Houston (ON HOLD)

Blake

My stomach does flips as I'm led to another strange room. The two soldiers escorting me follow me into the room.

I look around and take in the details of the new room. It's colored white- not unusual- and there are cabinets on one side of the room in the same color. This whole facility is fancier, more sterile and high-tech, than anything I've ever seen before. A metal table is in the middle of the room, the lights reflecting off of the surface. I don't like that there are straps on the table, probably for strapping down limbs.

"Sit," One soldier tells me, making a chill run down my spine.

Though I don't want to, I obey and creep onto the table. The metal is cold under my hands. I sit at the edge at first, my legs dangling off the side of the table, until the soldier tells me to sit straight on the table and I do so.

Before I can do anything else, the two soldiers grab my arms and pull me backward, onto the table. My head hits the metal painfully, making my brain seem to rattle around in my head.

The two soldiers begin to buckle the straps around my ankles and wrists. I struggle a bit, taken by surprise, but mostly I'm scared and confused. What are they going to do to me? What are the experiments anyway?

When they have me tethered down, one soldier talks into a radio on his shoulder and says, "Subject restrained."

A second later, there's a click and the door opens. Two people dressed in starchy white lab coats enter the room, one man and one woman. The woman has dark hair pulled back into a bun so tightly I wonder if it hurts. Her face is young, but also very cold looking. I figure she can't be older than forty. The man has the same color of skin as Lacey, and he looks much older than the woman, maybe sixty or so. His once dark hair is graying.

"Age?" The woman asks, looking down at the clipboard in her hands.

At first I think she's talking to the soldiers, so I'm not expecting her to look at me with her cold eyes and raise an eyebrow. She's talking to me.

"Eighteen," I say after a second. Thinking about it for a moment, I wonder if my birthday has passed yet. I might be nineteen, but then again I still don't know how long I've been captive. I decide that eighteen is a safe answer.

"Place of birth?"

"Portland, Oregon."

"Health?"

I'm not sure how to answer, so I'm actually glad that the other doctor speaks up and answers.

"Has been imprisoned for quite some time. He's been decontaminated, but he never showed signs of sickness or parasites. By the looks of his face, he has had a recent broken nose. He's fairly malnourished, maybe dehydrated. Nothing too serious."

Me being malnourished isn't a serious thing? What I'd do for a bowl of my mother's rabbit stew right now...

"Has he had a checkup yet?"

"No."

"Make sure he gets one by the end of the day. We can do without it for now. You two are dismissed until we are finished here."

The two soldiers leave and I'm left alone with the people who I'm assuming are doctors. Maybe these people will be friendly! Doctors are all friendly aren't they?

"How are you today?" The man asks me.

"Uh...been better." I reply.

"Doctor Keller, stop talking to the subject." The woman snaps. She goes to the cabinets and starts pulling out miscellaneous supplies, putting them on a metal tray near her. I don't know what some of them are, but I can see an IV bag, several needles, scalpels, scissors and bottles of some sort of liquid I can't see clearly. She brings the tray and sets it near the table, and then she reaches into her pocket and brings out some sort of remote. She presses a button and the lights in the room dim, several transparent screens dropping down from the ceiling tiles and centering themselves next to my head. A screen seems to float above my face, reflecting my nervous face back to me in the glass. The screen shows several numbers all circled around a diagram of a brain, the diagram showing the electrical patterns of the brain. A screen by my chest shows the same numbers, only centered around a heart. With a shock, I realize that the heart and brain must be mine, the heart projection beating perfectly in time with the nervous beat in my ears.