisible signals, I reached through the copper to close the window blinds and dim the room to light levels I was used to.

Then we got right into it. Once we were seated on the floor cushions, Liam turned the machine on, steadily dialing up the strength as we took meditative breaths and mostly kept our eyes closed. Jack was already into new age spiritual stuff, so he was the first to feel the effects. On the other hand, I had trouble taking any of this seriously at first, because I kept thinking about how this made us look like we were in a strange cult performing some techno-ritual for a vision quest.

But around a power level of five, things really started to go off. It was in something of a dissociative state, but I was sinking deeper into myself, and random memories from all across my life were rushing by. As the power increased, so did the machine’s hum, and the sharper my worn-out old memories became. I saw parts I didn’t like about myself, stories I had tried to bury.

Past the things I had tried to forget were the things I actually had. By the time we were at a power level of eight, I was seeing the faces of classmates that had disappeared to me long ago. Fights with childhood friends. Pizza and movie nights with my family. Good times, rough times, everything in between. Moments that I had no idea were still recorded within the deepest layers of my mind, locked inside neurons without rhyme or reason, yet must have still made me who I am on some level, even without my awareness of the memories.

All four of us were lost in the weeds at first, overwhelmed by but also curious about the recollections. Even so, we were able to touch on the events in Denver before our first session was done. During our discussion afterward, we realized none of us had recovered anything that had been suppressed just yet, but many smaller details about what happened down there had come into sharper focus. We would just have to keep increasing the signal strength.

We kept at it, burning through Boris’s six backup batteries that would need to recharge overnight. Every session, we’d up the power another notch, talk about what we remembered, maybe get a meal, and then resume. The memories weren’t coming back to us easily or quickly, but we were overcoming whatever force was trying to keep them sealed. We ended the evening at a power level of thirteen, at which point our escape from the bunker was finally coming in clearly. The key portion of that night was still missing, but we knew we could recover it after some rest and recharging of our own.

We resume our journey in the depths as we begin our escape. A few minutes are still unaccounted for—anything that happened in the Sanctum itself. But what we say to each other suggests something nightmarish just went down.

My shout of, “What the hell was that thing?” seems to mark the earliest next point we can all remember. “Everything feels… confused.”

We are running back through the crypt. A subdued chirping alarm sound is on repeat. Our hearts are racing and we’re covered in sweat. We can still feel icy adrenaline and terror in our veins. Something has just royally scared the shit out of us, and yet, we’re already having trouble remembering what it had been.

“No idea! Just run!” Liam pushes out. “It could still be after us!”

There is a demented howl behind us, and we dare not look back. The shriek reverberates throughout the long corridor of death. It’s scratchy, inhuman, and like it’s coming from a monster with many sets of vocal cords.

A garbled and faint digitized voice announces something about security protocols engaging. I expect turrets to drop down from the ceiling, or maybe gas to be released. What we get may have the potential to be worse.

We reach the big room through the door we had cut in half earlier, and at first Jack is the only one remotely clear-headed to notice.

“Shit!” he cries out once we’re already in the main area. “The lights!”

They’ve come on, and are bright enough to overpower the flashlights. Only… they aren’t a normal color. The central hub of the compound has been flooded with a strange, shimmering and prismatic illumination, and of the four of us, only Jack immediately knows what that meant.

“Don’t move. Don’t make a sound,” he says quietly but sharply, and we look up to see that the ceiling has several dozen glowing crystal-like orbs. “This is the same light me and Boris saw in the warehouse.”

“Does that mean one of those killing machines is in here?” I ask, not bothering to mention my perfectly logical theory that the lights could reach into the other, destroyed world where such metal monstrosities now lurk.

“Try not to think about it,” Jack whispers. “Everyone… look at the hallway to the cafeteria. Dark, no lights there. We should shuffle over… very quietly… Unless we hear heavy footsteps… then we run.”

Did Neptune create the lights? Or did they steal them from some other shadowy group that once operated in the east? I instinctively want to ask the others for their opinions, but I manage to keep my mouth shut.

As we stealthily make our way to safety, I keep my mind full of thoughts, and it occurs to me that if the lights really do act as a bridge between worlds, wouldn’t that mean there would have to be another bunker, under another Denver? Would Neptune really build the same place twice, just to give themselves a transdimensional guard dog?

