We took the elevator to the fifth floor and found ourselves on top of a sandstone castle. The area was set up like a puzzle in a 3D platformer: on one wing was a giant typewriter and on the other there was an oversized lever. There was an inscription on the wall about needing to find a book about books to open the way forwards.

A border services officer was locked out of his computer because their facial recognition systems were malfunctioning. One of his coworkers had decided to feed additional training data of “green mammals” to the algorithm.

The air was noticeably cooler when I walked down the stairs from my room. The staircase itself ended abruptly and I nearly fell to the floor half a storey below. I saw my parents cooking some crab legs in the kitchen and thought about how much a meal cost.

I was called into the dimly lit room when I saw the human-sized sculpture of a contorted face. The bronze statue had a chin that was twisted to one side and sunk inwards. I was invited to help fix the piece in lieu of my other duties and I agreed without really know what that entailed. Moments later I felt my own eyes started to droop as I struggled to stay awake.

It was Friday and the only thing I had left to do was to take some weekly measurements in the lab. I was tasked with recording the direction of the flow of water in one of our model pools. The model simulated the interaction between ocean currents and the coastlines of islands.

I woke up in my room but something was off about it. There was an extra bed by the window and some children’s clothing on it. I walked towards the stairs and saw that the living room was now a large open area and none of the furniture seemed familiar. I decided to lay down on the sofa and started watching a livestream playing on my phone. My mom came down the stairs in sportswear.

A humanoid robot with a bare metal chassis looked up and started to walk towards me with its head tilted at an angle. I asked the robot what it was looking for only to find that it lacked the ability to speak. It made a scissor-like motion with its fingers so I looked around the table for a pair. By the time I had found a pair and was about to pass it over to the robot, it had already picked up one on its own. It resumed its advance towards me, but this time with the scissors snipping away in its hand. It got real close to me, the scissors now poking at my arm and snapping right against my skin. However the moment the blades managed to pinch a bit of skin and drew blood as it sliced my flesh, the robot suddenly jumped back and started to malfunction.

I was laying on the floor and I could hear some kind of denpa song blasting in the room. I knew that the end of the day was approaching and my body felt limp as I struggled to get up. I could feel people carrying and pushing me around on the smooth linoleum as I ping-ponged between the walls of the room. I felt my mom trying to get me to sit up to no avail.

I was in the kitchen after a trip for groceries. I looked inside the fridge and saw a large set of alcohol. The main bottle had a special cap which had multiple differently shaped spouts to pour out of. I felt an obligation to drink despite never drinking due to the fact that I had purchased the alcohol myself. I went digging in the fridge for some coke and a lemon.

The three of us headed to the tennis courts only to find that most of them were already occupied. A friend was bothered by the inefficient use of space and the arrangement of nets as the court area was also a mix of basketball and volleyball. The three of us tried to play tennis next to a giant mecha sitting in the corner.