Abducted

A thought pops into your head. You don't know where it came from, but you think of a song; in a frail whisper you sing the chorus to yourself,

"Always look on the bright side of life; always look on the right side of life..." You repeat the chorus over and over again several times, struggling but unable to remember the rest of the lyrics, but it's good enough for now. After a few minutes your tensed body begins to loosen, and you ease your grip on the blankets. "Always look on the bright side of life..." But without warning the robot says to you,

"You -I mean- Subject 77 is ordered to cease making noise at once." In that instant, the shock forces your eyes open; you immediately tense up again, undoing what you worked towards. So much for that, you suppose. You pull the covers over your head.

You spend who knows how long trying to get yourself to fall asleep. Since you have no idea how much time is passing, you aren't really sure if its been minutes or hours since you jumped into the bed, and it agonizes you!

---

Somehow, after what feels like forever, you feel yourself begin to drift off to sleep. You welcome the sensation, even though there's no guarantee that you'll wake up in the same place for once.

Images begin to form. What are they?

Gods are speaking in your dreams. You see a giant feathered serpent.

A light surrounds you; it is a calming light, not like the one you first woke up under. It seems so peaceful. Before your very eyes something large emerges from the light: a great feathered serpent that you can''t see the tail end of.

It circles around you silently, floating in the air, and you are not afraid of it. Despite its massive size, you feel protected by it. The serpent's feathers are in every color imaginable, while it's own body is a shimmering emerald green. No, you wouldn't mind staying here for a while.

---

You are torn from your dreams and into the real world when your robot guard, standing beside you, says: "It is time for Subject 77 to awaken." Startled, you sit upright. You rub the sleep from your eyes, and your stomach feels like it's dropping as you acknowledge that this is indeed the reality you're in.

Maybe you're finally allowed to ask the robot more questions. What should you say to him?

>"May I speak again?"

"Um..." you begin to say. "Am I allowed to ask any more questions yet, or..." You speak in such a timid voice that at first you aren't sure the robot even heard it, but he replies matter-of-factly,

"Subject 77 is mistaken. It has only been 12 standard Earth hours since it's arrival in it's cell. The tranquilizer has not yet worn off completely. Only after 24 standard Earth hours will Subjects' minds be clear enough to think properly." So that's what was in the pale man's needle(just thinking about him sends a shiver down your spine).

You have no idea why your captors care so much about whether peoples' minds are clear or not, but you don't question it. Maybe they just use any excuse not to answer any questions. You look down at your arm; there's a bruise from where the pale man stuck the needle.

Since there are no windows in this cell, it's not much brighter in here than when you first came in, but the light outside your door is shining underneath it, and it's at this point that you notice the number 77 is marked on your right wrist in black. The robot speaks again:

"It is time for Subject 77 to join the others in the designated dining area."

"Dining area?"

"That is what I just said," the robot replies. "Subject 77 is to follow me to the dining area. Any attempt to resist will result in immediate termination." Well, you don't like the sound of THAT. You take solace in the possibility that there's other people like you who you can talk to, so you get out of bed and stand next to your guard.

The robot walks to the door; he produces a card from his hand, puts it under a scanner, and types in a few numbers on a keypad. The door swings open and more light fills the cell. Taking a deep breath, you follow your guard and step outside.

You look around at the hallway you're in. It is sterile white, just like the first room you woke up in, which hurts your eyes. The hallway isn't very wide, with a blank wall only a few feet in front of you, but the hall stretches on in two directions: left and right.

What else do you see?

Odd tassels, tinsel, and fairy lights hang on the ceilings and walls. Unfamiliar potted plants bring life to the otherwise lifeless corners. Everyone appears to be eating some sort of nutrtional paste. A menacing yet polite lifeform covered in red scales and armed with fangs the size of knives, and claws made of metal caters behind the counter.

As you go right and walk behind your guard down the hall, the two of you pass by another robot, who looks exactly like your guard, who walks with two other humans down the hall in the opposite direction; you don't get a good look at the two humans, but they're both wearing the same plain, white garb that you are. Just catching a sight of two others who may be in the same position as you fills you with relief. You and your guard take another right turn, and you begin to pick up on noises. You listen more closely and realize what it is: Thank God, there's more people! you think with a smile on your face.

Part of you feels bad for feeling so overjoyed, after all, these people are probably in the same boat as you. Still, you're just glad that you'll be able to have a conversation with someone else. You and your guard finally turn to face the dining area.

Just like everything else in this awful place, the whole area, from the floors to the tables, is colored white. (Do these people even know what color is?) There are several dozen other humans-some are standing in lines, and some are sitting down at the tables talking to each other. Robot guards like your own pace around the floors, observing the humans quietly. Speaking of robots, your guard informs you,

"Here is where Subjects eat three times a day; they get a half-hour to eat and converse. The choices today are nutritional paste and protein blocks." The robot then strolls away to join the other guards in walking around the dining area.

