The sergeant followed me to my room and stood at the door waiting while I packed up my few belongings. You don’t really accumulate stuff when you’re afraid to leave your room. All I had was a small backpack, a couple of notebooks, 2 pens, toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb, and 1 change of civilian clothes. I’d already changed out of my cadet uniform into my only other pair of civvies as soon as I walked in. I had no doubt in my mind that had I tried to wear my uniform, not only would it have not been allowed, but I’d probably get beaten for the audacity of it.
Once I was ready I let the sergeant know and he started leading me down the hallway, but not towards the front exit. I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought, frankly I wasn’t surprised they didn’t want me leaving by any direction but the back. The shame from what my parents had done was bad enough, they surely weren’t going to parade me around.
Speaking of my parents, I should probably talk about what I’d found out in the intervening span of time between their betrayal of our country and now. Now first, understand my parents were beyond brilliant, and were celebrities within their fields. My father had built the first FIVR pod, and was the lead engineer when they started building it into what would become the FIVRTS. My mother was a geneticist, and I had no clue what she actually did other than work for the government. It took almost 2 years of having hate slung at me while I got beaten before I had some inkling of anything. Boiled down to the bare bones, my parents had been working on some kind of ultra secret project, and then deleted years of data, destroyed a bunch of stuff, and then disappeared. Why I was to blame for any of this, I had no clue, it wasn’t fair, but life rarely is.
My thoughts snapped back to reality as I stumbled into the sergeant. He’d stopped at a door I’d never taken notice of before, to me, it looked like every other door here, He had some kind of security card in his hand, holding it up to the door. Something gave off a quiet chime and the door slid open to expose what looked an awful lot like an elevator. I was brusquely pushed in with the sergeant following me before the door slid closed. I couldn’t feel any movement, but I wasn’t about to ask him what was happening since he’d been silent thus far. It felt like we’d been standing there for hours, but honestly it was probably no more than 30 seconds before the door slid open again.
We were absolutely no longer looking at the hallway in the dormitory, instead it looked like one of those ancient steam rooms you saw in archaic movies. Lots of pipes, wafts of steam, and a ton of clanking noise. I almost laughed at the absurdity of the whole thing, but a growing fear kept me quiet. What if they weren’t actually kicking me out but instead I was going to be the subject of some gruesome experiment!? I thought back to what my parents had said about the Institute being the only safe place for me, and now I was wondering if they had any idea how unsafe being on the inside was. Part of me wanted to believe that they’d had some kind of plan to keep me from being a target, but I suspected they simply hadn’t expected it to fall on my shoulders. Maybe they didn’t plan ahead, or maybe they just didn’t care, I mean, they had committed treason and left me hanging.
Whatever the truth of it was, it didn’t matter now, I wasn’t safe in the Institute, and now I was being led to who knows where by my silent companion. We dodged around the clanking machinery for about 200 feet before we came up against a wall of steel. By now I had assumed I was being led like a lamb to the slaughter, but I didn’t see much I could do about it. I wasn’t going to be able to overpower the sergeant, and even if I did, then what? The sergeant surprised me by putting his palm up to the wall and sliding it around a bit until something beeped. Part of the wall folded back on itself, inside was a small room with another door on the other side.
“This is as far as I go” said the sergeant. “The door ahead of you is DNA locked to you, and only you. Inside you will find a fully functional pod with enough nutrient solution to last for the rest of however long you have to live. Once you enter that room, this door will close and it will not open again.”
I stared at him blankly, “I’m … confused?”
“The minute your door closes, I will make my exit, and on my way into the city, my pod will have an accident. You and I both will cease to exist, at least on paper. I will retire to somewhere less unpleasant with a significant windfall in an untraceable account, and you will live out your life in whatever reality that pod is hooked up to.”
Without any further words he shoved me into the little room and the metal door unfolded back into the wall seamlessly. I thought about pounding on the wall, but I knew it’d do no good. On the off chance anyone knew how to get down into that room, they either wouldn’t be inclined to help me, or wouldn’t hear it anyway. I straightened my shoulders, did my best to convince myself I was brave, and put my hand on the door in front of me. Nothing happened, not until I slid my hand around a bit and heard the soft beep as the door slid sideways into a hidden pocket. The inside of the next room was spartan, what looked like a fully connected FIVR pod, a huge tank that I had to assume contained nutrient solution, and a desk with something on it.
Sitting on the desk was a note that read ‘Jackson, please know that we are not traitors. What the government was trying to do was wrong and we could not continue working on it. I hope some day you can forgive us, but know that we love you, and that we had to stop the program by any means possible.” It was signed by both my parents, and I recognized my mother’s handwriting even after all this time.
