Cardio was easy. Cardio was controlled. Cardio could be stopped. This? This was hard, uncontrolled, and Troy was unable to stop for a single second. Sure, he could stop moving his legs, but that would just leave him a limp pile of flesh, secured against stone stairs.

How long had it been? How long had he suffered? The man did not know. He only knew of the burning in his legs, the screaming of agony. These words were coming from a man capable of exhausting himself to the point of masochism, in favour of not looking bad next to Charlie. Others would have stopped by now, their body shutting down the control to the legs. By now, endorphins had been cycled through so many times. There had been waves of pain with small reprieves in between. The young man liked to think of those pauses as long, but they were only a few floors long.

Yeah, any standardized measure of time was no longer working for him. Time was beginning to wither away, his mind not able to keep up with the counting. His pulse was not to be trusted on stability either, it going up and down as it is damn pleased. Instead, there was only one measure he could count, and that was the number of floors climbed.

It was not a total count, more of a relative distance between two events that were already close to each other. It maxed out at ten floors, the brain unable to process so many digits at once. Even then, the young man was not always fully sure when he had hit that toll.

Why had he not just fallen? Why had he not stopped, spouting something about taking a break? It would take a few words to cut in, and the AI would have to understand how hard it was. Troy was in pain, his body was flaring up, and his feet were… he did not even know how his feet were coming along. They had been the first to stop giving him any feedback. Were they bleeding? Possibility. There were no marks on the shoes last he checked. Were they swollen? Most likely. Had the blood flow within stopped? No, Troy would have fallen over if that had happened yet.

Once again, the man had to remind himself just what was making him go on. The original reason for his enthusiasm had been due to him just wanting to see some buildings fall apart realistically, them all falling gloriously like dominoes. It had been some sick fantasy derived from a deprived childhood. That was all it was, a curiosity fueled by a lack of it when he was little.

The energy provided by that was more than enough for about the first fifty floors. There were even a couple of places where he thought it smart to skip every second step, in favour of speeding up his pace. Why he had thought that a good idea when the building was immeasurably high, he had no idea.

The body was failing, but the mind was not accepting this failure and pressing on regardless. It could have been described as willpower making it all the better, but Troy knew that he was mentally strong enough for what he was doing. A part of it was the place itself, the unnaturalness of it all not letting him calm himself to a presentable degree.

There was an idea of what would happen to him the moment he stopped. Adam would likely try to encourage him kindly, trying out different tactics or leeways to make the man give one more attempt at a trek. After that failed, the AI would move over to the stick, trying the approach of authority. Troy was only to be the hand, in the end. The hand followed the will of the brain, no matter how little the hand wanted.

That could have been it. The young man understood his position, understood that he was expected to continue until his body fell apart. He needed to continue the tireless march, to walk up those stairs until the air would thin out and suffocate him. No… the air would always be fine. Even if it felt like he was waking up so many stairs, he should have been close to the place he started, a few meters away from the entrance. Only his body was being strained, the reality he was in remaining the same as it was before.

Maybe it was all some philosophical drive? About how Troy needed to continue his walk to the top, no matter how hard it was, and never really knowing when the top would come. Honestly, the designers of the buildings were not too intuitive on the inside, support beams and stairs up and down being the only defining features. Everything else was empty space. Perhaps the final floor would come to him once he stopped walking towards it, that part of the building finding its way to him once it was needed.

Oh, if only. Troy could hypothetically see if that would come true, his body already on the brink of initiating a face plant on a hard surface. It would be slightly painful, sure, but it would also help him escape the horror that was climbing those stairs. Or it wouldn't. It all depended on some hypothetical situation turning out to be true or not. Now, the young man might have sounded crazy, but there was no way he was starting up again if he had stopped. The second he untensed those legs of his was the moment that the muscles would stop functioning.

With one extra push, another floor was reached. In that success came the three-second reprieve, as the man got to walk on flat ground so that he could reach the staircase. It was an efficient space design for them, only taking up so much space in length and width. However, this caused more normal walking than what was required. If that had been cut out, the man was sure he would have reached many more floors. Or well, another way of thinking of it would be that the bad design had allowed his legs enough semi-rest to still be able to recover some bit of structure.

'I still do not understand your words fully. Are you sure that you are correct when you say that there were no roads inside the more important parts of the city?` Adam sent to the poor man.

Yet another distraction in his gruelling walk would be the AI. Somehow, it had come to the conclusion that he was perfectly viable to asking complicated questions while looking as if he was struggling to even breathe. Deep breathing was a hard thing to regulate, when he was expected to answer with a quick voice, okay?

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Okay, so this is important for you to understand,” Troy said, trying to rephrase his explanation into a more fundamental one. Instead of going from the basic idea of both parties knowing how a city was built up, the young man instead took it as him explaining advanced chemistry to a person who had only ever cooked rice. A hard task, requiring more than a little backstory. “First, please explain what a car is to me in ten words or less.”

'Cars are vehicles used for transporting people and goods,` Adam instantly sent back, letting Troy get a more thorough understanding of what he had to work with.

