Twenty-three. This number was no longer a simple mathematical value suspended in my mind. Twenty-three times, in the corridors of that damned third floor, I had perished, scorched under the lasers of Sentinel drones. Each time, I had relived Alisha's cold fingers tightening around my throat, the life being ripped from my body, over and over again. Yet, the Memory Shield worked like a curse; it didn't forget the pain, on the contrary, it etched every detail into my mind. Every death was not a trauma, but a dataset.
I opened my eyes. The flawless, sterile whiteness of the ceiling no longer dazzled me. The "prop" beside me this time a brunette woman with full lips was in a deep sleep as programmed. I didn't look at her face. They were filling material for this scene. Their names, faces, or fake dreams meant nothing to me.
I sat up. The phantom pain of the probe that stabbed my kidney in the previous loop wandered as a thin ache on my right side. My hand involuntarily went to that spot; my skin was smooth, but my nerve endings remembered the burn.
I didn't go to the bathroom. I didn't need to splash water on my face to come to my senses. My mind was ice-cold clear. I dressed quickly and stepped into the corridor. The artificial daylight emitted by the nanobots, that gooey positivity on the walls, was nauseating. I had memorized the rhythm of the building, the blood flow in its veins. I knew which floorboard would creak, which second Alisha would be in which corridor.
I skipped the cafeteria. The void in my stomach was filled not with hunger, but with cold rage. I headed behind the game room, to that blind spot under the fire escape stairs. She was there. She was leaning against the wall, arms crossed over her chest. The expression that appeared on her face when she saw me wasn't that old melancholic smile; it was anxiety mixed with respect.
"Twenty-three," she said, her voice trembling. "You're pushing the limits. Even if your body doesn't, your mind might collapse." "It's not stubbornness," I said, my tone sounding foreign even to me; metallic, stripped of emotion. "Just hatred. That's the only fuel keeping me standing." She took a step towards me, hesitantly placing her hand on my shoulder. The warmth of her palm was the most realistic detail of this simulation. "You look different today," she whispered. "That look in your eyes... You're not afraid of the drones anymore." "They are just obstacles. Pieces of a puzzle," I said, as her hand slowly lowered from my shoulder. The contact was distracting me. "The real issue is what comes after. The access door to the fourth floor."
"Don't forget my promise," she said. She locked eyes with me. "When you open that door... Whatever you encounter, don't hesitate. I have huge gaps in my database about that place. Only a 'Maintenance Floor' tag and plenty of error codes." "Doesn't matter if it's the depths of hell," I said, turning my back. "The exit is there."
Time: 16:47. The chaotic noise of the main hall, laughter, and fake joy remained behind me. Taking advantage of the three-second gap created when Alisha gave her attention to the newly arrived group, I slipped through the door on the right. I was in the stairwell. I clasped my hands over my head. Memory Shield active. My heart beat not with fear, but regularly like a machine. When I pushed the third-floor door, that familiar industrial coldness hit my face. The buzzing of fluorescents. Hummm… click… hummm… click…
I synchronized my breath with the flickering of the lights. When those metallic clicking sounds came from the misty depths of the corridor, I smiled. Four Sentinel Drones. They were coming, hanging from the ceiling, scanning with red laser eyes. In the past, I would hold my breath and cower against the wall. Now, I knew their blind spots like the back of my hand. The moment the first drone turned right, I slid under its scanning field by a millimeter. When the second drone descended, I took shelter in the shadow of a metal column. The laser light passed the tip of my nose, close enough to make me feel its heat. I didn't flinch.
I waited for that critical sync error between the third and fourth drones. 0.4 seconds. In my twenty-second death, I had miscalculated this gap and paid the price with my lung being shredded. Now I was ready. Click-click-click. The gap opened. With a silent, fluid movement, I slipped between them like a shadow. They remained behind me. And there it was, in front of me. Different from the others, heavy, rusted, that door with biological hazard symbols on it. It had no handle, just a wheel turning in its center. I took a deep breath, gripped the wheel, and pulled with all my might. The ear-piercing scream of metal grinding against metal echoed in the corridor. The door groaned open slowly. I went inside.
The moment I stepped in, the sterile laboratory air gave way to a hot, humid, and nauseating atmosphere. It was as if I hadn't entered a building, but the internal organs of a gigantic, sick creature. The door slammed shut behind me with a loud noise. Was this a corridor? I wasn't sure. The metal walls narrowed concavely, closing in on me. Their surfaces were covered with a rotten skin-like texture stretched over the metal. Beneath this texture, purple and red cables thick as wrists throbbed like arteries. With every pulse, a dark, molasses-like liquid oozed down the walls, dripping onto the floor with a drip… drip… sound.
The floor was sticky. With every step, the sole of my shoe sank into that flexible surface, making squish… squish…sounds. The surroundings were illuminated by glowing red emergency lights embedded in the walls. Every time the light hit, the corridor seemed to breathe, the walls contracting and relaxing. There was a heavy smell of rust and dried blood in the air. The cleanliness of ozone was gone, replaced by the stench of a slaughterhouse.
"You did it..." I flinched at the sound. She appeared beside me. My chestnut-haired ally. But even her simulation seemed unable to handle the weight of this environment; her face was pale as chalk, her eyes wide with terror. She covered her nose with her hand. "This place..." her voice trembled. "In my database, this place shows up as the 'Maintenance Floor'. But this... This is not a maintenance area. The building looks infected." "This isn't the simulation's backyard," I said, looking with disgust at the blackish liquid oozing from the veins in the wall. "This is reality itself. Those beautiful rooms upstairs, that tropical paradise... All a mask worn over this rot."
