I had always believed that if I ever got into a fight, I'd move like Bruce Lee or a Hollywood protagonist—effortless, precise, untouchable. Enemies would fly. I'd walk away without a scratch, not even bothering to look back.
Reality, however, had no interest in my fantasies.
It was 10:00 p.m. I was walking home from the office, barely four hundred meters away. Close enough to feel safe. Close enough to relax. I told myself nothing could happen in such a short stretch of road.
Then I heard footsteps.
I glanced back. Three men.
The moment our eyes met, they stopped. Just for a fraction of a second—but it was enough. The man in the middle, clearly the leader, continued forward with forced nonchalance. Thick beard. Long, matted hair. Bloodshot eyes swimming in alcohol. The two beside him were younger, lean, their patchy beards failing to make them look older—or less dangerous.
They weren't just walking. They were tracking.
Cold crept down my spine. My fingers tingled, then went numb. My mind—so confident in imaginary heroics—collapsed instantly, screaming a single command:
Run.
I ran.
I didn't care how pathetic I looked. I just needed my door. My breath tore out of my lungs. Sweat blurred my vision. A silent please escaped my lips—to my legs, to fate, to anyone awake behind those dark windows.
For a moment, hope flickered.
Maybe they stopped. Maybe I'm wrong.
I looked back.
He was right there.
A hand yanked my collar. My balance shattered. I slammed onto the pavement, rolling hard. Asphalt burned through fabric and skin. Warm blood flowed from my knee and elbow.
I tried to rise.
A boot crushed into the back of my head.
The world fractured. My forehead struck the road. Blood pooled beneath my face, mixing with sweat and dust.
Hands wrapped around my neck and dragged me up. The leader's face hovered inches from mine—veins bulging, eyes wild, breath reeking of cheap alcohol.
"How dare you write that filth about the Mayor?" he hissed.
"What exactly did you write?" one of the younger men demanded. "That he launders money? That he's a criminal?"
"I—I didn't," I gasped. "I'm not a reporter. I work at a travel agency."
The slap came fast. White-hot pain exploded across my face.
Something inside me snapped.
I drove my knee upward, hard.
The leader howled and staggered back.
The victory lasted a heartbeat.
The other two rushed me. I grappled with the nearest one—fists, elbows, desperation. Then I felt it.
Cold. Sharp. Deep.
A blade slid into my abdomen, just beneath the ribs.
I locked eyes with the youngest—the quiet one. No rage. No hesitation. Just emptiness.
The knife came out.
Chaos erupted. Someone shouted. The leader grabbed the boy, yelling. In the confusion, the blade struck again—sloppy, panicked—before it was finally pulled away.
They hadn't come to kill. They'd come to silence someone else.
They ran.
I collapsed.
Blood poured from me, soaking the road. My thoughts slowed, thick and heavy.
I shouldn't have fought back.
Then came fragments.
Sirens. Shouting. Lights.
Voices overlapped. Someone was crying.
Who… would cry for me?
I had no one.
Darkness swallowed everything.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The smell of antiseptic dragged me back. My body felt impossibly heavy. Tubes. Machines. A ceiling that didn't belong to my room.
Before panic could fully bloom, a calm voice spoke.
"Is he ready, doctor?"
Ready?
"Yes, sir," a nervous female voice replied. "His recovery exceeds expectations. All tests are complete. He's… compatible."
Compatible?
Cold dread seeped into my veins.
"Good," the man said calmly. "Transfer him to Sector A."
Shit. They really are going to experiment on me.
The thought surfaced fully formed—and only then did my heart react. It slammed against my ribs, erratic and violent. A fraction of a second later, the ECG beside me betrayed my panic, its steady rhythm fracturing into a frantic staccato.
"Oh?" the calm voice noted. Not alarmed. Curious. "Is he awake?"
"Most likely, sir," the doctor replied after a pause.
Footsteps approached. I couldn't turn my head. Couldn't move anything at all. But I felt him lean close—felt the displacement of air, the warmth of breath against my ear.
A smile hid in his voice.
"You're lucky, kid," he murmured. "You get to complete the Boss's objective."
Then he straightened. Distance returned. His tone cooled to administrative indifference.
"Sedation threshold maintained. Take him."
The bed jolted.
Wheels rolled beneath me—soft, precise. Automatic doors sighed open and sealed shut again. The ambient noise thinned as we descended, pressure shifting in my ears. Somewhere deep underground, sound itself seemed discouraged.
The air changed. Heavier. Still.
I became aware of things I'd never noticed before—the pulse in my neck, blood rushing through narrow passages, the wet pull of breath in my lungs. My body was loud. The world was not.
I wanted to scream. To rip the IVs out. To run until my lungs ruptured.
I couldn't even blink.
"Sector A. Level Three. Subject Fifty-Eight."
The words echoed—not acoustically, but internally, as if the room itself were reading me aloud.
That's when the work began.
They didn't use anesthesia.
They used precision.
"Initiating neural decoupling."
A pause.
"Motor pathway suppression… confirmed."
The urge to move evaporated—not resistance, not paralysis—absence. My fingers no longer existed as concepts.
