"Systems always fail in predictable ways."
Steven Gaye whispered this to himself as his soldering iron hovered over a gutted PlayStation controller. The room smelled of burnt plastic and stale coffee, the acrid tang of all-night engineering sessions. Outside, a late autumn wind rattled the windowpane, but Steven barely noticed. His world had narrowed to the circuit board under his magnifying lamp, to the delicate dance of applying just enough heat to bridge two contacts without frying the chip.
"Trace the failure back far enough, and you'll always find a human error."
His professor's words from last week's Automation Ethics lecture echoed in his skull. Professor Calloway had been talking about factory robots, about safety protocols—but Steven knew the principle applied to haunted houses too. Maybe especially to haunted houses.
The controller sparked to life in his hands, its LED blinking an erratic pattern. Steven leaned back in his creaking desk chair, rolling the stiffness from his shoulders. On his center monitor, frozen mid-game, the pixelated specters of R.E.P.O. waited patiently for his return.
"What kind of error made you?" he asked the screen.
The game, of course, didn't answer.
"Time to go to class I guess..."
Hartwell University's Engineering Annex was a brutalist concrete block that seemed to repel sunlight. Steven took the stairs two at a time, his steps echoing in the stairwell.
"You're late, Mr. Gaye."
Professor Calloway didn't even look up from her tablet as Steven slipped into the Advanced Control Systems lab. The room hummed with the sound of servo motors and cooling fans, a symphony of precision engineering.
"Traffic," Steven lied, sliding into his workstation. His fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up yesterday's code.
Calloway finally glanced at him over her glasses. "You don't own a car."
"Pedestrian traffic," he amended without missing a beat. The lie came easy these days. Lying to Calloway felt like cheating on a test he'd already aced.
His current project, a self-calibrating robotic arm, twitched to life as his code compiled. The servos whined softly as the limb began its diagnostic routine, each movement mathematically perfect.
"Like watching a conductor lead an orchestra," Calloway had said during his freshman review. "If the orchestra was made of scrap metal and bad decisions."
Steven smirked at the memory. He'd taken it as a compliment then. Still did.
The arm completed its cycle with a satisfied beep. On impulse, Steven opened a new terminal window and fed it a snippet of R.E.P.O.'s movement algorithms. The arm jerked, then began moving in uncanny, almost organic patterns.
"There you go," Steven murmured. "Now you're learning."
Across the lab, Calloway sighed. "Gaye, if you're done teaching our equipment bad habits..."
Steven killed the program. The arm went limp.
"Sorry, Professor. Got carried away."
The lie tasted like copper pennies on his tongue.
Steven went back to his dorm to finish on this project that makes up 80% of his grade for the course.
Steven exhaled through his nose, rubbing his temples.
"Error in Line 47," the terminal spat at him.
"Yeah, no shit," he muttered, squinting at the spaghetti code he'd written at 3 AM.
A heavy hand clapped his shoulder. "Hey Steven. You look like haven't been touching kids for a while."
Steven didn't need to turn around to know it was Miles Tanaka, also an electronics engineering major and the only person on campus who could keep up with him in a circuit design fight. Miles and his other friend Mark always joked about Steven being a pedophile ever since they caught him talking to 4 high school students from an academy nearby. Miles dropped into the chair beside him, tossing a soldering iron onto the desk like it was a challenge.
"Your PID loop's oscillating," Miles said, nodding at the jerking robotic arm. "And this shit's overcorrecting."
Steven groaned. "I know. It's the integral term—it's too aggressive."
"So fix it." Miles said while smiling at Steven provoking his stupid ahh.
"I'm trying." as Steven looks into his calculations and code for the stupid project.
Miles smirked, reaching over to yank the keyboard from Steven's hands. "Watch and learn, Steven Gayelord. If only you were actually using your time to learn, than flirt with the students from the nearby high school."
Steven's fingers twitched toward the stolen keyboard as Miles began typing with exaggerated flourish. The robotic arm spasmed violently, nearly knocking over a beaker of spare resistors.
"Christ, Tanaka," Steven hissed, grabbing the arm's base. "You're going to—"
The arm suddenly moved with liquid precision, executing a perfect three-axis rotation before delicately plucking a microchip from the workbench. Miles sat back with a shit-eating grin.
"See? Just needed to..." (insert clickity-clack noises)
"Override all the safety protocols, yeah, brilliant," Steven snapped, checking the servos for strain. "We're not all willing to burn out a $15,000 lab arm to prove a point."
Miles' grin didn't waver. "Yet here you are, running game physics on industrial equipment." He nodded at the terminal where R.E.P.O.'s movement algorithms still glowed. "What's next? Teaching it to teabag?"
A snort came from the doorway. Mark Villanueva leaned against the frame, his ever-present laptop tucked under one arm. "Don't give him ideas. Last week he made the 3D printer play Snake during calibration. It's actually crazy he hasn't invented an automated minor farm so that he has a continuous supply of minors."
Steven opened his mouth to retort when the lab lights flickered. The robotic arm jerked—not from code, but from a power fluctuation that shouldn't happen in Hartwell's dormitories.
All three of them froze.
"Uh," Mark said slowly, "did Professor Calloway finally install that killswitch she kept threatening?"
The temperature dropped five degrees in as many seconds. Steven's breath fogged as he instinctively reached for the modified PlayStation controller in his bag—the one currently wired to detect electromagnetic anomalies. Its LED array pulsed crimson.
Miles' eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. "Okay, what the actual—"
"The dorm's haunted now?" Mark finished, voice pitching upward. "Cool. Coolcoolcool. I'll just—" He took a step backward toward the door.
The controller's vibration motor activated at full intensity, rattling against the workbench. On Steven's monitor, lines of code began rewriting themselves—not with the familiar logic of his automation scripts, but in jagged, glitching characters that hurt to look at:
WRAITH JOINED
STATIC JOINED
ECHO JOINED
LOCKS JOINED
"What the fuck," Miles whispered, uncharacteristically serious.
Steven's stomach turned to lead. He knew those prompts. They appeared in R.E.P.O. when someone joins the lobby. But this wasn't the game. This was—
The robotic arm moved without input, its joints screeching as it contorted into an impossible angle—fingers splaying like a spider testing its limbs. The servos screamed in protest, the smell of burning insulation filling the air.
"Kill the power!" Steven lunged for the emergency shutoff.
"Wait!" Mark grabbed his wrist. "Look at the screen!"
The corrupted code had resolved into a single line:
THE HOUSE REMEMBERS ITS PLAYERS
Then the fire suppression system of the dorm room activated, dousing them in chemical foam.