Chapter 16 - No Way Back
The monitor showed the gray-coated figure securing the hatch with deliberate, almost practiced movements.
He never looked toward the camera.
He behaved as though he knew exactly where every lens was positioned.
Because perhaps he did.
When the hatch locked into place, every emergency light in the control room shifted from white to deep crimson.
A mechanical voice echoed through hidden speakers.
"Surface access disabled."
Rick barked sharply.
The sound bounced through the enormous chamber before disappearing into distant hallways.
No response came.
Only silence.
The realtor hurried to the nearest terminal.
"Maybe we can unlock the doors."
She pressed several keys.
The screen remained black.
Then it suddenly illuminated.
No operating system.
No desktop.
Only a blinking cursor.
Words slowly appeared without anyone typing.
WELCOME, OBSERVER.
Below it another sentence formed.
YOUR EVALUATION HAS OFFICIALLY BEGUN.
The elderly woman whispered, "That message never appeared unless someone new arrived."
I looked around the room.
Rows upon rows of abandoned desks stretched into darkness.
Coffee cups still rested beside dusty keyboards.
Pens lay exactly where someone had dropped them decades ago.
It looked less like an abandoned laboratory...
and more like everyone had simply stood up one afternoon and vanished.
Rick wandered toward one workstation in the far corner.
Hidden beneath the desk lay an old cassette recorder.
The batteries should have been dead years ago.
Instead, it clicked on the moment I picked it up.
Static hissed through the speaker.
Then a frightened man's voice emerged.
"If you're hearing this... they never shut the facility down."
The recording crackled.
"My name is Dr. Samuel Pierce. We weren't studying families..."
Heavy breathing interrupted him.
"We were studying observers."
The tape skipped several seconds.
"The people inside the houses were never the experiment."
Another loud burst of static.
"We were."
The recording ended abruptly.
Every computer monitor in the room flickered simultaneously.
Each displayed a live image of us standing there.
But something was wrong.
On every screen...
One extra person stood among us.
None of us turned around.
May you like
Because none of us wanted to discover who was standing behind us.
---