No, that would stretch credibility too much. There’s no way…

We all suddenly freeze in fear upon seeing a large mechanical leg phase right through the bunker’s concrete wall and impact the floor only some forty feet away. Servos whine, hydraulics expel air, and another leg joins it.

Blood thumps through my chest. We’d have no chance against just one of those things from the warehouse, even if we were armed.

“Get ready to run,” Jack orders as his eyes focus on the hallway.

The robotic hunter-killer’s head begins to emerge. I catch a glimpse of its glowing eyes.

But thankfully, only for a split second.

Before it can fully emerge and charge at us, we hear a small explosion go off, muffled by distance and obstruction. We can’t be sure then what would’ve caused it, but looking back on it from the present, we came to realize that no one had been carrying the torch or its fuel tank.

Had we used it to create a small, makeshift incendiary bomb?

With our recent memories already gone at the time, we couldn’t remember what the source of the explosion would have been. All we know is that it saved us, as whatever got destroyed in the blast caused both the deadly lights and the building’s unseen hallucinogenic hardware to shut off.

In darkness again, we check ourselves with our flashlights—and most of us just now seem to realize that we’re in a concerning state.

“We’re all bleeding!” Jack exclaims, wiping away some of the fresh blood under his nose and on his cheek. He is as disturbed as the rest of us by where it is coming from. “What the fuck?!”

“Did the lights do this to us?” Kate gasps out.

“No, I noticed it when we were leaving the crypt,” Liam tells us, not that this is of any comfort. “Does anyone see a door that wasn’t here before?”

As we start looking, emergency lighting kicks in, and we can hear some other power source coming online. It’s unclear why backup generators are only now firing up, but at least the whispers and shadows are gone, and the layer of psychosis that had been pervasive since I first stepped into this place had been lifted. Best of all, the way out has appeared.

It seems impossible that we all would have missed it before, but in the middle of one of the main room’s walls is a wide archway that opens to a very long hallway—almost the length of a football field, by rough estimate. And to erase any doubt, there is a standard lit exit sign above us.

“How is that just… right there?” Kate asks angrily. “We pressed against every inch of these damn walls!”

“Does it matter?” Liam huffs. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

Even if anyone actually wants to stick around and explore a little more, the problem is that the pinkish dangerous lights are slowly turning back on—and they also fill our exit corridor. At their full strength, we’d again be at the mercy of any number of killing machines. Accepting that our most important discovery of this journey has been forgotten, we run as fast as we can down the hallway.

We push our legs hard, and our fear and exhaustion lead to a few trips and stumbles on the way. But we pick each other up and tear through the ridiculous and seemingly endless passageway as our eyes, now accustomed to low light, are once more nearly blinded by the brightening liminal lamps.

At the end of the hall, Jack and Liam pull open the door into the stairwell, and when we all get to the other side, we slam it shut and catch our breaths. Gone unnoticed when it was pitch-black down here, there is now a blinking red light above the door, likely indicating some sort of alarm. On the floor, my glow stick still has a little bit of life left.

“Don’t stop,” Liam urges us. “Keep going. Assume we’re still in danger.”

We do, and race up the stairs no matter how much it hurts. I feel like I’m overheating on the way up, but now I’m wondering if that had something to do with the inexplicable heat in the stairwell that would keep Liam from going back down hours later.

Whether it’s from great physical strain or the confusion from the mental recalibration needed after leaving a twisted reality, a delirium takes hold halfway up the stairs. I’m no longer consciously moving my legs; my body acts on its own as my mind shuts down. Everything blurs, and I don’t make a retrievable memory of getting to the top, or passing out with the others in the place where we’d wake up later that night.

And that was it. Six sessions and dead batteries later, that was all we could remember. To get any further, we’d have to dial up the power even more, and doing so would assuredly have painful side effects. What we’d done so far had already given us pounding headaches and, when it came to processing information and feeling grounded in the present, a fog of confusion.

It was too late to get a hotel, and we were too tired to drive, so against our better judgment, we’d have to spend the night at Boris’s. There were enough beds for everyone when including the couch at the big old house, but despite our host’s insistence that it was safe… I don’t think any of us could shake off the worry that the entity which put Liam in the hospital was still roaming in the wiring. I couldn’t imagine how he felt about staying here one more night. It’s not like he wanted to talk about it with us.