“Good enough I guess. Yes, that is the primary purpose of these vehicles. They are almost universally self-driving, allowing the passengers to not have any control in any aspect. Excluding taxis, most cars are owned by people privately and are used in the same manner. If we go by older statistics, each adult has on average one car that they use every day. As I mentioned before, I lived in a smaller city, so it only had a population of about seven million people inside, with an average age of… let's just call it twenty-seven. Most of the people living there have some sort of work. The profession does not matter. What matters is when they come to work. As you might know from observations, humans are diurnal. We operate from the moment the sun goes up to the moment it goes up. This means that we go to work the second we see that sun,” Troy started his explanation off with, stopping momentarily to let himself keep some of the air in his lungs.

Speaking for too long was not going well for his circulation, his legs quivering too much for comfort. If they began to get loose at the wrong moment, there was a good chance of him falling down the stairs. It wouldn't kill him, but it would hurt more than he was comfortable with. “When you have a population of seven million people, all needing to go to work at the same time, do you think that it is a good idea to take a car? Without much thought attached, it would certainly seem faster than walking, as the vehicle can move faster than the legs we have attached. People had that epiphany many years ago, and they certainly followed such a line of thinking for a long time. However, there is a bad thing about cars that you always need to take into account, when you have a lot of them. Adam, would you be so kind so as to take a guess?”

'An large amount requires a large spending of currency?` Adam suggested. Somehow, the lack of tone made the AI seem overly cautious, even if there was no difference between how he usually spoke.

“Close to be sure, but no. The problem I am speaking of would be the space that each car took up. You should be able to remember the street I was on not long ago, correct? That street had possessed a total of eight lanes, four for each direction. This might seem like a lot, but what happens when a million needs to pass through? Entire skyscrapers can be filled by a single company, each floor able to house hundreds of workers. Just think of the needed space to keep the cars safe, if not hardships taken in getting the cars there in the first place. At that point, walking a few kilometres would be easier for most. Roads were not able to scale up along with the cities, making them slowly but surely obsolete. Do you understand now, Adam?”

'If your message was to show off how cars are obsolete in the current age, then I do understand it fully. If the point was something else, I fear that something has been misunderstood.`

“Oh, no, you understood it just fine then. Nothing more was expected of you,” Troy answered, doing his best to sound nice. In honesty, he was just relieved that he would reprieve from talking, allowing his body to at least rest one part of itself. The legs were going through one of the tougher phases currently, making it hard for him to think clearly. “Though, I would like to know if you have counted how far up we have gotten now. I feel like we have been walking for a long time.”

'You have walked up to one thousand two hundred and fifty-five floors. By approximate measurements, we are somewhere between five and six thousand meters above the ground. I had expected you to have stopped before we reached four thousand meters, but your endurance has turned out to be exceptional. I congratulate you on it.`

Troy was silent for some time, his mind going through the paces of analysing, dissecting, and generally throwing the words heard into a meat-shredder. This was done repeatedly so that the man was sure that he had not misunderstood the shit that had come out of the AI’s figurative mouth.

“So you're telling me… that you did not expect me to walk this far up continuously, and had already included in your plan for me to have a rest?” Troy asked the AI, not stopping for a minute in his steps.

'I had thought that obvious. However, from your reaction, I take it that this facet of the plan was to be shared instead of assumed that you understood. For that, I apologize.`

The tortured man just groaned in frustration, as he got himself down on the floor. It was hard with no bedding for the body, but it wasn't like he actually cared about that fact. His legs were throbbing, his mind was in shambles, and his emotions were running wild. His persistence, his arrogance, and his generally idiot-based logic had allowed him to physically drain his legs of all the energy that had been stored. He just needed to ask how much he had walked, and the AI would have answered him, with that little complement of endurance along with it. If he had any desire to move, he would have found a wall to bash his own head in with.

With a high tone from the earpiece, the doctor's words pierced through the man’s self-loathing, pushing into a brain that did not care for anything at the moment.

“I can see that there is not much more we will be able to do in this part of the current test. This is perfectly fine, as we were supposed to have a break in five minutes. Troy, if you would be so nice so as to-*

“One moment, sir. Just have to make sure about this,” Troy said, raising his finger in the air as if that was the world's pause-button. “When we begin this test again, in what location am I expected to be in?”

*Well… that is a good question. As this test is based on destruction, we do make sure that there is something to destroy constantly. This means that during the breaks, we will be resetting everything in the world. This does include the locations. So, this means that you would start in the same place that you started before.*

“Adam, please argue with the doctor about this, so that we can start here instead. I am way too tired to do it myself,” Troy requested of Adam, putting his arm back in its rightful place on the floor.

*Now, now, there is no reason to… buddy, are you sure that these words should be used? Yes, I understand that much work has been done, but that does not mean that… are you sure? Could you give me one to a hundred on that? And that is not an overestimation? An underestimation? That is… certainly a sign of dedication. Okay, fine, whatever. Troy, when the test starts again, you will be put in the same location that you left in, which will be the current floor in the building you are lying down in. Now, if you would please get out of here, we can get you lunch… and possibly a wheelchair if we have one lying around.*

Whatever Adam had used as a bargaining chip, Troy felt that he owed the guy something. A wheelchair. That would be nice. Almost enough to make him get up from the floor. Instead of walking to the existence, the young man did the ultimate movement of crawling with his arms. It was awkward, surprisingly slow, and a tad painful for the lower body, but it got the job done in the end.

“See you soon,” Troy said, as he pulled out the earpiece.

'I will wait patiently. Come back in full health, please.`