The camera clicked on with a sharp digital chirp, the autofocus motor whirring as it tried to find purchase in the gloom. The date stamp in the corner read October 14, 2024, glowing a neon green against the grain of the night vision.
“Mic check. One, two. You getting this, Marcus?”
“Loud and clear, Alex. Just keep the lens cap off this time.”
The footage showed a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, vibrating slightly in the cold wind of a Rust Belt autumn. Beyond it loomed the monolithic concrete shell of the old Halloway Data Center, a building that had been abandoned since the dot-com bubble burst, yet somehow still hummed with a low-frequency vibration that rattled teeth.
Alex and Marcus were typical American urban explorers—mid-twenties, clad in North Face jackets and armed with heavy-duty flashlights and a dangerous amount of curiosity fueled by Reddit conspiracy threads. They weren’t looking for ghosts. They were looking for “Project Slipstream,” a defunct government experiment rumored to have taken place in the sub-basements of this very facility.
“According to the forums,” Alex narrated, panning the camera across the graffiti-stained concrete, “this place wasn’t just a server farm. It was a testing ground for ‘quantum dimensional translocation.’ Whatever that means.”
“It means don’t touch the glowing green goo,” Marcus joked, cutting the bolt on the side gate. “Ladies first.”
They slipped inside. The air instantly changed. The crisp autumn breeze died, replaced by a stale, recycled atmosphere that smelled of ozone and dust.
I. The Loop
They found the stairwell behind a heavy steel fire door on the ground floor. It was industrial, painted a sterile, institutional gray. A faded sign on the wall read STAIRWELL B – ACCESS TO ALL LEVELS.
“We need sub-level 4,” Marcus said, his voice echoing too loudly in the concrete shaft.
They began to descend. The rhythm of their boots on metal grates was the only sound. Clang, clang, clang.
After ten minutes, Alex stopped. He pointed the camera at the wall. A crude drawing of an eye had been spray-painted in red.
“We passed that,” Alex whispered. “Five minutes ago.”
“Don’t be stupid. Graffiti looks the same everywhere.”
“No, look.” Alex zoomed in. “I scratched the paint with my key right next to it. The scratch is there.”
Marcus frowned, shining his light down the center of the banister. The beam swallowed the darkness, but revealed no bottom. He shone it up. No top. Just an endless spiral of gray railing and concrete.
“Let’s test it,” Marcus said, pulling a baseball from his jacket pocket—a habit he had for testing depth in abandoned silos. He dropped it through the gap in the stairs.
They watched it fall. One second. Two seconds.
Thump.
The ball didn’t hit the bottom. It hit Marcus on the shoulder, falling from above.
“Okay,” Marcus breathed, his face pale in the LCD screen’s glow. “That’s physics broken. We’re in a loop.”
“The transcript,” Alex muttered, panic rising in his chest. “Remember the video? The endless stairs. It doesn’t matter if we go up or down.”
Suddenly, a sound echoed from deep within the spiral—not above or below, but everywhere at once. It was a wet, guttural growl, overlaid with the sound of grinding metal.
“Run,” Alex whispered.
They scrambled down, vaulting steps, legs burning. The scenery didn’t change. Gray walls. Concrete steps. The red eye on the wall passed them again and again, a strobe light of madness. The growl grew louder, a mechanical predator closing the distance.
“There!” Marcus yelled.
A door. Not the fire door they entered through, but a wooden door with a brass handle, completely out of place in the industrial shaft. It looked like a door to a suburban bedroom.
With the mechanical screeching right behind them, Alex kicked the door open. They tumbled through, slamming it shut and collapsing against it.
Silence. Absolute, suffocating silence.
II. The Mall of Lost Time
They weren’t in a basement.
Alex pushed himself up, the camera lens adjusting to the wash of fluorescent light. They were standing in the middle of a shopping mall. But not a modern mall—this was a pristine, untouched relic of 1998.
Neon lights buzzed overhead. The floor was a checkerboard of polished white and teal tiles. To their left was a Suncoast Video; to their right, a KB Toys. A fountain in the center of the atrium sprayed crystal clear water, the gentle splash echoing like a gunshot in the emptiness.
“What is this?” Marcus asked, his voice trembling. “Is this… purgatory?”
“It’s liminal,” Alex said, the camera shaking in his grip. “A transition space. But it feels… heavy.”
They walked past the storefronts. The shelves were stocked. The food court smelled of fresh pretzels and Sbarro pizza, but there wasn’t a single person. No workers. No shoppers. Just the oppressive feeling of nostalgia weaponized into a trap. It felt like a memory of a Tuesday afternoon that never ended.
“It’s peaceful,” Marcus said, his eyes glazing over as he looked at a display of N64 games. “Maybe we just stay here. Grab some pretzels. Wait it out.”
“No,” Alex grabbed his arm. “Look at the shadows.”
Under the bright artificial lights, the shadows in the corners of the store weren’t behaving correctly. They were stretching, reaching out like spilled ink.
From the darkened entrance of a department store at the far end of the hall, a figure emerged. It looked like a mascot costume—a giant, grinning bear—but its proportions were wrong. The arms were too long, dragging on the tiled floor. Its eyes were wide, unblinking plastic discs.
It didn’t walk; it glided, friction-less.
“Run!” Alex screamed again.
They bolted through the food court. The “mascot” let out a sound that wasn’t a roar, but a distorted audio clip of a sitcom laugh track, slowed down to a demonic baritone. HA. HA. HA.
They sprinted toward the Emergency Exit signs. Alex shoved the crash bar. The door flew open.
They didn’t step outside into the night air. They fell.
