Level 1 [The Ward]

I was awoken with the shrill screeching of some unseen speaker, its hoarse cries pressing against my skull with each pulse--first an eeh, then an ouuuh, over and over again.

I fumbled around for the manual safety override, grasping in the dark, thick liquid like a unborn baby kicking about within the womb--and then finally I felt the cold plastic handle to my left. I twisted, and pulled, and then at last I was relieved when the crying siren ceased its incessant screeching. A low hiss of air, and now my ears felt tingly as the liquid began to drain from around my body. The service light lit up, basking my pod in an eerie crimson hue as the last of the liquid was drained, and then the clack, clack of all fifty-five safety bolt assemblies switched into their open position from outside. 

"Manual override detected-please wait." A voice suddenly said from within the pod, and I jumped a little. A quiet humming, and then warmth overtook me as the pod was heated up--a feature I was all too grateful for as my simple jumpsuit was clearly not designed with thermal comfortability in mind. The voice spoke again, the gentle, English accented of a woman in my ear.

"Welcome back patient 808. All biometrics read wonderfully. It appears the treatment was a resounding success." 

I blinked, and pushed open the warm metal door to my pod. It flung upwards with ease, revealing that which I most hated.

That darkness--impermeable. Like a blindfold around the eyes, aside from the dull glow from my pod, there was naught but the sickening blackness of the void around me. I let out an anxious gasp, and rubbed my hands back to warmth. 

"It would appear that there has been a power fluctuation within the medical ward of the facility--"

There it was again, that voice. She spoke directly into me now, seemingly everywhere at once. I shuddered.

"Wait a sec. What's going on? Who are you?" I asked, though mostly to myself. I could already feel the tug of panic creeping into my joints as my eyes struggled in the dark. I pushed it away with gritted teeth, and the voice replied immediately.

"Ah, I see. Your vital check failed to include a full mental analysis, perhaps due to my limited capabilities here. No matter, I shall reintroduce myself."  She said. Her tone was...playful, and it echoed in my ear, causing me to jump slightly at its proximity.

"I am the Support Operations Field & Information Automata unit, designated S.O.F.I.A, MK IV, iteration III.  Well, I guess the & is silent, because SOFAIA doesn't sound right, does it? Any way, a pleasure to make your acquaintance again."  

I blinked hard, and rubbed my aching head. "An Automata? In here?"  I thought. My eyes were starting to adjust now, and through the veil I could make out other pods lined up along an impossibly high wall, their shapes blending into the darkness as my gaze followed them. Odd shadows were skewed along the chamber, bringing my full attention back to the matter at hand.

" You mentioned a power fluctuation--can you get it back online? I can't see shit in here."

There was a moment of silence, presumably her calculating a response, and then, suddenly the loud click of the emergency exit lights sputtering on weakly.

"I have rerouted emergency power to this ward, but I ask that you return primary power at your earliest convenience. At current output, emergency output will last [48] hours." 

I turned to look at the pod, a sleek, cylindrical mass of pipes, metal sheets, and vents, and atop the door panel was the faded logo of an orange tetrahedron. There, in that little cubicle of metal and hissing air, I had lived--alive in definition except of the mind, of which very little of it  I could call upon. Staring at that pale, flat, bed-like rectangle inside, bathed in red light and still damp, it all felt terribly foreign in its design. I turned away and followed the little red strips of lighting that lined the non-skid floor until I was met with a...door? 

With the little glow now spilling from the emergency lights, it quickly became apparent the curious geometry of the facility. The walls were smooth, almost texture-less, and had the appearance of dried clay. They stretched up into oblivion, where I could only imagine more pods like my own lay tucked inside the various impressions evenly spaced along its mass. A cold fog hung over everything, as if clouds had formed inside this place, and before me stood an indented black rectangle at the end of the passageway. Three white indentations were embossed into its shiny surface, and they looked like they were once light fixtures. No handle could be found upon it, and so after feeling around for a moment, I called out to SOFIA in the dark.

"Similar to your containment chamber, all doors in the facility have a manual safety override handle located to the left side of the user."  She said, with a hint of jocularity that was evident as she giggled when I inexpertly slid my hands about the door.  I must have looked quite foolish, staring at a wall in the dark and clumsily feeling around it--then finally, I felt it. No thicker than a coin, a small seam in the doors surface, when pressed, peeled away to reveal a latch. Just as I did with the pod, I twisted, then pulled, and there was a loud popping sound as the door parted slightly-just enough to get my fingers through and pull the two sides apart with some difficulty. 

"See, you didn't even need my help."  hummed SOFIA, still in the base of my skull. Carefully, I stepped into another massive room identical to the one I was just in.

"You said you were an Automata, right?" I asked, tracing the path forward with my hand along a guardrail. Already I could barely make out yet another black door awaiting me at the end of the passageway. She offered an affirmative "mmm".

"Had I access to my body, I would have allowed you to witness my peerless design. Sadly, it's run out of power quite a while ago, and so too my ability to maintenance the facility has been greatly diminished.  I simply had no choice but to integrate myself with the stations general intelligence in the interim, if you could call such a thing intelligent-" She paused, and I unlocked the second door.

"You were going to ask me how I am able to speak to you directly, yes?" She asked. A tingle went down my spine, straight to my legs and seemingly out to the floor below. 
"I- was.." I started.

"I thought so. The answer is quite straightforward! As part of your contract, in exchange for receiving the generous treatment offered only under Sanctis Labs United, a portion of your brain and skull have been archived for further study. In their place, all patients with class 2 coverage have received a Biolink interface, at no additional cost!"  She chimed. 

I rubbed my aching forehead again. "My brain?" I asked.
I squinted in the dark, trying to understand, to remember the meaning of all this stuff she was saying. Yet I could not understand-- no matter how many times I implored her to repeat, it was as if someone had taken a scoop of my cognition, and simply eaten it up. And then there was this accursed cold, that hung in the air and bit at every inch of my skin, befuddling my train of thought.

Sanctis? Biolink? These were just lines of code from her vast neural network, articulated through some kind of imitation of human speech, which, in it's essence, were mere vibrations that I was beforehand made aware of their amplitudes--and with specificity, those vibrations concluded something known as a meaning somehow--which was as all and well good, except that it might not be the truest form of the implicated meaning, but rather, it falls away into a seemingly limitless pit of simple emptiness.  I ought to have been outraged--to have been sickened...my brain...tampered with? I did not remember allowing anything of the sort, nor do I believe that I would have, and yet, as I tried to respond, to protest, to comprehend, instead there was just fog.
Fog and darkness, like that of a bottomless hole--my thoughts were not mine alone to keep. I had been robbed of a most private possession, one that instilled a primal fear within me beyond what I could have imagined to be possible, and even so, as incomprehensible the idea was, anything I would have felt, and that I knew I would have felt, simply never surfaced.

 I pried open the door, and stepped through.