The concrete was slick with centuries of condensation, pulling the heat from my skin until my bones felt like ice. I woke up to the rhythmic patterns of water hitting water.

Above me, flat industrial panes flickered and fought sleep. Their shallow light was pale, failing to reach any corners of the cavernous hall. It barely touched the surface of the central pool, if you could call it that. A massive, perfectly square cut-out in the floor filled with black, unmoving water. The stillness was uncanny. I couldn't even begin to describe the smell.

Then, the surface broke.

No splash, but only a slow, heavy displacement. Something gigantic, maybe even wider than the corridor itself, began to rise. Sheets of heavily-soaked and oily growth draped over a frame that seemed too large to exist in this cramped space. It didn't move like an animal. More like a shifting mountain.

I froze, my breath hitching in my throat. As the silhouette towered toward the ceiling, it defied the seemingly temporary illusion of functional architecture. The room somehow adjusted or maybe my spatial skills escaped me amidst disorientation. The hyper-sensory feeling of being perceived fell over me. Whatever I it was, the monolith was staring back. The moment my pupils locked with its gaze, however, the concept or presence of "now" began to dissolve. It wasn't a flash of light but perhaps a structural failure of mind.

The damp cold of the corridor suddenly replaces the searing heat of a childhood summer. The faces of my parents were wrong. They became featureless, borderline translucent expanses of skin, soaking for aeons in black water. I tried to reach for the memory of my first home, but the floorboards and wallpaper were made of the same mossy concrete from the frigid isolation tank.

The displacement was violent. Every second of eye contact redacted and paved over years of my life.

Paralyzed, my feet slowly left the ground. The memory of my graduation was consumed by unwitnessed perspectives of the creature’s rising silhouette. The smell of my favorite meal was replaced by the suffocating scent of ancient rot. I tried to remember my own name, but all that surfaced was the fathomless depth of the standing water. The visions were anatomically impossible. I saw myself waking up in this dark hallway, but in this version, I am the thing inside the square habitat, confronting terrified stranger after terrified stranger. Endless cycles spiral as infinity reveals itself. The boundaries of "self" and "other" fray until they snap.

When I finally managed to shift my gaze, the creature was gone. The silence of the corridor was flat, black and empty. I stood on the slick ledge, fighting shivers and dry-mouth, trying to reach baseline by attempting to recognize my own hands. I knew they belonged to me, but I couldn't remember a single thing I did with them.

My world was a corrupted file.