404: Exit Not Found I
Chapter 1: Free Coffee Refills!
Accounts Vary is designed to be heard—it’s an experience. Let it speak to you, or enjoy the text below. (Audio, 10 minutes)
Caleb wasn’t lost, no, not exactly.
He was wilfully rerouted, a term he made up somewhere around hour five of his road trip. It was the more comfortable and forgiving way of saying he had taken the wrong exit, ignored the "Authorized Vehicles Only" sign while flipping through an early 2000s playlist, and found himself on a two-lane road with more cows than cars. The GPS on his phone had given up about twenty minutes ago, looping between "Recalculating" and a defiant "No Signal" like it was personally offended by the sudden Prairie void.
He tried toggling to offline satellite mode, but the tiles wouldn’t load. No cached map, no coordinates, no modern hope.
His cousin's wedding wasn’t for another three hours, but Caleb had left early under the guise of caution. In truth, he just needed buffer time to emotionally pre-grieve the experience. He was fond of his cousin in a sort of vaguely nostalgic way. But he had a deep and specific aversion to hotel banquet chicken, uncles who said things like "let's get this party started," and relatives who believed dancing was a contact sport. His main goal was to show up clean, clap enthusiastically, and leave unnoticed before the father-daughter dance, back to his hotel room where he’d get bad pizza.
He'd mapped out an optimal arrival-to-exit window down to the minute. Reverse social engineering protocol: enough face time to prove you were there, not enough for conversation deeper than “They look so happy, huh?”
The road stretched ahead in a blur of wheat and heat. It looked like a screensaver from a 2003 desktop, endless and empty, except for the occasional hay bale. The kind of landscape that made you existential by kilometre fifty. Caleb had been talking to himself for the last half hour, not so much out of loneliness but to fill the quiet pressing against him. He was saying things like, "You’re doing great, bud," and, "Just a man and his air conditioning," in the deadpan voice of a game show host slowly losing hope.
He considered turning around, but there was something oddly magnetic about the hand-painted sign he had passed a while back that read: "You’ve Found Us!" Which, frankly, sounded pretty welcoming for a guy without a compass. Gas low, bladder rioting, without another human in what felt like decades, it was the only choice.
His last pinged cell tower was over thirty clicks behind him. He made a mental note to deep dive the area name once he got a signal again. If there was a cell dead zone that deep in 2025, someone had flagged it online. Probably on a ham radio Reddit. He turned down a gravel road that crunched under his tires and headed toward the promise of civilization.
Civilization arrived in the form of a single intersection, anchored by a gas station, a diner, and a video rental store with what from afar seemed to be a cardboard cut-out of Jeff Goldblum in the window. Caleb parked, cracked his neck, and squinted at the sky. The sun looked stuck in the late afternoon, frozen in a sort of warm glaze, even the shadows seemed bored.
At the gas station, a teenage boy in a mesh Snap-On hat jogged over to the car before Caleb could even unbuckle.
"Regular or leaded?" he chirped.
"Leaded?" Caleb repeated, blinking.
"Premium," the boy clarified. "$0.68 a litre today. Big special. You want a Slush Puppie coupon?"
Caleb nodded dumbly and handed over his credit card. The boy flipped it over and back, a small “Huh," leaving his throat as he moved toward the pump.
Like all good towns, the gas station was also the diner. His stomach rumbled at the thought of a gas station diner grilled cheese, a sort of lawless mass of white bread and something passing for cheese. He kicked a few rocks as he walked through the parking lot, looking toward the video store. Caleb clocked the signage reflexively. He’d know it anywhere. Weather-worn plastic, not a replica. The sun glared off the yellow lived-in sign like it had yet to hear the bad news about Blockbuster that we all got in 2010. A full continuity error in real life.
Inside the diner, the air was thick with the smell of bacon grease and old sugar. Everything was all soft pastels and checkered tablecloths, as though someone had tried to visually manifest the idea of "Easter, 1994.” The seats were cracked vinyl in faded aqua and rose. Each table had a napkin dispenser, a glass ketchup bottle, and a laminated card advertising "Jello Wednesdays."
A sign above the register read: "Refills are Free With a Smile :)"
The waitress was already pouring coffee before he sat down. Her nametag read "Jill," written in what looked like puffy paint. Her eyes seemed too wide and too cheerful for his mostly irritated disposition. He just wanted to figure out where he needed to go.
"You look like you could use something hot," she said warmly, as if it wasn’t chokingly hot outside. "Driving through or staying for the parade?"
"Parade?"
"Always a parade on Fridays," she said. "Gotta give the kids something to remember."
Caleb glanced at the menu. The "Special" was meatloaf with side options like "coleslaw" or "extra coleslaw."
Despite the cliche and his souring mood, he had to smile. The whole town was clearly playing with nostalgia. A theme town, maybe. The kind of place you’d find in a Buzzfeed list titled 25 Towns That Will Take You Back in Time.
On the table was a laminated copy of the local newspaper: The Haven Herald, with the date July 5, 1996. A front-page article teased: "Y2K: What Could Go Wrong?" with a photo of a man standing next to a giant desktop computer looking quietly terrified.
“Where’d you get these?” Caleb asked as he pulled out his phone to take a photo.
“The papers?”
“Yeah. I got one on Etsy for my mom, it was like a TV Guide from the year she was born, but 90’s stuff is harder to find.” He muttered. It was paranoid, and Caleb knew that, but if he could just take the photo and check the metadata, he’d see the year 2025 staring back at him and root himself in reality.
He didn’t really hear what she said next—something about the boy who delivers the papers—because the screen of his phone flickered, turned black, then blinked back on. No signal. No Wi-Fi networks.
"Phone trouble?" Jill asked.
"Yeah, nothing's been loading."
She nodded. "Sometimes they get tired around here."
"They?"
"The phones," she said with a wink. "The towers don't like 'em."
Caleb sipped his coffee and stared out the window. Across the street, a man was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the theatre while another was changing the letters on the marquee: TWISTER - NOW PLAYING.
A kid skateboarded past, Walkman clipped to his jeans, dragging a tangle of cassette tape behind him like some kind of urban tumbleweed. Like if someone had typed “90’s kid on a skateboard” into an AI video creator.
Okay, a town with commitment. Caleb couldn’t meet a girl willing to date longer than 3 months but this town had found a whole population willing to cosplay 90’s. Nice.
He left a five on the table and walked to the bathroom. The tiles were mint green, the soap dispenser was metal, and the air freshener smelled aggressively of fake cherries. He splashed water on his face, checked his reflection, and paused.
His shirt was wrong. It was the same colour, sure, but the logo was wrong. Slightly pixelated. It now bore the blocky font of something you’d find on a computer from your grandma's basement: a brand that never existed but somehow felt familiar. He reached for the phone, instinct that told him he could reverse image search the logo just for peace of mind. Then remembered: no signal.
He rubbed his eyes, checked again. Still there. He rubbed the shirt’s front like friction might restore it to its factory settings.
Back in the car, Caleb drove toward the highway. Took the first sign for the 42. Followed it for ten minutes. Another sign. Another left. Then:
YOU’VE FOUND US!
He suddenly met the single intersection.
Same kid at the gas station. Same diner. Fuckin’ Jeff Goldblum.
Only this time, Jill was pouring the coffee before he even walked in.
"We were wondering when you'd loop back around," she said, like she was saying ‘welcome home!’
Products, platforms and softwares mentioned in Accounts Vary will vary themselves. Like the details, some are real, some are fictionalized.