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he pressed his
forehead into mud.
    "I can overload your eye camera, and it'll
knock you unconscious for several minutes," I told him, thoughts
racing. "But that's it. It'll be offline, and if Command is out
there, they won't be able to access it and they won't know you're
alive. You'll also… go blind in one eye."
    He screamed at the top of his lungs, a
guttural and rage-filled sound. "Have you seen 'em? I'm losing an
eye either way! Do it!"
    Steeling myself against the pain he was about
to feel, I sent my quickly typed code instructions to his eye
camera.
    The resulting yell filled me with pain
just by pure empathy… and then the stream went black.
    I made no move for nearly two minutes, simply
struggling to understand everything that had just happened. Other
realities were real, something terrible was going on, the only
semblance of organization out there had been absent for a year… and
I'd just burned out some poor kid's eye to save him from scratching
his own face off.
    That was not the idea of helping I'd had in
mind, but… at least he'd live, and keep holding the black at bay,
whatever nightmare that entailed. Only now, there would be no hope
of rescue or reinforcements. He was on his own… because of me. And
I'd probably doomed that woman, too.
    I'd made a mistake.
    Meddling had been a mistake.
    Who the hell was I to be messing around with
interdimensional affairs?
    It had all happened so fast...
    Getting up, I unhooked my awareness from the
computer I'd been engrossed in, and decided to go home. Would
anyone even notice if I left early? Knowing Human Resources, that would probably be the offense that finally drew
attention… but I couldn't stay. Not after what I'd done.
    Moving out through the stacks of servers,
each darkly lit by a rainbow of diodes and info lights, I headed
for the door.
    The hallway was dark and quiet. There was no
need to light the building when I was the only one here… I'd never
tried to leave before my shift was over, and it felt incredibly
eerie to trespass through a space I shouldn't have been in.
Cubicles sat open and empty, filled with pictures of families and
children. These people would have been my coworkers, had I ever
spoken to any of them or even been in the office during the same
hours. I'd only been here once in daylight - a bright, shining, and
warm day of basic corporate policy training.
    I pressed against the exit door, intent on
going home and resting - and I came up short.
    The door refused to budge.
    With only the red EXIT sign's crimson light
to see by, I studied my escape.
    It'd been welded shut.
    With a very, very strange feeling that
I knew what I was going to find, I went around the entire building,
testing every exit.
    They'd all been welded shut.
    Peering out the windows desperately, I saw
only parking lot and grass, lit weakly by the ceiling lights I'd
turned on. The rest lay shrouded in thick fog.
    As I stared out, I thought about breaking the
windows… until I saw something moving in the fog, something which
sent me reeling back in terror. Turning all the lights off as
quickly as possible, I watched it shamble by without noticing me -
a massive jellyfish-like creature twenty feet tall, moving on
various tentacle limbs.
    Where was I? What was happening?
    How did I get into work? How did I usually
come into work? I recalled a very odd sensation at the start of
each shift as I entered the server room. Was I… was the server
room… in another reality? It might have been necessary for
interdimensional connectivity. Had I been unknowingly working in
another dimension all this time?
    The server room door!
    Rushing back to the server room, I examined
the very peculiar door that I'd always assumed was for security
purposes. It was large and metallic, and could definitely have
hidden circuitry or devices or whatever it was that connected
realities.
    I waited.
    Once the proper time came, I attempted to
leave.
    The doors remained welded shut, and the
situation outside