II.

I only had a brief moment to wonder about who this was— was she one of the people responsible for me being inside this tube? Or was she was somebody like me, in a predicament like my own? And why did I somehow have some sort of speaker inside this tube?

Suddenly, part of my view of the tube in front of me was blocked as a screen roughly 4 inches wide blinked into view. This was my caller, I gathered. A woman, probably in her twenties or thirties. Beside her was a teenaged boy. The image didn't have that high of a resolution but from what I could see, the woman wasn't dressed like a doctor or a labcoat.

The video was coming from slightly above the woman's head height, like cctv footage. On my end, it seemed to be getting projected from somewhere onto the inside surface of the tube itself. I tentatively lifted a hand to touch the screen and as soon as my right forefinger blocked part of the screen from my line of vision, the screen area somehow maximized, providing me more details about the scene.

The woman was looking behind her every few seconds which I attributed to the "it’s going to kill us," part she'd mentioned. I couldn't see anybody else behind them, though. It looked like they were in a very spacious and empty, interior parking lot with a very high ceiling and rows of floodlights. It made me think of an airplane hangar. Was this... was I in some sort of military installation?

"Hello? You have to help us. Let us in, please!" the woman said with more panic in her voice this time. "If you won't let me in, please at least take my son! He's too young to die!"

Why the hell was this being piped to my tube… pod… location? Was there a mistake? Things felt, in equal parts, like a shady government psychological experiment, a mental breakdown, and being a television prank show. Was I being observed for my reaction to the video? I looked behind me but as the tube tied to my neck didn’t allow me to fully turn my body, my best guess was the tube I was in was at or near the back of the room. If people were watching me, they were probably also doing it through a camera somewhere.

A second smaller screen suddenly popped up on the tube on the right side. Then another. And then another. The three new feeds showed video coming from outside locations. The first displayed a grayscale, bird’s-eye-view of what looked like a mountain road. The second displayed a broken gate and parts of a wall. The gate looked like it was made of a rectangular metal plate and meant to slide open and shut, if only about a third of it wasn’t heavily warped enough to leave the warped side easily scalable. The last screen displayed a set of three warehouse-looking buildings and part of another structure to the left. It was nighttime, based on how the majority of the visual elements were likely illuminated by external floodlights. My suspicion that this was some sort of military installation based on the place’s architecture.

I’d taken a moment to look at the woman and the kid and almost missed movement in the “gate” feed. Something big… and fast crashed through the already broken gate, almost instantly leaving camera view. The gate was now warped much further and pushed inward; chunks from the concrete wall beside it had also crumbled. I pushed on the screen and just as I hoped, the screen increased in size. There was not much to see now, though, just an image of the aftermath.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I suspected I’d get a chance to see it again on the last feed so I maximized that screen too. Five seconds passed. Ten seconds. And behold, there it was!

It appeared on the right side of the screen. I still couldn’t understand what it was. Roughly spherical in shape and rolling at great speeds on the road like a giant metallic bowling ball. Or maybe it was levitating some feet above it? It was a ball only it had parts hanging off it. Everything was hard to estimate at this point as I had no idea about the relative sizes of the other things on screen.

I noticed at the rightmost edge of the screen a series of partly transparent, rectangular icons. Guessing that they’d have some functions, I quickly pressed one and another video screen popped up. I pressed the others and ended up with three additional screens–

These new ones evidently showed nearby feeds as I could also see the cannonball thing on some of them taken from other angles, moving in time to the earlier feed. The additional screens also gave me more clues about wherever this place was but I couldn’t think about all that at the moment.

The sphere continued to roll this way and that, crashing against a wall, moving out of view for several seconds before reappearing. It brushed against the tailend of some kind of humvee, causing the vehicle to spin and move easily a dozen feet away. Comparing its height to the humvee made me think the main bulk of it was around ten feet tall.

The thing slowed enough for one of the cameras to get a clearer view of it. What the hell was going on?

I still couldn’t fully make it out. It looked like one of those AI-constructed gestalt images that made you wonder if you were having a stroke. Roughly, it was a metal sphere with metal plates layered on top of each other forming some sort of carapace. Bumps at random places made the main shape obloid, depending on its position relative to the camera. It could be a vehicle of some sort but there were two arms on its sides. The sheen on most of its body suggested metal but there was no way to tell. By arms, I meant, roughly humanoid arms, mismatched in size. The bigger one seemed to be three-sectioned with the equivalent of two elbows. The other arm was closer to being human-looking. Hell, it could be human-sized. Instead of hands, what protruded from the end of the arms were growths of triangular metal plates. Claws?

I quickly scanned the other previous screens and found what I’d missed, more of the semi-transparent icons. Pushing everything I could, more screens started popping up, cluttering the display and showing me more external footage of the base– that had quickly become my working theory about what this place was. Here and there I saw more buildings, some run down and sporting broken windows. Roads. Buildings with walls overrun by plant growth and rows of broken windows. An area where a barricade seemed to have been set up. Also, on the ground in many of the images were what I realized could only be the skeletal remains of people.

I focused on the original screen with the woman. It didn’t seem like there was anything else I could push. She repeated her plea, then, after once again failing to hear a reply, she started to bang on a surface in front of her producing a metallic clanging noise. The boy paced around the area, every now and then looking towards the partly opened gate they must have entered from. I knew she was on the lookout for their pursuer. That thing.

That thing had rolled from where I last saw it but was still visible on some of the screens. Still searching.

Again, I scanned the inside of my tube as I looked for some kind of emergency button. Nothing. But with what I saw of the base so far, with those bodies long since left to rot, it didn’t seem like anybody could even be around to help. It was just the woman, the boy, that thing and myself hiding inside this… whatever this was.

Then, an idea popped to mind. With my left forefinger, I pointed directly at the figure of the woman and pushed. A thin white outline appeared on the perimeter of her image and continued to follow her as she moved. To the right of the outline were three tiny icons in a column: a triangle, a thin rectangle, and something that looked like a speaker. I didn’t want to risk what the other two did so I pressed the speaker.

There was a mechanical click from the tube in my mouth and throat.

“Hello?” I asked.