Glitch

Two! Of A Different Kind

I open my eyes. My head is still hazy from all the ruckus I made before getting kidnapped. As bleary as it is, I can make out the words floating above me. Maverick incorporated. That was the logo I saw earlier.

Wait... what happened? Slowly I regain consciousness. I am not fully in control of my body, but mostly I am. Where am I? Strange muffled noise comes out of my mouth when I try to shout. The piece of cloth in my mouth prevents me from yelling. I was blindfolded and gagged before. If they took off the blindfold, that's good news right?

My arms are sore and tied behind me. While I'm in a sitting position. I wiggle in the restraints of the rope. What kind of animal ties their fellow human being up this way?? Or what if they aren't humans? I stop moving. The door to the other side creaks open and figures wearing white lab coats trudge in. The lab coats all have the maverick logo on it. There they stood, a Baker's dozen.

The men all stare at me defiantly through the transparent glass and I stare right back. Their mouths move but I can't hear them. Sadly I think I might have gone deaf from shock.

"Now can you hear me, number 049?" One of the men, considerably older than the rest, with a face only a mother could love, the head scientist I assume, asks. He removes his finger off a blue button near a mic which I now conclude is the reason I couldn't hear them before.

I glare at him. For people who looked like scientists, they sure are dumb. I mean I can't talk with this piece of cloth in my mouth so what now? I shake violently in the chair. Just remove this cloth from my mouth... I'll strangle him from here.

The head scientist chuckles. "We've got a feisty one on our hands." He taps the mic and speaks into it. "My apologies for tying you up in such an inhumane manner. But you were going to beat up the people helping to bring you in here, so I made the order. We will now remove the cloth binding your mouth."

Two men walk in, one I recognise from earlier which punched Kyle and the other which I don't know at all. The cloth is removed from my mouth and the two men stand at my both sides.

"Asshat!!" I glare at the head scientist as hard as I can. He shudders a little before asking for privacy from the other scientists. As soon as they leave, he starts speaking into the mic again.

"049, I bet you're yearning to know why you've been kidnapped and brought here against your will." He snaps his fingers then grins while staring off into a distance. "It's for the greater good of humanity. You see, here at Maverick incorporated we have a vision. A place where mankind can keep existing for millions of decades to come. I present to you Matrix - the fight for power."

He brings out a projector, then places it in an angle that I can see clearly and starts to demonstrate. "This is the Matrix." He points to a dot on the map, he zooms in and points again. "It's an alternate universe that exists only in the virtual reality world." He plays slides of people dressed in armour looking knight-like, kids running to hug their parents who just returned from war, couples being separated, and the King sitting on the throne with a bored expression. "As you can see, the Matrix is set in an ancient era, sadly this is a condition that cannot be fixed although we have certain hunches on how to do so... well, you'll see."

I feel queasy. For some reason, I don't want to be here all of a sudden. Not all of a sudden. I've been having a danger instinct right from the beginning. This isn't good, not good at all. I look at the scientist, holding back my tears and whisper in a soft voice. "What do you want? Why are you doing this? What does any of this have to do with me?"

"You my dear, will be our guinea pig for testing the game." Now his grin reaches both ears. "We can't say for sure that the game is a hundred percent safe. I'd say it's a 50:50. The other experiment 6 months ago went wrong, the circuits went haywire and fried all the test subjects brains in the real world. I hope the same doesn't happen this time."