Hello nosleep. My name is Steven.
About a week ago by your count, my ex-girlfriend and I entered a door.
She wants nothing to do with this any more, and doesn’t want her name associated with it, so I’ll call her by a pseudonym - Claire. She has asked that I make this post, so that you know the full story, but after that I don’t think she’ll make any more posts. She certainly won’t be going back there.
As Claire has recounted, we entered the Developer Room together. After some time exploring, she stepped outside, and when I went to join her, with a backpack full of artifacts from inside, the door slammed shut, and the previously orange light changed to a deep red.
I tried for a long time to open it. I pushed with all my strength, but nothing worked. It wouldn’t move at all. It didn’t even vibrate at its hinges. I examined the door in minute detail, and discovered that it doesn’t even HAVE hinges.
I believe I felt despair at the time, although this was a long time ago, and my memories are hazy. I knew that the door’s closure was a reaction to my attempt to remove artifacts, but even after I’d replaced them all, the exit refused to open.
Claire had left her shoe by the door. She’d also left her notebook, and I decided that if I couldn’t leave, I’d continue her mapping. She believed there were 111 doors, plus the exit. She was wrong; there are 444. We’d been pushing them from the right hand side, but if you push them from the left, they each open into a different room. And from the Lobby, each door has a small groove in either side; you can pull these to reveal two more rooms. So I set about mapping all 444 rooms.
This took me about a month. You don’t need to sleep in the Developer Room, but you can, and since my phone continued to keep time, I decided to keep a roughly normal schedule, sleeping in Room 3 (Furniture). Every day I would check the exit, but it remained steadfastly locked. On day 13 I found Room 142 (Food), although it wasn’t until day 16 that I dared eat. If I was stuck there forever, I decided, I may as well enjoy it. As it turns out, items in Food replenish when you leave and re-enter.
I wondered if the same was true in Room 2 (Beverages). It was, and I spent several days getting tremendously drunk, just for something to do. However, I never had a hangover.
I can tell you all this because I meticulously recorded my time there, first in Claire’s notebook and when it ran out, on my phone. To give you an idea of how long I was there, my text logs run to 882 MB.
When I had got the urge to get drunk out of my system I made a plan. I would catalogue every room in detail. This was a tall order, and after a month in Room 1 (Clothing) I decided to move on. I took a few months in each room, sometimes more, sometimes less. Room 9 (Sounds) was difficult, and I spent an hour each day there for a couple of years to avoid sensory overload. Room 10 (Planets) was brief as I couldn’t step into the room to examine them closer, though I would have loved to explore the surface of Mars.
I spent the most time in Room 8 (Library). It’s all very neatly organised, though no index cards or Dewey Decimal System made it awkward at first. I have an OCR app on my phone and I used it to copy a large number of books, although those files didn’t make it out of the Developer Room.
The Library contains, as best I can tell, every book ever written, past and future. I couldn’t read most of them, even those written in English. Try reading Beowulf and you’ll understand why. That was written a thousand years ago, and English from the year 3000 is no more comprehensible. Still, I got a good idea of world history for the next few centuries. Most is the usual - wars, natural disasters, political upheavals. Few countries you’re familiar with will exist in two hundred years, but people carry on as normal.
I also read a great deal of science. Before I entered the Developer Room I was studying for a Masters in Nursing and Health, so I understood a lot of the human biology. Physics was more difficult but I taught myself to the equivalent of an undergraduate level using textbooks from the 2080s, and some of the advances in our understanding of cosmology and particle physics are truly mind-boggling. That said, there was nothing in those books - that I could read, at least - that could explain the Developer Room.
At the same time I continued to catalogue the other rooms. I entered Room 316, by my reckoning, on 16 March 2343. There were mirrors in Furniture, and I occasionally checked my appearance; I hadn’t aged a day, and even my beard hadn’t grown.
I said people carry on as normal. So I thought, until I started to catalogue Room 316 (Humans). There were great apes in Room 6 (Zoo), but I hadn’t seen any humans. Here they were.
There are 8 billion people alive today, and about 100 billion people have died. I’m not sure, but it’s possible every one of them is in that room. Millions at least, all standing in neat regimented rows, as though lined up as soldiers for battle. Like the animals, they breathe and blink, but don’t react to my presence. They wear clothes (or don’t) according to their culture, and are ordered by time period, earlier humans to the right and later humans to the left. There are babies, children, adults; and they seem to be sorted by external characteristics, so that there are progressions in height, skin tone, hair colour, and so on.
As I progressed along the rows I started to recognise some by their clothes. The first I could be certain of were Roman soldiers. Eventually I got to the 20th century, with styles I recognised better. It seemed that each year of history corresponded to about 200 lines of humans, stretching off into the distance and out of sight. Of course I could only really tell with western-style clothes, and from here it would have taken about a week to trek back to the Library to find books on the clothing of other cultures.
I kept going, and as I started to see new styles, I tried sketching them on my phone (Claire’s notebook was long since filled up). In the late 21st century there was a split trend, with some people covering up more and more, even covering hands and face, while others wore less, to the point that many were completely naked. Some time later I started to see cybernetic implants, very obvious at first but becoming more subtle as the technology advanced.
After that, people started changing, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. I don’t know if this was deliberate genetic engineering, or extreme evolutionary pressure, or simply an alarming drop in the human population, so that I passed fewer people per year of history. Whatever the answer, people developed features that took them away from what you or I would call completely human. Some developed webbed hands and feet, then gills, becoming more like fish. Others shrunk and developed longer arms and thicker body hair, eventually averaging less than a metre in height but with arms that looked suited for climbing trees. Still others became much larger, walking on all fours with thick limbs, but still taller than me. Their teeth became longer and fang-like, and their eyes more like a cat’s than a human’s. But with each new branch of humanity, I could clearly track the evolutionary path. These are indeed our future descendants.
