"On your feet, soldier!"
A loud shout appeared out of nowhere like thunder, jerking the young man sleeping on the ground awake.
"I told you to stand on your feet! What are you doing dazing off like this?! On your feet, soldier!"
The second shout didn't come alone, but with a brutal kick that made the young man jump on his feet out of pain.
"Where am I? Who are you?!"
The first thing the young man did was to look in honest puzzlement towards the man who just woke him up.
"Are you playing dumb now, soldier John Mirage?" The man gave the youngster a look full of anger, before turning round and walked in a strict and serious way, "ten minutes and I'll see you in the death squad! No excuses this time!"
"What the heck…" John looked sleepy, sounded sleepy, and yet his mind jolted awake when he heard his name, "John what? That's not my name!"
John stood in his place for a few moments, before rubbing his cheeks and hair to wake himself up. The first thing he did next was to take a good look at himself, at the place he was in.
The more he saw, the more shocked and confused he became! He heard the man calling him "soldier" two times, and he was indeed wearing a military uniform. It was black suit, with faint brown lines appearing all over it.
"I never joined the military…" John muttered to himself, before taking a better look at the place he was in.
He was inside a big room, one that was like a big hall or something. Yet there was nothing else but a big semi-opened door that the man who woke him up walked through it to the outside!
There were no other doors to any other room, there wasn't even a door leading to the kitchen or bathroom. There was just this room, one big metallic room, and he was standing in the centre of it!
The room was lined by metallic walls, had metallic ground and ceiling! John didn't need to personally check and touch the walls or the ground to know they were formed of pure silver and black metal. He could easily tell from the metallic lustre appearing on the surface of everything.
"Where am I?!" John could see a bed that was just formed of a single mattress lying on the ground at a corner, a closet with metallic doors that were widely opened, and a single table and seat; all made out of metal!
This was by no means how John used to live in, or even how apartments looked in the world he lived in. "First a weird man waking me up, then an alien name, and now this weird place… A mirror!"
Just as he was lost in thoughts and confused, walking in circles in the room, he suddenly recalled the need for a mirror. Just when he got hope, he lost it faster as he realised there was no such a thing as a mirror in this place.
"I can't go out… Not yet…" John resisted the urge to leave the room, to go and look for a mirror. He wanted to see what he looked like, as a crazy thought popped into his mind, one that he wanted to check if true or not.
But before that, he sat on the only seat in the room, placed both hands on the table, and there he saw something new.
"My hands…" he saw hands that were big, with thick fingers. He moved his sleeves up, and there he found bulging muscles, giving an impression of how sturdy and strong his body was.
"I… I never had such a body… Such muscles…" he muttered in disbelief, slowly feeling that the crazy idea he had before wasn't that crazy at all, "This body isn't mine… This place isn't my home… And that's not my name… Don't tell me…"
He couldn't say it out loud, but his mind admitted it regardless, he was into a different body with a whole new life that didn't belong to him.
"Did I die?" The first thing that came to his mind was getting reincarnated.
"My name is Eric, Eric Benz. I was born in the United States, lived there my entire life! I'm a software engineer, working as a senior developer at a very promising artificial intelligence company. I'm a single father to a little girl, her mother died two years after giving birth to her, my Bethany. She is now with her grandfather on vacation…"
He kept recalling his life before, trying to make sense or relate to any of the weird situation he found himself in, "the last thing I remember was… Crossing that street and getting hit by the bus…"
He paused in his words, feeling like he got a bucket of cold water over his head. He recalled perfectly how it felt that day. He was crossing the road, distracted by his phone, ending up getting rammed by a rushing bus.
"No… I recall waking up at…" Just as he was about to recall more memories of last night, he suddenly felt an excruciating pain hitting his head. He held his head with both hands, resisting the urge to scream out in pain.
The pain vanished when he stopped trying to recall what happened after getting hit. "That… It was new…" He never had such pain before. He checked his head, fearing there was a big wound there, but found nothing.
"My hair…" as he touched his head to look for any wound, he touched his hair. He used to have short hair, but this was a very long hair, long enough to make a bundle that extended to his back!
"This… I'm in a different person's body for sure," after considering all the clues he found, he reached this conclusion, "and the only place I can think of, formed of metal, with little to no furniture like this… Am I in prison?!"
He couldn't find any other possible place in the world but this, "yet… That man called me a soldier… I never went to the military; do they have places like prison there? Like this?"
John moved his eyes around, before summing up his courage, "I'll need to go and explore where I am, gather more clues, and find what happened to me, the real me!"
John clenched his fists, stood up, and walked to the door. He tried to look at his looks at the hazy reflection of the metallic walls, to see nothing clear except a big and broad body.
"If I had that body before, I'd have been popular with ladies," he tried to push a smile on his face, before passing through the door and getting welcomed with the world beyond.