"Nociceptive gating engaged."
Pain disappeared next. Not relief. Erasure.
"Proprioceptive feed—offline."
My limbs lost weight. Then location. Then meaning.
Touch followed. The bed vanished. So did gravity.
"Hearing attenuation in progress."
Voices stretched, distorted, collapsed into a low mechanical hum.
"Olfactory and gustatory shutdown complete."
Antiseptic became a memory. Taste followed it into nothing.
At last, even the darkness behind my eyes dissolved.
I wasn't blind.
There was simply no longer anything to see.
I was no longer a body.
I was awareness—unsupported, untethered—suspended in an infinite absence.
Time lost structure. I tried counting. The numbers slipped away before they finished forming. Thought became the only motion left, looping endlessly back onto itself.
I wanted to die.
Not out of fear—but for the mercy of an ending.
But the machines—or whatever they had turned me into—refused to let go.
I remained.
Waiting for the void to either collapse…
…or change.
After an eternity—long enough for hope to rot into resignation—a presence disturbed the void.
Not a sound.
A pressure.
The voice did not arrive through ears or echo through space. It manifested directly at the center of my awareness, perfectly formed, impossibly close.
"Oh my God… look at you."
The man's voice trembled with unrestrained delight.
"What a masterpiece. Jennifer—are we getting signal fidelity?"
It wasn't young. It wasn't old. It carried the manic reverence of a creator staring at proof that his obsession had been justified.
"Yes, sir," a woman replied. Her voice sounded distant, degraded—like it existed at the edge of a system. "Neural activity has stabilized. The subject is responding."
Responding.
The word hit harder than any pain ever had.
They weren't hearing my thoughts.
They were watching them.
The realization spread through me like oil in water—slow, invasive, impossible to remove. There was no inside anymore. No private space left to retreat to.
"Fantastic!" the man breathed. His excitement spiked, then wavered. "Absolutely fantastic—okay. Okay. Control. Control…"
I felt his breathing slow, deliberate, practiced.
When he spoke again, the joy was gone.
What remained was weight.
"Mr. Markus," he said, his voice now deep, measured, final, "you may not yet possess the context to understand what you are. That is acceptable. Context can wait."
A pause. Intentional.
"We are the Axiom Directorate."
The name carried confidence—like something that had never needed permission to exist.
"For decades, we have charted the architecture of the human mind. Not metaphorically. Literally. We mapped cognition, stress tolerance, identity persistence. We pushed bodies until they failed. We pushed minds until they fractured."
Another pause.
"You did neither."
My awareness tightened—if such a thing was still possible.
"You are not an experiment," he continued calmly. "You are not a subject. You are not a survivor."
His voice lowered, heavy with certainty.
"You are the culmination"
I wanted to kill him.
I wanted to drown him in every curse I had ever learned, to tear my rage out of my chest and force it into the world. But I was trapped—entombed inside my own awareness. My mouth was gone. My limbs were theoretical. I existed only to observe.
I was a witness to my own erasure.
"It appears Mr. Markus is attempting to vocalize," the man observed calmly, his voice coated in practiced sympathy. "Jennifer, try to imagine how distressing this must be for him. Grant him expression."
Not mercy.
Permission.
Something surged through me—sharp, electric, wrong. It felt like a circuit closing somewhere far beyond my reach. Then, suddenly, form.
A mouth.
Nothing else. No body. No breath. Just the crude awareness of lips and tongue obeying foreign parameters.
I wanted to scream.
Instead, what escaped me were the weakest questions possible—raw, instinctive, stripped of eloquence.
"What do you want?" I rasped. "What… what did you do to me?"
The man chuckled softly. Not amused—satisfied.
"I anticipated something more… expressive," he said. "But this will suffice. Jennifer—show him."
I heard it then. A sequence of deliberate inputs.
Click. Click. Click.
The void ruptured.
Light crashed into me—sterile, merciless, blinding. My vision locked onto a white wall, too close, too clean. I sensed a surface beneath me—a table, perhaps—but no weight, no pressure. Just the implication of placement.
Then hands entered my field of view.
Gloved. Precise.
They grasped whatever I was seeing through—eyes, lenses, something worse—and rotated it.
The world turned.
And my sanity followed.
Directly ahead stood a transparent containment chamber.
Inside it lay a body.
My body.
Perfect. Intact. Sculpted into stillness like a museum piece. Chest unmoving. Eyes closed. Alive—or preserved so convincingly that the distinction no longer mattered.
But that wasn't the worst part.
Beside it hovered a smaller cylinder.
Inside, suspended in thick amber fluid, floated a human brain.
My brain.
Wires pierced it like roots. Micro-pumps pulsed gently against exposed gray matter. A single thick cable glowed faintly as it extended from the chamber—bridging the impossible distance between the organ and the body it no longer inhabited.
Between me and myself.
I couldn't scream.
There was no sound violent enough to contain the realization that I was looking at my own consciousness as an object—cataloged, maintained, owned.
Silence stretched.
The man let it.
"And as for what I want…" he said at last, his voice rich with quiet triumph. "That requires context."
A pause.
"Let me tell you a story"