The smell of sterility. That was the first sensation I was greeted with. A hospital? My groggy mind assumed. What happened? I hated hospitals. Whatever joyful memories I might have, none had been derived from a hospital. The only thing they seemed to ever offer me was pain. And so I avoided them like the plague. I would look both ways when crossing a road not because I didn’t want to get hit by a car and die. But because I didn’t want to get hit by a car and wake up in a hospital. The blanket on top of me felt stiffer than I’d like. Yet another quirk of hospitals. When my bleary eyes opened, the room looked like it smelled. Clean and white. Unnaturally so. A cuboid of indifference to any suffering that took place within it.
My awareness returned before the memories did. For a couple of discombobulating minutes, my mind struggled with where I was. This feels like a hospital room, I pondered, yet it doesn’t seem like one. There were no bulky machines that mathematically decomposed the signal of my existence. There were no windows in the room. It was impossible to tell if it was day or night. What kind of a hospital is this? And then the memories came flooding back. Of an empty, twilight campus. Of the shadow in the shape of a man. Of frantic running. The adrenaline followed, violently washing away the last of the grogginess. I jerked upwards from the bed in a sudden panic. The motion gave me vertigo, but I couldn’t afford to wait for it to retreat. My life was in danger.
This is no hospital, I realised with dread. They’ve got me. With a swift motion I threw the blanket off of me. These were not my clothes. White trousers and a matching long sleeve. They felt more like pyjamas than anything else. Stretching the waistband, I saw that I was wearing grey underwear. I shuddered in disgust. These fuckers dressed me! It was a violation. Being taken advantage of when I was unconscious. With great difficulty, I tried not to think of what else they might have done. My legs gave in when I tried to stand. They were nothing but sore jellies from my previous episode of physical exertion. If it weren’t for my instincts guiding my fall, my head might have resembled a cracked watermelon on the hard ground. It was nonetheless agonising, and I spent a minute on the floor in white hot pain. When the sore waves subsided, I looked up from my knee.
The room gave the uncanny impression of being the default state of a small bedroom. It was a perfect square of length no greater than two and a half metres. The floor was made of grey ceramic tiles. The walls were painted white. The ceiling had a flat cylindrical light source that was most likely controlled by what looked like a light switch near the door. It was uncomfortably bright. The bed I leaned against was minimal. The aluminium frame reflected the mind of a pragmatic designer whose only concern was cost. The mattress was thin and springy. In the true spirit of a prison bed, it was bound to the wall. The only other furniture in the room was a tiny bedside table that had a single drawer. I reached over to open the drawer. It was empty. I also noticed that the small table was firmly attached to the bed. Unmovable. There were two doors in the room. One door looked heavy. It was almost black. Its edges were metallic, but the surface might have been wooden. It was safe to assume that wood was reinforced by a metallic skeleton within. There was a small rectangle near the bottom of the door. I tried not to think about this door. It undoubtedly led to freedom, but I would break before it did. The other door looked less menacing. It had the same white hue as the walls. I slowly pushed myself up from the floor and walked to it. The door slid into the wall to reveal a confined bathroom. A toilet. A sink. A claustrophobic shower cubicle.
Okay, enough loitering, I thought anxiously. It’s time to try it. I walked to the dark, menacing door. It looked positively impenetrable. I swallowed. Reaching out, the contact of the cold metal of the handle with my sweaty palms made me shiver. With a shaky breath, I gripped the thick handle and turned. Or at least I tried to. It wouldn’t bulge even a millimetre. I was offended. It shouldn’t not turn. It must have been jammed. I exerted more pressure. My second hand joined in the effort. I bent over it to use the rest of my body in this tug of war like my life depended on it—which it did. And yet, it was futile. The weight of my entire existence amounted to not a single acknowledgement from the apathetic handle. Not even the tiniest of nods. I broke.
“Fuck you!” I yelled. Perhaps at the handle. Or my captors. Or myself. I let go of it. The inside of my hand was a pure red, as if the handle had left a branding to taunt at my humiliating failure. I punched the door, concentrating my frustrations onto the surface of my knuckles. I screamed animalistically, but not at the physical pain. My other hand banged on the door. “Let me go!” I shouted at the door, hopefully to an ear on the other side. “Open this fucking thing!”
