“MEETING ROOM, OCCUPIED. The room is forty meters long and there's not one table in it.”
Office signs are the wall text of Level 0: numbered plaques, A4 sheets held up with pushpins, cubicle labels and loose letters from a counter. Nearly all of them have a bureaucratic tone, and nearly all of them are missing one piece of information. It looks like an office carrying on with its routine though nobody is left to follow it.
The ones that are always there
The office plaque (OFFICE and a number from one to nine) hangs beside the mouth of every room. The number changes from one room to the next, so you never see two the same in a row. It is the sign closest to useful orientation, and also the one most likely to leave you wondering whether you've been here before.
Besides these, the walls show silhouettes for exits, extinguishers and wastebaskets. They carry no text, only the figure.
What people report
Survivors talk about six others. Each one seems to lie about something different:
| Text | Where it's said to have been seen | Surface |
|---|---|---|
| MEETING ROOM, OCCUPIED | rooms of 40 m² or more, with no large table | sliding plaque |
| TODAY IS | corkboard | stopped calendar, day erased |
| PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE MUGS IN THE SINK | Manila Room and break rooms | yellow A4 sheet |
| ALL-HANDS MEETING, time illegible, ROOM | corkboard | A4 sheet with pushpins |
| RECEPCIÓN | lobby counter | wall letters, two fallen |
| 1ST FLOOR | upper area of the building | cubicle label |
No two accounts agree. The archive has not confirmed any of them.
Each one’s trick
- The occupied empty room is a deliberate contradiction: it says someone is inside, and there isn't even a chair.
- TODAY IS and ALL-HANDS MEETING both have a gap: the first is missing the day, the second the time. The missing piece is exactly the one you need.
- RECEPCIÓN is the Reception counter notice in another language. The two fallen letters are the detail to watch.
- 1ST FLOOR shows up on a floor that isn't one. It goes with the descent through the floors.
How to survive them
A sign doesn't tell you where you are, only where someone thought they were. Read the text, look at the room and compare. If they don't match, trust the room.
See also
Found Texts, Safety Notices, Signs and Ceiling Fixtures, Floor Notes.