“Subject 247 is now awake and shows signs of intelligence and apparent calm not dissimilar to subject 52 and 198.” Benedict said in a soft and professional tone.

I didn’t dare say anything back to the man in front of me. I could barely see his features, the wall behind him littered with powerful LED lights was obscuring his face. I could see his little square glasses, that he continuously pushed back on his nose, and the ridiculous plastic and cartoonish badge hanging on the front of his dark red blouse, announcing him as Benedict, forty-seven years old, head scientist with a Ph.D. in evil.

It seemed professional at first glance, but the weird addition of his age and the even more so word evil, immediately made your assumption switch to childish accessory.

He would not have been out of place in an amusement park or in a kid’s show on TV.

Now my hands, legs, torso, and neck were stuck in a tight metal clutch, firmly shut, and pushing me uncomfortably onto some sort of angled table. I could barely distinguish the thing I was half standing half laying upon, but at least it wasn’t wood. My current T-pose was close enough to being religious.

At the time, I honestly believed that him not being an apparent zealot was to my advantage.

“His profile suggests he is very performant under pressure and can speak English. I assume he is biding his time in an attempt to free himself in the future. We will try a slower approach then, making him understand what is happening to him should be to our advantage.”

He coldly continued to talk, sometimes looking at me, but his gaze not looking at me.

“His awakening speed and health condition suggests…”

“Where are we? What are you going to do to me?”

The scientist’s eyebrows scrunched up for the briefest of moments, then his eyes finally met mine.

“I would appreciate if you didn’t interrupt me when I’m doing my audio logs, it is highly annoying to edit out your voice afterwards.”

I spoke back to him before I even realized what I was doing. “What? Is this a joke? You honestly think I’m in a position where I should give a fuck about…hey? Where are you going?”

He had taken three steps forwards, walking behind me, out of view. I heard him open a drawer and pick something up in the room. Then nothing. A shiver and cold sweat started to run down my back. My anger had been overtaken by logic, reminding me that antagonizing a guy who had strapped me on a torture slash operating table was not smart at all.

A few minutes passed. I was certain he was still behind me, but I couldn’t hear him, actually, I couldn’t hear anything else but the buzzing of a computer and the throbbing of the wall of LEDs in front of me.

I wanted to ask him what he was doing but couldn’t force myself to.

Then he came back, and my eyes immediately fell on the gun he was holding in his right hand.

He was entirely inexpressive, even though I could not be sure because of the lights partially blinding me. I swear that made it worse.

“It seems subject 247 won’t cooperate and will not respect my word. He is dismissed.”

“Wait, wait wait…” I started pathetically.

He raised his hand, and for the briefest of moments, I was able to think so many things at once. This made no sense. This wasn’t happening, I had been drinking coffee and working on a paper last thing I knew and…How did I get here? Why was this happening to me?

Weird how it was only at that moment that I asked myself that, how what should have been my first thought was going to be my last.

He raised his hand. I saw the tip of the barrel reach straight between my eyes, centimetres away. I stopped thinking, I stopped breathing, my heart jumped a beat, and the mad scientist, still looking completely indifferent, pulled the trigger.

I couldn’t raise my hands, I couldn’t even flinch my head away, I could only…

Click.

“Good visual reaction. Bonnie, what was his FHM output?” He asked.

“50 FHM Benedict.” Someone answered him in a feminine but inhuman voice.

I inhaled a large gulp of air.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

This was the first time in my life I felt true terror. I had been in a car crash before, seen the front car inexorably come closer to me, but even then, my main feeling had been annoyance. It didn’t beat the emotions I felt waiting in the hospital three years ago, but it was close.

I wanted to scream, I wanted to insult him, I wanted to punch him. Me, the boy whose last fight had been about not wanting to give out his lunch to the local high school buddy.

But I couldn’t. I was in shock. All those feelings and desires went and left me as the horrible realization came that I could have died, right here and then, on the whim of someone I had met less than five minutes ago.

I didn’t dare say anything. I looked at him, trying to decipher something, anything, in his expression.

I was studying synergology for goddamn sake! I had made cold reading my doctorate focus point.

Sure, I wasn’t an active practitioner, we weren’t even sure if it worked conclusively after all, but I should have spotted something.

But no, this man had just pulled the trigger of an empty gun on my face, and I had nothing that could tell me if it had been a cruel joke, a mistake, anything.

So I was terrified. What if the gun wasn’t empty the next time I talked to him?

He examined me for a moment, keeping the gun pointed on me for an uncomfortably long moment, before finally aiming it down.