III. The Slide Rooms
They tumbled out of a yellow plastic tube, landing on soft, multi-colored foam mats.
Alex groaned, checking the camera. The lens was cracked, spiderwebbing the view, but it was still recording. He looked around.
They were in a colossal, cavernous space that resembled a McDonald’s PlayPlace expanded to the size of a cathedral. Huge, interlocking plastic tubes—red, blue, yellow—wove through the air like the intestines of a clown. The walls were painted with crude clouds and smiling suns that seemed to watch them.
“Project Slipstream,” Alex whispered, spotting a clipboard lying on the foam floor. He picked it up. The document was stamped CLASSIFIED.
Subject has entered Dimension X-17. Instructions: Descend headfirst. Do not communicate with anomalies.
“Marcus?” Alex called out.
“Up here!”
Marcus was climbing a net of webbing toward a glowing green “EXIT” sign suspended in the air near a blue slide.
“Marcus, wait! The signs are lies. I read about this. They trap you!”
“It’s an exit, Alex! I can feel the breeze!” Marcus yelled, reaching for the ledge.
As Marcus pulled himself up, the blue slide next to him shuddered. A massive, bulbous shape squeezed out of the tube. It looked like a Daddy Longlegs spider, but the size of a minivan, and instead of a spider’s head, it had a human-like face with oversized, watering eyes.
“Where are you going, little traveler?” the spider-thing asked. Its voice was wet and sounded like a child trying to deepen their voice.
“Marcus, don’t talk to it!” Alex screamed.
Marcus froze, staring at the creature. “I… I’m going home.”
“Home is gone,” the creature giggled. “Only the slide remains. Down is the only way out.”
The creature lunged. It was impossibly fast. Marcus screamed as a spindly leg wrapped around his waist. He was dragged not into the creature’s maw, but into the slide.
“Alex!” Marcus’s voice Dopplered away as he was sucked down the plastic tube. Whoosh.
“No!” Alex scrambled up the netting, but the creature turned its weeping eyes toward him.
“Another player?”
Alex didn’t think. He threw himself into the nearest opening—a red spiral slide that seemed to go down vertically.
He slid for what felt like hours. The friction burned his elbows. The static electricity made his hair stand on end. The darkness of the tube was total, broken only by the red recording light of his camera. He was crying, sobbing Marcus’s name.
The tube ended abruptly.
IV. The Pool Rooms
Splash.
The water was warm. Uncomfortably warm, like bathwater that had been sitting for twenty minutes.
Alex surfaced, gasping for air, the camera held high above his head. He waded to a tiled ledge and pulled himself out, coughing.
He stood up and panned the camera around.
He was in a vast, indoor aquatic complex. But there were no deck chairs, no diving boards, no lifeguards. Just miles of white ceramic tiles and turquoise water. The architecture was nonsensical—pillars rising from the water to a ceiling that was hidden in shadow, pools that connected via flooded hallways, staircases that led into deep ends.
The lighting was dim, a sickly halogen yellow that hummed.
The silence here was different than the mall. It was heavy. Damp. The sound of dripping water echoed from unseen corners. Drip. Drip. Drip.
“Marcus?” Alex whispered. The name died in the humid air.
He began to walk, his wet sneakers squeaking on the pristine tile. This was the deepest level of the nightmare. The anger and adrenaline of the chase were gone, replaced by a crushing, profound sadness. It was the feeling of a childhood party that had ended hours ago, leaving you waiting for a parent who would never arrive.
He walked for hours. He found a room where the water was dark red, lit by a single underwater light. He found a hallway that stretched for a mile, ankle-deep in water.
He found a window.
He rushed to it, wiping the condensation away.
Outside, there was no city. No sky. Just more windows, looking into more pool rooms, stretching out infinitely like a fractal. In the window across the way, he saw a figure.
It was him.
He waved. The figure waved back, delayed by a second.
“It’s not a reflection,” Alex sobbed into the camera microphone. “It’s… it’s just more me.”
He sat down against a tiled pillar, his energy spent. The terror had hollowed him out.
“Project Slipstream,” he mumbled, staring into the lens. “They didn’t build a teleporter. They built a blender for reality. The stairs… the nostalgia… the slides… it’s all just filters. Keeping us distracted.”
He looked at the water. It was perfectly still, glassy and inviting.
“I think I see the bottom,” Alex said softly. “There’s a drain down there. A big one.”
He stood up. He set the camera down on the dry tile, pointing it toward the pool.
“If you find this footage,” Alex said, his voice flat, devoid of hope, “don’t come looking. The exit signs are lies. The nostalgia is a trap. The only way out… is through the drain.”
Alex stepped to the edge of the pool. He didn’t jump. He simply stepped forward, letting gravity take him. He slipped into the water with barely a splash.
The camera continued to record.
It recorded the stillness of the water. It recorded the hum of the lights. It recorded the faint sound of wet footsteps approaching from behind the camera.
A shadow fell over the lens. A long, spindly hand, black as void and trembling, reached out and pressed the STOP button.
Epilogue: The upload
Video uploaded: October 15, 2024 User: [deleted] Views: 14
Comments:
User_88: Fake. The CGI on the spider was mid. Nostalgia_Freak: Does anyone recognize that mall? I swear I went there in ’99. TruthSeeker: Look at the timestamp at the end. It jumps to 2055. Slipstream_Admin: [This comment has been removed by the content moderator.]
The algorithm churned. The video was buried beneath cat memes and gaming highlights. But in a dark room in a government facility, a server rack hummed, archiving the footage in a folder labeled Subject 8,942: Transition Complete.
And somewhere, in the spaces between spaces, the water rippled.
