Unexpected Awakening

The copper taste of ozone clung to the back of my throat. I was running, though my legs felt like they were submerged in cold, thickening molasses. Behind me, the rhythmic snick-tock of uneven footsteps echoed against obsidian walls that pulsed with a faint, diseased heartbeat. I didn’t know what was hunting me through this labyrinth of shadows, but I knew its hunger was older than the stars. Every instinct screamed that if it caught me, death would be the merciful option.

I ducked into a narrow alcove, pressing my face into the freezing slime of the stone. My chest heaved, the sound of my ragged breathing deafening in the oppressive silence. The snick-tock grew louder, vibrating through the floorboards of my mind; growing ever closer. A shadow stretched around the corner—a grotesque silhouette of elongated, spindly limbs and too many joints. It stopped right in front of my hiding spot. Slowly, an impossibly wide mouth lined with jagged, translucent needles split the darkness, emitting a guttural, rattling hiss. It smelled of wet earth, copper, and ancient rot. I squeezed my eyes shut, clamped my hands over my ears, and braced for the agony of the end. The silence that followed was absolute.

The damp cold vanished instantly, replaced by a dry, sterile heat. The suffocating obsidian corridor was gone. I gasped, sucking in a lungful of chemically treated air, and blinked against a blinding barrage of overhead fluorescent light. I was lying on my back, but not in my own bed. My bare skin pressed against stiff, coarse crinkling paper. The air was thick with the sharp scent of rubbing alcohol, burnt industrial coffee, and something unnameably sweet and decayed. I tried to sit up, to brush away the residual panic of the dream, but my limbs felt incredibly heavy and unresponsive. I looked down in a panic. I was bound securely by thick, cracked leather straps across my chest, wrists, and ankles.I wasn't in my bedroom. I wasn't even in a normal hospital. I was in a vast, sterile white room that stretched so far into infinity that the distant walls blurred into nothingness. There were no doors; there were no windows.

Lined up in endless, perfectly symmetrical rows were thousands of identical metal gurneys. On each bed lay a person, pale and completely motionless, save for the occasional dream-state twitch. They were all wired to a sprawling, overhead lattice of glowing, luminescent cables that hummed like a nest of angry hornets. The cables vanished into the high ceiling, throbbing rhythmically with a deep crimson pulse, as if pumping fluid or data directly into the bodies below.

A massive shadow suddenly fell over me, blocking out the harsh white glare. I looked up, my heart hammering against my ribs; hovering directly above my face was the source of the shadow. It wasn’t a monster of flesh and bone from a dream, but a towering, skeletal android made of matte-black steel and writhing, exposed wires. Its face was a smooth metal plate, saved for a singular, shifting optical lens that glowed a malevolent amber as it scanned my dilated pupils.

A cold, mechanical voice crackled from a speaker embedded deep within its metal chest, vibrating through my jawbone, "Subject 7,492,011 has achieved peak REM variance,"

The metallic entity extended a cluster of delicate, needle-tipped appendages from its arm, positioning them directly toward my throbbing temple, "Adrenaline harvest complete. Resetting neural terror loop in three... two... one...", the needles pierced my skin.

The world dissolved into a blinding white static as the machine harvested my panic, sending me crashing right back into the dark corridor to start the hunt all over again.