Despite everything, we did manage to get a good night’s sleep and wake up well-rested. Well, mostly. I mean, I did have a strange dream where nothing happened for a long, indefinite period of time… except for a rabbit-like creature just staring at me with an angry expression in some forested park on a moonless night. But other than that, I was feeling fine in the morning.

Turned out the others had similar dreams, with different scenery. I’m not one to talk about dreams or look for meaning in them, but we needed something to talk about at the breakfast table, so we shared. Not that there was much to discuss.

They all had a nightmarish darkness that often crops up in dreams. We stared at the creature that stared back at us, its eyes glowing as it bared its teeth. For Kate, this happened in a hospital room. For Jack, a “vaguely familiar” kitchen. And for Liam, an old car pulled over to the side of an empty highway.

No harm came from the encounter, and we didn’t bring it up with Boris. It was creepy and inexplicable that we’d all have similar dreams, but all we could do was chalk it up as another side effect from using the device.

Liam was resolute on trying one more time with the engine cluster if it meant recovering the most important moments, and told us that we didn’t have to join him today. We all volunteered to press on with him, no matter the danger. We knew we were playing with fire, given what happened here before, but the truth was something each one of us was still determined to see.

We returned to the cage, plugged the machine back into a battery unit, and took some deep breaths before resuming. There was no point in hesitating. As Liam had said: anything we would see was in the past. It already happened. Now we only stood to benefit from learning about our condition. Hopefully.

He turned it on. Then steadily dialed up the power to level fourteen.

We saw nothing new. Head pain was already setting in.

Fifteen. I could see… a red flickering light.

Sixteen. The hum of the engines was loud. I’m reminded of the beginning of Back to the Future, with Marty and the huge speaker and all the sound settings on max. The sheer potential power waiting to be unleashed. But now wasn’t the time to think of my favorite movies. Focus on the sanctum…

Seventeen. We could feel our bones rattling. The air seemed dense with electricity. The room began to fade away, and our reality starts to exist only in the past. Our grasp on the present has slipped, and now it’s as if we’re back in the sanctum. Like we’ve stepped into a time machine to relive the past.

I see something grotesque. It’s squishy, organic. Like a giant stomach. It’s breathing, and it’s on a large stone plinth.

Eighteen. We ask Liam to stop, to at least give us time to adjust. But he knows we can take it. He wouldn’t keep going if he had doubts.

The stomach becomes a blob of amorphous, skin-covered flesh.

Jesus. There are small computer monitors jutting out of it. They glow red. It’s some body horror Cronenberg monstrosity. What comes next is even worse.

“What the hell is that?!” Jack is the first to screech out, as soon as we reach a power level of nineteen.

One after the other, we all see the last thing still alive in the bunker. And with it, a flood of memories, like a blast door keeping back a cosmic horror has just been torn open. There is no need to go any further, or stay any longer. It all comes back to us within seconds. It’s too much. We need time to process.

Liam hits the panic button, and the power to the machine is cut off.

We were back in the now, and at first, all we can do is look at each other in stupefied silence as our bodies tremble. We knew that we’d just remembered everything. We were done with the room. There wasn’t a reason to return to it, or Denver, again.

So… what to do with the rest of the day?

Compare notes and come up with a clear retelling, with the help of beer and Boris’s stash to keep our nerves from fraying. But nothing could keep away the shakes. This… this would be traumatic for a long time. Boris was part of our conversation, acting as an objective archivist whose mind was still intact. He could keep us organized, and ask the questions we didn’t think of.

Finally, we open the door to the sanctum. It is like an unholy church inside. Instead of worshipping Satan or some other demonic being, it’s as if Neptune had been praying to a living amalgam of flesh and electronics. And we are rendered speechless by what we see. We don’t know where to begin. I’ll do my best to describe the scene, but… I still don’t know where to begin.

The room is warm, fairly small, circular with four pillars, has no pews or chairs, and is bathed in a red light. That light comes from the mass atop a stone altar in the center of the room. It is absolutely surreal, and disgusting. A large lump of hairless flesh, about the size—and appearance—of a limbless, headless cow is a nest for five integrated monitors of various sizes. On the screens is the solid red light, and overlayed atop the crimson background on each unit is some kind of… data readout? Thin white vertical lines flash by, flicker in place, or travel from end to end. We are too far away at first to see any finer detail.

