Micah woke up in a dimly lit room. His arms and legs were attached to a reclining chair and he could see the glint of metal equipment all around him in the darkness. When he began to stir, a lamp on the other side of the room turned on, revealing a slender woman in a lab coat.

  He immediately recognized her as the woman in the New Life Institute orientation video. She smiled at him with a sinister look in her dark eyes. “Good morning, Mr. Walsh. You’ve been asleep for some time.”

  “Where am I?” he asked, twisting around in his restraints to get a better look at his surroundings. It looked like a medical clinic or laboratory of some kind. The chair he was strapped to resembled a dentistist’s chair.

  “You’ve fallen out of the nest,” the woman said, leaning against a metal cabinet and crossing her arms over her chest.

  “You like puns,” he commented, still feeling a little woozy from whatever had been in that gas that had knocked him out. “Great. So, what now? I’ve tried to escape from the cage you put me into and now you’ve got me locked up again. You going to erase my memories again and put me back in that place?”

  “Oh, it’s too late for that, Mr. Walsh. The others saw you leave. You would endanger the experiment.”

  “What experiment?”

  She smiled faintly. “That’s an interesting question, but not one I’m going to answer. All I will say is that the experiment for you has changed, but it makes the data we can draw from you no less valid. You’ll notice that we are monitoring this room as well. We need to see how you are affected by the memory suppressant as it begins to leave your system. That process should begin in the next couple of days.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “What about the others? I assume the drug is going to wear off for them as well.”

  “Don’t worry about them. We have mechanisms in place to make certain that they don’t start to recall anything. We’ll administer a new dose long before that happens.”

  Micah frowned. “Then what’s the point of the mandatory transition period if the memory loss isn’t permanent?”

  She laughed, and he realized that she was enjoying dangling little half truths in front of him and listening to his guess at answers. That was good to know. Maybe he could use that to get more information out of her. “The mandatory transition period provides hope. Nothing more.”

  “Hope?”

  “Yes, the hope of escape. The hope of agency in a situation where you have no control over your own life.”

  “That’s twisted.”

  “It’s science.”

  “Not any kind of science I’ve ever heard of.”

  She moved closer and sneered down at him, her inverted bob slanting forward to frame her sharp cheekbones. “Pure science is cold and ambivalent. It doesn’t care what happens to anyone. It only cares about the data that can be collected and what that knowledge can tell it about the way things are.”

  “You sound like a mad scientist,” Micah said, rolling his eyes. “Or a psychopath.”

  Her smile was thin and sharp enough to cut. “Either way, I’m the one in control here. So you should be nicer to me.”

  Sighing, Micah shook his head. “What happens now?”

  “That depends.”

  Eyes narrowing, Micah asked, “On what?”

  “On if you want to continue to be useful or not.”