Empty Room

In a normal American neighborhood in the suburbs, signs about a missing girl hang on every tree and light post. However they aren't even noticed by Edgar, who drives his van around town while eating gummies and dealing with the pain of his wounded hand.

Once he has what he needs, he travels to the outskirts of the city, where he enters an old building after retrieving various things from the trunk, including a gun, some rope, and a bunch of cell phones.

Moments later, Nell wakes up inside a sealed room with no recollection of how she got there. The room is completely empty except for a bug, a digital clock on the wall, a speaker, and a big panel with the number nine on it, matching the one on her shirt.

With trembling legs, Nell slowly makes her way to the bolted door but no matter how much she pushes and pulls, nothing happens; her calls for help are ignored as well. At that moment, the clock turns on and begins counting up the seconds that pass;

Nell also notices there's a red rope in the room. As soon as she moves it, she's pleased to find her phone under it, but making an emergency call is impossible because the sim card has been removed.

Then, she extends the rope across the room, noticing the length and getting the chills at the possible implications of what they want her to do with it. Seconds later, she makes quite a shocking discovery: there's a stain on the floor that suspiciously looks like blood.

When she looks up, she also discovers there's a glass hatch on the ceiling showing her the night sky. Unfortunately no matter how much she jumps, she just can't reach the knob to open it.

Nell begins getting nervous as she paces around the room wondering what she's doing here when suddenly, an alarm rings and the room's light changes to green.

Nell immediately sits on the floor waiting for the worst to happen, but the light goes off merely seconds after it starts. To calm herself down, Nell takes out the phone again and checks what else she can find.

All contacts have been deleted, and the photo gallery has some pictures of the ocean that remind her of a beautiful, calming poem. There's also a picture of Dawn who Nell is very happy to see, but it also makes her wonder why she left her.

Inspired by the idea of maybe seeing her again, Nell takes off a shoe and throws it at the hatch, trying to hit the knob or at least get somebody's attention, to no avail.

This frustrates her so much that she throws her phone at the wall, which ends up stuck in the number nine panel playing a song called "The Stranger". The song is comforting to hear, but most importantly, Nell discovers there's a hole on the panel now.

She eagerly makes it bigger hoping it may be an escape opportunity, but she just finds more wall behind it. All of the sudden, the clock reaches fifteen minutes and stops as it begins beeping, the lights also are turned off.

Noises of doors and windows being opened and closed can be heard outside, so Nell closes her eyes and recites the ocean poem to fight off an anxiety attack.

It only takes a few seconds for the lights to come back on, and when Nell opens her eyes, she realizes the bolts on the door have disappeared and now she can open it. Unfortunately this ends up being another dead end, because behind the door there's also more wall.

As soon as she finds this, the clock changes to forty-five minutes and begins counting down, causing Nell to insult it and summon the green light for a few seconds again. A big surprise follows it: a male voice repeats the insult, which comes from a vent that Nell now notices on the wall behind the door.

Desperate for company, Nell comes closer to talk into the vent and gets to meet Travis, a fellow prisoner locked in a room with the same characteristics as hers except he has number six.

He swears he doesn't know who has captured them or what they're doing here either, but he keeps asking strange questions, like wondering if Nell has a chair. Unknown to them, Edgar is watching them both through the security cameras.

When the subject of the rope comes up, Nell expresses her worries about the potential end but Travis concentrates on the more practical use, explaining he tried to use it to open the hatch and it broke. He warns her that the knob won't hold yet Nell tries it anyway, managing to put the rope around the knob by using a strong knot.

Unfortunately it can't hold Nell's weight, so the knob breaks and makes her fall, dislocating her shoulder. With her ears ringing, Nell passes out while looking at Dawn's picture on the phone only to wake up a moment later to the sound of Travis calling her name.

For a few seconds, the ringing echoes in her head and Nell has a vision of bubble wrap being cut above her face. While she waits for the pain to pass, Travis points out she needs to fix her shoulder before adrenaline wears off.

At first Nell refuses to listen to his suggestion thinking she's in this situation because of him, but as the pain continues she realizes he may have a point.

By standing against the edge of the door, Nell manages to push and put her shoulder back into place. Afterward, she tries to distract herself by chatting with Travis and playing the song on her phone, to which Travis whistles along because it's a favorite of his.

While they share their thoughts on the song, her ears begin ringing and she has another vision: there's a man in front of her trying to grab her wrists, and when she tries to defend herself with a pen from his pocket, she hurts his hand.

Then, Travis begins asking more philosophical questions, like wondering if Nell thinks she deserves to be there, because he does, he also goes on a tangent about the possibility of divine intervention having sent them there.

Their discussion about god's will is suddenly interrupted by Travis yelling at someone to stay away from him. The lights in Nell's room turn green again and seeing Travis hit the other end of the vent sends her into an anxiety attack, which she pushes through by repeating the ocean poem.

Once the lights are back to normal, Nell tries to talk to Travis, who mentions a man that came to his room to "fix him"; his head is going through a killing headache too, implying this man hit him.

