《Dreams Recounted》#64 | Lab Rat

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I am a younger version of myself.

A spacious and bare metallic elevator surrounds me with no buttons anywhere. There are elevator doors on each wall and a floor indicator above each one in red clock font. Joining me is an android maid designated as my robot companion and is how I use the elevator.

Every floor that the elevator passes is unique and I must pass the floor test to continue downwards. The floors are counted backwards with the number starting at zero and increasing when going down.

The counter ticks to floor one and two of the doors open revealing dark decrepit brick hallways. I pick a door and walk down it until we come across split paths, my maid informing me that we have to loop around to the other side and enter the elevator from the other door for it to count as passing the test. She informs me that the leftmost path is the most likely to loop back around.

After walking a bit more she suddenly lays her hand on my shoulder stopping me in my tracks. A dusty torn up mummy shambles right past us and into another hallway. She informs me that two creatures roam the halls and advises me to avoid both. One is a mummy that stays far away from any light and is mostly blind but has great hearing. The other is a matron that moves faster than the mummy and holds a lantern.

We travel down the way the mummy came and encounter the matron at some crossroads. Luckily she was turned away from us so we trail behind her using her to keep the mummy away and to light up the path ahead, waiting for her to pass any more crossroads so we can split off from her and get back to the elevator.

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Some time later we finally make it back in one piece without alerting either the mummy or matron. The elevator closes its doors and promptly descends.

…

The counter ticks to floor ninety one and only one of the doors open revealing an empty room similar to the elevator but without any of the doors or counters. My maid enters the room first and I try to follow but an invisible barrier blocks me from passing through the door. She informs me to stand in the centre of the elevator, make myself as thin as possible, and to stay as still as possible.

I do as she tells me to just as a hole opens up in the middle of the roof, a camera extending down. The camera projects a cone of red light towards what it is looking at. The camera scans the room in a ring around the center, the edge just barely not touching me. The camera then retracts and the hole is replaced with the original smooth metal seamlessly. My maid then steps into the elevator, grabs me by my shoulders and shoves me into the safe room.

The elevator does a repeat scan with the camera and this time does detect something, the android. The camera lets out a quick little beep and retracts again but this time the door to my right in the elevator opens. I stay in the safe room. She enters the room and all I can see from mine is a red laser running through the middle close to the ground and some cute little hamsters.

My maid starts ruthlessly tearing through the hamsters, killing as many as she can by burning them in half on the laser. A few hamsters run to the side where I can see them better. The ones that I can see start quickly mutating horrifically. One grows another head and another's fur gets replaced with teeth. They don’t get to mutate very far before she grabs them and kills them with the laser.

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After they have all been killed she gets back into the elevator and ushers me in with her hand. This floor seemed to be a test of initiative. The safe room being blocked off if not entered in time and the hamsters mutating enough to kill you if you don’t get them first. We descend aiming for the bottom floor.

…

I used the elevator as an escape from home. Before running away I lived in a facility with many other kids each with their own android robot companion. My room was mostly empty. A single door in the middle of one of the walls, a path leading to a single lone bed placed against the back wall, and a pool on both sides of the walkway.

At the top of the facility in an office sits a man in a business suit. He is the one who runs this place and is the cause for all the suffering. The more stress and pressure he puts himself under the more money and valuables he is awarded.

He even made himself two robot companions that follow him everywhere. Designed to be cold and sanitised, unappealing to the eye, that forcefully takes him away from anything that gives him relief or happiness. The two robots are almost the complete opposite to the ones us kids are given.

I lie in bed just waking up when the door opens and in walks the man with his two robots tailing him side by side. In his hands he holds a tray filled with good looking food, breakfast, and hands it to me. The food is designed to make me sick by using a weak poison and he tells me not to vomit in the water. We all had actually built up an immunity to the poison long ago but act as though it still works whenever he is watching so he feels miserable for poisoning us without actually poisoning us and avoiding him changing the poison or upping the dosage.

Looking over his shoulder I see some of the other kids already out, lying on their stomachs on the floor playing chess. I try to eat it as quickly as possible so I can join them.

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