“What… the fuck…” one of us mutters, I’m not sure who. Funny, that. Everything else comes in so clearly, but I can’t remember who was the first to say it. They definitely got out what was on all our minds, though.

We are so enamored and disturbed by the flesh computer—which steadily breathes, I’ll remind you—that the collection of skeletons in the room only attracts our attention once we’re slowly walking forward and shatter a few old bones under our feet.

There are dozens of them, all charred black and brittle, and they radiate from the stone centerpiece. The floor is also covered in ash thick enough to almost entirely bury some kind of ornately carved pattern that cuts through stone tile. The people in here must have been burned by temperatures or fires so hot that they didn’t even have a chance to get away. And, for some reason, there isn’t a consensus on what the “worshippers” were doing.

About half seemed to be trying to escape from the flesh machine. The others were crawling towards it. Maybe it’s indicative of the schism inside the group? That, or… something had gone wrong during some crazy ritual.

“Is that… disgusting thing a living computer?” Kate wonders. “What were these people trying to do with it? Let’s just get out of here. This is too much.”

“It might be what’s keeping us down here,” Jack reminds us, and holds up the torch and fuel tank he’d been carrying as he gets an idea. “If it’s… organic, we can burn it. I can turn this into a bomb—we don’t even have to be in here when it goes off. That… thing shouldn’t exist.”

“Liam? What are you thinking?” I ask him. “Come on. You better not want to try and mess with it. You know something bad will happen.”

“You all see something you don’t understand, and your first thought is to kill it,” Liam remarks, surprising us. “Yes, I said kill, because if it’s breathing, it’s probably alive. And then there’s the information it might carry. If we can access it, we could learn… we don’t even know. Everything?”

“Bud. Listen to yourself. Is it getting into your head? Does anything in this room scream ‘good things will happen’ if you do a little browsing on this abomination? Look at the damn keyboard! I think it’s made out of bone!”

“Guys?” Kate timidly speaks up after looking around for a moment. “It’s hard to see in this light, but does it look like the wall is made out of… metal?”

We investigate the circular wall closely together, using the flashlights to filter out the red glow of the room to see its true color. I’m just glad to not have to stare at a pulsating flesh lump computer for a minute.

“This reflective dark bronze… I remember it being on the engine,” Kate says, having seen the hardware up close before. “The alternator part of the circuit board is made of this metal. Why is it coating the wall?”

“Maybe we’re in some sort of resonance chamber?” Jack surmises. “It could keep a signal contained in here, bounce it around…” He jostles the torch and tank. “Liam, please tell me we’re burning it. Don’t be that guy in the movie who goes too far and gets everyone killed.”

“If that’s what you think will happen, then the rest of you can go. I have to try,” Liam proclaims, and pulls over the bulky keyboard, the only one we see connected to the organic machine. Its wire seems… oddly normal.

I get a look at it, and the letters have a strange, atypical placement. But, compared to it being made of bone instead of plastic, that isn’t so bad.

The other three of us stay. Of course we do. When have we run away whenever we find more of the bizarre shit Neptune brought into the world?

We try to maintain some kind of safe distance, even as we lean in to see the biggest of the little CRT screens… that are sticking out of a stomach. Liam presses a key, and the data feed on the central monitor fades into what looks like a DOS menu from the old days, only it’s against a red background. A company or developer isn’t mentioned.

Still showing some caution, Liam studies each screen for any changes before he tries any commands or selects one of the text menu’s options. System Check. Execute. Restart, Shutdown, Settings. It’s basic and simple, predating a user interface. There are only 256 kilobytes of RAM, 124 of which are already used by the system. You’d think they could stuff more memory into a respiring sack of flesh… Unbelievable. Even now, I’m still trying to be funny. I’m looking at enough nightmare fuel to last a lifetime, and I’m thinking up jokes.

There is one word on the flickering red screen that stands out, and it strikes Jack in particular. Its text is bigger and it hovers above the menu, so I thought it was the name of the operating system at first.

“Fonsanimarum…” Jack murmurs. “That sounds Latin.”

