Slip : Part 7 : Through the Static

 “Belle! Belle, can you hear me?!” Sunny shouted as loud as she could — but it was as if they couldn’t hear her at all.

“No, look — the dancing one! The cat’s dancing, see? This one’s definitely AI!” said another familiar voice, followed by cheerful laughter.

No one knew that Sunny was screaming her lungs out, calling their names with all the strength she had left.

For a few fleeting seconds, the sound of footsteps and laughter began to fade…

“No… no, no! Please answer me! Damn it! I’m right here! Can’t you hear me!?” Sunny cried. She took a deep breath and screamed again, using every bit of her strength.
“BELLEEEEEEEEEEE!!! HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

………………………………

And then — silence.

The same suffocating silence returned.
The laughter, the chatter, the footsteps — all gone.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

Sunny screamed hysterically, pounding the walls over and over — bang! bang! bang! — then snatched the pen from the skeleton’s bony hand and began scrawling wildly across the wall in a frenzy.

After a few moments, she collapsed to the ground, lying flat in utter exhaustion.

Time lost all meaning.

She didn’t know how long she had been lying there, staring blankly at the ceiling. Slowly, her thoughts returned — fragmented, trembling. She began piecing things together.

Pu had said she’d been trapped here for many days — yet in reality, she’d only been missing four.

When Sunny had gone to get her water, it had taken less than a minute for her… but in Pu’s notebook, she wrote that Sunny had been gone for a very long time.

And now Pu was nothing but bones.

And then — Belle’s voice.

“That day… Belle told me she heard me shouting for help on the stairs…” Sunny whispered to herself. “It must’ve been this moment… but that was days ago for her. Yet it’s happening right now for me… Time here — it’s completely distorted.”

At that thought, Sunny bolted upright.

“I’m stuck in another dimension… That must be it. It sounds insane — but what else could explain this madness? Time here is fractured — overlapping. The past and future keep colliding. Pu’s body — decomposed far beyond four days, like months. The voices I heard — happening days later outside… This place has both past and future colliding in one endless loop.”

Her eyes lit up with a glimmer of hope.

“If I keep walking… maybe I’ll find a moment — in the past, or the future — where I can get out.”

With renewed determination, Sunny slowly pushed herself up and stood.

She turned back toward Pu’s skeleton, her voice soft but resolute.

“I’m going now, Pu. If I come back to these stairs again, I don’t know if you’ll still be here… but I have to keep walking. I have to find the way out.”

She stepped past the skeletal remains and walked toward the corridor. Then, uncertain, she hesitated — and turned back.

Just to be sure.

What if Pu had… come back to life?

Sunny descended a few steps, her heart pounding. But as soon as she reached the stairwell, the stench hit her — thick, rotten, metallic — so strong she almost vomited.

She stumbled back and ran to a corner, retching violently.

“If I keep going down, I’ll probably go back to when Pu’s body was fresh… but if I go forward — could I go back to when she was still alive?”

Sunny covered her nose with a handkerchief and carefully approached the stairs again. The foul odor still lingered, unchanged — which meant time hadn’t shifted yet.

She turned away, heading toward the office cubicles.

The desks of her coworkers were neatly lined up. The window glass along the wall reflected nothing but the stale light above.

Sunny rummaged through drawers, under desks — scattering things across the floor. No food, no snacks — nothing. Only an empty bottle.

She filled it with water from the dispenser, grabbed a pen, and scribbled something on the wall. Then she headed for the opposite staircase.

When she emerged again onto the fifth-floor corridor, the words she had written were gone — erased, as if they had never existed.

Every object she had moved, broken, or disturbed had returned to its original place. Everything — perfectly restored, unchanged.

And when she crossed to the stairwell where Pu’s remains were, she found the skeleton even drier, more decayed than before.

Her footsteps echoed softly on the stairs — steady, rhythmic.
Her faint breathing matched their tempo.

She stepped carefully over the crumbling gray dust scattered across the steps, continuing upward in her endless search for an exit.

Sometimes the stairs appeared spotless — no trace of blood, no remnants of decay — as if nothing gruesome had ever happened there.

But no matter how many times she searched the stairwells, no matter how many loops she made, she never found Pu alive again.

Maybe death was simply death — unchangeable, unrepeatable.

Everything was too strange, too convoluted to make sense anymore.

So Sunny stopped questioning it.

There was only one thing she now understood, after hundreds — maybe thousands — of cycles through this place:

The only thing that ever changed…
was what existed between the stairs.

Without any way to tell day from night, Sunny could only rely on her body’s signals — her heavy eyelids, her aching limbs — to know that she was tired. So she assumed it must be late.

She gathered some notebooks and documents from a nearby desk, stacked them together into a makeshift pillow, and lay down in exhaustion. Her eyes slowly drifted shut as her consciousness faded into darkness.

………………………………………………………………………….. 

— To be continued... —

Slip #1,  Slip #2 , Slip #3,  Slip #4,  Slip #5,  Slip #6, Slip #8,  Slip #9,  Slip #10