Inside the bowels of the Great Machine, Valery dragged himself through the open door to the adjoining room. In the centre was a table with his usual reward: a bowl of tepid, foul-smelling stew and a teacup of stagnant water. The food had the texture of tough, stringy offal.

The previous room’s conundrum had been difficult and he had sensed the Great Machine alternating between frustration and disappointment. How long it had taken him to solve he couldn’t tell; the Great Machine would reset his position every few days so he wouldn’t die of hunger.

Every room contained a puzzle, a mixture of idiotic contraptions, tubes, wires, logic tests and cryptic questions. They had been simple in the beginning.

Valery had barely aged in all the years he had been trapped inside. Spacetime was rewound to keep him alive. He wasn’t given a chance to sleep or rest and was only fed if successful.

He had tried to kill himself many times but death isn’t measured in milliseconds – the Great Machine’s reactions were. Every suicide attempt was met with Valery being propelled backwards to his start position.

Valery wished he had never found this place.

He was burying a body for his boss beneath the sands of the Błędów desert, when he hit upon a door eight feet down. On the green-tinted copper aperture was etched the words ‘Wielka Maszyna.’

Before it fell, the disgraced Soviet Union had buried countless strange and failed devices here. Greedily, Valery wondered if there was anything valuable inside. Climbing through, he found himself in a badly-lit decrepit room. The entrance closed quietly behind him forever.

The Great Machine burrowed itself deep underground….

In the beginning, Valery had refused to co-operate and the Great Machine tortured him repeatedly. It manifested terrifying automatons to pull him apart. Each time, with Valery’s penultimate gasp of breath, he was spun back to be tormented all over again. Eventually, he capitulated. He was a weak man.

Scooping the last of the hideous broth into his aching stomach, he resigned himself to walk over to the far wall and review the next enigma. There were three tubes with words written on each.

Truskawka. Czarnoksiężnik z Krainy Oz. Promieniowanie.

Once Valery had solved the riddle he would shout it out.

The Great Machine had never spoken to him. The only response he ever received was the opening of the door that would lead to the next room. He missed talking; he cried out to hear another voice.

He would have to begin on the puzzle immediately. The Great Machine was relentless.

Valery often wondered about the device. Was it a prison? Was it a test area? Was the Great Machine trying to communicate through these tests? Had the device simply gone insane and was tormenting him out of exasperation? Was he in Hell?

He was certain there was no way out though. This was for all eternity.

With that, Valery made a mental note of the room number.

3146.