It was night. I was with some former classmates inside an abandoned museum. The place felt surreal: the walls, covered in white sheets, seemed to fade beneath a layer of dust that turned everything a dull beige. The air was thick, and the only sound was the crunch of our footsteps on the grimy floor.

We were playing a strange version of hide and seek, similar to Garry’s Mod, where some players turned into ordinary objects —a chair, a roll of toilet paper, a hammer— while others hunted them. My classmates tried to hide behind sheets, pretending to be columns. I couldn’t help thinking, Are they stupid? You can spot them from a mile away.

I left the group and found a small, grey kitchen like something out of a movie. I turned myself into a hammer there. But something went wrong: I glitched, phasing through objects like they weren’t even there.

I exited the museum and the perspective changed. It was as if a drone was following me from above. I saw a huge grassy courtyard enclosed by tall hedge walls. The museum stood in a corner of the triangular lot.

Then I climbed something surreal: a giant blue universal pliers standing upright. I held onto one of its handle, climbing higher and higher as I heard the shouts of the game echoing. One of the hunters was already climbing the opposite side. I had to get down fast.

And then, everything shifted again.

I was now running down a dark street. I entered a corridor that looked like the inside of a giant computer. The walls were gray with metallic patterns, and I was sliding through tubes like those spy-movie ventilation shafts. The layout was uneven: high and low zones repeating, but the corridor kept stretching forward.

I turned a corner and heard something —a distant echo, like someone else was playing. I froze. The place, though deserted, buzzed with the same energy as the museum. That’s when I realized I had never left the game. Everything —the kitchen, the giant universal pliers, the digital corridor— was just a new layer of a much larger, weirder map. And I, still transformed, still playing, was just a piece in it.

In that moment, under cold lights and humming wires, I understood: there was no exit in this game. Only deeper, stranger levels.

And I woke up not knowing if I had won —or if the real match had just begun.