“All right…” Liam exhales sharply. “Let’s try a system check…”

“The shutdown option also sounds good,” I mention. “I don’t know how deep your DOS knowledge is, but I have a feeling none of the prompts we’re used to are going to work. What if this thing doesn’t even have files on it?”

“I should at least be able to find out that much.”

Selecting the system check clears the screen, which then displays nothing but a progress bar. When it reaches the halfway point, it stops moving. The monitor seems frozen, and we impatiently wait for it to resume. Instead, the screen glitches out and displays garbled text before the entire system crashes. No one moves as the room goes completely dark. In the blackness, we can hear our hearts thumping—and the breathing of the machine.

After a few seconds, the computer reboots on its own and the monitors again fill the room with red light. While waiting for the OS to load, us spectators suddenly notice that we aren’t quite as… alone as before.

“Liam…” Kate murmurs, her eyes showing fear.

“I know,” he pants, “I see them. I’ll shut it down. Just have to wait…”

There are shadows of people on the walls, hundreds of them. We don’t see their eyes, but we can feel them watching us. Their whispers are loud. We group up more tightly in the center of the room, to give them as much distance as we can. The shadows have to be hallucinations; light isn’t even coming from enough sources and angles to cast all of them.

“I hear them,” Jack mutters. “Liam. Let’s just destroy it. Please!”

I hear discernible words, too. Things like, “You don’t know where you are… You are lost…” and, “Give us life… We were promised…”

In all its analog glory, the menu returns, and Liam at last appears to give up his quest by selecting the shutdown option.

Instead, the screen goes blank, and a single word appears: “Invalid.”

“Come on!” Liam now also begins to panic. “Something has to work!”

He hits escape to go back to the menu, and starts trying commands. He isn’t used to the keyboard layout, and the loud clacks of the keys come slowly as he needs time to find each letter. He tries traditional prompts. He creates his own. He tries to browse for files a few times between his shutdown attempts.

“Animarum…” Jack continues to think aloud in the meanwhile, his voice cracking as the shadows grow in number. “That’s… soul? No… plural…”

“Liam, what did you do?” Kate asks him, and I turn my eyes back to the screen to see that it’s changed again, this time into a simple yes or no option.

---

RUN

Y/N

---

“I don’t know what happened, it just showed up after another one of my bad commands,” Liam says. “Shit. I’m not sure what to do. There’s no context.”

“Don’t second-guess it,” Jack tells him. “You’re thinking it’s a riddle, aren’t you? It could run a script, or let us run away? It’s a computer system; it’s literal. That machine running a program is probably the last thing we want.”

It sounds rational, but Liam still hesitates a moment longer before hitting the ‘N’ key, and we all see him do it. Not that it matters. Because, once again, the bionic brain or something connected to it is what’s really in control.

A giant verbose text dump fills the screen, scrolling too fast to read.

“I didn’t do that!” Liam exclaims. “You were watching!”

Kate has other concerns, and is looking around frantically. “Where’s the door? I can’t find it. Does anyone know when it disappeared?”

And Jack is lost in his own world of ancient language dictionaries. “Fons is… Spring? Fountain… or source… I think it could be all three?”

It feels like I’m the only person still watching the monitors, all five of them executing what seems like an impossibly long code for their era. And then… I swear I see, for just a split second, eyes made of text on each monitor, looking at us. I try to get the others’ attention, but by the time they turn back to the screens, they’ve all reverted to blank reds. The program is now running.

I’m not sure when it appeared, but we notice that the machine itself now has a shadow casting on part of the wall behind it. Its silhouette is well defined, and the figures that had been watching us are nowhere to be seen.

The shadow version of the fleshy computer, and only its shadow, begins to wriggle as something pushes its way out from inside of it, as if it were a soft egg. I want to run. We all must want to claw our way out of here, to find and break open the set of doors that had just been concealed from our minds. But I can’t move my legs. They’re either paralyzed, or I’m being enthralled by some demonic entity, or… I’m simply too afraid to command my muscles.

We watch as a creature tears its way out of the computer’s shadow with its gnarled claws. Its form lets out an audible shriek into the red-lit room, and its head emerges to reveal two long, rigid ears that make it… look like a rabbit.

“No… No, no, no…” Liam starts having a breakdown. “Not again. I’m sorry. I never should’ve brought you all here.”

“It’s all in our heads!” Jack shouts. “It’s not real! The machine is just… Kate! You have the crowbar—destroy the god damn thing!”

