I sat down at a desk in the coworking space I went to a few years ago, but the space was quite different. I was in a room with grey walls and a grey floor, a very high ceiling, and windows only near the ceiling as if we were underground.

I was at first alone in this room, then my manager came in. A woman also joined us, and my manager started pushing his and my stuff around quite violently on the table to make room for her. My keyboard, mouse, various cables, etc. fell to the floor, but at least the laptop and screen were not affected. I got mad, but didn’t say anything. I just got up and gathered my stuff from the floor.

I do not remember whether it was in this room or somewhere, but I then remember watching a YouTube video about some sort of strange challenge in which we had to find a serial killer.

I grabbed some cables that I wanted to store somewhere and left the room to enter something akin to a sports store, or a gym that got used as a store; I didn’t really understand it when I got there.

There were students inside, in jogging gear, but they were not here to do sports. They were in a bunch of side rooms used as offices, with all the computers running Windows XP. I felt out of place, but I used the fact that I was holding my cables to believe that I was seen as an IT technician while crossing those rooms.

I crossed a room filled with lockers of different sizes, visibly used as both a changing room and a storage area for sports gear. The students there, men and women, all ignored me while they were changing, all in the same room.

I went behind the rows of lockers to reach an area of the gym with less people, closer to the walls of the very large main room. I was looking for something akin to a server or wiring rack, a place where I could get rid of my cables without anyone noticing. I found one, and there were some curious students around. They quickly left, to my relief.

I was now alone, and I read a message written on a yellow piece of paper I had on me. As I was about to drop my cables without anyone seeing, a blonde woman found me. She held something in front of me as if it was some booklet holding a cop insigna, as seen on TV shows, but it was just a piece of black glossy paper folded in two.

Both of our pieces of paper seemed to indicate that now that we met, a mysterious unidentified enemy knows our location. We can choose to flee and let the other get killed, or help each other. Something also made us become blind quickly if we did not regularly close our eyelids very tightly.

We started running, crossing the aisles of the sports store to reach the exit, holding each other’s arms to not lose each other.