She felt for the lock in the dark

She felt for the lock in the dark. How long she had been in here she didn't know. Maybe a day, maybe two. The Room wasn't supposed to malfunction like this. She had checked everything herself beforehand. The reality capacitor had been fully functional, the screen gauge operated at full charge, and the environment recreation tool had worked without flaw. She had spent the past decade developing the technology; if there was anyone in the world who knew that what had happened was not supposed to happen, it was her.

She had set the Room to a swamp landscape; it was a test to demonstrate to investors the power the Room held: generating fog, humidity, frog croaks and bird chirps with ease. She had volunteered herself to prove that no matter how real it may seem, in opposition to concerns of the psychological community currently suing her, the Room posed no real mental threats. Yes, there may have been a few test subjects who had been unfortunately thrust into a malfunctioning Room, switching rapidly from desert to arctic to forest conditions. But those were one in every 1,000. The benefits of the Room far outweighed the potential downsides.

It had been quite a while in the dark now. All the lights had gone dark. The fog dissipated. The room conditions stabilized. Initially her heart raced, the thought of being trapped in an unknown environment becoming very real to her. But as the hours marched on, and the darkness continued to penetrate her mind, she began to lose hope that she would ever find the lock.

Disclaimer: This post was written with “The world’s most dangerous writing app” - a website which is designed to generate a prompt (the first sentence of each post), set a certain amount of time for writing and delete all your work if you stop writing for 5 seconds before the timer is up. Grammatical errors, misuse of language, spelling errors and the overall general quality of the work should bear that in mind ;)