📘 BLUE FIVE CHAPTER ONE — ORIENTATION

 📘 BLUE FIVE

CHAPTER ONE — ORIENTATION

The badge printer jammed twice before it finally accepted the name.

Not your real name.

Nobody used real names here.

The card slid out warm.

BLUE FIVE

The supervisor clipped it onto your vest without looking up.

“Forklift cert’s loaded. Radio’s synced. Don’t leave assigned sectors.”

Normal orientation stuff.

At least it sounded normal.

The warehouse was enormous.

Not impressive enormous.

Wrong enormous.

Like parts of it continued farther than the building should physically allow.

Rows of fluorescent lights vanished into haze overhead. Forklift beacons blinked through distant aisles like ships crossing fog.

Nobody talked much.

Just scanner chirps. Pallet wrap crackling. Conveyor hum.

The radio on your vest clicked once.

Static.

Then a woman’s voice.

Quiet. Controlled.

Too calm.

“Blue Five… do you hear me?”

You stopped walking.

The orientation lead kept moving like nothing happened.

“Yeah?”

Silence.

Then:

“Don’t trust automatic doors.”

The transmission cut.

You looked toward the nearest dock sector.

An automatic door slowly opened by itself.

Nobody was standing near it.

For a second, you thought you saw another warehouse beyond it.

Not another room.

Another version.

The lights were different there.

The forklifts sounded different.

And just before the door shut again—

You could’ve sworn someone wearing your exact badge looked back at you from the other side.

The orientation lead finally noticed you stopped walking.

“You coming, Blue Five?”

You looked back toward the door.

Closed now.

Silent.

Like nothing happened.

But the radio clicked one more time.

Barely audible.

Like the voice was speaking from very far away.

“It already found you.”

Then the radio clicked again.

The signal sounded distant. Faded. Fragmented.

Like her voice was coming from multiple places at once.

“Blue Five…”

Static swallowed the channel.

Then her voice returned somewhere deeper in the interference.

Further away this time.

“...do not trust automatic doors...”