Fred stepped through the door, expecting for a moment to find himself back in one of those corridors — with signs pointing toward departments nobody needed and rules that existed only because someone, somewhere, had once decided that they had to exist. Instead, he stepped into something that did not even bother pretending to be a place.
It was a gray expanse without recognizable walls, without a ceiling, without any fixed point on which his eyes could settle. The ground beneath his feet felt like a claim rather than a fact. And the fog hanging everywhere was so thick that Fred had the feeling he might soon have to submit an application just to keep breathing.
“Wonderful,” he muttered, coming to a stop. “Now I’m officially nowhere. That could have been handled more simply. A sign would have been enough.”
He walked a few steps, more out of the instinct not to stand still than because he had an actual plan. His footsteps sounded dull, swallowed by the fog before they could even find an echo. Fred noticed that he was trying to count how far he had gone, but after only a few seconds he felt as though the numbers were slipping through his fingers. Maybe it was the fog. Maybe it was because concepts like “far” and “near” no longer meant anything here.
Just as he was wondering whether it was even possible to get lost in a place without direction, he noticed a faint light in the distance. It was not bright, nor inviting, merely... present. Like a small reminder that something here might actually have a purpose — or at least wanted to pretend it did.
“Good,” Fred said dryly. “A light. At least that’s a concept I understand.”
He moved toward it, and as he walked, he could not tell whether he was getting closer to the light or whether the light was getting closer to him. Both possibilities seemed equally plausible. The closer he got, the more clearly he could see that the light was coming from a pedestal standing in the middle of the fog, as though someone had put it there and then forgotten to come back for it.
On the pedestal stood a black rotary telephone. Fred stopped and stared at it, as though he first had to decide whether this was really the kind of reality he was currently trapped in. The telephone was old-fashioned, immaculate, as though it had never seen a single speck of dust. It looked completely out of place, and precisely for that reason, it fit perfectly.
“Of course,” Fred muttered. “Why not? If we’re going to have a labyrinth, we might as well have a landline.”
He reached out, and the moment his fingers touched the receiver, the telephone began to ring. Not hesitantly. Not politely. It rang as though it had been waiting for hours to finally reach someone.
Fred flinched, more out of annoyance than fear. “Yes, yes,” he said into the fog, as though that would somehow make the telephone understand that he was not impressed. “I’m coming. You don’t have to ring the entire existence apart.”
He picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. For a moment he heard nothing, only a faint static that reminded him of the hum of office equipment at the Central Authority — that familiar, exhausting background noise that eventually crawled into your head and stayed there.
Then a voice spoke.
“Fred Müller,” it said calmly, as though it were not greeting him but confirming him. “You have come a long way.”
Fred twisted his mouth into a grimace. “If that’s a compliment, I seriously have to wonder who sets the criteria around here.”
“You are at the center,” the voice said.
Fred looked around. “The center looks like the nothing left over when reality wasn't finished being installed.”
There was a brief pause. Then the voice spoke again, as though it had decided that humor was an unnecessary complication.
“This is where the decision is made.”
Fred remained silent for a moment. Not because he was impressed, but because he was trying to identify the trap hidden inside the statement. So far, the labyrinth had not convinced him through force. It had exhausted him through logic. It had made him wait until the waiting itself began to seem reasonable.
“I see,” Fred finally said. “And what exactly am I supposed to decide? Whether I stay here until I turn to dust, or whether I can go back and have to submit an application to return?”
“You can stay,” the voice said. “Or leave.”
“That sounds surprisingly simple,” Fred replied. “That makes me suspicious.”
“Suspicion is appropriate,” the voice said without the slightest change in tone. “But it is not decisive.”
Fred slowly exhaled. He thought about the queue that had consisted of no one but himself. About the empty room with the gray spot on the wall. About the mirrors that had asked him what he was really looking for and had given him no time to find the answer. And he thought about the grim reflection that had simply disappeared — as though the labyrinth had taken a piece of him without asking permission.
“If I leave,” Fred said, and he noticed that his own voice had grown quieter, “will I actually be outside?”
“You will be where you were,” the voice replied.
Fred snorted. “That’s not an answer. That’s a file note.”
“File notes are sufficient,” the voice said.
Fred fell silent again. He wanted to say something that sounded like resistance. Something that would prove to himself that he was not merely a figure being pushed from door to door. But the fog around him did not press against him. It waited. And the telephone in his hand was not a tool. It was a connection holding him in place without ever touching him.
“All right,” Fred finally said, his dry humor returning, though thinner than before. “Then I’ll leave. Not because I believe that will solve anything. But because I’m tired of standing in rooms that pretend they have meaning.”
The voice said nothing. Neither approval nor rejection. Simply nothing. And that was the unsettling part.
The fog began to move. Not like wind. More as though some authority had finally released a door after an application had passed through every possible desk.
A door appeared in front of Fred — plain, unremarkable, so normal that it seemed almost ridiculous in this environment.
No sign. No form. No rules he could read.
Fred stared at it for a long moment. He did not know how long. Time was nothing more than a polite assumption here anyway.
Finally, he stepped closer and placed his hand on the handle.
The door was warm.
“All right,” Fred muttered. “Let’s see what you people mean by ‘leave.’”
He opened the door and stepped through.
Behind him, the telephone stopped ringing. But Fred was not sure whether it had actually stopped — or whether he was simply no longer able to hear it.