[The countdown begins. The rules mean death]
After repairing an antique pocket watch, I found it locked around my wrist, its crimson digits beginning a 72-hour countdown to my death.
My only way to survive is to enter one bizarre, self-consistent space after another. In an apartment where you must smile forever, the corners of the neighbors’ mouths are splitting open. In a library where absolute silence is required, knowledge spreads in the form of screams…
I thought I was just a prisoner fighting to stay alive.
Until I saw a design for my workbench at the heart of one of the spaces.
Until I realized that every loophole in the rules perfectly matched the way my mind works.
Until, as I hovered on the brink of death, the watch that had been counting down to my end gave me its first cold prompt: [Core anomaly detected. Temporary access granted. Please write a new rule for the current space.]
I suddenly realized that the source of this global wave of rule-based horror might lie in the fire that engulfed my studio three years ago.
And what I have to do now is more than just survive until the countdown reaches zero.
I also have to find the first “me,” the one who turned the world into a prison.
