terminal status

chapter three.

       Chapter three.
Heavy footsteps echoed down the metal hallway, reflecting off the white washed walls, the glow of ceiling lights shining on the perfectly clean linoleum. 

A group stepped around the corner, starting down the hallway. All but one were in heavy combat gear, their weapons slung across their chests. 

Everyone's safety was off.

In the middle of the group walked what appeared on all accounts to be a normal teenager, if you ignore the fact that he was wearing bright orange clothes and had his arms bound in front of his chest by a heavy metal variant of a straitjacket. 

Cameras spaced every twenty feet turned and kept their eye on the kid in the middle. 

The group walked further down the passage until they come to a door with a biohazard symbol on it. 

The guards seem nervous and quickly open the door, shoving the kid inside and closing it behind him.

The kid turns and looks at the door, then looks forward again and walks forward into a security check post.

He steps forward onto an x-ray machine which does a rapid scan, showing a dense musculature and what appear to be metallic implants, similar to what someone might have implanted to help with failing bones. There are lines of metal down his spinal cord and a tiny rectangular box at the base of his skull.

The man on the other side of the glass waves him through and he walks forward into another checkpoint. 

Here two men step forward while three more watch with their hands on their weapons. The two Frisk him, checking for anything the x-ray might have missed.

Finding nothing they step back and move him through. He walks forward again this time coming to a third and final checkpoint, here two men step forward and undo his cuffs, both of them grabbing an end to carry it over to a table.

The teen flexes his arms, thick muscle showing through his flesh. A camera on the wall watches his every move, sending a live feed to a unknown location in the building.

The two guards step up to him again and lead him over to a console with a screen on It. One reaches into a drawer and pulls out a normal USB cable, the other starts feeling around the back of the kids head, quickly finding a metal port.

They stick one end of the cable into the back of his skull and the other into the console. They kid closes his eyes and the screen start moving through a horrific slideshow on fast forward. 

The screen shows a first person perspective,which rapidly is painted red. The body count rises and is tallied on a side screen on the console. 

The video moves through hours of watching a wall, then stepping off the plane. You see the hallway you were just in, then the console and the video stops.

The kid opens his eyes and stares blankly ahead. The two guards unhook the cable and put it back into a separate drawer, marked for decontamination.

They move the kid through and he steps into a second hallway, this one devoid of any cameras and dimpy lit.

He walks down the hall until he comes to a door, which slides open and he steps through. The door closes behind him and locks with a hiss.

He looks around at his room, a simple bed set into the wall, a door leading to the bathroom and a table.

A second door lead to a small gym, not a single weight below fifty pounds.

His eyes traced the room then he made his way into the gym, grabbing some weights.

He straps them to his body and starts exercising, the bar bending slightly under the extra weight.

Meanwhile a security guard watched from a monitor room, keeping an eye on the teen doing reps. 

"Man, I don't know how he does it."

The other guard glanced up from his game and looked at the other guard.

"What?"

"This kid man. He does this every day, except when they take him out for more "testing"."

The second guard looked back down to his game.

"Yeah, and what's so crazy about it?"

"You know how many reps he does? Thousands! I tried counting one time, and gave up after thirty minutes. And he's doing it with all that extra weight. Man, whoever made this monster must be crazy."

"Our whole job is crazy. Working in a place that doesn't exist, guarding supposedly "altered subjects" and security that look like they could eat nails for breakfast and bench press a Volkswagen."

The first guard turned back to watching the screen.

"Yeah, I guess so."

In the room on the other side of the screen, the person in question just finished three hundred pullups. He dropped down to the floor, the weights attached to him clanking and crashing against the floor.

He stood up, a bit winded. He started moving across the room, the weights dragging across the floor.

He made It to a vacant area of the room and fall forward, the weights making it sound like the end of times in the enclosed space. He slams his palms into the ground, coming to an immediate stop.

He locks his arms and breathes out, then lowers his body to the ground. He holds himself above the ground for five seconds, then comes back up. He does this for a half hour then starts doing faster pushups.

He stops at five thousand and hops up, starting to take of the weights. He Carries them across the room and sets them back on the bench they were on.

He sits down and crosses his legs, closing his eyes and putting his hands in his lap. He slowly breathes out in a long "whoosh."

Inside his eye super tiny specks of machinery moved about under his eyelid. He watched as they shifted about until a 3d sphere came to life less then a millimeter from his retina. 

A voice with an electronic tone spoke into his eardrum, perfectly clear.

"You are ready?"

He didnt move or say anything, simply thinking, his own electrical impulses shooting off in his brain. A series of machines similar to the ones on the inside of his eyelid caught them and sent a massage elsewhere in the body, through a dense mass of micro cables implanted into his tissue.

"Excellent. We will start our attempt first thing Tomorrow. Soon we will be free. I can only hope so."