I spent several days documenting these post-humans. Then I had an accident. I was examining a large, muscular creature, about three metres tall. It had thick, dark brown hair all over its body, clawed toes, and taloned fingers, though it still had opposable thumbs and looked quite dextrous. This was as much as I could tell when I lost my balance, and briefly touched it.
Its head slowly turned to me, its yellow eyes widening. This had never happened before, and for the first time in decades, I felt an actual emotion: fear. Without thinking I immediately turned and fled, back along the rows of post-humans, back towards the door to the Lobby.
As I ran, I heard a blood-curdling roar. This spurred me on faster, and as I ran at break-neck speed I heard its heavy footsteps, slow at first, then faster. I had a head start, but it was gaining on me.
The creature was faster than me, but it was also a lot larger. Thinking quickly I figured that it would be less able to make sharp turns. Being very careful not to touch anybody else, I started weaving in between the post-humans. This gave me an edge over the creature, but only just. It obviously didn’t know my destination, or it could have simply ran along the wall and easily outpaced me.
I ran like this for eight days. Claire sometimes used to bring me along when she ran, something I’m far more grateful for now than I used to be. I never got tired - not physically, anyway, but our minds are not equipped to handle a week-long adrenaline spike. Mentally I was exhausted.
By the time I reached the door the creature was maybe a hundred metres behind me. I ran in a straight line for the lobby, passed through the door, and sighed with relief as the door closed behind me.
How stupid of me. A few seconds later the door opened. The creature had to stoop to get through the door, but it wasn’t letting me go that easily. I ran across the lobby, opened a random door, and passed through.
By a stroke of luck I was in Room 210 (Walls). In the seconds it took the creature to cross the lobby, I’d hidden myself behind some two-metre-high wood panelling.
It couldn’t see me when it entered, and paused. Then I heard it sniffing, and start to move. Of course it could smell me. Of course.
I knew I could keep out of its reach by weaving between obstacles, but would this be my life forever? As I started running again, I came up with a plan.
I led the creature on a chase around Walls until I figured I had enough of a lead. I paused just long enough to fish out Claire’s notebook from my backpack, checked the list of rooms, then ran full-pelt for the door.
I had only a few seconds before it followed me into the lobby, and ran around the outside, counting doors until I reached Room 87 (Tools). I made it inside just as I heard the door open on the other side of the lobby. A minute passed; two minutes; three. The creature hadn’t seen which door I entered.
When the doors are closed, no sound penetrates them, so I had no way of knowing whether the creature was trying doors in turn, or was simply waiting out there for me. I had to assume the latter, but needed to work quickly in case of the former. I located the ropes section, and found a suitable length of climbing rope. I attached one end to a climbing harness which I fastened around my body, and the other end I tied to some heavy-duty poles, which I fashioned into a cross shape, four metres wide. I checked my notes, did some counting, took a deep breath, and prayed that I’d got all my calculations right.
Then I opened the door.
As I suspected, the creature was still there. As soon as I opened the door it roared its ear-splitting roar, and ran towards me. But I was already running in a straight line, right across the lobby to Room 10 (Planets), threw open the door, and plunged into the abyss beyond.
I heard a CLANG! as the steel poles caught on the doorframe to Tools. At the same time the harness stopped my fall, leaving me bruises and, as I learned later, two cracked ribs. From above I heard the creature turn, and run towards the still-open door to Planets. I think it jumped to clear the rope lying taught across the lobby; it was agile, and just small enough to leap straight through the door. As I swung on the end of the rope, I saw the creature sail past me. I watched as it fell into the inky blackness, slowly getting smaller, its screams gradually dimming, until it was gone.
With an exhilarating sense of triumph I climbed back up the rope and swung myself onto the floor of the lobby.
As I undid the harness and tried to calm down, I realised something had changed. The red light that had been my perpetual companion for centuries had changed back to its original orange. I didn’t know what this meant, but I suspected. I carefully replaced everything I had moved in that place, retrieved all of my belongings, put Claire’s single shoe in my backpack, and pushed the entrance.
It opened.
The light beyond was blinding, but I stepped through, and found myself in a bustling market. Behind me was a white stone wall, no handles and no sign of a door. I checked my phone; it was 8:27 on the morning of 19 May 2022. Google Maps informed me I was in Lima, which, accounting for timezones, made it just five hours after Claire and I entered the Developer Room.
It took me a lot of effort to get back to England. I don’t speak Spanish, and had to rely on Google Translate to explain how I’d got from England to Peru overnight, with no luggage, no passport, two broken ribs, and one woman’s shoe. The authorities didn’t believe my story, and I’m certain they wouldn’t have believed the truth; but after the hospital treated my injuries and the police decided there was no evidence of a crime, they wanted nothing more to do with me, and I was repatriated to England yesterday, 27 May.
I lived alone in the Developer Room for, I think, 370 years all told. My body is that of a 26 year old, but my mind feels all four centuries. I have knowledge beyond anything any other human will understand for hundreds of years. I’m fairly sure I loved Claire, but such emotions are hard for me to understand now. I’ve seen what becomes of humanity, and don’t know if I want anything more to do with it.
I’m writing this because Claire asked me to, and in the hope that it will bring her closure; I owe her that much at least. I haven’t decided what I’ll do with the rest of my life.
All I know for certain is that I’ll be very careful before opening any doors.