The Severance Floor: My Ex-Boyfriend Erased 8 Hours Of My Memory Every Day At Synapse Health
Part 1
Every afternoon at 5:00 PM, I stepped out of the subterranean elevator with no memory of what my body had done since 9:00 AM, holding only a clean paycheck and a growing sense of dread.
Two months in, I woke up at home with severe physical bruises and three handwritten words carved into my forearm with a pen: “IT FEEDS BELOW.”
When I confronted my employer, corporate security served me with a pre-formatted legal injunction threatening immediate imprisonment for breach of contract.
The light that morning, the forty-fifth day since I started at Aetheris Dynamics, seemed to pierce right through my eyelids. It wasn’t the soft, familiar glow of my Salem townhouse. It felt sharp, almost accusatory, like a spotlight on a crime scene.
My head throbbed with a dull ache. My tongue tasted like stale metal.
I tried to push myself up, but a jolt of pain shot through my left wrist. I gasped, a small, choked sound swallowed by the sudden silence of the room.
My eyes snapped open. I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the familiar disorientation to pass. Every morning, for the past forty-four days, I had woken up with a sense of vague unease, a phantom limb where eight hours of my day should have been. This morning, it was different.
This morning, the unease had a physical manifestation.
I slowly brought my left arm into view, cradling it gently with my right hand. The skin around my wrist was a mottled canvas of purple and blue, a constellation of fresh, angry bruises spreading across my inner forearm.
My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t remember anything. There was no memory of impact, no clumsy fall, no reason for such violence on my own body.
Then, my gaze dropped lower. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird desperate to escape its cage.
Across the sensitive skin of my inner forearm, just above the wrist, three words stood out in stark, black ink. They weren’t written neatly, but scratched, almost gouged, into my flesh. The lines were jagged, some bleeding slightly from the force.
“IT FEEDS BELOW.”
The words seared into my brain. The ink was still fresh, slightly tacky to the touch. I could feel the faint raised edges where the pen had pressed deep, the tiny breaks in the skin.
This wasn’t an accident. This was deliberate.
And my own hand had done it.
A cold dread, unlike anything I’d felt before, seeped into my bones. The vague unease of the past weeks solidified into pure, unadulterated terror.
Who had done this to me? No.
What had *I* done to myself?
I sat bolt upright, the blanket pooling around my waist. My eyes darted around the room, searching for something, anything, that could explain the horror etched onto my skin.
There was nothing out of place. The room was exactly as I had left it the night before.
My gaze landed on my phone, charging on the bedside table. A sudden, irrational compulsion seized me. I had to check it. I had to know.
My fingers trembled as I fumbled with the charging cable, pulling it free. My thumb hovered over the screen, sweat pricking my brow.
What if there was nothing? What if the void truly was absolute?
Then again, if my “in-nie” self – the one who lived those eight hours in the Aetheris building – had the presence of mind to carve a warning into my arm, maybe… just maybe… it had left something else.
I unlocked the screen, scrolling through my apps. Email, messages, news alerts. Nothing.
Then I saw it. A small, unfamiliar icon in my photo gallery. It looked like a video, but it was encrypted, locked behind a password I didn’t recognize.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, typing the only three words that mattered right now.
“IT FEEDS BELOW.”
The lock clicked open. My breath hitched.
The video started immediately. It was shaky, filmed vertically, clearly held by a trembling hand. The image was dark, grainy, illuminated only by a faint, sickly green light emanating from somewhere off-screen.
The camera panned slowly, revealing a narrow corridor. The walls weren’t the polished steel and concrete of Aetheris Dynamics. They were rough, uneven stone, slick with moisture.
A low, guttural hum vibrated through the phone’s speakers, a sound that seemed to come from deep underground. It sent shivers down my spine.
I could see my own distorted reflection in the corner of the frame, my face pale and drawn, eyes wide with a fear I’d never experienced. My lips were moving, but the sound was muffled, indistinct, lost beneath the strange humming.
The camera stopped. My breath caught.
Before me, stretching into an inky blackness, was an ancient archway. It was carved directly into the living rock, massive blocks of rough-hewn granite forming its crude, imposing shape. It looked like something from a nightmare, a gateway to somewhere that shouldn’t exist.
A faint, almost imperceptible symbol was carved into the keystone of the arch. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
The camera zoomed in slightly, then dipped down, briefly showing a glimpse of a grimy concrete floor, then a rusted metal plate. The words “SUB-BASEMENT 4” were painted on it in faded yellow.
My “in-nie” self, the one trapped in the void, had gone below. And it had left me a message.
The video ended abruptly, plunging my room back into silence, save for my own ragged breathing.
I stared at the black screen, then at the livid words on my arm. The hum from the video still echoed in my ears.
Sub-Basement 4 was supposed to contain Aetheris’s secure neural processors. It was supposed to be a high-tech data center, not a gateway to an ancient, subterranean stone archway.
My erased self knew a secret. A terrible one. And it was screaming for help from the dark, cold depths of the building.
Part 2
Mark had that video on loop. The stone archway, beneath Sub-Basement 4. That was the first place he went when his shift started the next morning. The same muted hum of server racks, the same blank-faced security detail. But he wasn’t looking at the front now.
He moved around the back, away from the main thoroughfare. His phone’s flashlight cut through the gloom behind the humming machines. The “servers” were just black metal shells, cables running to nowhere. His hand met a cool, rough surface behind them. Not concrete. Stone.
He found the seam. A hidden access panel, perfectly camouflaged against the dark rock. He leveraged it open. A faint grating sound echoed in the quiet sub-basement.
Beyond the fake tech, a narrow granite staircase descended into absolute blackness. The air that rushed out was cold, damp, smelling of ancient earth and something else he couldn’t name. It was not digital. It was older. Something was living under the bedrock.
A sharp, controlled cough behind him. Arthur Pendelton stood there, unmoving, his eyes like chips of ice. “Mr. Gable,” he said, his voice flat. He held out a crisp white envelope. “A formal notice. Any further unsanctioned investigations, particularly into areas outside your auditing scope, will result in an immediate five-million-dollar civil suit for corporate espionage and an emergency seizure of all personal assets.”
You are Mark Gable. Standing before the colonial staircase, legal threat in hand, you know the company’s secret is far older and more dangerous than any tech. What do you do?
A) Force entry into the subterranean archway during your next shift to confront the truth head-on. 👉 Read Chapter 3
B) Pretend complete legal compliance, sign the warning, and secretly audit the historic physical building records. 👉 Read Chapter 4
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