Amy must have been less squeamish than I am about undressing a corpse. Or maybe she just happened upon the body after having spent much more time in the rooms than I have. John Mason is in the corner of the room between two entryways wearing only a t-shirt and underwear—could she not go further, or didn’t she see any use in those items? The body is probably in between Amy and Frederick in terms of decomposition. He was tall and had brown hair, but it is difficult to say more about him except that it appears he was a dog owner. The reddish-brown fur with a white collar clings to the skeletal mummy of the canine corpse resting next to him. There do not seem to be any signs of predation on John’s body, so probably the dog died first. It also does not look like the man ate the dog as the body is lying intact as if it died in its sleep. I wonder if they found the food Amy wrote about. Maybe it wasn’t nutritionally sufficient for a dog, and it died first, or the man put it out of its misery, because it was starving. I turn away from the corpses; I can see the writing on the wall.

  Three walls in this room have entryways; the fourth is covered in columns of blue ink text. I walk closer to see what Amy wrote.

  I have been here in these yellow rooms for three months. The first week was the hardest. There was no food, and I could only drink by finding a leaking sprinkler and cupping my hands under it. After a week, I found a special room with doors that provides a nutritious protein smoothie of some kind. Physically, I feel okay having survived by drinking this for months but having only this day after day is wearing on me. If you arrive here not having found any food, here are directions to that room. Looking at this wall, turn to your right and follow these directions with the numbers representing the number of rooms before the next turn. Forward... .

  The instructions to return to the room where Amy’s body is are given. They seem to match in reverse the route I took, but here she uses forward and backward instead of up and down. Unfortunately, I have already been there and there was no food. I continue reading to see if she provides any additional clues as to how she was able to eat.

  In that room, you will find the protein smoothy waiting for you on the long counter that runs the length of the wall opposite the door. No matter how long you wait, you will only ever get one unless you leave the room and get at least one hundred rooms away. In addition to refilling the bottle, this room will reset itself completely. Any damage you do to the room, soil you leave in the corner, or writing you leave on the walls will disappear. Most importantly, anything you leave there will also be lost. The area around this room does not ever seem to reset, so I keep my things five rooms to the left when reading this wall. I have been using the smoothie room as my starting point for exploration. The body in this room is the first other person I have seen here. I found him about a week after I found the smoothie room. I was the one who stole his clothes. I was freezing every day and probably close to hypothermia with the damp, the stress, and the barely adequate food, even if the rooms are not horribly cold. I took sneakers, socks, a hooded sweatshirt, and sweatpants. He didn’t have anything else on him except what you see still there and a house-key. My assumption is that his name was John Mason, because the dog beside him has a collar that says to contact that name if found. He had no other identification. Maybe he was just out on a jog with his dog when he ended up here somehow.

  Do you, reading this now, know how you got here? I don’t. I normally walk around my building after lunch to get a little exercise before heading back to the grind. That day, it was raining, so I decided to walk around inside the building. There is an unused wing that has been empty since a mass layoff two years ago. It’s a little creepy, just hundreds of cubicles all in silence with lights that have motion detectors and turn on as you walk revealing more empty cubicles and silence. Beyond this area there is a dividing wall and then a pair of doors that open into the very back rooms of the building. These rooms haven’t been occupied since before I worked there. The desks had those super old computers that only display in green, and every desk had an ashtray built into the desk. After walking through that section, I came to a double door that I assumed led to the back stairwell, but there were these strange empty yellow rooms. I started walking around them a little and was confused, because the building shouldn’t have been that big. When I backtracked, the doors to my work were gone and replaced by more endless yellow rooms. I had my bag with me and my company mobile phone, but I couldn’t get a signal. I don’t know how I got here. It wasn’t even Y2K yet. I wonder if I am in alternate reality. The sweatshirt John is wearing says it is for the Los Angeles Rams, but I thought it was the Saint Louis Rams. I don’t really know football though. By the way, it was Friday, April 30th, 1999, when I first arrived in the rooms.

