Meander 2021

On a deserted stretch of road somewhere in America, Lisa accepts a ride from a man with a cross tattoo on his right hand. He introduces himself as Adam, and they chat about ordinary things while she reveals that she once had a daughter, Nina, who died young, and that today would have been her ninth birthday. A radio report describes the main suspect in a serial killer case as having a tattoo that exactly resembles Adam’s. Before Lisa can react, he slams on the brakes, she slams her head on the dashboard, and consciousness slips away.

She wakes in a network of cramped metal tunnels, dressed in a silver and black catsuit with a strange luminescent bracelet clamped to her wrist. She crawls through the maze, stepping carefully past a series of deadly traps: a crushing mechanism, a wall of flamethrowers, a flooded section, and a pit of acid. Along the way she encounters the fallen bodies of other victims, all wearing the same suits and glowing bracelets, their faces waxen and unreadable as they fade into the shadows.

A voice calls out from ahead, and she finds another live victim who looks battered and exhausted, as though he has been trapped there far longer than she has. Flamethrowers begin to power up again, and they sprint toward the only safe space available—a chamber that isn’t large enough for both of them. After a brief struggle, she secures the spot, and the other man is killed by the blasts. The only part of him that survives is his hand, still bearing the cross tattoo, confirming that the man was Adam. Lisa realizes she must have been unconscious far longer than she thought. She removes the bracelet from his wrist and discovers more symbols tattooed beneath, though she cannot make sense of them yet.

A skull descends from the ceiling on the end of a mechanical tentacle, binding her wounds and then attaching to her suit. She experiences a jagged flashback: Adam attacking her with a knife, her being stabbed, the car crash, and a strange light in the sky.

Continuing through the tunnels, she evades another trap—this time a spinning blade—and is then stalked by a zombie-like creature, burned all over and missing a hand, a remnant of Adam’s revived form. She narrowly escapes and enters a brightly lit chamber, where more memories surge to the surface, including Nina’s accidental death at a window.

The Adam-zombie returns, and she eludes him once more. She reaches a tunnel section that seems to lead to daylight, but razor wire blocks the exit. She tries to crawl through, but becomes hopelessly entangled. A flamethrower hisses to life, and she braces for the end, only to have a trapdoor open beneath her, dumping her into darkness.

She awakens again in the same chamber, and in a moment of desperate resolve she draws Adam’s wrist symbols on the wall using her own blood, hoping the next victim might decipher them. The action reveals that the symbols are actually directions through the labyrinth. Renewed, she sets off again, moving with a new clarity that makes the traps easier to bypass. When she reaches the acid pit, she uses the acid to burn off the bracelet and discovers fresh symbols tattooed on her own wrist.

Following the new directions, she finds an organic, womb-like chamber through which she can glimpse silhouettes of strange creatures moving beyond the walls. She presses on, encounters the Adam-zombie once more, and crushes it in a shattered section of the tunnel’s waste system.

At last she reaches another tunnel segment with daylight at its end, but it’s guarded by three rotating blades. She slips past the first two safely, but the third blade slices into her foot. Undeterred, she crawls on toward the end, only to discover that the daylight shown is really a screen displaying a video of a sky.

As she sobs, the ceiling opens and she begins to float upward toward a bright light. She wakes outside, on a rock beneath a blue sky, her foot healed. Nina appears, and Lisa asks if she is dead. Nina explains that her body died many times—the corpses she had encountered in the tunnels were previous iterations—but she is safe now, and she urges her to live. “Live,” Nina says.

The final image pulls back to reveal they are standing on a beautiful alien planet, the world around them vast and luminous, offering a new beginning and a hopeful horizon.