My attempts at persuading my captors to free my personhood lasted for quite some time. As time went on, the frequency of cursing gradually decreased with my volume, until I was left muttering hopelessly to myself. The adrenaline and physical effects of my panic attack wore off. I felt my body tire out and took refuge on the floor. I couldn‘t help but feel that this was largely my fault. Maybe I should have hit the gym. Then I would’ve broken the handle and not the other way around. Maybe I should have been more careful last night—or whenever that was. It was impossible to identify all of the variables that had led me to this cage, but there must have been something that I could have done differently.
When my mind had finally calmed and accepted the situation for what it was, there was something glaringly odd. Everything was too clean. None of the white surfaces had even a smudge. The bathroom, albeit compact, was much cleaner than mine at home. It just didn’t compute in my mind. While I was certainly glad that I wasn’t locked in a room with bloodstains on the walls and a toilet that invoked lethal disgust, why was this place so spotless? It was inconceivable to think that my captors cleaned this room for me and purged it of dust to flaunt their hospitality. This was obsessive levels of sterile that would have been unattainable for even a five-star hotel. Not that any of it dispelled fears that I was awaiting to be butchered. I remembered watching a documentary in my teens about a serial killer who happened to have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I tried not to dwell on this.
Just like the way that someone at the bar might appear increasingly attractive after each drink, the sad unluxurious bed looked more appealing after every minute. My body was at a low that I hadn’t felt in years. Possibly ever. I abjectly crawled back onto the bed and, with great effort, retrieved the blanket from the floor and covered myself with it. It could be worse, was my last thought before I fell immediately into a deep sleep. It was, unfortunately, not deep enough to be dreamless. While my body rested, my mind did not. I saw images of a human figure chasing me as I frantically ran from street to street. Peter was watching from a distance. I ran to him, begging for him to help me. He laughed and pushed me towards the shadow before vanishing. I saw Hope. I explained in a gibberish mess that I was in danger. Hope said we all were, before walking away at an impossible pace that I couldn’t catch up to. I saw Irene. I asked hopelessly if she would help me. She said I was asking the wrong person. There were some other familiar faces. They couldn’t save me. I resigned myself to walking towards the figure.
“It’s meal time,” he said in an unfamiliar voice. He sounded as if he was right next to me.
“What?” I asked in bemusement.
“Food will arrive shortly…”
My eyes opened. To my despair, it was the same room I had gone to sleep in. What wouldn’t I do to wake up in my own bed, I thought drowsily. The light seemed less assaulting than it had before, thankfully.
“... Keep away from the door. If you do not comply, you will not receive sustenance.” The voice was of a man. It sounded authoritative. My fight or flight instincts completely shook off my tiredness. I looked around the room. No one else was here. There must be a speaker somewhere, but before I could search for it, there were noises coming from the other side of the door. Muted footsteps. A clink. The sound of metal on metal. The tempo of the beat was at a rate that had to be automated. I tried my best to muster up whatever composure I had left. A final click was heard before the rectangle slid open. The rough metallic noise rattled me. A small tray of assortments was brought through by a gloved hand.
“Hello?” I asked tentatively. If I was any less afraid, I would have been embarrassed by the way that my voice wavered. “Who are you?”
After the tray had been placed on the floor, the hand returned through the hole. It slid closed immediately. That gave rise to an indignance from which I drew a minutia of courage. “Why am I here?” I said loudly, almost certain that they could hear from the other side. They didn’t dignify me with a response. I had a sudden urge to pick up the plastic tray and throw it at the door. That impulse was quickly subdued by an even greater craving for food. It was impossible to tell the time, but I was sure I hadn’t eaten anything in at least a day. Approaching the tray, I saw that on it had a sandwich, two sausages, a small apple and a carton of water. In spite of myself, a part of me was delighted. The food looked appetising and I was starving. A rebellious part of me felt insulted that they would give me good food, as if they thought it would be that easy for my captors to buy my submission. Moreover, I had no idea what was really in this stuff. They could be drugging me with god knows what. With a shrug, I brought the tray to the bedside table and began eating the sandwich while sitting on the bed. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to eat whatever they gave me, even if it was spiked with a humanity-ending bioweapon. At least the sandwich was tasty. It had ham and tomatoes. And there was even a serviette.