  I do not know football either, but I’m pretty sure Los Angeles is where the Rams are from. The building Amy described does not sound like the abandoned warehouse on the closed road near my house. Does distance traveled in the rooms equate to distance traveled in the real world? I should be more than ninety-five miles from where I first entered the rooms. Part of that was zigzagging, so I’m really only seventy-five or eighty miles from where I entered. Amy may have slipped into this space a hundred miles away or maybe there is no correlation at all. What she wrote about the smoothie room doesn’t seem to be accurate anymore. According to her text messages she has been dead for two and a half decades and that room looks like it must have looked when she died. Since I am here already, I continue to read the wall.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  It’s been about a year. My phone and my hair growth confirm that time passes here just like it did on the outside. I think I have explored every room within fifteen hundred rooms of the smoothie room. I have found five other bodies and claimed possessions from them. Those all had IDs. My intention is to inform the families and return their belongings when I get out of here, but for now I will collect whatever I can find that might be useful. I suspect all were death by starvation, or suicides because they were starving. In all of my searching I have never found another smoothie room and there are no bodies within several hundred rooms of it. How long can someone survive on just water? A few weeks? None of the male bodies I have found have had long hair. Unless they figured out a way to cut their hair, they weren’t wandering the rooms very long. I’m not sure what to do now. Do I explore further out? Do I just hunker down and play snake until someone finds me? I feel like I’m losing it a bit.

  I try not to think about being here for more than a year.

  My phone says it is two thousand one now. Happy New Year to me. I recently undertook an expedition. I used clothing to make a sack in which I could carry twenty bottles of smoothie. I then went back and forth to the room until I had collected enough to fill the sack. I also drank one and came back again to get one to carry in my hand. I walked in one direction for ten days. It was all the same. I went left out of the smoothie room and crossed more than seven thousand rooms. Nothing changed. I kept careful track on my phone of each time a wall forced me to turn to make sure I could find my way back. There were a few stretches where I went a long time without finding a dripping sprinkler. The carpets were fairly dry. Fortunately, I had filled the first smoothie bottle I emptied with water, so it wasn’t a problem. I decided to go a few rooms up and take a parallel course on my return trip, which brought me to my most recent body find. This insect free environment seems to allow bodies to mummify with no preparation. He had made a mound of carpet from the surrounding rooms and stacked them high enough to remove some ceiling tiles. He then hanged himself from the sprinkler pipes using his belt, and he was still hanging there. I am only five foot one and it would have taken a lot more carpet for me to get high enough to cut him down, so I left him hanging there. I was able to reach his pants, so I removed wallet from his pants and learned his name was Johnathan Hatfield. Seven people found their way out by what may be the only way. I don’t know if I will try another expedition like this. Everything seems pointless. If I could find someone alive, that would at least be something. How many people might be walking around these rooms right now and we will never meet because they are thousands of rooms away? Sometimes I sit listening, but a distant voice wouldn’t be heard over the humming from the lights. Still, I try calling out once in a while. It’s weird to hear my own voice and the design of these rooms minimizes echo, so my calls just disappear into infinite nothingness. There’s no end for the sound to hit and bounce back to me.

  I wonder what condition Amy would have been in had she held on a couple more decades for me to find her alive. She left one more message on the wall here and then it looks like she stabbed the pen into the wall and left it.

  May 7th, 2001. I’ve taken some more expeditions in various directions. I even dragged fifty bottles of smoothie on a trip straight ahead from the room and covered more than a hundred eighty thousand rooms. Aside from discovering more bodies, everything was the same. I’m out of ideas. Nothing works.

  This later writing is harder to read and larger than the earlier neat and orderly writing.

  September 30th, 2001. I think the dripping and buzzing is louder now than it ever was. There was a time I didn’t notice it, but now I notice nothing else. My head is throbbing and on top of the normal headache, I also have a piercing pain in my skull like a migraine. I can’t sleep and I’m hardly eating. I find the smoothies more nauseating every day and sometimes I’m throwing them up. Have they been slowly poisoning me? I’m no closer to finding out why they are keeping me here. Why did they even bring me here to do nothing with me?

  The next entry reads:

  It’s almost 2008. I have no more strength to live like this. I cannot play snake again. Exploring just makes me tired and the bodies I find depress me. I found one yesterday that hadn’t mummified yet. There must be thousands of bodies of people who died of starvation or took their own lives when they realized hunger would take them soon. I no longer think of myself as the lucky one who found food. More than eight years is enough. I think I can now see the buzzing of the lights. It’s a shimmer on every wall and a sparkle on the dark damp carpets. My nose was bleeding today and my teeth are getting loose. I know how to get out of this place. Everyone gets out of here the same way.

  I pull the pen out of the wall and test to see if it still writes. After scribbling on the wall a bit with the tip pointed down, it does make a blue mark. I put it in my jacket pocket.