T-015 Replay room

Threshold Institute · Case file T-015

Number

T-015 in the catalogue

Kind

Room

Class

Class I: harmless while it is left alone

Found

Year 21, month 10, day 1

Where found

The old canteen of the sealed level, closed since year 20

Status

Unchanged since the breach; count the figures before you count yourself alone

Now

At the lab and in the rift

Part

Part II: The rooms turn

Containment procedures

The canteen is sealed and numbered. Anyone who must enter T-015 counts the people they see in it before they go in and again at every turn, against the replay log kept at the door. The rule written by Mara Okafor after T-015 stands for every room on the sealed level and, later, beyond T-001: in a room that shows people, count them, and shoot the one that does not belong.

Description

A room that plays back the people who walked it: their faces and their steps, along the exact paths they walked, again and again. The replays see no one and cannot be touched; a hand goes through them and they walk on. A real creature can walk among them, and does, unseen until it turns out of a path.

Discovery

On the first day of the tenth month of year 21 the night guards reported staff in the closed canteen: a cook at the counter, two technicians at a table, and Tomas Rehn walking the room with a rope and chalk. Rehn was asleep upstairs. He watched himself measure the canteen in year 15 (see T-011); Jonas Berg watched himself drink coffee there at nineteen. On the eleventh night one of the figures turned out of its path. It was a stalker (see T-002), real, that had come in among the replays where no one looked at it twice. It took a guard, Ingvar Tell, before Okafor's team brought it down. The Institute learnt that a room's tricks could hide a threshold's creature, and that the habit its staff had built over twenty years, to trust what they knew, was what the room used against them.

Addenda

Addendum T-015-A

incident log, Year 21, month 10, day 11, kept by M. Okafor

02:20. Replays in the canteen: seven. Count matches the log.

02:41. Count: eight. Tell went in to look for the eighth.

02:42. Eighth figure turned off the cook's path toward Tell. Replays do not turn. It blinked. Two shots from the door. Tell down.

02:44. Stalker down by the counter. Replays still walking round it and over Tell. They did not stop for either of them.

Addendum T-015-B

note, Dr S. Kader, Year 21, month 11

I recorded T-015 for a month. Among the replays are people I cannot name, in clothes that are not ours, walking paths that start at the canteen's far wall where no door is. I think they walked this room on the other side of T-001. Filed with my other thoughts, which Director Lind now reads.

What followed

Two years later the Institute found figures that did not walk at all (see T-016).

Previous fileT-014 Upside-down roomPart II: The rooms turn Next fileT-016 The watchersPart II: The rooms turn

In the file

• People: Tomas Rehn, Mara Okafor, Jonas Berg, Dr Selma Kader, Director Hanne Lind and Ingvar Tell.
• Places: The sealed level.

In the game

The note you find in the game:

Year 21, month 10, day 1. Found in the old canteen of the sealed level, closed since year 20, when the night guards reported staff in it: a cook at the counter, two technicians at a table, and Tomas Rehn walking the room with a rope and chalk while Rehn slept upstairs. On the eleventh night one of the figures turned out of its path and took the guard Ingvar Tell.

A sealed room on the lab's lower level where pale, flickering figures walk again the paths of those who walked it before, at the pace they walked them, fade at the end and begin again. A visitor who returns finds their own earlier steps among them, and the last team of this Institute that walked it walks it still.

The figures are harmless: they hear nothing, see no one, make no sound and stop for nothing. One of them is not a figure. A researcher who turned stands among them as pale as they are, until it is hurt, leaves the room or comes for whoever is watching. Found behind a warning plate that bears its code and a figure trailing faded copies of itself.

Status: unchanged since the breach; count the figures before you count yourself alone.

Today it is found at the lab and in the rift.