The room was dark and cold.
There was a hustle in the air but not a sound could be made out. The coldness carried along with it a pungent smell of sweat and garbage. You could hear constant gasps of breath like the wing beat of a crimson hummingbird- incessant. You knew that you weren’t alone. You could feel the distinct feeling of flesh on flesh interaction. You’d get bumped and stirred in the maze of the invisible crowd. Nothing was in your control and nothing could be understood. But soon that all changed. In the corner of what appeared to be a spacious room, glinted a lone spark of light. All the sensations stopped. There was no more sound, no more smell, no more feeling, just a lone star in the lonely abyss of that dark and anonymous room.
Then suddenly everything went white.
There wasn’t one scintilla of light anymore but an inundation of luminescence. Massive floodlights, like the ones you would see at the night of a big baseball game, stood at each corner of the once dark room. Only these lacked the affability and warmth you would usually associate with lights at a baseball game. You’d have to squint your eyes to try to see much of anything else- your pupils had yet to adapt to abrupt illumination- yet you could make out a pattern of blues and whites in your immediate proximity. And even among this uncanny feeling of obliviousness, not knowing where you were and what was happening, you could make out the huge crowd of people that had engulfed you, faces of people you’d never seen before, and in a setting you don’t recall in the slightest.
Out of the hundreds of those who had gathered around in that horrid room, our focus narrows down to the story of a simple black-haired middle-aged man. His stature is lean, but not of the athletic type. His hands are veiny and slender, yet have uncharacteristically many scars. His nails are blackened and his face rather droopy with exhaustion. His black hair is in chaos and his chin scruffy. The pupils of his eyes are darker than the darkest of nights and seem oblivious of the figures around him. He seems detached from the world, yet looks around, just as the others are; men and women of all shapes and sizes- trying arduously to soak in the situation. The faces, the voices and the reactions of these people are different, but not their clothes. Everyone is dressed in a similar one-piece gown, with no sleeves and in the same pale blue desaturated color. The type you’d find common of patients in a hospital.
“W-Where am I?...” Whispers the black-haired man as he wets his throat in vocalization for the first time in what seems to have been a decade of reticence. He clutches his temple in hard attempt to remember anything. He doesn’t recall a thing.
‘How did I get here? Where was I before this? Why do I not recall anything?’
These were some of the questions that this man could not get an answer to. And neither could the hundreds of others around him. All he could remember was his name and four seemingly random numbers:
‘6-9-0-5’
In that particular order. He clenches his head again in a futile attempt to remember, but alas nothing else comes to mind.
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‘6-9-0-5’
Deep in thought the man ignores the sudden push of another befuddled body. He stumbles to the ground with almost no resistance. His knees feel cemented, and make no attempt to correct his fall. His face hits the ground first and then his hands. As his hand touches the satin black floor for the first time, he realizes just how cold it really is. It feels unearthly cool.
“SCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE— ”
An ear deafening screech hollers across the room. The sound cracks in audible segments in a direction that can only be defined to be in the center of the room. As the crowd retreats in reflex, a lone radio remains stationary at the center of the empty circle. Looking at it now, it doesn’t seem to look like any high-tech futuristic mechanism you’d expect from a sci-fi movie but is a rather old and musty looking wooden radio.
“SCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE— ”
The screech resonated one more time across the room after which a sound emerged so mechanical that it couldn’t be alluded to a human being.
“Hellllllloooooo...”
The crowd shunned under the influence of the radio.
“Helllllllooooo... Hello can you guys hear me?”
Not a soul makes a sound.
“I will assume that all of you are awake at this point!” the voice inhales,
“Congratulations! My fellow participants! You all have been given the liberty to enter as the last batch of contestants in a once in a lifetime opportunity as participants in this little game”
‘A game…?’ the black-haired man echoed in an obscure voice. He could feel the blood slowly pulsating through his disengaged thighs. The monotonous voice behind the radio continued.
“The rules are simple-”
The black-haired man finally settled back on his own two feet. He wiped the soot off his blackened hospital gown and flailed his arms to regain control over his upper body.
“Take a look at the ceiling of this factory”
As if puppets under the control of the puppeteer the individuals in the crowd obediently follow and take a gander upward, where their gaze is met by a giant electronic display with a number printed across the screen in a digital red:
1256
“What in world…?” “Is this a late night show...?” “Where’s the exit?” were some common heresies among the sea of people as the voice continued
“The number that you see displayed above is a count of the number of people that live on this island”
“Did he just say island…?”
“And that would include all of the people in this factory as well! Now listen up because the next part is the important bit.”
The black-haired man had an epiphany of uneasiness as the next few words came out of the wooden radio.
“Your goal as a participant in this game is simple. You are to reduce the number you see on the ceiling to one. Doing so will grant you victory in this game and allow you to reap all the benefits of a victor”
Ears perked up in the crowd when the word ‘benefits’ was made audible.
“Yes, you heard right! If you are able to succeed in this simple task, you will be granted anything you desire. Anything! There is no limit to the size or rarity—”
Eyes began to sparkle and the crowd started becoming upbeat.
“All you have to do is make the number at the top of the screen into a one and press the small red buzzer—”
A stage light illuminated a red buzzer atop a podium located at another corner of the room.
“And you win!”
“That’s simple enough!” shouted a rotund man on the inner edge of the circle. “But how do we reduce that number-”
“TIIINNNGGG”
The digital number 6 on the ceiling reduced to a 5 as if almost on cue, reducing the entire total to 1255.
1255
“Well that’s even more simple!” the voice behind the radio answered coyly with a faint snicker in the background, “You just have to kill everyone else on the island and be the last one remaining!”