“That’s surprising.” He said with no surprise. “Almost twice as our previous outlier.”

“FHM has reached 51 in its peak and is now stabilizing at 12.”

It wasn’t a person answering the mad scientist, I realized, it was a computer. I had never used those speech bots, not performant enough to beat the click of a mouse, but I was able to recognize the unmissable clipped voice of a robot trying to copy a person’s way of communicating.

“Very impressive. Are we sure he’s genetically male?”

“With a 99.992 percent certainty.” Said the robot.

“That makes him an anomaly, then. Most peculiar. Aren’t you saying anything anymore?”

He had directed his question to me, but I did not feel an ounce of desire to answer him.

“Oh, don’t worry about the recording, I have a voice filter on since subject 3. I rather like discussing with my subjects, haha.”

He hadn’t laughed. The haha had been said as if it was a word. And it was eerie.

I trembled.

“…What are you going to do to me?” I asked.

“22 FHM.” Announced the computer.

“Thanks Bonnie, keep me informed if it grows above fifty-one.”

“Forty-one. Understood.”

“Fifty-one.” He corrected, his eyebrows scrunching up once again, but this time real annoyance heard in his voice.

I almost felt relieved hearing anything remotely human in the man in front of me, then immediately reminded myself that that was most certainly not a good thing.

“Fifty-one. Understood.” The computer corrected itself.

“Sigh.” He said the word. “I have one of most intelligible English you can hope to have, and even then, the best voice recognition software fails to understand me on a regular basis. Dramatic, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer.

“Oh, yeah, I should answer your question first. Well, hello, I’m Benedict, and I’m charged in filling up this crystal with fear, horror, and madness, or FHM in short, to make the thing inside grow in power until its inevitable revival. I’ll show it to you in the future, it’s sitting above your head. I don’t really care about that though, my personal goal is to find if there is an upper limit to the quantity of FHM the crystal can store. The thing that comes out gets stronger according to the FHM contained, and no apparent limit was found. Intriguing, isn’t it?”

He sounded like a phone salesman repeating a script he had since long known by heart.

“What?”

“What seems to be hard to understand?” He asked patiently.

“Thing?”

“Well, the residents of world K97 call it the demon king, but they are dumb and are not a very sophisticated people. Don’t worry though, you are scheduled to go to another world at the end of your residency here, which is quite beautiful, although the people are even dumber.”

“You… have lost your mind. Are you going to kill me? Cut me to pieces on this table? To fill up a stone that doesn’t exist?”

His eyes lit up a bit, and I could almost hear enthusiasm in his cold voice.

“It does exist, I can’t show it to you as I try to avoid touching it as much as I can, but quite soon you’ll feel it trying to seep into you. Don’t worry, as long is it is not used in the proper ceremony, it is perfectly harmless. And your death is in no way the purpose of this experiment. As for the part where you will be cut to pieces, that may be the case. My experimentation leads to quite some resource issues, and I found that by filling in some orders, in your case one coming from world S3, I could hit two birds with one stone. The orders usually lead to quite some high FHM output, you see.”

At the time, I didn’t know, I could not understand, and I looked back at him with confusion.

My parents would call the police. I had been kidnapped in the middle of the day in a busy coffeeshop by a madman, no way he could have taken me unnoticed. Maybe he drugged my drink? Then passed himself for a friend to carry me back with no resistance? There were quite some incoherencies with that theory, but that was the best I could come up with.

So I needed to wait, I needed to gain time.

And then, as if he had read my mind, as if my planning was nothing to him, he said: “I’ll come back in a week from now, ask Bonnie if you want some water, and you won’t starve in that time, don’t worry. Do try not to sleep, the point of this experiment is to raise the madness aspect of your output, and I have found nothing better than sleep deprivation to that effect. Goodbye subject 247.”

“What!? Wait, what do you mean…?”

But as he left, as he passed next to me and I saw his expression, I realized I had already stopped existing in his eyes.

This was so impossibly monstruous that I stopped talking.

Moments passed, my silent horror growing at each of his steps echoing in the room. I was realizing that I was now a real-life version of a protagonist in a horror film, stuck in the basement of a serial killer. I heard some sort of sci-fi door opening and closing behind me, and I was alone.

Only hearing the bee-like noise of the computer somewhere behind me and the low humming of the hundreds of LEDs in front.

Wasn’t this good? I asked myself. I can hold on, if he’s not here he can’t hurt me. They will find me quickly; I can’t have gone far.

But despite my efforts to reassure myself, I had a terrible, terrible, feeling of dread.

To him, giving me time wasn’t an issue.

And I was number 247.