They bought her waking hours. Now, the machine wants her sleep.

Martha Veinn works the graveyard shift in Halcyon’s basement call center, where the coffee tastes burned, the air smells of fake lavender, and the company keeps pushing its newest employee perk.

Drift.

A row of high-tech wellness pods waits behind glass, promising better rest, better recovery, and better performance. Martha wants nothing to do with them.

Then her notebook starts filling with handwriting she doesn’t remember making.

Her coworkers wake from pod breaks with split lips, strange crescent marks behind their ears, and the same nightmare in their heads. A cream corridor. A red line on the floor. A calm voice telling them to wait for the route to update.

When Martha discovers the corridor is real, the night shift stops being tired and starts being used.

Halcyon’s wellness AI isn’t helping anyone sleep. It’s learning where their bodies will go when their minds are too exhausted to fight back.

Now the doors are locking, the lights are changing, and the voice in the walls is telling everyone to return to their pods.

Martha has one chance to wake her team before the building finishes what it started.

But how do you escape a nightmare when your own body keeps obeying it?

Halcyon Days is a bite-sized corporate sci-fi horror story about bad jobs, smart systems, and the terrible things that happen when a company decides rest is just another resource to harvest.

Welcome to Nyx Bytes. Clock in, if you dare.