/ Adrian
Woke up in a nice room, well lit, pretty high-tech, if judged by the ceiling I met right after I opened my eyes.
Body felt way too light, way too energised. I pulled myself up to sit. A damn metal bed, ones that are used in the morgue for body preparations. Though, funny enough - I was fully clothed. Checked - the underwear, the pants, the socks and shoes, the shirt… What the heck?
"Oh look at this, how fascinating." - I hear a man's voice beside me. I turn to see what is there.
Dark hair, suited up, on a couch, there's a woman next to the couch, standing, by the looks of it - maid? The whole thing looks like a penthouse suite, with just this corner that looks like a high quality lab. Just where the hell did I get to?
"Confused much?" - The man addresses me, as he picks a glass with a liquid in it. Slowly swishing the liquid around… Is he having whiskey in there?
"Where am I?" - I finally speak up. The voice is mine indeed, just how I'm used to it.
The man lets out a chackle… Not really a laugh, rather a stifled amused version of it.
"I rather wonder how the hell you managed to do what you did." - He answers.
"What do you mean?" - I ask back.
"Besides you hacking into system somehow and managing to pring your own body in a span of day, in my lab, as well as get the system to even prepare the clothes and get a damn request to the maids to clothe you. I wonder just how the fuck you pulled that off, a random person from fuck knows where." - The man places the glass back on a tray, then gestures to the maid to leave. She does so with no words spoken.
And now there's only two of us in here.
"So, you brat, you better tell me who you are, before I throw you into the hands of my fine lads to figure it out on their own." - He looks at me… the same way I looked at the VCs of the board, when I was about to devour them for experiments.
Not complying would not be very nice, nor very much guarantee me getting out of here alive. Besides all that - I do in fact need information about where I am, as well as how to find the others. Right, others.
"I followed Niko and the others. That's how I got here." - I say.
"What's your name?" - He asks.
"My name is Adrian." - I reply, as I get up from the metal slab and walk over to him. Then it catches my attention - the window. And I walk over to it. Looking outside puzzles me. It looks like a fairly well kept garden. Immaculate precision. Very well planned. But where's the rest?
"Heh, you won't see much from here, Adrian. Let's go out." - Man gets up, walks over to the window, presses the panel and part of the window moves, allowing to walk through and inside the garden. We both walk in. The air is humid, pretty chilly. That gives me a shiver. I look up - there's stars, night sky. Looking aside - nothing. Absolutely nothing.
"Follow me." - The man commands. He goes over to the nice waist-high fence and looks down. I follow along, walk to the fence and look down.
What?! There's the whole lot of the ants nest of a place. We're on top of the high rise building, there's a few other similar look-alikes with fancy gardens on the very top. Below - flying cars, neons, the buzz of densely packed world of humans. Madness.
"Where am I?" - I ask.
"So you got here and have no clue where you are. Fairly shitty planning, if you ask me." - He replies.
"What's your name?" - I look at him. Noticing that he has that superior look, that condescending thing about him that irks me the way… The way I want to punch this smug face real hard, or throw him over the fence.
"You can call me… Hmmm" - He smirks. - "Call me Feng."
"Alright, Feng, where am I? What is this place called?" - I ask.
"Pfft," - He laughs, - "This place is called Iron City, white boy." - Feng surely gets under my skin for no good reason.
"What do you mean I printed myself here?" - I ask.
"You sure have a lot of questions, white boy. Printed means printed. You used my 3D printers to print yourself into existence, tissue by tissue, cell by cell. In my lab. Like a damn virus that got in whilst nobody watched. You busted the system yet do not recollect this part? That's a bummer." - Feng lets out.
"I just…" - I take a deep breath. Trying to access the whole thing.
"Thinking too hard? Making up lies is hard indeed. Try being honest then?" - Feng leans closer to say it to my face, his eyes glistening with mischief… The kind I saw in the eyes of some goddamn psychopaths.
"I was somewhere, like in a system, going from reality to reality, then followed a person by the name of Niko out of the system. And ended up here. I don't know how I printed myself or happened to awaken here. I just did." - I let out, as I walked back into the room, as it got pretty cold for me to stand outside. Feng followed behind me, then closed the panel once we were inside.
"Who is this Niko person?" - Feng asks, as he lands back on a couch.
"She's someone I was on a quest to find." - I answer.
"Oh Adrian, is that love?" - Feng grimaces.
"No, it's an obsession," - I answer, as I sit on the other side of the couch. - "The obsession to find her real self, as she is the lab rat I created in one of the realities and she… She just would not die. Breaking my plans so often it got highly annoying."
Feng shifted about, leaning on the couch leisurely.
"You seem like a bag of mysteries, Adrian." - Feng says, - " Though chasing after the favourite test subjects - I can relate to that. Though I've never once come across anyone or anything with such a name like Niko. Hmmm." - Feng snaps his fingers, and the maid pops into the room. - "Call in Sheng."
The maid nods and walks out. We sit for a bit in silence, then a man walks in, bowing to the Feng beside me.
"Check if there's anyone with the name 'Niko' in the city." - Feng says, the guy that walked in pulls out a glass thing, sort of a transparent tablet, taps on it and does some hand gestures above it.
"There's no one with such a name here, Sir." - Sheng replies.
Feng gives a nod then looks at me.
"So, are you lying to my face, Adrian?" - Feng raises his brow, like I'm trying to bullshit him here.
"No." - I reply sharply.
"So you followed her and ended up here. Interesting indeed." - Feng presses lips, then takes a look at the other guy in the room.
"There could be a research facility." - I let out, as I sense that if now he misunderstands something - I might be dead real fast.
"Research facility?" - Feng takes a deep breath. Then looks at his lab. - "That would be highly impossible IN here. To sort of miraculously wake up in any research facility here."
"Huh? Why?" - That got me highly puzzled. It makes no sense… Unless…
"Oh you DO look confused, white boy." - Feng breathes out. - "You see, in any research lab here anyone who is a test subject will be going in, sure, but nothing will come out. All shall be used. Some for the beauty industry to live long - especially marrow and blood, the good cells, the rest is for organ exchanges, then it's the food chain and whatever they make out of it. Anything goes. Especially from a young age to age 25 roughly. Older subjects are highly guarded test rats, for primary test subjects. A fine industry." - Feng looks at me with this matter-of-factly mundane piece of information the way he just said it all.
"How fucked up." - I replied.
"It is how it is. Have been like this for over a few hundred years. With only changes in how well things are executed. All the rest are very old practices all in all." - Feng shrugs.
I lean on a couch.
"So you mean, there's this place called Iron City which harvests humans for prolonging the youth, as well as the cattle for mutilation and food. That's not that fun, as much as entertaining to the pedos and the mad ones." - I say, feeling the weight of tired sense kicked in.
Feng laughed out loud. He sincerely laughed here. What the heck is wrong with this guy? The other one just stood there the whole time. Not moving from that one spot.
"Alrigh, Adrian, tell me about where you've been and how it was in there. For that I'll let you stay here for a bit." - Feng came to, after all that laughing. - "Prep guest room." - He said to Sheng, who then left.
"So you wanna know all of it." - I say to Feng.
"I do, please, all the details. I'm just wondering which random ass you fell out of." - Feng smiled at me.
Shit. There's no way but to cooperate here. It definitely feels right now that my whole survival depends on it.