⤷ Limspace Systems ⤏ Nexus ⤏ Limspaces
The Foyer
DESCRIPTION
fig 1.0 A typical room within the Foyer.
This is my fault.
I only wanted to go home. I didn’t want this to happen, especially not to Isaac. He’s forgiven me, somehow. But I don’t have the heart to tell him what I think about that—it’s not fair to him.
It started somewhere else, but it ended with an office. There was a vending machine, desks, computers, a water cooler, and some potted plants, apparently. I’ve never seen that room. The Foyer is made of countless copies of it, but no two are identical.
We were the first to see the ‘lucid zone’—the rooms that most resemble the original. It was a slog, despite being the smallest area. The two of us had plenty to talk about, though.
A good way to tell when you're leaving the lucid zone is the carpet. Stable rooms tend towards greys, navy blues, and occasional dark greens. The copies can get a lot gaudier. Iridescent pink is the strangest I’ve seen.
Eventually desks stretch to ridiculous lengths, and windows shrink into pinholes or grow to consume the walls completely. It still seems like office space, just gradually less like something from the real world. We argued a lot about that at the time. More than we ever had. Where was the line? When is an office not an office, y’know? Not sure I’ve ever figured it out. Isaac thought the copies were their own, new thing.
After a while the rooms sprawl, going for miles. You can find dark sections, rooms with wires hanging from the ceiling, or desks fused into the floor. The rooms might even be totally empty. We argued about that, too. Isaac said it was still recognisably office-esque, parts of it anyway. I told him it didn’t fit with everything else in the lucid zone. He disagreed. I folded.
There were no arguments about what lay beyond—the Heap, the point where the Foyer forgets what it started out as. The ground is uneven, covered in broken furniture and ‘Brambles.’ Isaac came up with the name: plants that grow wildly and can cover entire rooms. They were enough of a problem that we needed a word for them, anyway.
It wasn’t a good experience overall. But the thrill? I craved it. I’d been dealing with the same places for years. This was different, even if it wasn’t what we’d hoped for. It took us nearly a month to cross. In hindsight, we had it pretty easy.
There’s no single moment where the heap ends; you’ll just notice that the next room doesn’t. It’ll be a space where you can’t even see the ceiling, let alone the distant walls. With massive lights like hanging suns. There are only four of these ‘cardinal rooms'.
I never went north and never plan to. People don’t come back from there. The West has people living in burrows built inside concrete caverns. I met a charming man from there once; he spat on my shoes and called me a can-sniffing snack-muncher. They can stay in their dingy warrens for all I care.
I’ve actually been to the East. Isaac would have loved it. It’s a massive swamp of rotting paper, stagnant, stinking, and waist-deep to boot. There are floating towns built from scrap wood, and people scavenge from vending machines submerged in the slop. It deepens the further out you get, and the slurry is viscous enough that anyone falling in won’t be swimming to safety.
I vividly remember when I first saw the South. We’d just, finally, crossed the heap. I remember thinking, 'Where the hell is the ceiling?’ before anything else. There were massive lights in the cloudy sky that made it seem like perpetual noon. Sprawling fields and rolling hills made of shaggy green carpet, broken up by the occasional stream—fed endlessly by water coolers. Even trees, sort of. Smooth trunks towering from the ground, covered in fluttering paper leaves. Continually fruiting with colourful containers in bizarre shapes: vending machine items. At a glance, I’d have thought we were on earth. Both of us were grinning.
It took a few weeks to get settled. Isaac had always been on edge—argumentative and uncomfortable in his own skin. But in the forest? He was all smiles and jokes and laughter. He was easier to be around, and I might have jokingly called it an improvement, but it kept nagging at me.
I think now it’s appropriate to explain how we arrived here.
The Foyer is not old. It’s practically a baby compared to some limspaces out there. The Nexus has been around for a while, though; it swallowed me up years before all this. And I met Isaac three years after I arrived. Me and him? We wanted out. Me more than him, honestly. I missed my dad and his jokes. I missed fast food. I missed internet memes. I missed. I missed. I missed. One day we found what you’d probably call a rift or a breach or something. A fresh wound in the flesh of reality. We decided to enter. I figured I’d die with no regrets; it was better than always wondering ‘was that an exit?’
It wasn’t.
The breach led us… outside. Outside of everything. There was no sound, barely enough light to notice there was nothing around us. My senses were dull, like I was floating more than walking. Trying to walk felt like slogging through molasses, torturously slow, and my body was numb and cold at the same time.