As the green light comes and goes again, Nell swears she'll find a way out and begins looking around the room again, finding a wire behind the panel that she can't really use.

While randomly touching her arm, Nell suddenly discovers something has been put under her skin and Travis confesses he has one on his leg too, which itches.

Noticing they're running out of time, Nell tries to think of a plan again, and this time she decides to use the hatch knob to take off the screws from the vent. The idea does work and she gets to open the vent, so Travis begins copying her while Nell goes back to the wire behind the panel.

By pulling it through both the panel and the wall, she discovers the hidden camera, which she then shows to Travis by putting it through the vent. Afterward, she breaks the wire, causing Edgar to lose access to her room. Next, Nell enters the vent, which proves hard to do because of how little room to move there is.

In the middle of it there's a green light, and as soon as Nell touches it, a yellow light takes over the room and an alarm begins ringing, hurting Nell's ears. She immediately makes her way back, and in her hurry she hurts her shoulder against the edge of the vent.

This causes her to have another vision, and this time she sees her own hands covered in blood. Once the painful moment has passed, Nell reminds Travis to work on the vent while she takes care of her shoulder, which has dislocated again.

This time she fixes it against the panel and that's how she notices she's bleeding: the area that got hurt is the bugle on her arm. Thanks to the wound, now Nell can take out what they put under her skin, and she's shocked to find a microchip.

There's not much she can do with it though, so she goes back to check on Travis, who can't finish unscrewing the vent because his knob has broken. Only one minute is left on the clock, which makes it go red, thus Nell tells Travis to try to open the vent using raw strength.

As he recites the ocean poem, Travis pulls hard and manages to open the vent at the same time the clock reaches zero. The time being over equals bad news: the lights go off and the door closes again, with the bolts returning to their place and cutting Nell's access to Travis.

Just a few seconds pass before the lights come back on and Nell allows her anger to flow, she interrupts her own reciting of the poem and admits aloud that things aren't fine and she isn't safe.

Suddenly, a small opening appears on the door showing a bright red light on the other side. With extreme care, Nell puts her hand through it only to find a loaded gun.

As soon as her hand is out with the weapon, the lights turn green and a strange gas begins filling the room, sending Nell into panic again. She begins yelling, wondering if she should end things and the lights change colors again, which finally makes her understand the system behind them: it's a sound pressure meter, and she needs to reach red.

To do so, she shoots the glass hatch, effectively breaking it and making the lights go red for a few seconds. As Edgar watches from a new camera, Nell picks up the bug then throws the rope up through the hatch until it's firmly stuck somewhere, providing her with an escape route.

Her expectations are instantly broken though: she isn't on a roof, she is inside a different room that hangs screens with the night sky above her and Travis' cells, although now they're displaying the word "end".

Speaking of Travis, Nell tries to check on him through his hatch and finds out the worst news: his room was filled with gas too and it was so overwhelming that he used the gun to end things, which is also enough for the lights to change to red. There's no time for Nell to grieve though because Edgar is now leaving his office to check on them.

Nell hides against the wall and once she's sure Edgar can't see her, she crosses his office and gains access to the rest of the building, which seems to belong to some fancy company.

As she runs through the corridors, Nell notices it's daytime outside, yet there doesn't seem to be other people around. The only noise comes from a room with a tv, where a video is playing on a loop of Travis promoting robots so authentic that you can't tell they aren't human.

Disgusted by what she sees, Nell breaks the tv with the gun before leaving the room. In another corridor she finds a giant photograph of Dawn, which presents her as the director of this robotics company.

At that moment, a guide shows up behind Nell together with a group of visitors that are being given a tour, but they all ignore Nell and after looking at the picture, they go on their way.

Before Nell can even begin to consider what's happening, Edgar finds her and triggers another memory: he's the man cutting the bubble wrap on her face and the guy she hurt with the pen.

Scared, Nell raises her gun to defend herself but Edgar only needs to press a button on his tablet to make her freeze: it turns out Nell has been a company robot all along, model nine to be exact.

When Nell wakes up later, she's sitting near the ocean from the pictures. Edgar shows up as well and throws a gummy at her, petty revenge for what she did to his hand, which is also the reason why the program has stuck Nell to the chair, unable to leave.

The ocean has been designed to fit Nell's comfort tastes, and Edgar promises to let her go if she answers his questions about her time in the cell, which is revealed to be a way to test the robot's capacity to feel like a human.

Nell and Travis were supposed to connect and they achieved that, going as far as caring for the other's safety. Edgar also asks if at any time Nell questioned her humanity, which makes her realize she doesn't even understand who she is.

It turns out she's been here week after week for a while now because they're working out the bugs in her system so they can proceed on making model ten, and at the end of every test, she got her memories erased.

This information is too much to deal with, so Nell begins ignoring the questions and recites the poem as she retreats into her own mind. Seeing as there isn't anymore he can do with her today, Edgar turns Nell off and puts her back in the cell.

where she wakes up with no memories again while Edgar leaves to enjoy his weekend with his family.