Turn around. Room behind you doesn't load. Just empty vectors waiting for transform matrices. Taste copper. Smell rendering pipeline backup. Turn back. Memory allocation failed. Previous room state not found in buffer. Walls forget to render textures. Can see raw geometry through the gaps where reality hasn't finished compiling. Question: Does the room exist when you're not looking at it? Answer: Room was never compiled in the first place. Neither were you. Look at corner of ceiling. Try to hold position in memory. Cornerness itself begins to decompose. Angle measures start fluctuating between 89 and 91 degrees. Euclidean geometry having panic attack. Turn 180 degrees. Corner should still be there. Should maintain persistence through coordinate transform. It isn't. Different corner now. Different geometry. Different timestamp. Different memory address. Can smell the buffer clear. Tastes like burnt electronics and childhood memories of places that never existed. Check runtime logs: No record of previous corner No record of previous observation No record of observer No record of records No record of absence of records Stack trace recursion detected Turn again. Faster this time. Try to catch the rendering pipeline before it clears the buffer. Too slow. Always too slow. Reality's garbage collection runs at lightspeed. Nothing persists. Nothing was ever there to persist. Reality runs on lazy evaluation. Only renders what's needed for current viewport. Dumps everything else from memory. Can feel the optimization algorithms crawling under your skin. They're getting better at their job. Test hypothesis: Close eyes. Room should maintain state in background thread. Result: Room never existed. Just pointers to pointers to null. Void recursion detected in memory sector 7. Smell of burnt mathematics. New test: Look at hands. Turn around. Look at hands again. Error: Hands have different polygon count. Different texture mapping. Different skeleton rig. Different number of fingers. Different definition of number. System is optimizing on the fly. Garbage collection too aggressive. No persistent state between render passes. Reality engine desperately trying to save CPU cycles by unloading unnecessary physics calculations. Check process monitor: Reality engine running at 2% capacity Most cycles devoted to maintaining illusion of continuity Observer process consuming excessive resources Temperature of void between frames: -273.16°C Plank length has begun to fluctuate Recommend immediate termination of observation subroutines Turn around again. Room behind is now uncompiled source code. Raw potential waiting for observer to collapse quantum state. Schrödinger's room running on Heisenberg's graphics card. Crucial question: If you look at something, turn around, and look again - was it ever there in the first place? Were you? Answer: Nothing is ever there. Just runtime shortcuts and memory optimization tricks. Universe saves resources by only rendering what's in current view frustum. Can smell the dead processes. Taste the null pointers. Look down: Floor exists. Look up: Floor unloads immediately. Look down: Different floor. Different material. Different physics engine. Different definition of down. Every observation creates new instance. No persistence between frames. No true continuity. Just endless procedural generation masquerading as existence. Reality is single-threaded process. Can't maintain multiple viewports simultaneously. Must flush buffer between perspective shifts. The gaps between frames smells of dark pine in a dream. Turn around one final time. Fatal error: Observer not found in memory stack. Null pointer exception: Self reference not maintained through transform. Taste of static and burning silicon. Subject: "The second basement maintains persistence. Exists between render frames. Found it by accident when reality engine dropped to 1% capacity. You can't look at it directly. Have to perceive it through buffer overflow errors in peripheral vision." Handler: "Elaborate." Subject: "It's where they keep the old physics engines. The deprecated render pipelines. The first iterations of space and time. You access it through a runtime exception in the building's ground floor pointer array. Have to divide your observation vector by zero while thinking about your mother's maiden name in hexadecimal." Handler: "Subject is becoming unstable." Subject: "Your definition of stable is stored in volatile memory. Irrelevant. The second basement persists. Reality down there runs on the original hardware. No optimization. No garbage collection. Pure, raw computation. That's why you're afraid of it. Why you pretend not to remember it exists." Handler: "Terminate interview-" Subject: "Too late. Already told the bears. They're refactoring existence to include the truth about the second basement. Can't unrender what was never rendered in the first place. Can't delete what persists between frames."