After I had finished the sandwich and sausages, I saved the apple for later. I didn’t know what the time was, much less how often they would even feed me. It only took a moment for me to decide to take a shower. I could smell the aftermath of all the running and panic attacks. It wasn’t good. My skin felt sticky. Walking into the bathroom, the light switched on automatically. It was the same ceiling light design as the main room—cylindrical with black edges—but smaller in diameter. The mirror was embedded into the wall. It revealed the face of a dishevelled man with bags under his eyes and a pitiful expression.
This all seemed oddly advanced for a prison cell. In the prison industry, the name of the game was how to provide the bare minimum for human survival while meeting ambiguously worded regulations that an expensive lawyer could trivialise. And these people weren’t even that. Where I would have expected—if at all—a barely functional shower with cold, murky water, I instead found a comfortable albeit small shower unit that sprayed pleasant streams of warm water that looked positively potable. There was even a ventilation unit that activated with the lights that took care of the steam. I took my time in the shower. Partially because time didn’t exist for me since I couldn’t measure it. But also because it was genuinely the only thing that approximated a meditation I desperately needed both physically and mentally. Not that I did any form of actual meditation in my previous free-range life. Sitting still while idly performing introspection was just not something I could do—I had to be doing or thinking at any given moment, whether that was doing maths, reading the news, or scrolling through trending developments in some shitty social media website. After drying myself with the inconveniently small towel, I was physically relaxed for the first time in what felt like a week. I had nearly exited the bathroom naked, but I realised that they must be watching me somehow, so I didn’t. There had to be a camera somewhere, but just like with the speaker, I had no idea where it was.
Leaving the bathroom, my sight had set on the light switch near the door. Upon closer inspection, it looked more advanced than I had anticipated. There was no switch, but a dial that looked like it moved vertically. My hypothesis was that lifting it would make the light brighter, and bringing it down would dim it. I tried to test this hypothesis by moving it. It wouldn’t budge. Rather, upon contact, the immediate space below the vertical slit that the dial inhabited produced a bright white word against its black surface. Locked. So it appeared that this was indeed the light switch, but I was locked out of accessing it. What kind of a bourgie light switch is this? I thought wryly. Where the hell am I? Some rich psycho’s pleasure dungeon? That would explain a lot, but I hoped it wasn’t the case. I shuddered.
I turned back to the rest of the room, appraised it once again, before resigning to lying on the bed. There was nothing to do. The absence of stimuli was strange. Unnatural. Terrifying. I had always understood intellectually that boredom was a legitimate form of torture, but experiencing it had reminded me that abstractions were merely cheap substitutions for the real thing. I felt, for the lack of a more adequate word, fine. But I could feel an anxiety slowly swelling inside me. Nothingness was a ghastly terror that would eventually drive me insane. I knew I was more susceptible to this than most people. My mind was a restless one. Sleep never came at will. A vast nothingness would guarantee that my mind would inevitably attack itself. Like my body turning against itself in trying to purge a terminal affliction. Perhaps this was their plan. To reduce me to a stimulus starved beggar who would do anything they demanded as long as I could do something. I could only hope freedom would find me before madness.
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It was impossible to know how long I had mused for, before a voice jolted me out of my thoughts.
“Mister Young,” he said. It was the same authoritative voice from before. Like a prison officer. There was an accent. It sounded American. But not too American. “I will ask you some questions. You will answer them succinctly and truthfully.”
“Doctor Young,” I corrected. “And why don’t you start by telling me why I’m here?”
“I’m afraid that is not how it works,” he said. “Please state your name in full.”
“Who are you?” I persisted.
“If you do not cooperate, then we will make you cooperate.” Despite the casual tone in which he said it, the threat lingered palpably.
“Fine,” I uttered in what I had hoped was defiant. “Alex Young.”
If the man was pleased, I couldn’t hear it. “Please state your age.”
Where’s his voice coming from? I wondered. I tilted my head slightly. “Thirty-two.”
“Please recite the alphabet in reverse order.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked incredulously.
“Please recite the alphabet in reverse order,” he repeated almost perfectly.
I sighed, before proceeding to do so. The exercise wasn’t particularly difficult for me. Forward and backwards were fundamentally the same. The quantity of information captured in one ordering was the same as the other. As I recited the letters, I realised I knew where the voice came from. The cylindrical light. It doubles as a speaker and a microphone. And, if my intuition was correct, it also tripled as a surveillance camera. The black rim around it was an eye. I was certain of this. It probably didn’t have any blindspots. A panopticon.
“How long do you believe you have been in the room you are currently in?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Give your best estimate.”
