Tutuklandık

The button had no numbers—just a small, pulsing dot. Elias pressed it because there was nothing else to press.

The elevator doors sealed with a hush. Not a slam, not a click—just a quiet certainty, like a decision made long ago. It began to rise. Not with a jolt, but with a slow, smooth pull upward, like being drawn on a string through oil.

There was no display. No floor count. Only a faint hum. A subtle mechanical breath, steady, patient, not quite electric.

Elias adjusted his coat. The walls were steel, but not cold. They held warmth the way memory does—a residual, not a presence. He checked his watch. It was blank. He tried to check his phone. No signal. No time. No apps. Just a black screen reflecting his face, slightly warped by some internal pressure he couldn’t feel.

Five minutes passed.

Or five hours.

It became difficult to count.

There were no emergency buttons. No hatch. No phone behind the little door. Just the faint, rhythmic sound of motion. Elevation. Constant, unbroken elevation.

He coughed. His voice echoed a second too late. The sound hit the walls like it had traveled further than the space should allow. He looked up, expecting ceiling lights. There were none. Just light, sourceless and grey, as if emitted from the material itself.

Eventually, he sat down. The floor didn’t vibrate. There was no motion sickness. The elevator rose as if it weren’t moving at all.

A panel shifted.

It didn’t open. It just. adjusted. And behind it: another person. Not standing—embedded. A woman, visible only from the chest up. Her arms vanished into the wall, as if poured in. Her skin was the color of raw plastic. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved.

“Going up,” she whispered.

Then silence.

Elias backed away, but the wall behind him was no longer there. Just more paneling. Smooth. Endless.

The elevator grew.

Not suddenly, but undeniably. Like a lung filling slowly, unnoticed until it's too tight to ignore. The ceiling seemed further. The corners more distant. The floor under him paled, its color fading like it was forgetting pigment. There were now doors on each wall, all sealed. All identical. None opened.

Elias spoke. “Hello?”

The woman’s mouth moved again. “Going up.”

There were more figures now. Half-visible in the walls. Faces. Heads turned sideways. Hands that gestured things he couldn’t interpret—warnings, perhaps. Rituals. Or echoes of long-forgotten tasks.

They weren’t alive. But they weren’t dead. They were. *part* of it.

The elevator was not a room. It was a vessel. A slow exhale of architecture. A corridor of minds.

He tried to remember where he was going. Why he stepped inside. What lay above.

There was no answer. Only ascent.

No hunger. No thirst. Just awareness. Compressed, stretched, compacted again. Like a thought trying to become real but failing.

Elias looked at the walls again. They shimmered. Slightly. Each surface like a mirror of a mirror. His reflection was thinning. The proportions were wrong. His mouth no longer matched his jaw. His hair fell upward now. Or downward. He couldn’t tell.

Eventually, he stopped thinking in language.

Eventually, he stopped being Elias.

And still, the elevator ascended.

Forever.

Into something that could not be named.

But always, always—

Going up.

The walls began to breathe.

Not metaphorically. The steel pulsed now, shallow and slow, like a sleeping lung. With every breath, the seams of the elevator subtly shifted, as though the architecture were considering becoming organic. The doors no longer aligned. Corners softened. The floor bowed ever so slightly, as if weightless things had begun gathering just beneath its skin.

Elias stood, or thought he did. Gravity itself had begun to lose preference. He drifted, not upward, not downward—just away from self. He clung to the idea of up, the idea of direction, but there was no longer anything to measure against. The walls moved like memory—always present, never fixed.

Then came the windows.

He hadn’t noticed their appearance—only their presence. Four panels, one on each wall, had become transparent. Or maybe the material had stopped pretending to be solid.

Beyond the glass: blocks. Endless black modules, floating in the void, each sealed, each humming in orbit like coffins in ritual. Some turned slowly. Others sat still. Inside each, a single figure, hunched or standing, eyes open or closed—each pilot sealed in their private geometry. Each unaware of the others. Some whispered. Some screamed. None could hear.

The elevator passed them. Or they passed it.

And still it rose.

Elias tried to call out, but his voice struck the inside of his own throat like a ricochet. Language collapsed inward. Words lost heat. He became aware of the sound *beneath* all sound—*the Murmur*—though it was no voice, no word. It was what words decayed into.

Then came the fold.

The room turned in on itself. Not rotating. Folding. Like a sheet of paper closing in from four sides at once. The corners touched, then passed through each other. Light inverted. Color became mood. The floor became reflection. The ceiling turned to mist.

He saw his own body across from him—slightly older, slightly thinner, eyes glazed. Then another—eyeless, skin made of mirrored dust. Then another—no head, only a ring of thought orbiting a torso of static.

Each version of him was still. Watching. Waiting. Or remembering something that hadn’t happened yet.

Above, a new sound: the tone of something very large waking up.

The windows vanished.

The figures in the wall turned their heads in unison. Eyes opened. All of them. No pupils. Just glowing sockets filled with the same grey as the elevator’s endless light. They smiled—badly. Like trying on a face without instructions.

Elias screamed, but the sound didn’t escape. It folded into the air like steam, absorbed by the room. The air grew thick. Words became objects. His thoughts, once fluid, began clotting. Memories surfaced—but not his. Images of rooms he never entered. Lives he never lived. A wedding underwater. A death on a rooftop with no sky. A child carved from marble, handed to him by a machine.

The elevator was no longer rising.

It was unmaking height.

It was lifting through abstraction.

Through the absence of boundary.

He felt his name shatter.

Not forgotten—obliterated.

He no longer *was*. He was only in. Inside the thing. A passenger in a container of thresholds, endlessly breached.

The last thing he saw before the walls returned to steel, before the hum grew teeth, before direction died —

—was a plaque forming on the mirrored door.

It read, simply:

“YOU ARE ARRIVING.”

Then it melted.

And the elevator kept going.

Now faster.

Now forever.

Going up.