We started moving forward. The walls narrowed a bit more with each step, claustrophobia gripping my throat. "Calm down," the girl said, squeezing my arm. "Your pulse is too high. They might be smelling your fear." "Who?" I asked. My voice echoed hollowly. The answer came from the depths of the darkness. GRRRCCCHH… VOOOMMM… A wet, mechanical breathing sound. The noise of bending metal. Further ahead, something moved in the shadows. But these weren't agile like Sentinel drones. It was a heavy, clumsy, and inevitable mass.
When the red light blinked once more, I saw them. Four of them. They had completely blocked the corridor. They weren't human. They weren't robots either. They were a cursed alloy of both, forged in hell. They stood over three meters tall. Their skeletons were matte titanium, but they were wrapped in raw, skinless, reddish muscle fibers. The muscles tensed and quivered as they moved, reacting like a living organism. They had no faces. Where their heads should have been was a smooth, metal dome; and right in the center, three vertically aligned bright blue sensors. Gears constantly turning and interlocking under their jaws made a chug-chug-chug sound, as if chewing invisible flesh.
"Fall back," the girl whispered. "These are... Guardians. 'Biomechanical Executioners'. They are designed not to fight, but to annihilate." The Guardian in the front took a heavy step. The floor groaned under its weight. It raised its right arm. Metal plates opened with a clatter, and a massive plasma blade formed of energy, glowing with purple light, extended from the end of the arm. The heat of the blade licked my face from meters away. "Maybe we can communicate," I said, stepping forward with a madness born of desperation. "Stop! My name is..." I couldn't remember my name. Damn it, what was my name?
The Guardian stopped. Its blue sensors locked onto me. The metal dome on its head tilted slightly to the side. The sound of the gears turned into a high-pitched buzz, and a distorted, static-filled voice echoed directly inside my mind. "Sample 894. Loop anomaly detected. Consciousness level: Above critical threshold."
They were speaking. "I am not an anomaly!" I shouted. "I want to get out of here! Grant access to the 12th floor!" The muscles on the Guardian's shoulders tensed. Old wounds on it began to bubble and boil, closing up. "Exit request denied. Harvest is not yet complete." "Harvest?" The girl had frozen beside me.
The Guardian took another step. "Emotional spectrum energy. Fear. Hope. Lust. Pain. Source 894, your efficiency rate is dropping. Resistance increases harvest quality. However, escape attempt initiates extermination protocol. Your biomass will be recycled."
The truth hit my brain like a sledgehammer. This wasn't a game or an experiment. It was a farm. We were batteries. Our emotions, our fears, our happiness in that fake paradise... All energy for someone. Alisha wasn't a warden, she was a farmer. And these... These were the butchers.
"Run!" the girl shouted. But where? The Guardian lunged with a speed unexpected from its massive bulk. It swung its left arm, a massive hydraulic claw. I ducked by reflex, but I wasn't fast enough. The metal fingers gripped my torso. My breath cut short. As my feet left the ground, I looked into those blue sensors, that soulless, expressionless face.
"Let him go!" the girl screamed. She attacked the Guardian's leg, punching it. But it was like hitting a mountain. The Guardian swatted her away like a fly with the back of its other arm. The girl smashed against the wall, onto those gooey veins, and lay motionless.
The Guardian brought me close to its face. "Pain signal optimization initiating. Neural implant activation." And in that moment, the concept of pain was redefined. A hatch on the Guardian's chest opened, and an invisible wave radiated out. This wasn't a physical blow; it was a command sent directly to my nervous system: AGONY. My bones weren't broken yet, but my brain was receiving the signal that every bone in my body was being shattered simultaneously. My eyes felt like they would pop out of their sockets, uncontrolled saliva drooled from my mouth. This pain was nothing compared to the Sentinel needles. It was as if my skin was being flayed alive, every single nerve ending burned with acid.
My perception of time distorted. Seconds stretched into hours. CRACK. I didn't hear the sound of my first rib breaking, I felt it. That muffled explosion from inside. But the pain... Because of the neural implants, it was so severe I couldn't even scream. "Harvest efficiency: 400%," the mechanical voice said. "Pain is the purest form of energy."
CRACK. CRACK. Two more ribs. One must have punctured my lung; hot, metallic liquid sprayed from my mouth. My blood splattered onto the Guardian's smooth face. I saw the girl. She was crawling on the ground looking at me, helpless terror in her eyes. She was saying something, but I couldn't hear.
The Guardian continued to squeeze. My ribcage was caving in like a tin can in a press machine. I felt my internal organs being crushed, shifting places. My heart, finding no room to beat in the compressing cage, fluttered madly. The neural implants kept me awake. They wouldn't let me faint. They made me watch every second of death, life being drawn out of my body inch by inch.
CRUNCH. My spine. I went numb from the waist down, but the fire in my torso didn't go out. My vision started to darken. The last thing I heard was the Guardian's emotionless analysis: "Sample 894 exterminated. Energy stored. Loop resetting." Then, the metallic claw squeezed one last time and stopped my heart. Darkness.
I opened my eyes. The ceiling was white. The sun that fake, accursed sun was leaking through the curtains. I was in my bed. I was drenched in sweat. My chest ached as if still in that vice. My hands went frantically to my chest. It was intact. Bones were in place. But my mind... The Guardian's voice echoed in my mind: "Harvest." "Emotional spectrum energy." "Sample 894."
I looked at the woman beside me. She was sleeping. I was trembling as I got out of bed. Not from fear. I now knew what we were. We weren't batteries. We were livestock. And this camp was a slaughterhouse disguised as luxury. I raised my hands. I clasped my trembling fingers together. I squeezed so hard that my nails dug into my flesh. I looked in the mirror. That tired victim in my eyes was gone. In his place, a butcher seeking revenge had arrived.