Inmate Number 113887

“Good morning inmate number 113887, it is now six in the morning.” 

Someone or rather something was talking to me. I swatted at the air, fumbling to find my bedside table, in search of my alarm clock. 

“Good morning inmate number 113887, it is now six O’ five in the morning.” 

The sound of a robot woman rang out again. Strange, considering I didn’t have a robot alarm sounding alarm clock. The room was pitch black, as I stood from the bed, the cement floor stinging my feet, as I rushed to the side of my room I had thought my dresser was on. 

A large table got in my way and I plummeted over it, squarely landing on my shoulder. 

“Ouch,” I said as I gripped my shoulder sitting up on the cement floor, the cold instantly seeping through my thin layer of clothing. 

A million questions raced through my head. Why is it so cold in here? Why is there a random table in my room? Why is it so dark? 

“Good morning inmate number 113887, it is now six ten in the morning.” 

“What the hell?” I said aloud as I began to stand, my numb butt cheeks protesting.

“The lights are now coming on.” the short clipped robotic female voice said. As soon as she had finished speaking, a large bank of bright lights turned on, practically burning my retinas. I was ill prepared for such a display of brightness. Not even the sun could compete with these lights. 

“What the …” I started as I looked around at my new very visible surroundings, interrupted by the voice yet again.

“Good morning inmate number 113887, five minutes until inspection.”  

The room was all white. White floors, white walls, white furniture, the bed frame was white with white sheets. I looked down to find I was wearing what appeared to be white nurses scrubs, only the material was much thinner. 

I wasn’t in my room. I wasn’t asleep in my bed in Monterey Heights Indiana. I had absolutely no idea where I was. The robot voice had called me an inmate. 

Was I in prison?

How could I go from peacefully sleeping in my room to waking up in the prison of Narnia’s White Witch? Panic began to set in as my stomach started to tie in knots. I felt the sudden urge to vomit in the perfectly white porcelain toilet that sat in the corner of my room, or rather my cell. 

“Inmate number 113887, what are you doing?” a different, more male robotic voice sounded. Thinking I had been alone my head whipped around turning to face the wall, that I now saw was actually a door secretly built into the wall. In the doorway was what I could only assume was a guard. He wore head to toe black body armor, that made him stand in contrast to the room he stood in. His face was completely covered, with a mask that had a speaker attached to it. The voice that came through was like one of those voice changer machines that my friends and I would use to disguise our voices and prank call people back in the day. 

“Inspection, inmate 113887!” the voice barked at me. 

I gaped at this intruder of my domain. What the hell did inspection even mean? I was a twenty-two year old biology major with hopes of becoming a doctor. I’d never been to prison, I had no idea other than from movies what inspection even meant. 

“Urrr..” I began, wringing my hands in my confusion. 

“Inspection!” The voice rang out again, only this time the man had pulled out what looked to be a cattle prod with a taser on the end. 

“Oh...ah...ok,” I started backing up to the far end of the cell, my hands raised in front of my chest, “listen I have no idea what is going on here, or..” before I could finish my sentence the man had crossed the threshold of my cell, and had hit me in the stomach with the non-electrified side of his cattle prod. 

I cried out in pain, as I felt my whole body reverberate with the effects of that one hit. 

“Jesus Christ,” I cursed out, “Are you superhuman?” 

Pulling me up, the man grabbed my arm, flinging my body across the room as if I weighed nothing more than a piece of paper. I felt every bone in my body as they crushed against the wall. Surely this would be the end of my life. I had been flattened like a pancake on the pure white wall. I felt my body crumple into a heap on the floor, as my brain tried to process the pain I felt. 

I don’t know how long I laid there like a crumpled ball of dirty laundry, but the super powered man had grown tired of waiting, and I had been left in the dark room once again. As I came to, I could feel every nerve protest as I attempted to stand up. I felt like I was spinning, and went as quickly as I could to the bed, only stubbing my frozen toe on the bizarre middle of the cell table. 