This place looks like a prison cafeteria, but cleaner... Prison... is that what this place is supposed to be? You shake the thought out of your head. You've never heard of any prison that had robot guards and strange men who stuck needles in prisoners. You'll have to ask when you talk to someone else.

As you walk to the end of the lines you look at what's at the front: Yet more of the G-Models are serving the humans their food on metallic trays. At the front of one line you see the nutritional paste, it looks like mashed potatoes. At the other line you see the protein blocks, gray gelatinous rectangles.

Since you ARE pretty hungry, you decide, perhaps against your better judgement, that you might as well get something to eat. So what will it be, nutritional paste or protein blocks?

All the protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals a healthy individual needs and more to make them healthier. Also contains antibiotics, superconductors, hydrocarbons, flavorings, hormones, etc.

Nutritional paste it is. It sounds like it has more value in it than the protein blocks; even though it looks absolutely disgusting, you need to stay healthy. You cautiously go to the back of the paste line.

By observing the other peoples' faces, you see that they don't look happy to be there, but they don't look afraid like you are. Some of them just have blank stares on their faces. Maybe if you're here long enough, even you'll get used to your current situation.

A man directly in front of you turns around to look at you with a slightly puzzled expression; he then looks at the number on your wrist and smiles. He says to you,

"Ah, you must've just arrived! I don't think I've ever seen you before." You nod your head in response. The man is very thin, and tall as well. His hair is a dirty blond color, and he's growing a beard; he has the number 56 on his wrist.

The man introduces himself to you. He says is name is...

Jerry Marcel

He says his name is Jerry Marcel,

"I've been here for a couple of months now," he explains, "at least, I think I've been. I don't remember much before that, but since we've just met I won't bore you with what little I know of my life story."

"I don't remember much either!" you gasp. The two of you are given trays with the nutritional paste already on it; the paste looks even more disgusting in person, and it has an artificial smell to it.

"Yeah," Jerry sighs. "Its the so-called tranquilizer that they give us. They don't want us to remember much, and there's not much we can do about that." Suddenly you feel cold. "Anyway," he asks, "What's your name?"

"Gertrude Taylor." you reply. The two of you walk away from the line and Jerry leads you towards one of the tables. You both sit down and Jerry tells you in a low voice,

"I know you must have a lot of questions and I'll try to answer as much as I can, but we've only got about 20 minutes left and we've got to make sure the guards don't hear us." He looks around to make sure there aren't any robots too close by. "OK, we're clear for now. Ask away."

This Jerry Marcel character looks like the most trustworthy person you've encountered thus far. What should you ask him first?

AN: HELLO PEOPLE! Holy smokes, it's been almost a year since the last post I made! I hope people still care to look at this stupid thing. I hope it won't take me another 10 months to write another reply.

---

God, you've got so many questions you don't even know where to begin! Your mouth hangs open, which kind of makes you look like an idiot.

But images of a certain pale man and his toothy grin flash before your eyes. You lean over to Jerry and ask in a whisper, "Who's responsible for this?" Maybe you should've asked the 'what' before the 'who', but a G-Model strides through the aisle after you ask the question and you don't want to risk having it hear you.

A couple of other people heard you, though, and they look at you and Jerry.

Jerry looks down at the floor and begins to speak...

"It was aliens. I was gazing at the sky that night, admiring the shooting stars, when such fateful object met my line of sight, falling towards the ground. It was an alien probe. A blue dog-like robot with the stature of a man. He came to warn of the aliens after hukanity and him, but they were too quick, and he was too slow, and we ended up captured here. I never saw him again."

"Isn't it obvious?" he says softly. "We're all alien abductees. True, you don't see them often, but they're there, watching us. Sometimes they like to come look at us from a window, always up high. As far as I can tell, we're on a humongous spacecraft."

Jerry pauses and looks solemnly at the number on his wrist. You lean in closer to show you're still listening. You blurt out,

"But that man! The one with the needles, surely you've seen him? He looks human to me." Jerry nods,

"The doctor? Yeah, he seems human. But he's different from them." he grips his wrist like it's hurting, "Nobody's been able to figure out what his deal is, though."

The other people who have been listening to you and Jerry nod in affirmation. Jerry goes on in a bitter tone, "We don't know why we're here. Those stupid robots won't tell us. You'll see soon that life is pretty boring around here.

"We wake up, we eat, we go to the gym to exercise, we eat again, rinse and repeat until its time to go to bed and do it all again the next day. Oh, but that's not entirely true, no sir. Once a week, if we've been behaving, we go to the Theater, and that's-"

Jerry, probably unintentionally, has been letting his voice get louder. A G-Model stops where we're at and looks at us with blank white eyes. There is a pregnant pause in the air. It must be waiting for you and Jerry to explain yourselves...

