When he woke up it was dark, the lights of the laboratory had been shut off and he heard bursts of gunfire in the distance.

The sense of excitement that came with the sense of exploration was extraordinary for 03, it was downright addicting. He searched through all the cupboards and shelves before he was done with the room. Looking up he saw the square where his coffin was, trapped between the two walls slightly too big to fit down but not really being held up by anything, the feeling he felt when he saw just how far he had travelled was stupefying and although there were few things he liked about the coffin he still found himself growing slightly sentimental, this wasn’t something he wanted as it made it harder to leave through the door into the next room but he found he couldn’t shift his emotions into something else like he could his body.

So with a gentle gale like movements, he drifted away from line of sight with the coffin leaving the room bracing himself as he entered into a darker hallway. There were nearly no lights, except a small dim red one a terrifying amount of distance away from where he was now, it was like a full three rooms.

He saw this as a great journey and it called to an inner part of himself, the excitement, the thrill, the fear. Three parts of a puzzle thrown into a pot and left to boil fueling his desire to travel, he would make it too the light this was to be his great destiny he believed no he was aspired to reach the light. The dream became his beloved obsession for a time, but he was shocked the distance further than anything his imagination could build was actually not that far away at all as he reached the end of the hallway in a short minute or two.

A twist in the dream came when he saw the light bend around the corner of the wall to his right, and an opening in the wall to his front. A new door, and a new path.

A choice, this he needed to make but how he was alone without guidance and now he felt the fear that came with divine governance of the universe. If all things waited on his actions then even not choosing was a choice that could be disastrous.

Now he had to decide the fate of the world with even minor decisions like this, continue forward or take the corner.

The decision to make no decision was made, he continued forward through the door as if he had never seen the new hallway to the right, he didn’t even check what was down it as doing so would prevent him from total denial of its existence.

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There was now no choice and so he didn’t need to be afraid of choosing wrongly. He lifted the weight off his “shoulders” only to find the floor missing as well.

What he believed to be a door was actually an open elevator shaft and now he was in free fall. His new form didn’t bounce and he broke like an egg when he hit the floor splitting open his inner body running like a sticky liquid pouring out of himself.

He was in total darkness except for a flicker from an opening about three floors above and a small gap on the floor where a hatch was left open.

His brain began to bubble before his eyes grew from the bubbles and he looked around with them, he didn’t know what happened at first but he quickly worked it out.

He kept looking around before he saw that the hatch on the floor seemed to go somewhere, reaching out with his legs he shifted them into bone hooks clipping them into the edge of the open hatch then he pulled himself close peeking inside.

There was light inside, and a corpse too. If he still had lips he would have licked them as he was just started to think he was hungry so he poured himself into the gap leaving a trail of blood and organs behind before he took the form of an inverse stomach soup melting down the corpse and eating it through his new skin.

He was like a living blood jelly that used muscle fibre to flip itself like a runny pancake to fully cover the corpse. Leaving sticky bits of stomach wall here and there.

Eventually, the corpse was nothing more than a puddle of half-melted flesh before 03 was full. Then pulling himself together he retook his original human appearance then he practised walking, he spent hours at it but probably mastered it after a few minutes.

Then he pressed himself into the gap in the elevator door and passed through, he wasn’t able to get through so once more he became a flesh jelly. Then as a puddle on the other side he regrew some limbs, to be exact he grew three super hairy legs in a triangle formation, he placed them in front of him and tried walking forward but he didn’t get very far and simply kept kicking himself.

It didn’t take much time at all to realize that his current form was inferior to his previous one, so once more balled himself up before hardening his outer layer. This time taking a crab-like appearance just with a circle of legs rather than just the side and a long dangling tongue where his right pincer should have been and a shield-like shell arm where his right should have been before he started to stretch himself out and dropped the tongue and the shield arm moving to take on an armoured caterpillar before snapping open his front and making a snake-like jaw, from within him a long tongue slithered out, then he walked off.

Time passed, as he slinked from room to room occasionally feeding on a nearby corpse before he reached his very first dead end. A giant reinforced door even thicker than the door to his room, to get here he travelled down a hallway, up into a vent, through three maze-like rooms and through a bunch doors and an open vault-like door.

The door had the number 4-01 on it.

03 decided to return to his human form and tried to take on a more ‘scientific’ appearance as he had learned of clothes from his previous meals and wanted some of his own but didn’t take any with him so now he wore a white lab coat and was his sixteen-year-old self.

He approached the door and saw that it had singe marks around the lock. 03 pushed the handle… the wrong way before twisting it the other where the lock opened before he entered inside the room.

Where inside he saw an older man strapped to a chair.

“ Who?” The man didn’t look friendly but he also didn’t seem to be able to focus very much on 03 as he asked.