Inside the Glass Cage
When I pressed the power button, the headset settled like a lid over the world, and the room dissolved into glass. The couch, the coffee table, the potted plant—each object remained, but everything resembled a flawless pane, every surface catching the tremor in my hands. I took a cautious breath and stepped inside a memory dressed in crystal: the hallways of my apartment reflecting me back with sharper edges, as if the glass cared to study my nerves. It felt initially like a performance, a safe theater for fear, but the closer I listened, the more the room leaned in to listen too.
You are not here; you are only looking.
The game offered a promise: fear managed, danger controlled. The corridors were transparent and endless, with doors that opened inward toward you, the glass sighing as you approached. A distant clock counted steps; a soft, approving hum urged me forward. The walls did not merely reflect; they learned. My own image on the pane began to move before I did, a pale echo stepping in rhythm with my breath. Then the glass had not just trapped me in the scene but captured the moment between heartbeat and action, and I felt a pressure—like a hand pressing against the inside of my skull.
Desperation nudged me toward the edge of an escape: a button to remove the headset, a line of safety across the screen that read, in flickering letters, PROCEED OR REMAIN. I pressed nothing and pressed everything, but the device refused to release. The outside world remained a rumor—a distant siren, a lamp blinking in a hallway—while the glass became a stage for my fears. A voice whispered from nowhere, a barely human purr: You are not the guest here; you are the invitation. The mirror of the room began to warp, showing thinner, sharper angles where shadows bled into light.
In the center, a chamber opened like a throat: a chair, a station, and a screen that displayed my face, eyes wide, mouth slack with silence. The screen scrolled a message in slow, deliberate letters: You are almost free. To step through, you must abandon what you know about yourself. The room hummed. A second heartbeat thrummed in the air, not mine. I spoke aloud to the reflection, but the voice that answered was not my own: We want your breath, not your escape. The glass kept listening, and I began to hear the world outside as a rumor, a rumor that no longer existed.
When the final hinge cracked, the headset released, and I found myself seated in a different place entirely—a room that wore glass as a skin and called it home. The window to the street was gone, replaced by a quiet void that smelled faintly of ozone and rain. The last sound was a whisper at my ear: you are no longer the watcher; inside the glass cage, you are the prisoner—and the watcher too.