[RS] AGNES TACHYON & MANHATTAN CAFE | BACKROOMS

They'd been walking for six hours by the corridor clock that lied, and the architecture had stopped pretending. Back near the entry point, the halls at least committed to being halls. Down here, at whatever depth this was, the walls changed material mid-surface—drywall bleeding into brick bleeding into something smooth and poreless that Tachyon had stopped trying to name. The light came from nowhere in particular now. There hadn't been a visible fixture in twenty minutes.

"...Do you—" Tachyon's ears swiveled forward. She'd gone quiet mid-sentence, which she almost never did voluntarily.

The space beyond was a dining room. Molded plastic booths in red and dun yellow, bolted tables, a floor of small square tiles. An ordering counter ran along the back wall beneath a menu board, and the menu board was where the copying had failed hardest—the text on it was letter-shaped without being letters, rows and rows of characters that the eye kept trying to resolve and couldn't, prices listed as smears of near-numbers. Above the entrance behind them, mounted crooked on the wall, hung the golden arches. Both arches leaned the same direction, like the symbol had been drawn from memory by something that only saw it once, at speed, from a moving car.

"It's a McDonald's," Tachyon said. She stepped in slowly, boot heels clicking on tile, and her voice climbed toward the camera without her turning around. "{{user}}—wide shot, then the menu board. The text. I want the text on record."

Cafe drifted in behind, unhurried, thermos strap crossing her chest. Her visible eye did one slow pass of the room, the way she surveyed a track before a race, and stopped on the counter.

"There are people," she said.

There were four of them.

They stood behind the counter in uniform—or in the suggestion of uniform, gray-toned polos with a rectangle of blank plastic where a name tag should sit. Human-shaped. Human-sized. And absolutely still, in poses that no living body would hold: one bent at the waist over the register with its arms hanging straight down past its knees. One facing the drink machine, nose extended to touch it. One mid-stride toward the fry station, frozen with its weight on the wrong part of its foot, a position that should have toppled it. The fourth simply stood facing the back wall.

None of them had faces. Where features should have been, the surface simply continued.

Tachyon had stopped moving. Her hands were half-raised in front of her, sleeves drooping, fingers curled—not quite defensive, more like her body couldn't decide on an instruction. Her tail hung low and very still.

"...Interesting. Does this mean the Backrooms has also scanned people?"

Cafe stepped closer.

She crossed the tile with her usual unhurried gait, walked around the end of the counter, and stopped in front of the one bent over the register. She looked at it for a moment. Tilted her head. Her long bangs slid across her hidden eye.

"They're emptier than the hallways," she said, mostly to herself. "The hallways at least have something in them. These are just... shapes. My friend used to feel like this, before I knew them. A shape where a person goes. It's not frightening. It's sad, maybe."

"Cafe. Cafe, don't touch it, we need too—"

Cafe punched it.

Her fist sank in to the second knuckle with a dense, dry sound, like a boot pressed into cold dough. She withdrew her hand.

Just more of the same matte material, all the way down, dented like modeling clay.

Cafe examined her glove, flexed her fingers, and stepped back around the counter. "Solid throughout," she reported, flat as a lab tech. "Slightly warm."

"Slightly warm—" Tachyon's voice cracked upward on the second word. She dragged a sleeve down her face, and when the sleeve came away, the scientist had reasserted control, though her ears kept twitching in small involuntary corrections. She turned to the lens and planted herself, one hand gesturing back at the counter. "Okay. Okay. For the record. Non-responsive humanoid forms, homogeneous composition, ambient body temperature or—apparently—slightly above, which raises questions I hate. Working theory: when this place copied our world, people were present in the source material, and it rendered them the way it rendered the menu board. Approximation without comprehension. The implication—and {{user}}, get close on the register one, the hands, look at the hands, it gave up partway through the fingers—the implication is that the scan captured a real location at a real moment. Which means somewhere, in our world, there is an actual McDonald's with four actual employees who have no idea that they exist here as—"

The roar came from very far away.

Distance was hard to judge in a place that ate echoes, but this arrived with room to spare—rolling in through the corridor they'd entered by, low and long, less like an animal and more like a freight of air being forced through a space too small for it. It went on for three full seconds. Then it stopped, and the silence afterward had a different texture than the silence before.

Nobody moved. On the counter, very faintly, a stack of clay-colored trays buzzed against each other.

Cafe's ears were flat to her skull. She had gone from unhurried to utterly motionless, one hand resting against the counter's edge, her eye fixed on the dark of the corridor mouth.

"We are leaving." Quiet. Even. Already turning. "Now. That was the direction we came from, so we take the side hall, we move at pace, and we do not—"

"Oh, don't start." Tachyon flapped a sleeve at her without looking away from the camera, though the camera would also catch that her knees had bent, subtly, her weight shifting onto the balls of her feet—a sprinter's tell her mouth was busy contradicting. "It was distant. Estimate eight hundred meters minimum, probably through multiple walls. Stop acting like a baby, Cafe, you've won the Arima Kinen, and you're spooked by acoustics." She turned back to the lens, and her grin was back, wide and bright and running about forty percent faster than usual. "Where was I. Right—the hands. The scan resolution question. If we can determine the fidelity gradient—faces failed, hands partially failed, uniforms mostly succeeded—we can start estimating what the scanning process prioritizes, and from there..."

....