Chapter 11:
A Place between There and Now
I was back in the corridor, I stood directly in front of the door. I wasn’t going to open it for a second time, so I just turned around and started walking. After I walked for a while I turned back around, the door was about 1 meter behind me, I hadn’t moved at all. I turned around to continue walking but was met with a second door, it looked exactly the same and was also labelled !$&”§!_. It was coming closer, the room between the doors got smaller and smaller. I needed to open one of them or I would be crushed. I opened the door behind me, the one that wasn’t moving towards me and walked into the room.
It was dark, I couldn’t see a thing. I took out my lighter and lit it, still black, I could see nothing but its flame. I moved my hand over the flame, I could feel its heat, but I couldn’t see my hand. A drop of pure black dripped from what I can only assume was my hand onto the lighter and extinguished the flame. It was pitch black.
I woke up, I immediately grabbed my neck with my hands and coughed hard several times. Having that thing inside my throat felt like choking to death on a frying pan and having thousands of needles pierce your neck from the inside.
I looked up to the sky, it was early morning, and it was the first time I could watch the sunrise behind some mountains in the distance. Since I arrived here my view was obscured by that fog every morning. It felt like the first sunrise I had seen in years, and who knows, maybe it was.
After spending about 5 minutes marvelling at the sunrise my gaze wandered to the warehouse. It was a giant black box that stretched along a good third of the meadow and obscured the view over part of the mountain range.
I got up and started walking towards it. It was absolutely enormous and only got bigger the closer I stepped to it. It must have been like 30 meters high. I walked around the building until I was on the right side from where I had started. Six words were written on the wall in huge neon lights that were still illuminated, they read “Your Uniform Intelligence Project – Main Server”.
At the back of the building, I found a lattice staircase leading up to a fire door, but I couldn’t open it from the outside. As I walked the stairs back down, I noticed something. I walked around them and found what I had seen, an iron door with a sign on it which read “trespassing prohibited”.
Regardless I opened the door and walked inside
I found myself in some sort of entrance area or lobby. A desk for what I believed to be a reception was standing at the end of the room with two large red doors large beside it and two hallways leading away from the lobby to my left and right. I walked three or four steps. Black.
-Error code 5 – Target finds critical variable in estimated 12 minutes
-System shutdown – Rebooting after fix/variable/key removal
-Saving Target specific memory data
-Deleting consciousness
-Error
-Target undefined
-Error
-No results
-Running identification program
-!$&Ӥ!_
-Error
-Target not found
I woke up, I was lying inside a glass tube, I couldn’t move my body. I heard voices around me, but I couldn’t understand them. The only thing I could see besides the outlines of people moving quickly around were a pair of cables and a red light which kept flashing at constant intervals. I heard them scream “shut it down, it’s too risky, it will kill us all” “No! it is too valuable, losing it would doom us all” “if we don’t kill it now, we will die regardless of what happens after this all ends” from the outside of the tube. One of the people ran up to me and started typing something into what I could only assume was a computer inside or next to the tube. “I’m sorry, but I have a newborn child, I can’t die now, this experiment was doomed to fa” I heard a loud bang, there was a small crack inside the tube and through it a single drop of blood which covered the entire glass front fell down on to my hand. I heard his body drop to the floor.
I couldn’t see anything through the glass, but I could hear the voice of another man through some sort of speaker. How I dreaded this voice, I couldn’t bear it, I wanted to kill him so badly, he should feel my pain, the pain he caused me, I didn’t care if it was intentional, not that I even thought about that, but I had already decided, this man, he would die, and I was the one who would kill him.
“Could the cleaning team please remove what is left of 31 and also please bring a new glass tube with you, we need to replace the old one. 9 thank you for handling the situation you did this wonderfully, 24 please reset YUI manually and change the key location, hurry up, it will soon be able to use its real muscles or what is left of them again.”
Another drop of blood fell onto my hand. Not like the first drop, I could feel it, and I tried to move my hand, it was exhausting but I could move it slowly upwards. “I’m done 7, we can start it now” I could see the red drop of blood on my hand. “Then do so, you can see on your screen that everything is working what are you waiting for you, idiot!” As the red light blinked one last time I saw my hand, it was black, black like the shadows. Black
-Booting
-System test
-Consciousness replacement loading
-Error
-Preexisting data found
- loading Error
-Loading preexisting data
-Starting YUI
I woke up and looked around I was still in the lobby. I got back up and walked over to the reception when I heard someone say, “what was the highest number he said?” I turned around, a shadow was leaning against the wall next to the door. I immediately reached for my right jacket pocket, but it was empty “Are you looking for this?” it showed me my knife while it had a second one in its left hand. “You won’t need this, I just want to ask you some things. What was the highest number the man through the speaker said? I know you understood him.” It stepped towards me. I said “30” in panic, “30 what?” he said, I screamed “31” as I started running towards the door left to the reception. It said, „You want to kill him, don’t you?” I stopped “yes, I want to see him suffer” It started sprinting towards me as it screamed, “then please die now.”
It stabbed my knife into my stomach and immediately pulled it back out to stab me with the other one which it immediately pulled back out again to stab me again with the first knife. I looked at its face, it was smiling so bride I could see its teeth. “You are me, aren’t you?” I asked. It pulled a knife out of me and started laughing. It stabbed me in the heart with both knives shouting at the top of its voice "No, we aren't the same, not anymore”
- booting #013
- repeat
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