Laila had always been good with numbers. As a data scientist, she found comfort in the logic of algorithms, where every input had an output, and every variable had its place. But the moment she entered the old warehouse, she knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the abandoned state of the place, or even the cold air that sent a chill down her spine—it was the unsettling sense that something fundamental was missing.
The tip she had received had been vague at best. “Strange data activity,” the message said. “Something’s wrong with the code. It’s affecting things outside the system.” She assumed it was a bug—an error in a system too old to function properly. But what she found inside the warehouse was far worse than any bug she had ever seen.
. . .
The first sign that things were off came as she walked through the front entrance. The silence was overwhelming. No hum of electricity, no echo of her footsteps—just a void where sound should have been. It was as if the air itself had swallowed every noise. As she moved deeper into the building, the walls themselves seemed to shift, flickering in and out of existence like a glitch in a video game.
Laila’s instincts told her to leave, but curiosity pushed her forward. At the far end of the warehouse was a makeshift command center—a maze of wires and screens displaying lines of code. She approached one of the terminals, her eyes scanning the data for clues. But something was wrong. One of the variables in the code—normally a placeholder for data—wasn’t just empty; it had disappeared completely.
She tried to run the program, but as soon as she did, the warehouse around her began to change. Objects flickered, disappearing and reappearing at random. Corridors shifted, doors vanished, and entire sections of the building seemed to blink out of existence. The more she worked on the code, the worse it became.
. . .
Laila’s fingers flew across the keyboard as she tried to reverse the changes. But no matter what she did, the code refused to cooperate. It was as if the variable had never existed, like a black hole swallowing everything around it. And the more she tried to fix it, the more the fabric of reality began to unravel.
Suddenly, a voice crackled through the speakers, low and distorted. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Laila froze, her heart racing. She wasn’t alone. But before she could react, the voice continued, “The code is the key. You need to leave, or you’ll disappear too.”
The message sent a jolt of fear through her, but Laila wasn’t ready to give up. She dove deeper into the system, looking for the source of the disturbance. That’s when she found it—a hidden subroutine buried deep within the code, referencing a place that didn’t exist in any known system. The variable wasn’t missing; it had been erased from existence. And in its absence, reality itself was beginning to collapse.
. . .
Laila realized too late what she had stumbled upon. This wasn’t just a glitch. It was a doorway—an entry point into a dimension where the rules of logic and physics didn’t apply. As she tried to back out of the system, the room around her began to warp, walls dissolving into nothingness.
She ran toward the exit, but the door had vanished. The warehouse was collapsing, and there was no way out. Reality itself was unraveling, piece by piece, and soon, there would be nothing left—not for her, not for the building, and not for the world she once knew.
And then, just before the darkness consumed her, she heard the voice again, softer this time: “It’s too late now. You’ve crossed over.”