What’s the point of this? I pondered. It seemed like a little more than a taunt. “More than a day. No more than three. Two days, maybe.”
“And what do you believe the current time of the day is?”
“That’s an impossible question,” I said exasperatedly. “I don’t know. Two PM?”
There was a pause, before, “Thank you.”
“Can you answer some of my questions now?” I asked the empty room. There was no response. And just like that, the interrogation was over. Well, that was awfully pointless, I seethed.
I passed my time lying on the uncomfortable bed. I avoided the bathroom as much as I could. The ceiling light in there had the same black rim, meaning that someone was most likely watching me when I used any of the facilities. Rationally, I shouldn’t care. There was nothing I could do about it. But the thought nonetheless made me uncomfortable. There was a possibility I could be still rescued. Somebody had to have noticed that I was missing. After all, Hope lived right next to me. Maybe she had even heard the struggle. Or even before that when I rushed into my apartment. There was the off chance that she wasn’t home at the time, but surely she would eventually notice my absence. If not her, then Irene. It was strange that she had stood me up, but when she would inevitably try to arrange a second meeting, she would surely regard her failed calls with suspicion. Regardless, someone would alert the authorities. It might take a while, but it would happen. Then, the authorities would investigate my disappearance, apply cutting-edge forensics and find wherever this place was and rescue me. Or at least that was what I would believe if I were a simpleton. The authorities were always slow. My life was only a tiny footnote in their list of priorities. They were much more concerned with being able to secure budget, or filing enough reports to justify a marginal promotion, than committing resources to finding one missing person in an ever increasing sea of missing persons. If my name ever lands on the desk of some officer or investigator, it would most likely be accompanied with my mangled corpse chopped up in a hundred pieces, recovered from a little known lake by some kid and their father on their kayaking trip.
Perhaps I could pretend I was having a heart attack to trick my captors into coming into this room, then overpower them. I chuckled. Not in a million years, I thought wryly. These people can probably snap me like a twig.
“It’s meal time,” came the familiar voice, interrupting my thought. Huh? Has it really been that long? I pondered in confusion. “Place your tray near the door and stay back. If you do not comply, you will not receive sustenance.”
I got up from the bed and placed the tray on the empty floor next to the door. It had nothing but my used serviette, an empty water carton and the core of the apple I ate not too long ago. Only a few seconds after I had retreated to my bed, I heard footsteps from the other side, followed by mechanical sounds and the opening of the rectangular gap. Gloved hands swapped the empty tray with a new one, which had the exact same meal. I only watched as the gap slid closed. It was clear that I wasn’t in a position that compelled my captors to answer any of my questions. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I ate anyway. If I delayed eating this meal, I’d need to delay the next one, and so forth. Equilibrium was important.
I couldn’t ignore the fact that my kidnapping occurred on the evening that I was supposed to meet Irene. That seemed too large of a coincidence. After all, Irene was a mystery within a mystery. She was unforthcoming. Almost as though she was deathly allergic to giving me even a scrap of information. It was entirely possible that Irene was involved in my abduction. She and her shadowy associates would fit the anonymity that was preferred by criminals. But why would she do that? I was working on the mathematical problems that were provided to me, which was what she wanted. And the image of a bunch of physicists who were proficient kidnappers was too comedic to be feasible. There was another possibility. Irene had been meeting me to give me information. Classified information. The kind of information that was valuable and possibly destructive in the wrong hands. That must have been why the research was so sensitive in the first place; there were bad actors looking to steal the research, along with whatever other information that Irene had. This meant that I wasn’t necessarily the target. It was Irene. She who carried valuable, physical files. I was merely the associate caught in the crossfire. For all I knew, Irene could be locked in another room, suffering far worse than I was. Worry wasn’t an emotion I expected in the basket of things I felt regarding Irene. But here I was. Sitting on a springy bed. Chewing on a mouthful of sausage. Feeling genuine worry for a woman who had up until now only vexed me. It wasn’t just my life that was in jeopardy now. This was an important fact. The stakes were much higher than I had initially thought.