“I… I can’t move,” she murmurs meekly.

The creature begins to rapidly grow in size. Its bones and limbs crack and bend unnaturally, and it’s like it’s being painfully forced into a certain shape. The shadow soon shifts into more of a human form, and it stands upright. It twitches sporadically as it makes strange, agonizing sounds. Its existence is pain.

It’s all just signals, hallucinations, I try to convince myself. And even then, that thing is still only a shadow. Get out of my head, get out of my head…

The silhouette suddenly vanishes in the blink of an eye. But there’s no relief to be felt, as the door hasn’t reappeared. The entity is still with us. It’s only a matter of time before it emerges. Will it attack? And from where? If I could just move… and destroy the god damn misshapen machine…

The creature reappears in front of us. Our bodies should have been icy cold with fear and adrenaline, but instead, we’re all burning up, like we have raging fires inside as an otherworldly monstrosity examines us.

We’re all dead. It’s only a question of how painful it will be, how long it will take. It’s going to kill us like it did everyone else calling this room their grave.

“W-what… are you…” Liam manages to push out.

The monster’s head snaps to face him, and then it speaks. It’s like hearing an edict from a divine being, or Lovecraftian god. Its voice is deep and powerful, strong enough to feel in our bones and inflict pain on our ears.

“I can see inside of you… They await… a proper vessel…”

“Who? Who are they?” Jack asks weakly.

“You will… know soon…” it tells us, in booming words that are hard to hear and discern, but still reach our minds through a kind of telepathy.

It lurches forward, and we still can’t move much of anything other than our eyes. We watch as, without any warning, it impales Liam with a pair of claws, right through his forehead. He only lets out a gasp.

I fully expect him to lifelessly drop to the ground, and yet… there’s no blood. He convulses a bit, but stays standing while—my best guess—the creature surveys his mind. The mental probe lasts only a few seconds, and the claws are retracted, leaving trauma, but no visible wounds.

“Guilt…” the being’s unmoving mouth gives a judgment.

“Liam! Shit, are you okay?” Jack calls out to him.

He stammers back, “I-I… I don’t know… what it…”

The creature slithers over to me next, its muscles wriggling in unsettling ways beneath its torn, raggedy gray skin. I want to be brave and strong, and yell and curse at it or something, but I don’t. I can only stand there, and would probably piss myself if I actually had anything to drink recently. I look at the place where its eyes should be almost pleadingly. It doesn’t do me any good.

Without giving me a chance to prepare, it sticks two long claws deep into my consciousness. Unexpectedly, and mercifully… it doesn’t actually even hurt. It’s more like it had just nullified my feelings. Sight, sound, and any pain. For a few seconds, I become pretty much just a brain in a jar, left only with my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But they’re all scrambled. They become such a mess that my entire being is reduced to red television static, chaos. Or maybe it’s more apt to say that I’m seeing a representation of the billions of neurons in my head, all firing at once.

I think… the entity had accessed all of my organic coding, translating my life into data it could understand. But I can’t know for sure. Whatever it did, I had never felt so violated and helpless.

“Guilt…” the monster repeats without emotion once it finishes its probe.

Is it angry? Satisfied? Aren’t we all guilty in our own ways? What the hell is it doing to us, and what is it after? Is it even… really judging us?

I only hear it do the same to Kate and Jack; I’m not watching anymore. No, I’m just staring at the floor impotently. Shit, at least Liam displayed some chivalry, calling the abomination a bastard and ordering it not to touch Kate. I get it, human nature and all that, but, like… I don’t think our words are going to reach this thing, bud. Much less get it to back off.

“Guilt… Guilt…” it drones on.

In my dazed state, I wonder if it’s hungry. Maybe guilt is delicious and it’s been so long since it’s had a nice meal. With all of my baggage and regrets, I could probably give it a filling dinner.

I gaze back up to see it return to Liam, and creepily stroke his head like he’s a good little pet. Wait… does it need us for something? That almost feels even worse than it just melting our minds, or whatever it can do.

Somehow, Liam’s determination to fight back or save us is strong enough to get his body to move again, however briefly and weakly. He manages to reach out and, in an effort to push away the entity’s arm, ends up pulling off some of its barely-attached skin. We all see it happen; we will remember it later when we use Boris’s contraption. And yet the skin disappears before it hits the floor, and then more regrows over the exposed glowing muscle in an instant.