I forced myself to move, one tedious step after another. We were on a flat plain, the ground textureless and smooth beneath my tingling feet. In the distance there was a second breach. The way out! I tried pointing it out to Isaac, but he was already rushing ahead. He tried to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear much besides my breathing and the sound of the rift—crackling like TV static.
'Work', ‘Got here', and ‘Way out’ were all I could catch. He was breaking up like a bad phone call. He was excited, though, practically running. I struggled to keep up. The breach led out into some sort of room. I didn’t get a good look, but I can guess what it was in hindsight.
That wasn’t what I was focused on.
There was a third breach. Shimmering, beautiful. I took a look. A room. A bed. A bedroom—mine! I processed it for a few seconds. It was where I’d entered the Nexus. Would it spit me back out now? Was it that easy? I considered just running through, Isaac be damned. He couldn’t hear me, and who knew if the rift would stay around to wait for him? It was selfish and ugly of me. I pushed the thought aside.
Fifteen seconds. That’s how long I’d been turned away. Fifteen seconds to just imagine walking through and going back to how things were before everything—even if I had to do it alone. Not to act or even intend. And in that time, Isaac had reached his own breach and stepped through. I don’t know what happened next. There was just a lapse in memory. Like falling asleep without dreaming. Instant.
I was in a room. I got up and went to the next room. It was the same. I went to the next room. The same. And the next. And the next. And the next.
It didn’t end. The same room was just repeating over and over and over and over.
The sound of Isaac shouting stopped my spiralling. I followed his voice, and after a few minutes I reached him. That was how we found the Foyer, or how it found us. Isaac thought we created it. Maybe he was right. Maybe the Foyer is my monster, my mistake created with those fifteen selfish seconds.
So there we were, in the south. We’d spent months relaxing. But the questions were there, like tinnitus in my ear. Why don’t I remember? Why won’t he explain? One day I bit the bullet and asked him.
‘What happened to you?’
He hesitated. I could see him look for the words. A moment passed. Then he told me. The Foyer was the office where he worked. Same as my bedroom, it was where he entered.
‘But that’s not true,’ he said. Isaac came from his office, but he came from the Foyer. Because despite having his face and his memories, the specifics were wrong. A flawed copy. Slightly off.
‘I’m not Isaac.’
He said that bluntly, like he was commenting on the weather.
Where is the real Isaac? He didn’t know.
‘Why the fuck did you keep that from me?’
He figured I already knew, deep down.
I regret some of the things I said. Deeply.
After that, we separated.
I only reached out to him recently. He doesn’t hold anything against me, for what it’s worth. But I don’t think we’re friends anymore, if we ever were. There’s never been any sign of the ‘real’ Isaac. I’m scared to look. I like to imagine he’s somewhere, happy. Maybe back home? Maybe the rift really did let him leave. A comfortable lie. He’d have gotten the message to me, somehow; that’s just the kind of person he was.
It’s been a few years since then. People come and go, but I’ve built a new life here. Something meant to last. I wanted, so deeply, to go home. Still do. If I got the choice to leave or stay, I’d leave. But I know this is my fault. So I stay, I help. I do what I can. I keep an eye on things, too, rumours mostly. People talk about lands even further south where the Foyer starts to copy itself, maybe even copy us. Someone even suggested maybe we were the copies. The thought unsettles me, I’ll admit.
I mean, if I am just a copy of a copy of a copy, how would I know?
ACCESS
Entrances
This place is a new entrance to the Nexus. The main one, I suppose. If you want to avoid getting stuck here, then stay away from anywhere in baseline reality, like abandoned offices, places under construction, or anywhere that's empty but doesn't feel like it should be.
If that happened to you, I'm sorry. I know it's my fault. What do you want me to say? I didn’t mean to do this.
For the rest of us? We're already in the Nexus; you can get to the Foyer from a few other places in the system, but it's not consistent. Elevators sometimes work, though the second you step out and lose sight of them, they're gone, so be careful.
Exits
You can leave easily enough; as long as you have something on your person that isn't part of the Foyer, you've got decent chances of it eventually spitting you out somewhere else.
The system itself has no known exit. Forgive me for speculating. But maybe the original room? The breach? I keep revisiting things, going over it all in my head, and I just wonder. If we went through mine instead… maybe things would be different. Y'know? It’s far too late now, but it’s a nice thought.
— June 4th 2023. Written by Mark Mayhew, thank you to OaC (Isaac) for the help.