He gawked... Another year...?
"No... It can't be... What the hell is this?"
He looked around, everywhere, his breathing starting to fail. He wasn't on the ship. He was in a loop.
A distorted loop.
He stopped, his mind racing.
"What the hell is this fish and bubble? It's a sequence similar to the last one."
"Too strange to be a coincidence."
"...Frutiger-Aero-Morse."
"But I don't know Morse."
"Willy-nilly."
If he just passed through the room... And it added 1 year... reaching 531, that means he isn't in that room for just a few seconds; he's been traversing it 531 times, no matter how much time he's already lost.
By the way... What is time? Where was he, if not suspended in a temporal labyrinth distorted by a spatial anomaly?
"Wait..." He took a deep breath, calm blooming from beyond. "I need to confirm. There might just be another room and..."
The radio crackled to life again—"Yeah? So, I'm the problem?"
"Damn it..." He chuckled, cynical. "Am I dead, then?"
The same dialogue.
"Wait..." He took another deep breath. "If I've been here before, then I left clues. Anything. Wall... Display? Ceiling? Anything at all."
He approached the display again, but there was nothing new there.
"Okay... wall..." He knelt, scanning every detail on the dusty metal, until an engraved poem appeared in his field of vision:
"Nunes was born on a Monday"
"Entered the void on a Tuesday"
"Fell to the moon on a Wednesday"
"Fell in love on a Thursday"
"Worsened on a Friday"
"Lost her on a Saturday"
"And was killed on a Sunday"
The gunshot echoed again.
The Squeeek followed.
And vacuum was all that remained—silence.
"Okay, hold on." He frowned, as if all of this would suddenly make sense. "'Lost her,' that must be because she died. And that scream I heard? Did I die? So today's Sunday?"
After all, what did "Sunday" truly mean?
"Alright, I'll try to pass through again."
And so he did. The button was pressed. And the outer hatch opened.
Again... He chuckled, already stepping inside, the door automatically closing behind him.
This time, blood. Lots of blood. His own.
"What the hell...?" He was there, faceless, torn in half. It didn't stink as it should; he had only died recently.
"No... No, wait a minute." He laughed, cynical, shaking his head. "What the hell is this? Is someone using my face as a mask, huh?"
"If I died, it's Sunday." The thought floated in his mind.
"Okay, I died. Sunday." He nodded, his eyes immersed in his own thoughts and visualization. "The first room, I started at 530. Why? I gained consciousness through what? Why did I hear Ketlen dying? It didn't seem like I killed her; it seemed like suicide."
Her words came back instantly:
"What I'm going to do now is simply erase a mistake that never should have existed."
"Okay, then I..."
"Ketlen... KETLEN, YOU MISERABLE BASTARD! WHY DID YOU DO THIS?!"
"100% suicide, no doubt about it," He clenched his eyes, rubbing his shoulder. "But this time, there was no radio, no voices."
...
"So, they wanted me to think that...?"
"530 --> Radio" "531 --> Radio" "532 --> Nothing"
"Nundinae..." he whispered, like a terrible secret.
He took two slow steps.
Stopped. Turned around.
He looked at the hatch he had just passed through.
"It won't repeat if I go through the door, that's logical." He nodded.
He looked at the ceiling. The floor, the display, the poem.
The soft curve in the lights.
The corridor... it wasn't exactly straight. It was curved. But not circular. Not cyclical. It was twisted. And there was a peculiar mark of furniture on the floor, as if a table and chairs had been removed in a hurry.
"This isn't a corridor..." he murmured, his mouth dry. "It's a ribbon."
... The light flickered for half a second.
He turned once more. He observed the edges of the wall, where the floor merged with the ceiling, without corners, without angles.
"A Möbius strip."
He closed his eyes for a second. Memories of the police office.
A paper with a cut. One twist. A turn. A staple.
The light flickered again, half a second.
Now he spoke to himself, with the clarity of someone who had already understood everything—and hated the fact that he only knew half of it:
"A Möbius strip only has one side..."
"You think you're going forward, but in reality... you're just passing through the other face of the same path."
"And when the turn ends... you return to the starting point."
"Only inside out."
"I died, who killed me?"
"The 'Squeeek' killed me, whatever the fuck that is..."
"I see..."