Orientation
Rain hammered against the windows of the transport van while the mountains outside disappeared beneath thick midnight fog. Inside the vehicle, silence settled heavily between the passengers, broken only by the low hum of tires moving along wet roads somewhere deep in the wilderness.
Ethan Vale sat near the back of the van staring at the contract folder resting on his lap for the tenth time in the last hour. The number printed across the payment section still looked unreal.
$90,000 for nine nights.
No physical danger. No invasive procedures. No illegal activity.
Just stay awake.
God.
It sounded too easy for that amount of money.
Across from him, a woman around his age finally broke the silence while adjusting the sleeves of her oversized gray hoodie.
“You guys think this is secretly illegal?”
A few nervous laughs spread through the van.
Good.
At least somebody else felt unsettled too.
The woman smiled weakly afterward. “I’m Mira, by the way.”
“Ethan,” he answered quietly.
One by one, the others slowly introduced themselves as the van continued climbing deeper into the mountains.
Mira Solis was a university dropout drowning in debt. Daniel Cross claimed he joined for “easy money,” though the dark circles beneath his eyes suggested deeper problems. Leah Hart barely spoke at all, spending most of the ride staring silently through the rain-covered window beside her.
There were nine participants total inside the van.
All strangers.
All desperate enough to accept a suspiciously generous offer from a company nobody had heard of before last month.
Somna Labs.
The name alone sounded cold.
Clinical.
Artificial.
The driver suddenly slowed the van near a chain-link security gate rising from the fog ahead. Massive floodlights illuminated tall concrete walls beyond it, partially hidden between dense forests and steep mountain cliffs.
Ethan frowned slightly.
This wasn’t what he expected.
The recruitment emails described Somna Labs as a “private neurological research center.”
Not a fortified underground facility.
The gates slowly opened with a metallic groan.
And for one brief second, Ethan noticed something strange painted across the concrete entrance wall beside the checkpoint.
A sentence.
Most of the letters had faded with age, but he could still read enough of it beneath the rain:
SLEEP IS MEMORY’S GRAVE
God.
That didn’t feel comforting.
The van rolled forward through the gates while thick fog swallowed the road behind them completely. Ethan instinctively looked back through the rear window afterward.
The outside world had vanished.
Only darkness remained beyond the mountains now.
Ten minutes later, the vehicle stopped inside a massive underground parking structure beneath the facility itself. Bright white lights flickered softly overhead while armed security personnel waited silently beside elevators at the far end of the concrete chamber.
Nobody inside the van spoke anymore.
Even Daniel looked uncomfortable now.
The elevator ride downward lasted far too long.
Ethan counted nearly forty seconds before the doors finally opened again.
The facility beneath the mountains looked disturbingly modern compared to the brutal concrete exterior aboveground. Long silver hallways stretched beneath soft artificial lighting while massive glass observation windows lined sections of the corridors.
Yet despite the clean appearance—
the place felt wrong.
Too quiet.
Too empty.
Like a hospital abandoned recently instead of actively operating.
A tall woman wearing a black identification badge greeted them near the entrance desk.
Dr. Evelyn Mercer.
Her smile looked professional.
Practiced.
Not warm.
“Welcome to Somna Labs,” she said calmly while the automatic doors sealed shut behind the group with a heavy mechanical sound. “For the next nine nights, you are participating in one of the most important neurological studies ever conducted.”
Something about the way she said nine nights made Ethan uneasy immediately.
Dr. Mercer guided them deeper into the facility while explaining the experiment rules in a perfectly measured voice.
No caffeine restrictions.
No physical restraints.
Participants could socialize freely inside designated sections of the lab.
The only rule that mattered:
Nobody sleeps.
“If any participant loses consciousness for more than sixty seconds,” Dr. Mercer explained, “they are removed from the study immediately.”
Simple enough.
At least on paper.
Then they reached the sleeping quarters.
Nine rooms.
Nine beds.
Nine digital clocks mounted above the doors.
And every clock displayed the exact same frozen time:
3:17 AM
Ethan slowed instinctively.
The others noticed too.
Daniel frowned immediately. “Uh… why are all the clocks broken?”
For the first time since meeting them—
Dr. Mercer hesitated.
Only for a second.
Then she smiled again.
“We haven’t started the experiment yet.”
And somehow—
that answer felt worse.