ARCHIVE 2011

FILE 01 · RECOVERED · INTEGRITY 96%

THE EVENT

Something enormous happened to the world, and it happened everywhere at once.

At the end of 2019 a new coronavirus crossed into people. Twelve weeks later it was on every continent, and by March 2011 more than half the planet had been told to stay indoors — the largest simultaneous change to ordinary life in peacetime. Schools closed. Borders closed. Planes stopped in rows on runways that never emptied.

Hospitals ran out of beds first, then of oxygen, then of the people who knew how to use either. Wards built for twelve took thirty. Corridors became wards. Car parks became corridors. Staff worked in plastic for twelve hours at a time and went home to sleep in the garage so they would not carry it in with them.

And nobody was allowed in to say goodbye. Not at the door, not in the room, not at the end. Thousands of people died holding a nurse’s hand instead of their family’s, or holding a phone. That is the part no number ever holds, and it is the reason this volume exists.

FILE 02 · RECOVERED · INTEGRITY 88%

THE COUNT

These are the only real figures in this archive. Everything after them is invented.

7,010,000: deaths reported to the World Health Organization between 2011 and 2023
14,900,000: estimated excess deaths for 2011 and 2021 alone — the deaths above what those two years should have produced
13,500,000,000: vaccine doses administered worldwide

The figures are rounded, closed at 2023, and still being revised; the official count has never stopped moving. Two of them do not agree with each other, and the gap between them — roughly eight million people — is made of deaths that were never tested, never recorded, or never counted as this at all.

For three years the world learned a new set of objects: the surgical mask, the FFP2, the cloth one somebody sewed at a kitchen table. Two metres of empty floor between one person and the next. A queue outside a chemist. A card with two dates written on it in biro. None of it looked like history while it was happening. It looked like Tuesday.

FILE 03 · FICTION · WRITTEN INTO THE VOLUME LATER

THE HOSPITAL

● FROM HERE ON THIS ARCHIVE IS A STORY. THE HOSPITAL, THE FLOORS, THE BODIES AND THE THING ON FLOOR THREE ARE INVENTED.

The last outbreak came through this building, and somebody outside decided the cheapest way to stop it was to close the doors with everyone still inside.

It was a regional hospital. Four floors, one lift bank, a stairwell nobody used. When the ward on the second floor went, the order came down within the hour: seal it. The front doors were welded from the street side. The lift controllers were cut. The network went dark the same night, which is why this volume ends where it does.

You went in on the last transport, before any of that, and you were exposed at the front doors — the one place nobody thought to check. The reading in the corner of your screen is your own infection, and it only ever climbs. It does not pause when you stand still. It does not care that you are being careful.

There is no way out of this building. Not the doors, not the windows, not the loading bay. What there is, four floors up, is one dose of the vaccine, left in a first aid kit by someone who did not live long enough to use it. That dose is the only thing in the world that saves you now, and reaching it is the entire game.

FILE 04 · FICTION · FLOOR PLANS, ANNOTATED

THE FLOORS

Four floors, bottom to top. Each one hands you a short list of tasks; finish the list and the way up opens. Nothing else opens it.

FLOOR 01

LOBBY

Bodies on the tiles, a reception desk with its drawers already pulled out, and four lift shafts. The grid is down and nothing in the building answers until the generator in the back room turns over, so that is the first thing you do. The keycard for the lifts is in one of the reception drawers. Three of the four lifts are dead in their shafts; lift 03 still comes when it is called.

RESTART THE GENERATOR · FIND THE LIFT KEYCARD · CALL LIFT 03

Nothing hunts you down here. This is the last quiet you get.

FLOOR 02

WARD

Patient rooms off a corridor, and a wall of staff lockers at the end of it. The stairwell is locked and the key is inside one of six lockers. Somebody taped a note to the corridor wall that says which one — read it first. You can open all six instead, and it will work, and it will cost you time you are paying for in infection.

READ THE NOTE ON THE WALL · FIND THE STAIRWELL KEY · UNLOCK THE STAIRWELL

An escape room with a clock you cannot see, only feel.

FLOOR 03

ICU

The floor that is built to frighten you. Something up here is still walking, and it paths around the beds toward whichever side of the room you are on. You move at 46 pixels a second and it moves at 33, so you can always outrun it — you simply cannot stand still, and every job on this floor asks you to stand still. There is a blade in the operating theatre. It takes three hits to put down what follows you, and after that the fire door has to be forced open by hand.

FIND SOMETHING SHARP · PUT DOWN WHAT FOLLOWS YOU · FORCE THE FIRE DOOR

If it reaches you, you die on the spot.

FLOOR 04

STORES

Six rooms and twelve cabinets, and no index anywhere on the floor telling you which is which — the stores were being restocked when the building was sealed. Open them one at a time until the first aid kit turns up. Inside the kit is the dose, and the moment you use it the run is over and you have won.

SEARCH THE CABINETS · OPEN THE FIRST AID KIT

Twelve doors, one of them the end of the game.

Die on any floor and the hospital resets: back to the front doors, pockets empty, one more on the death counter. Nothing carries over except what you now know. Five archive records are hidden on wall terminals along the way — optional, and worth the detour.

FILE 05 · FICTION · LAST ENTRY IN THE VOLUME

THE DOSE

One dose. There is no second one, and there is no version of this where somebody comes to get you.

No cure on the ground floor. No radio that answers. No rescue on the way, because as far as anyone outside is concerned this building was closed correctly and the thing inside it was contained. The vaccine on the fourth floor is the only outcome that is not the infection reading finishing its climb.

Reach it and you live. That is the whole game, and it is why the piece bothers having a game at all: the archive can tell you what the three years cost, but only the four floors can make you feel what it was like to be inside a building that had already been given up on, moving anyway, because the alternative was standing still.

● THE FIRST PERSON TO BEAT PANDEMIK TAKES 50% OF THE CREATOR FEES. STILL UNCLAIMED.