They said the experiment was going to change lives.

  They said that like it was a gift; like it wasn't a sentence.

  All I saw was white.

  A room so clean it didn't feel like a place. No corners that held shadow. No seams in the floor. The light didn't come from anywhere I could point to. It just existed, pressed flat onto everything until my eyes felt rubbed raw.

  They hadn't given me anything to sit on. I'd been on my feet since the moment they walked me in, and my legs already knew something I didn't.

  In the center of the room was a pedestal. Smooth, waist-high, rectangular concrete, with a matte-black button set in a ceramic edge on top. Perfectly round and ordinary. One word was printed on it in small clean letters: PLEXUS. Like an elevator emergency button that had gotten lost and ended up somewhere it had no business being.

  The only other thing identifiable in the room was the door. Not the whole door. Just an eye-level small square glass set into it. The only proof the world still had an outside.

  She stood there, framed by it.

  Dr. Halden. Blonde hair pinned back tight, pale brows, that bright clean face people get when they sleep regular hours and believe in what they do. Her uniform was gray with a thin blue strip at the collar. Everything covered in a standard lab coat. Calm posture. Calm that is either kindness or practice.

  Her voice came through the intercom.

  "There's a radioactive presence in the room, behind the walls. It does nothing until you press the button."

  I stared at the button.

  "And then?"

  "Then it has a fifty percent chance of activating. It might still do nothing. It might also kill you. Instantly."

  I waited for her to soften it. She didn't.

  "Will..." I muttered, "will I feel it?"

  "Theoretically, no. You won't see it, hear it, or feel it." A pause. "But observers outside may register something. That's the point."

  I looked at her through the glass. She looked back, patient, like this was going exactly how she wanted.

  My finger hovered over the button. It didn't hum. It didn't glow.

  Tap.

  Nothing.

  No flash. No heat. The room stayed white. My heartbeat didn't even pause.

  "That is consistent," Dr. Halden said. "Again."

  Tap.

  "Nothing?"

  Maybe I'm tapping it too lightly?

  "Hold," she said, scribbling something. "Go ahead."

  I almost laughed. The sound that came out wasn't quite laughter.

  Tap.

  Nothing changed in the room.

  But when I glanced back to Dr. Halden, there was something different about her uniform.

  The cut was identical. The badge sat in the same place. The collar strip was still there. But the colors were wrong. Deep green where gray had been. Pale yellow where blue had been.

  My whole body went cold.

  "Your clothes," I said, louder than I meant it to be.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  She blinked.

  "My what?"

  "Your uniform. They were gray. Now they're green."

  Her eyes narrowed, but she didn't look alarmed.

  "Interesting."

  "I'm not imagining it."

  "No," she said. "This is what I have been wearing all day."

  I heard my heart beat once.

  "Since internship, even."

  Internship? Like my memory was the thing malfunctioning.

  My mouth tasted like metal. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

  I tapped it again, needing the world to behave.

  Nothing changed. She stayed in green and yellow. Her blonde hair was still pinned. Her face was still clean and certain.

  The relief hit hard enough to come out as a sound.

  "Okay. Okay. It's random, it's just—"

  "Hold," she said.

  Her voice sharpened in my ear.

  "What are you — this is our first attempt."

  I stared at her.

  "What?"

  "This is attempt one."

  "But I've pressed it four times already."

  She looked at me through the glass like she could see my version of time and simply didn't recognize it.

  "You believe you did."

  I didn't.

  My hand moved anyway. Angry now. Terrified now.

  Tap.

  The uniform stayed green and yellow. The badge stayed in the same spot. The posture stayed calm.

  But the person wearing it was a man.

  Same blonde hair, cut shorter. Same pale brows. Same sharp bright eyes. The same face, reshaped. Like someone took her and flipped a single decision and let everything else carry over.

  "Where is Dr. Halden?" The words scraped out of me.

  The man leaned toward the glass. When he spoke, it was the same voice I'd been hearing all day, just dropped a half-register, like it had fallen into a different body without complaint.

  "I am Dr. Halden."

  I backed away from the pedestal. My knees buckled and I hit the floor, scrambling back until my shoulder met nothing, because the room offered nothing to brace against.

  "What the fuck is going on?"

  "Interesting," he said, soft and pleased.

  I lunged back and hit the button.

  Press. The white room became blue.

  Shit.

  Press. Press. Press.

  My finger hit until the skin numbed.

  I hit air. Looked down. A lever, slim and angled, where the button had been. My hand wrapped around it before I decided to.

  I pulled.

  The glass went dark. No doctor. No face. No proof of outside. Just brightness beyond it, thick and colorless, pressing against the boundary. I stared at something that had been waiting a long time; and it stared back.

  I couldn't stop.

  Let me out.

  Pull. Pull. Pull.

  My arm burned with it. My whole body was shaking, like the only way to stay alive was to keep making the world move first, to keep being the one who moved it.

  Let this end.

  Pull pull pull pull pull pull.

  I heard myself making sounds, not words, just breath tearing out wrong. My throat raw. My eyes couldn't find anything to hold onto. The room blinked colors that had no names. The floor became angles.

  I looked down and the lever was gone. A smooth blank panel where it had been. My palm hit it anyway.

  Smash. Smash. Smash.

  The panel split into a seam, into a hump, into nothing, the room trying to swallow its own mechanism whole.

  Smash smash smash smash—

  I tried to count. I couldn't hold the next number in my head. I hit it anyway. And again. And again.

  At some point I stopped being someone who counted.

  I don't know what came after. I tried again. The next number still wouldn't come. Time might have passed. It doesn't feel like something that happened to me so much as something that happened around me while I was busy pressing.

  When I look down, my hands don't look like hands.

  Not wrong in a way that I can name. Wrong in a way that makes naming feel like a game children play and then forget. I had fingers once. I'm almost sure of it. The shape of my own thumb. The memory keeps starting and never finishing. I don't know how many. I don't know what I look like. I stopped being able to picture it somewhere back in the pressing, and now when I try, I get nothing. Just a smear where a person used to be.

  The room is every color at once, folding over itself. No walls, not really. No floor, not exactly. Just shifting planes that rearrange whenever I blink, color fracturing into pattern into texture into something I can almost taste but can't speak. Sometimes the floor is a sound. Sometimes I breathe out and something comes out with it that isn't air, trailing off into the kaleidoscope and dissolving before I can look at it properly.

  The door is a light. A hard rectangle of it, too bright to look at directly, too definite to ignore. Like the room kept one boundary just to have something to hold over me.

  And the doctor is still there.

  She hasn't changed much. Not recently. Not for longer than I know how to measure.

  That's what I tell myself. I hold it like it means something.

  She has fur. Not soft fur. Not something that belongs to anything warm. It crawls along her outline in slow waves, some kind of static given some kind of patience. A coat sewn from the idea of a cat. It catches the colors of the room and twists them into something that moves like it's alive and feels like it isn't.

  I gag. Nothing comes up. My throat tries anyway.

  And the ears. High on her head, too neat, too precise. Twitching. The only things left that still look like intention. They are the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. I know that clearly, even now, even with everything else unclear.

  Horrifying.

  The word still works. It's one of the last ones that does.

  She watches me through the light where the door used to be, the same way she watched me at the start of this, whenever that was. Patient. Fascinated. Like I am still just a result that might come out clean if she waits long enough.

  She has looked like this for longer than I know. She is the most familiar thing left.

  I don't know how long I've been here. I've lost the number and I've lost the shape of the days and I've lost, I think, several things I don't know the names of anymore.

  I only know I have been tired of standing for a long, long while now.