Moppelgänger

We agree you were here.

You and your friends clean an office tower from 11 PM to 6 AM. Every night, the building drifts a little further out of agreement, and so does each of you. What you see isn't what your friend sees. And the one standing next to you might not be them.

Your first week

Every new hire gets the same memo. Most of it is about mops.

BRIGHTLINEFacility Services · Est. 1989

TO:: New night crew, Concord Tower
FROM:: Dennis Kell, Night Supervisor
RE:: Orientation, Mon–Fri

Welcome aboard. Shifts run 11 PM to 6 AM. You'll ride the service elevator up from the basement locker room each night and work one floor.

Mop spills. Empty trash. Replace dead bulbs. Every job pays.
Meet the nightly quota. The crew shares one wallet. Miss it and you're fired.
Stay together. Keep the lights on and the floors clean.
If a coworker seems off, use the UV flashlight. Don't ask them about it.
If a hallway seems longer than it was, turn around.
There is no 13th floor.

Coffee is in the break room. Paychecks are Friday.

— D.K.
Night messages: ext. 0013

The job

It starts as a cleaning game. That's the point.

Clean the floor

Scrub up spills and footprints, haul trash and swap out dying lights. Every shift is a freshly generated floor, so no night plays the same way twice.

Drift apart

Darkness, mess and being alone push you out of sync. Posters change, doors move, hallways stretch. Only for you, though. Your friends see the normal building.

Don't trust who comes back

Drift too far and you get folded into a hallway that isn't there. Something takes your place in the crew. It walks like you and talks with your voice.

You · 3:12 AM

Hallway, east wing. Lights on.
Mike is mopping next to you.
Mike says "this floor's almost done."
The exit sign is right there.

Mike · 3:12 AM

Hallway, east wing. It keeps going.
Nobody else is here.
He's yelling into the walkie. You can't hear it.
The exit sign is getting further away.

On shift

What's in the build right now.

1–4 playersSteam friends lobbies or LAN

Solo crewAI coworkers. Some of them aren't.

Proximity voiceWalls muffle. Walkies don't.

New floor nightlyProcedural layouts and anomalies

5-night weekQuotas, a shop, getting fired

1998Lo-fi PSX look, fluorescent hum

Concord Tower

Built 1979. Night cleaning contracted to Brightline since 1989. The tower stays the tower as long as the people inside it agree it does. In the daytime, that's easy.

The night crews have a word for the things that come back from the long hallways. They started calling them moppelgängers as a joke. The basement logbook shows the joke going sour around 1991, the same year a supervisor went upstairs and didn't come down.

The elevator panel skips from 12 to 14. Nobody on the crew has ever asked why. Not out loud.