Page 109 of Tapeworld Induction

Something fell from the sky with a bang.

He jumped. Fear dragged its talons across his back.

As he went to get out, he realised the car door wouldn’t open.

“Breathe…” he said to himself, bracing to push harder. “One… Two… Three!”

Nothing.

Counting each breath, he tried again.

“One…” Breathe.

“Two…” Breathe.

“Three!”

The door opened.

There. The tape just needed me to be perfectly focused.

Outside, the air was freezing. He shivered and huddled his arms around himself, rubbing his hands up and down. A fine dusting of what looked like oversized glitter was falling slowly from the sky, sticking to his clothes. He tried shaking it off, but it wouldn’t go. The stuff latched onto him like tree sap.

The lamp-post, the car, and the vague shape of whatever had fallen in front of it were the only things in sight. Around him, there was only the pitch black of night. Worse, a void. No shimmering vista filling in the blanks, no decorative Tapeworld landscape tailored to its owner.

He tried to call Dylan. No answer. Then Sacha. No answer. As he went to put his phone back in his pocket, it slipped to the ground. He leaned down to pick it up, but it was suddenly nowhere to be found. Telephone evaporation.

“Okay. So this place is another trap.” He vowed to never tape in by himself to one of Astrid’s destinations again. As if putting on the headset to her prison world hadn’t been enough… He felt an urge to kick the car door.

Isaak realised he knew better, and stopped himself. He rubbed the missing knuckle on his hand. Don’t…

He walked to the fallen object. At first he couldn’t even focus on it for long enough to make out what it was. Everything was blurry, a mess of grey, brown, and red. Slowly it started becoming clearer – what looked like interlocking shapes, held together by a set of red bands.

He touched it and his sight became cleansed, sharp. The contraption looked like a car engine, but soft and… gelatinous, he realised, as he felt it.

Isaak stuck his finger into a tubular indentation, and it twisted itself into shape to match the curvature of his finger. It felt pleasant, yet… itchy. He couldn’t scratch it though.

Trying to calm the sensation, he slid his hand in, then his forearm, and was soon up to the shoulder, his arm fully inserted into the slip’n’slide car engine, gelatinous goop all around it.

Then the whole thing lit up, and it was gone, the snot no longer glossing his arm.

He looked around, out of breath, bewildered, trying to keep a grasp on… reality? Isaak was now lying down in a dark room. There were shelves with books and papers and metal pipes and other various bits and bobs, repeated power tools and deformed, sloping saws. Some kind of storeroom? His skin had stopped itching at some point.

“Bring up diagnostics,” he said as he got up.

Familiar translucent shapes materialised in front of him. A holographic keyboard, split into two. Isaak placed his hands on it and his body shook, staggering backwards, but he didn’t fall. The hand-keyboard connection held him vertical.

The shapes, bars, and graphs bobbed up and down as the machine analysed him and the unfamiliar tape-space he was in.

His arm tested positive for a drug. The engine-oil goop must have been laced with LSD, capable of delivering an hallucination-rich high.

Astrid had successfully embedded the mind-altering effects of a drug in the fabric of a tape-space, messing with a strider’s perception of the world.

You crazy motherfucker.

A door materialised to his side.

He walked through it, out of the storeroom, arriving into a long, wide space. It was night-time, if the view out of the floor-to-ceiling windows was to be trusted. Pillars were evenly spread along the sides of the room, a space left empty in the middle, like a corridor.