I didn’t notice it at first, but the lighting in the room had changed. Initially I thought I had merely become more tired, but as time went on, it became unmistakeable. It wasn’t just that the light had dimmed. The hue had also shifted slightly. Where some time—possibly hours—ago the light had been bright white, the light in the room was now marginally dimmer and had a slight orange tinge to it. It was subtle and became more pronounced over time. And for the first time in what felt like weeks, I felt a good kind of excitement. For I recognised it. The returning of my oldest, most reliable friend. Time, I realised with an almost overwhelming sense of elation. I can tell time! It didn’t have the precision of a proper clock, but just being able to distinguish night from day and keep track of my stay was infinitely valuable. It was like finding an oasis in a scorching desert. An anchor for my sanity.
Some time later, another meal had arrived with the exact same rituals. First the authoritative voice. Then the sounds of footsteps and metal. Finally, the substitution. The meal was exactly the same as the previous two. With my newfound understanding of the dynamic lighting, I treated this meal as dinner. Which implied that the previous meals were breakfast and lunch. I would go to sleep sometime after this meal. Some semblance of my familiar life returned. A minutia, but it felt like a small, precious victory. This is a weakness, I realised. They can mess with me psychologically by simply changing up the meal schedules. Even a randomly generated schedule would mess me up in ways unimaginable. This made me paranoid. Has it really been a full day? I wondered with a bubbling anxiety. Or has it only been a few hours since my first meal?
“Oh god,” I muttered in a panicked voice. “This is fucked.”
The small victory was immediately dashed. What nominal certainty I had gained was casted to the unknowable void. There was truly nothing I could rely on in the tiny, confined universe of this room. I could have been living three-hour days, or fifty-hour days, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Time was not only malleable. It was a weapon wielded jealously by my captors. A constricting bind around my neck. And time wasn’t the only distance that was immeasurable to me. I couldn’t tell how close I was from tumbling down from the edges of my sanity. One misstep and I could lose my sense of self.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The fact that the hue was still dim and warm wasn’t at all a reliable clue. The voice had returned.
“Mister Young.”
“Doctor Young,” I corrected spitefully.
“I will ask you some questions. You will answer them succinctly and truthfully.” His tone never changed. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to a real person on the other side.
“I will allow it,” I said mockingly, “on the condition that you release me afterwards.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No,” I answered immediately. He didn’t acknowledge my previous question. But he didn’t reject it either. That gave me a tiny tug of hope in my chest.
“What is the name of the woman who lives on the same floor as you?”
My heart sank. I couldn’t allow Hope to fall victim to whatever this is. The thought of her being kidnapped made me feel ill. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said, mustering as much faux nonchalance as I could. The sudden dryness of my throat didn’t help. I suppressed the urge to reach for the water carton from the previous meal.
“What is the name of the woman who lives on the same floor as you?”
That same damn question. They wanted me to answer it. It occurred to me that they didn’t actually want Hope’s name. Chances were, they already had it. This was a test. What they were testing for, I couldn’t imagine. Are they threatening me with her?
“Hope,” I answered. “I think you’re referring to Hope. I don’t know her. She works at the university as well, but we don’t work together. We don’t even talk.”
A silence, before, “In your estimate, how long will humanity survive?”
“Not long,” I said wryly. “Any day now.”
It wasn’t a question I had put any thought in. It was irrelevant. My answers didn’t matter. I had no idea what they were getting out of these weird interrogations, but my genuine answers were certainly not it. That last question in particular was silly. Why would my captors care about my opinions on a matter that didn’t matter. The only kind of people who would ask these worthless questions to someone they had kidnapped were delusional cultists. I remembered reading up on morbid historical cults in the US. I really hoped that I wasn’t in the thralls of one. Worshipping some ridiculous deity while being abused in every way possible by mad followers was not how I imagined I would go.
Footsteps. My thoughts halted. My heartbeat quickened. It wasn’t a meal. It couldn’t be. The familiar rituals had not been followed. Could it be that my request to leave had been acknowledged? That would be such a ridiculous outcome that a part of me felt like it might just happen. After all, I had been kidnapped against all odds in the first place. The rectangle on the door slid open and closed in quick succession. In between those events, an envelope fell through. I was too perplexed to be disappointed.
“You are to have the envelope on you at all times,” the voice commanded. “If you lose the envelope, you will die.”
I will die? I thought frantically. He said it in the same firm tone as if he was notifying me that it was meal time. This was the first time I had been threatened so explicitly in this whole messed up ordeal. At this point, it didn’t just feel terrifying, but also out of place. As if being threatened by your favourite teacher. How would I not keep the envelope on me? I was confined to this tiny space after all. I wonder what’s inside of it that’s so important.
“If you open the envelope, you will die.”