I was angry, angry at my parents for leaving me, angry at the government for doing something that made them feel like it was their only choice, and angry at the world for all the pain and suffering I’d gone through. My hand involuntarily crumpled the note into a ball and threw it across the room while I screamed. I screamed and stomped around the room until my throat became raw. Once I was done with my tantrum I realized there was no water and no food, which meant I could either die of thirst here in the room, or get in the pod. Honestly, at that point, I almost felt like the former was the better option, but I knew I couldn’t just give up now, not after the abuse of the last years. Giving up now would be, at best anticlimactic, and at worst, just downright stupid.
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I sat down in front of the coffin looking pod with all its wires and tubes, wondering how it had even gotten here. I was unknown floors below the institute, hundreds of feet beyond clanking pipes filled with who knows what. Topping it all off, there was the door hidden in the wall that according to the sergeant, nobody else could open, even if they could find it. He had implied that he’d been paid to bring me down here, was it my parents before they left? Before I climbed in I had one thing left to try, maybe he’d been lying to me about the door. My door opened easily enough when I found the right spot, but try as I might, the hidden door leading to the rest of the world refused to open for me.
Having tried everything else, I resigned myself to entering the pod, I mean, it’s not as if I had a lot of choices to begin with. Climb in, or die, it didn’t take a genius to figure out which one was the better option. The pod itself was nearly 8 feet long and 4 feet wide, with multiple tubes and wires leading out of it and into various devices that gave off a low level electrical hum. Then there was the largest tube of all leading from the tank into the pod, that would be the nutrient solution no doubt. From what little I knew about how long the nutrient solution would last, and given the time compression the commandant had mention, I could easily live 200 or more years on the inside. Better than dying out here I figured, and looked for a way to open the pod.
It hadn’t come with an owners manual, and there were no obvious latches or control mechanisms, which made it all the more annoying. I walked around the edges as best as I could for several minutes inspecting every angle, looking for, well, anything. Huffing in annoyance I put my hand down to lean on the pod for a moment.
“DNA match found, initiating boot up procedures” said a pleasant female voice.
As startled as I was, I’m sure I yelled out a few obscentities while I stumbled backwards before tripping on my own feet. I sat on the floor, legs splayed out awkwardly, as I watched a row of lights start blinking in series, all of them amber. Moments later one of the lights stopped blinking and turned green, with the rest following over the next several minutes. Once all the lights had gone a steady green, the top of the pod slid open to reveal a large cavity with what looked like a headrest made of some kind of gel at one end. I’d never seen the FIVR modules before, but this one seemed more impressive than I had even imagined them to be. I reached out towards the headrest, just to see if it was as squishy as it looked, but as soon as my arm entered the cavity the voice spoke again.
“Foreign material detected, please remove all non biological objects before entering capsule.”
Huh, guess that meant I had to enter the capsule in my birthday suit. Having shared living quarters with thousands of other cadets for the past years, the notion didn’t really bother me. I was in no particularly hurry to climb in, but on the other hand, there wasn’t much else to do. I began removing my shirt as walked over the desk before taking off the rest of my clothes. Instinct kicked in and I folded them properly before stacking them neatly on the desk.
“Guess some habits will never be broken.” I chuckled to myself after realizing what I’d done. It wasn’t as if I’d ever see those clothes again, or that anyone would care if they were strewn across the floor.
Ready as I could be, I stepped into the pod and lay down, sure enough the headrest was just as squishy and comfortable as it had looked from the outside. I’d just started to wonder what else I needed to do when a thick syrupy looking substance began pouring out of several holes on each side of the pod.
“Please remain still while the system adjusts to your body. You will begin to feel a numbing sensation as the nano-gel comes into contact with your body.”
One might imagine that hearing that it was normal would be comforting, but the truth is, it was actually quiet disconcerting. Its one thing to be told you’d be going numb, but something else entirely to start losing feeling in parts of your body as the substance came into contact with it. What started as a slow drip rapidly became a torrent of liquid flowing into the pod. As it reached my chest I had a sudden thought, ‘How the hell am I supposed to breath!’.
Apparently I had vocalized my sudden fear because the voice responded, “The nano-gel is fully oxygenated and will provide your body with all necessary requirements.”
Great, I’d read about stuff like this before, divers who used to go to extreme depths would breath in some kind of gel that kept their chest from compressing in the depths. Again that whole, knowing is one thing, doing is another came up. My instinctive reaction to having my face covered with liquid was to hold my breath and struggle to reach air. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t move my body, I couldn’t even feel most of it, and I could feel myself losing the fight.
Little known fact, you can’t really hold your breath until you pass out, once you start to lose consciousness, you lose control over the motor functions. Meaning that my body forced me to breath in once I started to see spots. I assure you that having something that felt like the consistency of slick snot entering your body is unpleasant as it sounds. The only saving grace as I see it was that I couldn’t feel it for very long as the numbing sensation took hold very quickly. I don’t recall closing my eyes as the goop covered my face, or drifting off to sleep, one minute I was there, the next, I wasn’t.