I laid down and closed my eyes, willing this all to be a dream.

“I’ll wake up, back in my bed, back in my life” I whispered to myself, the reality of my situation becoming all too real. My head was throbbing and I reached back to massage the pain, only to feel a large expanse of gooey substance, that after a while I realized was congealed blood. 

“There goes the white sheets,” I couldn’t help but smile to myself as I spoke into the nothingness, in an attempt. 

Without any warning, the rights popped back on, once again blinding me momentarily. 

“Inmate number 113887, on your feet!” the robotic voice barked out. 

Ugh, not you again. You might as well finish me off.” But as I rose from the bed I saw this guard was different. I could only tell because he was much shorter and smaller than the other. Maybe he was the nice one. That was how it worked in movies, right? 

I was fully standing now, and saw the bright red contrast of my blood on the pure white wall. It was amazing I was even living. I probably had a concussion and a skull fracture. 

“Come with me,” the guard said, his robotic voice higher pitched than the previous guard. 

I walked out of my cell only to see more white, more bright lights. It was incredibly disorienting, I couldn’t tell where we were headed, as I followed the guard. He would take a left, and it would feel like we went right. The walls felt like the were caving in on us, than to only take a corner and feel like there was too much space, and I was about to float away in all that blank space. 

Eventually we made it a room I recognized. There was a blue cross on the door, not like a religious one, but a medical one. Apparently I was going to be treated. The way the guard had handled me, I figured they didn’t seem to care if I lived or died. 

The small guard led me into the medical area, and sat me down on a stark white medical bed. He pulled out a circular object that opened with a wave of his hands. Placing my wrist into the device, I realized I was being handcuffed to the bed, but not with any type of cuff I had seen before. The cuff had gone around my wrist but wasn’t attached to anything. I moved my arm slightly away from the edge of the bed towards my body, and instantly I felt my arm pulled by the cuff, as it immediately attached to the edge of the bed, a blue light glowing from the side panel. 

The guard laughed, which sounded rather demonic through the robotic voice changer. “You know better than to move your arm that far away, now you're stuck to the side for five minutes.” he snickered as he left, and I was alone in the strangest hospital room I had ever seen. 

Most of the instruments I couldn’t even describe. Screens and 3D holograms were everywhere within the room. One particular hologram first showed the human body with skin on it, then peeled away the skin to reveal the muscles, then peeling away the muscles to reveal the nervous system, and finally the body had become nothing but bones. It looked so real, that I stared, enthralled by such vivid and accurate technology. 

I wasn’t in medical school yet, and had only taken biology classes ,but even without stepping inside a med school, I could see that this room had nothing that was normal for any medical room. 

My stomach growled loudly, and I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. I had no idea what time it was or how long I’d been out for. My injuries were substantial, but it couldn’t have been the next day. My annoying robotic alarm hadn’t gone off. 

“Can I get some food here?” I called into the nothingness, “I’m going to die of starvation.” I added for good measure. 

Someone apparently was listening, because out of nowhere, a small weasel looking man came by handing me a large drink in a tall porcelain white glass. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, and his pale countenance only amplified his bizarre behavior, as he handed me a strange looking drink and scurried away out into the hallway. 

“Hey” I yelled, thinking maybe he could hear me. “What is this?” I held up the drink, and sniffed it. “Hey..Hey.. come on man, what is in this?”

I sniffed it again, and debated the merits of drinking something from a strange mole man or starving to death. 

“Just drink it.” I heard a soothing voice say from behind me. 

It was the first non-robotic voice I had heard since waking up in this nightmare. 

“113887,” the exasperated voice began, “drink your smoothie, I don’t want to force feed you again.” 

Force Feed? I had never been force fed in my life. In fact I had the opposite problem. I would gladly eat a ton of food if it didn’t immediately go to my ass. 

The soothing, floating voice came into view, and I saw a tall lean woman in a doctor’s lab coat, but the coat was black, as was her black bodysuit underneath. 