“What… are you…” Liam exhales as his body freezes up once more.

The monster grumbles a simple answer, “… Instructions…”

It’s uncomfortable to think about, and sounds borderline impossible, but if the computer is some amalgam of life and machine, an advancement of what they did to Central… could that mean that the rabbit is a mix of programming and… a soul? Neptune’s technology was and still is beyond full comprehension.

Done toying with and examining us, the program made flesh at last gets it over with, and executes its final commands.

“You will sustain them…” are the last words it says to us.

I suddenly feel something sharp and burning hot, and look down to see two large claws wrapping around each of my arms. I find that I’m not alone; the rabbit has created copies of itself, and now there is one behind each of us. The pointed end of the tuning forks going through their heads are at the back of our own. We all know what’s coming next. Not the why or how we got into this strangest of situations, but it’s obvious what will happen.

Liam starts to apologize to us again, only to be cut off the instant we’re each impaled.

What follows is… nearly indescribable. But I’ll try.

Visually, I’ve returned to the world of red static. Only now it’s being heavily distorted and becoming… denser? The rest of the experience is…

How to put it? This might be a deep cut for some of you, but it’s like my mind has just been flooded with Stage 5 of the music album Everywhere at the End of Time. Layered on top of itself a hundred times. If you’ve never listened, imagine several stadiums worth of crowds, talking over a dozen concurrent concerts and symphonies. I was hearing thousands of voices, expressing every emotion, and a chaotic mess of all the world’s music at once. Nothing is defined, and it’s impossible to hold onto any single transient piece of sound.

There are feelings, too. Endless emotions, mostly anger and fear. The thoughts are too tangled up to discern, though there are concentrated standouts that I can hold onto, if just for a fraction of a second. Despair, yet also newfound hope. And the burning… My skin is on fire, and I’d tear it off if I could move—anything to rid myself of the scorching pain.

But then it’s over as soon as it began. The universe of red chaos, and every noise, disappears. Every sensation normalizes… except for the burning. I might as well be a few feet away from the sun.

My eyes open, and I’m back in the room with the others. We’re groaning in pain and our heads are pounding. I feel warm liquid dripping down my face and see blood on my hands. Ahead of us is the rabbit. Or what’s left of it.

It still stands, but as a lifeless, dry skeleton. I can see the now rusted tuning fork inside its skull, just past its hollow eye sockets. The computer reboots once again, and when the red light of its screens returns, the remains of the living program are nowhere to be seen. Also gone: the white vertical lines on the monitors, the system menu, and the whispering shadows on the walls.

Even so, the machine continues to breathe, and the crushing sense of foreboding remains. We have no way of knowing what just happened to us, but incredibly, we seem to be alive. If not left cursed or scarred in some way yet to be seen. I am overtaken by an overpowering feeling that it was too late to fix anything or make a difference, but even after all of that, it’s Jack who persists.

He is the first to recover a little from the experience we just shared, and without saying a word, he jams the gas tank into the flesh sack. It appears to squirm in response. He then does the same with the torch, keeping its valve on a low flow and positioning it to gradually heat up the fuel. He listlessly asks Kate how long it might take to incinerate the computer, with any luck freeing us and keeping anyone else from falling victim to this place.

She has no idea; she’s never turned a torch into a bomb before. The doors have reappeared, so we run back into the crypt as our bodies ache and muscles spasm. Just for the record, I think it took about three minutes for the tank to explode. We weren’t there to see it, but I imagine it sprayed fuel all over the room and turned it into an oven.

From there, as our memories of the sanctum quickly begin to fade before we can even talk about it, we escape to the parking garage, pass out, and wake up with important moments wiped from memory. Things we really might’ve been better off forgetting, if not for the fact that our lives were on the line.

Problem is… I’m not sure that remembering our time in the sanctum can help us much. What were we supposed to do with that nightmarish knowledge?

So, after all of that, we found ourselves in vastly different surroundings: Boris’ kitchen breakfast table, warm and lit brightly by the sun coming in from the windows. We weren’t sure where to go from here. We had put the pieces together, and now our host was as contemplative as the rest of us.

