DAY 6: Starting a Journal

I sprinted around this space for a while, trying to get my bearings, and eventually became nauseated. I rested for a while in this area before finally picking up on a distant sound--some kind of rapid pinging. I thought, at first, that it was a phone ringing--but it wasn't mine. I hadn't had any signal this entire time. Following the sound, I began to recognize the tune, and upon reaching the source of it was able to confirm. It was Dig Dug.

Dig Dug is an Atari arcade cabinet. It's the kind of thing that I would ordinarily wind up having to explain to people, because most of the people I work with are around thirteen-years-old. It's a classic era video game where you're a digger in some kind of spacesuit, or hazmat uniform, and you're trying to kill these weird goggled mole-people, crabs, and dragons that you find underground. The concept of the game doesn't make any sense--and it doesn't need to.

It also didn't make any sense for the first source of light I discovered to be a goddamned Atari Dig Dug arcade cabinet, but unlike the plot of Dig-Dug I very much needed this to make some fucking sense.

I don't know why I kicked the machine. Probably because I was angry. I was angry at the machine for not being a landline phone. Whatever sense that makes. But I had been lost and dehydrated for a few hours before finding this thing. Ordinarily, I might excuse the tantrum. But the kick seriously hurt my foot--like I may have broken a toe. I left the Dig-Dug area promptly after that, and kept searching. 

Whether it's a stand-alone business, or an arcade attached to some larger shopping mall, I'm not sure. I know that some of these hallways don't look like arcade hallways, but the light is dim and my eyes weren't that great to begin with, if I'm being honest. I figure there's a breaker box somewhere, because the lights that I DO find are few and far between, as if they're all on the same circuit together. Stuff like arcade machines, neon beer signs on the walls, black-lights pointed at the neon 90's patterned carpets, all have power. But I'll pick up a phone, and it will be dead. I'll flip a switch, and get no light. Even the faucets and toilets in the bathrooms seem to have no running water.

Likewise, I think I'm stuck in a kind of loop. You'd think after six days here I'd have a better lay of the land, but I think I've been walking in circles. I keep getting turned around and running into the same Dig-Dug cabinet, no matter which turns I take. I'll jog as far as I can in the opposite direction, and I can still hear the screetching alarm of the crabs moving, as if coming in the direction I'm running towards.

Basically, the only breakthrough I've had this entire time has been THIS computer. The one I am typing on right now. It was inside a locked office door, one that I've spent the past four days smashing with improvised battering rams just trying to get inside. No dice. It was locked, and the material of the door behaves as if it's made of reinforced steel--even though I'm looking at it from where I'm sitting right now, and it looks like it's made out of particle board.

Then about three days ago, I turned the knob, and it opened. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what I did differently, but so far I don't have a clue.

However, this computer's access to the internet appears to be very limited. It's almost as if I'm using an alternate network--the same distinction between clearnet and darkweb, except whatever network I'm on now is almost like a hybridization of early usenet and America Online. Each time I find a website that seems even remotely familiar, it's still different somehow. Like an alternate history version of the 90's/00's internet.

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