He goes left.

“If you don’t know what's right, go left.”

He says to himself as he hangs a left. Looking down the hall, he is faced with a very stile hallway. The concrete is now replaced with bright white linoleum. Jaiden is surprised by how clean this section of the factory is despite being abandoned. His shoes squeak as he steps across every untouched tile. He grows slightly cautious as he continues down the new hallway. He eventually comes to the end of the hall where he is presented by a set of push double doors. Looking down, Jaiden sees a few signs that are attached to the door.

Caution. Ensure you wear the correct personal protective equipment before entering the development floor.

Correct safety gear? Development floor?

Jaiden reads the warnings before deciding that the sign probably isn’t relevant anymore. He pushes on the door and finds himself in a massive room filled with all sorts of unfamiliar machines and tools.

“Whoaaa…” he gasps.

The first thing that catches Jaiden’s attention is the room’s hundreds of pipes filled with various liquids that crisscross around the entire ceiling. Some connect to mysterious machines, some disappearing behind walls carrying the vibrant colored liquids to other rooms in the factory. He drops his bags as he finds himself in awe of the room that is begging to be explored.

He strides into the room and arrives at tables which are closest to the entrance doors. Various glassware of different shapes and sizes are strewn across the countertops. Most of them are empty, but there are a few vials sealed with rubber corks that still have different colored liquids. He takes a closer look and sees that the seals are still secured, ensuring the survival of whatever these liquids are. Each is labeled with random numbers and letters. “K26, K29, H43…” The meaning of these characters probably lost, gone with the researcher who was working on them.

His attention wanders away from tables to the greater room. He heads towards a line of shiny intricate machines that tower over him. Each machine stands there, silently observing him as he walks past. Each machine is connected by a ceiling pipe, ready to accept the liquid for whatever candy it’s prepared to make. A control panel with various buttons and dials sit adjacent to each machine. Curiosity wins out as he decides to investigate one of these control panels. Each one is identical to the one next to it, and the one before it.

The console is littered with buttons and gauges, but there is something that is quite blaring to Jaiden. A large red button sits in the middle. Jaiden looks around before slapping the button down. No response.

Lame.

After his small impulse, he walks away from the machines to a small packaging area. This part of the room is scattered with cardboard boxes and wooden crates. Taking a peek inside a crate reveals piles of unused plastic wrappings. He looks back up and sees a stopped conveyor belt with small individually wrapped pieces of candy sitting lonely on it, waiting for the belt to finish its journey and dropping them into waiting boxes.

“Are these new candies?”

When he was still a driver, his delivery manifests would list the name of the candies that would be loaded into his truck. This constant routine had subconsciously allowed him to memorize the names of a lot of these candies. However, looking at the wrappers in this area, none of them had names that he recognized. None of the vials, machines, or candies were familiar to him.

After he examines all these new candy boxes, he looks around for another area to explore. Scanning the far side of the room, he sees another set of double doors that leave the room and go deeper into the factory. Next to those doors, he sees various colored outfits. He walks over to them and sees white, blue and yellow PPE uniforms. While trucking does require some standard of PPE, Jaiden usually didn’t follow them. The ones sitting on the hangers before him look very different from any others he has ever seen. Each uniform is made out of some sort of shiny material and is just a flat color, with no other markings or symbols.

After reaching out and feeling a few of the outfits, he turns back to the room and surveys the spots that he investigated, wondering what to do next.