"Ah. Mr. Robot, we were just talking about the weather. It seems that it was rocky slme time ago."

"We... we..." you and Jerry try to say. Then Jerry tells the G-Model as smoothly as he can, "I was just telling her about the gym and how fun it is. Yeah, really fun..." he trails off and pretends that something has caught his attention.

The robot keeps looking at both of you blankly. It only says,

"Eat your food," and then it continues on it's path. You and Jerry breathe a sigh of relief. After a few moments of awkward silence, you check once more that there aren't any guards within earshot and you ask Jerry,

"What's in the Theater?" Jerry freezes. He stammers and the people around you cringe. That doesn't sound good, but you pressure Jerry to go on.

He tells you what's in the Theater...

Plush chairs of softness beyond compare. Disprnsers of nutrition laste and jellies. A giant screen of questionable yet actually good movies and shorts. A rack of electrodes and syringes filled with substance.

"It's kind of hard to describe." he explains, "I can tell you the things that are physically inside the Theater, but it's purpose eludes me. Nobody knows what it's for yet." Your eyes widen. Jerry goes on,

"Compared to everything else it's pretty cozy. There's comfortable red chairs lined up in front of a big screen, just like any normal theater. Along the walls there's dispensers with these weird jelly things that are, well, actually pretty good." Jerry smiles and he looks as though he's dreaming about the jellies he mentioned.

But he gets back on track, "We all go inside the Theater and we're supposed to sit in the seats and watch what's on screen. You wanna know the weird thing?"

"What?"

"They show us these weird videos," Jerry's face takes on a pensive expression, "You'll have to see it for yourself, but I don't get it. It just looks like a bunch of nonsense to me. Not like a pretentious art film kind of nonsense, I mean... Take my word for it, you'll see what I mean. You're lucky, actually, we should be going to the Theater in a few hours."

You're slightly annoyed at how vague Jerry is being; now you're nervous all over again from what he's told you. At least you have an idea of what's in store for you later today.

A sound emitting from speakers placed up high startles you - it's a metallic noise that almost sounds like a bell. Jerry quickly tells you, "It's alright, it just means we've got five minutes before we leave." You look down at your paste. You haven't taken a single bite out of it yet. Honestly, you don't feel like eating right now.

Should you ask Jerry one more question, or should you just suck it up and eat?

Don't just suck it, inhale the food... but not literally inhale like putting them into your respiratory system.

You were feeling hungry not too long ago, and once your nerves calm down you'll feel hungry again. So you're gonna try that pasty stuff.

You look down at the white-gray mush and smell it. Yuck. It smells like cleaning material. Oh well. Since you've got less than five minutes to eat you hurriedly scoop up several spoonfuls worth and shove it in your mouth at once.

The paste slides down your mouth like slime. The closest thing you can compare it to is swallowing a bunch of phlegm. Why does it taste like this? After it goes down you have to force yourself not to throw up.

Now your appetite is pretty much dead. You should've had the protein blocks. Jerry smiles at you and continues eating.

A few minutes later, the bell rings again and all the G-Models walking around the cafeteria march towards one person each. One of them stops by you, and you assume this one is your guard.

All the people put down whatever they were holding and stand up. Everyone exits the cafeteria in lines. At first, you feel a little strange walking in such a rigid fashion but you'll have to get used to it.

You look at the robot at your side. You can't even tell if its the same one who escorted you here in the first place, but again, you're gonna assume he's the same one.

You feel like giving a name to this G-Model. After all, you're probably gonna be here for a while. What should it be?

>Gulliver.

The name Gulliver pops into your mind almost instantly, though you aren't sure why. Because it starts with a G? Maybe.

Though the name conjures up a series of blurry images in your mind. When you think of the word 'Gulliver', you can almost hear the sound of an animal. You can almost see yourself running alongside this animal. You can almost feel your hands brushing down thick fur.

You get so lost in these images you nearly forget where you are, and when you snap out of it, you have to quickly wipe tears away from your eyes. For now, this robot's name is Gulliver.

The two of you get closer to where you think your room is. You're not entirely sure where your prison cell is, though, it's not like you were paying attention.

Has it been a full day since you've first arrived? If not, you imagine you're getting close. And then you can maybe hold a conversation with your guard.

It's kind of bugging you that you don't know the time. Your memories may be hazy right now, but that doctor can't get rid of that feeling of irritation you get when you don't know what time it is.

You're gonna risk taking to Gulliver out here in the hallway. Hope he doesn't go berserk on you. You've gotta think of what to say to him...