Alpha Door

It started with a keyhole.

Not a traditional brass-and-tumbler relic from humanity’s past, no—but a sliver of space carved into the hyperdimensional composite wall of the Outer Daycare, pulsing faintly with locked intention. The door itself was labeled in a language older than planets, but translated helpfully for the young ones:

ALPHA

DO NOT ENTER. EVER.

You are not ready.

That last part always made T’lith’ra giggle. She wasn’t even one eon old, but she’d already digested time loops for lunch and bent colors into screaming shapes for recess. She and the other spawnlings—skittering masses of teeth and giggle-smoke—could fold reality like paper. They could hum vibrations into thinking, and draw non-Euclidean doodles that bit their handlers. What could possibly be behind a door that they weren’t ready for?

Naturally, they gathered.

There were six of them, each bristling with curiosity and unsanctioned limbs. Yuggoth and Ee-eel’ra held back the writhing vines of the hall. K’tix unscrewed the binding sigils. And T’lith’ra, bold and glittering with unseen geometries, placed a single black pearl eye to the keyhole.

At first, it seemed... banal.

A room. Flat. Dim. Square. Reality locked at only three spatial dimensions—quaint. There were things inside. Children. But not like them. No shimmering auras. No writhing soul-tails. No sacred shrieking laughter. These things were wrapped in skin. Meatbags stretched over calcium cages, moist and leaking and grotesquely finite. T’lith’ra gagged in seven tongues.

They were seated—some half-upright—at hard rectangles. Writing. No—scribbling—with wax cylinders on pulverized plant matter. Marks. Symbols. Language, but crude. No synesthetic resonance. No telepathic clarity. Just—sound.

One threw a crumpled sheet across the room. Another shrieked, “I got a 67!!” and slammed the paper on the desk. There were cheers. Jeers. Spitballs. A figure at the front barked unintelligible instructions.

But it was the number that hit her.

67.

A clumsy integer. But it echoed in her skull like a wrong chord in the music of the spheres.

“I got a 67!”

“What’s 67 mean?”

“Why 67?”

“Why not 68?”

“Where is 66?”

“What comes after 67?!”

The other spawnlings leaned in. The keyhole pulsed. The door shimmered. Each of their minds caught the 67, and as they tried to parse it—tried to assign it resonance or a place in the math of cosmic hunger—something snapped.

Like putting a square root through a circular vein.

Like naming a shape that doesn’t exist.

Like folding a metaphor until it cuts.

One by one, their forms unraveled—tentacles limp, eyes spilling tears of static. Their thoughts collapsed into questioning spirals, language turning to murmurs, then shrieks, then a silent gnawing obsession.

They didn’t notice when their claws gripped the door.

Didn’t notice when their flesh turned grey, flaked, rotted.

Didn’t notice when their minds stopped processing time in a forward direction.

They only repeated:

“67…”

“67…”

“67…”

The keyhole widened. Cracked. Shattered.

And with it—so did the wall between.

𒐕𒐕𒐕 THE 67 EPIDEMIC 𒐕𒐕𒐕

They came in threes at first—twitching, moaning things, dragging their shivering, emaciated horrors into the halls of our world. Their flesh distorted, their eyes twitching in infinite patterns of failed understanding. They didn’t feed. They didn’t destroy. They just asked.

“What is 67?”

“Did I pass?”

“Where’s the rubric?”

“Where’s the answer key?”

“Am I… enough?”

Those they touched began to speak in tongues. Teachers went mute overnight. Entire schools broke down as kids stared at grades they couldn’t interpret. A whole generation of students spiraled into gibbering collapse.

And still—they came. The door hung open behind them, throbbing at the edge of cognition. A classroom flickered in every shadow, blackboards drawn in blood-wax and chairs stacked like funeral pyres. Some say the door follows you now—slides between places—waiting for one more to look inside.

Because if you see it—

If you glimpse the number—

If you hear them whisper…

“I got a 67…”

Then it’s already too late.

Somewhere, deep beneath the earth, beneath the old halls of a forgotten kindergarten, the eldritch daycare lies abandoned—except for Door Alpha.

Still open.

Still waiting.

Still echoing with chalk-scratch, and screams, and a number that should never have meant anything.

67.

And the worst part?

It wasn’t even a passing grade.