THE MAZE AND THE GHOSTS
Being an Orientation Manual for the Unoriented Idiot, in Which Elias Learns the Hospital Was Never Meant to Be Escaped
These are the serialized accounts for the novella, Working Terms. All tasks are mandatory. All emotions are optional. Welcome to your role in the system.
FROM THE LAST → Elias P. Rigg, a man of soft qualifications and softer direction, stumbles into healthcare via a mall-based apprenticeship and a knack for imitating competence. With a badge, a cart, and no real idea what he's doing, he begins his clinical journey at a facility whose grandeur is mostly implied. Trained more in optics than care, Elias quickly learns that survival in the medical underworld means faking fluency, memorizing rituals, and avoiding the red button. His story is less about malice than misalignment—between intention and system, performance and purpose.
Hey! Here’s a button for the index!
Prior to being officially permitted to touch the still-living bodies of strangers, Elias Rigg harbored the quaint assumption that a hospital was a place organized by urgency. This was perhaps inherited from childhood, perhaps absorbed via a steady drip of hospital dramas featuring minor-key piano soundtracks
He found Markworth Hospital, a structure of such maddening architectural decent that it could only have been designed by six committees, three state inspectors, and one well-meaning administrator with untreated vertigo.
It was, to borrow from Elias’s later scribbled margin notes, a “grand cathedral of non-directionality.”
The floors were numbered inconsistently. The elevators beeped in no known tonal sequence. Entire hallways terminated in off-brand vending machines or security doors labeled “Staff Access Only—Badge Recalibration Pending.” One door’s access hadn’t worked since the early 70s, a defection which no one had corrected (or possibly even noticed) because the door, much like several mid-level managers, retained the outward appearance of participation while internally doing absolutely nothing. Some wings appeared only in rumors and old floor plans. The surgical unit had two supply rooms: one full of expired suture kits and a dead printer, the other rumored to be haunted by a former circulator who’d once miscounted sponges and never recovered.
Elias got lost constantly. At first, endearingly. Then problematically. Then ritually.
He began referring to his shifts as expeditions. At one point he fashioned a crude directional system based on linoleum scuff patterns and an inexplicably placed wall-mounted glove box next to a fire extinguisher. It did not help, but it felt correct.
The people. The glorious, tragic, beautifully broken people of healthcare looked, to Elias, already dead.
Not deceased in the clinical sense. But post-human, in the way bread becomes toast: slightly darker, perpetually transformed, still technically present.
They moved with great solemnity. Their limbs functioned, their mouths produced words (“What’s the latest potassium,” “Just scan it and move on,” “I’m not dealing with 5B again”), but their eyes—the windows to the soul, as every laminated empathy training slide insisted—were uniformly clouded with disinterest, dread, or calendar-based despair.
There was no mentorship. There was no welcome. There were no directions except the ones taped to crash carts. There were simply badges, shoes, hallway friction, and the ever-present, low-sodium hum of defeat.
Elias smiled at everyone. He said “got it!” and “on it!” and “will do!” until his mouth ached from counterfeit enthusiasm. At one point, a nurse gave him a very specific look, the kind reserved for rescue pets, and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get cynical like the rest of us.”
He said, “Oh, I hope not.”
She laughed, but not in a way that reached her breathing.
At the end of his second month, he found a closet full of patient gowns folded like funeral linens and sat inside for eleven minutes. It smelled of starch and lemon ammonia; he felt safe there.
He took a pen from his breast pocket, clicked it twice, and wrote, in half-cursive on the back of a discharge printout:
“The map is not the territory; here, the map is a trap.”
Then he folded the paper and put it in his sock.
He then went to check on Mr. Harrow.
UP NEXT → THE ROUNDS REDUX: In Which Elias Encounters the Eyewitness, the Twitch, and the Judgement of the Clipboard
I’m keeping this free because that feels right. If you want to support it anyway, out of some quiet belief in people making things, there’s a button for that. There are no special perks, just the work and a thank you.