Sighing the doctor, or nurse, or whatever she was sat down next to me, and began pulling a strange tube out of one of the drawers near the bed. 

“Lay back,” she instructed, and waited for me to lay back propping my feet up. 

I looked at my feet and realized something was off. 

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, realizing my pinky toe had been replaced with what looked like a plastic tube. 

The doctor pushed on my arm. “Stop!, you know what happens if they hear you cussing, don’t make me report you.” 

“But...But.. my toe!” I exclaimed, gesturing to the missing appendage. 

The doctor nodded as she rolled to the base of the medical bed, attaching the tube she had retrieved from the drawer to what used to be my pinky toe. She flipped a switch, and I saw my blood begin to flow from my foot to a machine that collected it. 

I stared aghast, they were sucking blood out of my toe! 

“They really hit your head hard this time.’ the doctor said, as she stood by the bed, turning my head to examine the extent of the damage. 

“Uh… yeah.” I said, going along with it. 

She turned a bright light directly onto my head and sighed again, clearly over dealing with me. 

“You’re going to need this wound sealed,” she said nonchalantly, and set to work finding the iplements she needed. 

Sealed? I thought. What the hell did that mean? All too soon I found out. The doctor pulled out a strange looking contraption, and when she turned it on a blue flame floated above the tip. I realized she was going to cauterize the wound. 

“Oh no,” I said struggling to get away, “It’s fine I’ll just bleed to death.” My handcuffed ankle snapped back to the bed restricting my movements. 

“You know I would love nothing more than to let that happen.” the doctor said, as she wiped away the dried blood, “but then we wouldn’t have your anti-bodies and our sector would erupt in mass chaos.” 

 That was an answer I wasn’t expecting. For someone so important the guard certainly hadn’t treated me that way. I felt the stinging pain of the flame, as my wound was sealed shut. I tried not to scream, but eventually gave in, as the burning sensation had become too much. 

When she was done the doctor put her tools of torture away and slapped a strange white patch on my arm. I was suddenly overcome with a sense of calm, and the pain was gone. I felt my body turning to jelly, as all my pain, fears and anxiety melted away. 

“Great, now that you’re compliant, drink this.” She held the drink up, which I had been avoiding, and I eagerly gulped it down. 

“What year is it,” I asked, no longer cautious about my choice of words. 

“Fifty-two really did hurt you, if your memory is gone.”

“Yes, my memory is gone!” I exclaimed, realizing this was how I got some answers. 

“It is the year 3465, we are in the sector of Tarrut.”

I gulped my smoothie down, which tasted like sand, but I was too hungry to care. Somehow I had been catapulted into the future. 

“Where am I?” I said between sips. 

“Where you’ve always been 113887.”

I waited for her to elaborate, but no answer was forthcoming. She turned to walk away and I panicked, realizing I wasn’t going to get any more answers. 

“Which is….?” 

The doctor paused, a look of almost pity on her face. “The Wharf. The impenetrable prison built to house you and all descendants of Dr. Laura Carnes-Simmons.” 

Dr. Laura Carnes? 

That was me! It had to have been. I didn’t know what was up with the hyphenated name crap, but I was Laura Carnes, I was going to be a doctor. My boyfriend’s name was Lance Simmons. If this doctor was correct, I married Lance, and became a doctor, but something went wrong. My descendants were locked up. I had been transported to the future. Something I had done in my life had led to a future where my descendants would be locked up, and their blood was necessary to keep chaos at bay. 

“Why?” was all I could think to ask.

The doctor gave a small smile. “Dr Carnes-Simmons thought she was changing the world, but instead she destroyed it. You pay the price.”  She turned and left, leaving me with too many questions to comprehend a simple sentence. 

I was dazed as the guard arrived, leading me back to my cell. The stark bright lights shining inside the cell yet again. 

As the door closed, locking me into the hell of my own creation, I plopped down on the bed, head in my hands. 

“What the fuck did I do?”