Matt didn’t answer. He was staring through his camera viewfinder, bewildered. They rounded the corner into what should have been Kitchens and found themselves once again facing Home Office.

“Wait, what just happened?” Amy asked.

Matt shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“You walked in another circle.”

“Look at the camera.”

Amy looked as Matt pointed the lens down the Bright and Shining Path into Home Office.

The screen was showing Kitchens.

“That’s the footage from earlier,” Amy said.

“No,” Matt said, panning the camera. Every time he moved, the view of Kitchens moved with him. He zoomed forward until the screen was filled with a Gradgrind cabinet system. He got so close that Amy could read the SKU and sale price.

But in front of the lens, there in reality, was only empty air.

“It’s a problem with the memory card,” Amy said.

Matt ejected the card and held it between his fingers, like a magician revealing the one you picked. “It’s not a problem with the card.”

“I refuse to accept this,” Amy said.

“Accept it or not,” Matt said, “we are both experiencing it, so we have three choices. Either what’s in front of us really is Kitchens, but we think it’s Home Office, and the camera is right. Or what’s in front of us is Home Office, but for some reason the camera is showing us Kitchens, so the camera is wrong.”

“What’s the third choice?”

“We’re both losing our minds.”

“This is impossible,” Amy said, feeling helpless.

“It’s very possible,” Matt said. “Remember what I told you about EM fields? The really strong ones mess with your brain. Maybe it’s the lighting grid, maybe it’s power lines, maybe there’s a giant geomagnetic field under the building.”

“If it’s affecting our brains,” Amy said, “then why is it also affecting your camera?”

“Maybe it’s not,” Matt said. “Maybe the camera is fine, and both of us are hallucinating that it’s not.”

Eventually they settled on a new tactic: this time they would navigate using what was on the screen, ignoring the reality of their surroundings. Matt panned the camera until the tiny screen showed them the direction they wanted to go, then he held it up in front of them. They followed the path on the screen, ignoring what was actually around them. The split perception made Amy feel like she was going to be sick.

“I don’t want to go crazy,” she said.

“We’re not going crazy,” Matt said. “We’re experiencing some rather extreme effects of electromagnetic fields on the human brain.”

They followed the camera, and the route took them in a crazy looping circle through reality. On the screen, they were walking through Storage Solutions. In real life, they were colliding with wastebaskets and file cabinets in Home Office, then climbing over ottomans and end tables in Living Rooms.