so i had a pretty deep mental dive into sci-fi nonsense the other day, and good news is i feel pretty clever for thinking up something i haven't seen in in science fiction before, but the bad news is, it might actually be the Torment Nexus, so i think i'm gonna just quietly file it away.

NB, this idea has nothing to do with @xinjinmeng 's excellent MS-DOS style survivor-maze game, "Nexus of Torment," which can be found here. https://xinjinmeng.itch.io/nexus-of-torment please download it and pay Xin hundreds and thousands of dollars.