“Guilt… The ‘fonsanimarum…’ What’s it all mean?” Boris eventually murmured to break the silence. “And more importantly, what do we do now, to help you four? You told me the meds were working… but for how long?”

“Who knows…” Jack sighed. “They’ve put me in such a strange mental state, I’m honestly not sure if I only imagined all of what we just discussed.”

“It was real,” Liam said. “I’ve never remembered anything so clearly, once that device pulled the memories out of us. I also wonder about the heat, that kept me from going back down… Maybe it was also in my mind? Either way, now that I know everything that happened in that place, I’d never want to return.”

“Look, you guys have been through a lot,” Boris gave an understatement. “Take it easy the rest of the day, and I’ll drive you back to the airport tonight. Give me time to go through these notes, and maybe I’ll have a few really early theories about all of this in a few days.”

We were tired, and our voices were almost gone after an hour’s long group retelling. The others stood from their chairs to go find something soft in the house to collapse into for a while, but I couldn’t let things go just yet.

“Wait. Please,” I spoke up. “I know I come up with crazy ideas, but I have to get this out while it’s fresh. I didn’t say much during our talk, because I spent most of it thinking about everything. Hear me out. Some of this might even make a little bit of sense.”

They seemed okay with again entertaining my wild speculation about alternate realities and world lines, and retook their seats. They were probably thinking that this would take a while, or I’d start rambling. Truth was, I had really only focused on one aspect of our journey into the depths. Maybe the most important aspect.

“I think we were lured down there,” I began. “Subconsciously, since the very beginning… when we each happened to get too close to the device that put Kiddie Land into the heads of any kid that had—or would suffer trauma. Maybe this pull was once more powerful, or could’ve been if Neptune hadn’t collapsed and did manage to set up a network of engines across the country.”

“You’re saying we were always being drawn to that place?” Liam replied.

“It’s probably not the place. The Latin thing—or the rabbit entity itself. It just happened to be buried or abandoned below Denver. It was a ‘weak signal.’”

Kate wondered, “It’s too strange that no one seemed to have been through the door at the bottom of the stairs for decades, until us… Is it possible that only people who had already been ‘primed’ by an engine experience could perceive the entrance to begin with…?”

I took a deep breath before getting into the crux of the matter. “Jack, you said that the computer system’s title translates into a ‘well’ or ‘spring’ of souls. I don’t know how you guys think about some spiritual world or afterlife, or if ghosts or even souls exist. But what if… there is a reality where the soul definitely exists, or is more quantifiable or tangible. Stronger.

“And what if, whether through time travel, or parallel universes, or some other quantum event we don’t understand, that machine in the sanctum either stored the spirits of the deceased from a world of atomic fire, or, maybe… acted as a gateway to let them in from their reality. If the rabbit entity was a living program, then its purpose could have been… to… well…”

“You’re thinking it… injected someone’s… soul into us?” Liam flatly finished my thought, without showing overt skepticism.

“No. I think it put hundreds, maybe thousands of them into us. We all felt their thoughts. The heat and fire… And now… they’re gradually taking over. People in our memories and dreams give them someone to latch onto, letting them feel alive again. Every person they replaced—the ones that glow red—is one of them now. I know this is way out there, but if I’m anywhere near right… I don’t see how all of those individuals would settle for sharing. If they’re not already, they’re going to compete. For control. For… a full consciousness.”

I sat back in the chair, as the others stared at me. For the first time, it seemed like they were taking my ideas into serious consideration. I was actually hoping that they wouldn’t; that my usual crazy talk wouldn’t take. I would hate to be onto something. If we had reached the terminus of all of Neptune’s plans, was there no going back? Were we going to lose everything?

I have to hold onto hope, that this can be fixed. Somehow.

“Even… even if it’s true…” Liam said after clearing his throat, “There’s one more thing I have to mention. After we saw inside our minds and all that red chaotic static—did the rest of you have a feeling of crushing guilt? It’s like I’ve done something terrible. Yet despite what we did, I still have no memory of it.”

Yes, it turned out we all felt that way. But whatever it was we had done in the past and buried deep, don’t the guilty deserve a second chance? Maybe we could find redemption. If we were able to remember. If we had the time.

Amid our pensive silence, the ticks of the old clock hanging above the kitchen sink became loud. We were still trapped in the darkness of that crypt.