Room Nine wasn’t where it all began but it certainly felt like it was all going to end there.
I felt it as soon as I signed my name to the contract, agreeing to be a participant in the study they only referred to as ‘The Conversations.’ And I could still feel the chill scurry down my spine like a hundred migrating cockroaches as Mr. Sweet filed away the papers with a smile slightly too wide for his face.
At the time, I thought he was there to help me.
Despite his pale—almost translucent—complexion and the pitch black irises that felt like they were exposing every dirty secret I’d kept hidden, this tall stranger seemed like a slender angel sent from above when he intervened in my interrogation.
“Your name is Eli Parish,” Mr. Sweet began, sitting rigidly across from me at the cold, stainless steel table. “Confirm or deny.”
It took a moment to process his question. Not because it was a difficult one to answer—hell, it even had multiple choice—but because of the way in which he spoke. So deliberate and flat. So detached from the situation. “Confirm.”
“You have been a commercial cleaner at Obsidn Dynamics for seven months and twelve days. Confirm or deny?”
“I think so,” I said, trying to recall exactly how long I’d been there, but found myself unable to think about anything other than his paralysing glare. “Yeah, seven and a half months. Confirm.”
“You have been stealing company property every day for the past nine days. Confirm or deny?”
I flinched at this. It wasn’t because of the accusation, which were absolutely, regrettably correct, but because he knew exactly how long I’d been pocketing their tech. “Look, I can explain-”
“Confirm or deny?”
“I still have it all, in my apartment. I can bring it right back,” I pleaded, my voice cracking a little more than I’d expected.
Mr. Sweet only continued to glare at me. His eyes unfeeling. Unblinking.
“Confirm,” I said weakly.
Mr. Sweet lingered on my defeated face a moment longer than I’d have liked before finally breaking his gaze to open his briefcase. “The assets you stole have a combined value of three million two hundred thousand dollars. You are in a position to reimburse the Company this amount. Confirm or deny?”
“What?” I almost screamed. All I took were small devices, no bigger than a standard walkie-talkie. I was waiting to figure out what exactly it was they were built for before trying to sell them but if I’d known they’d been worth over three million dollars?
“Confirm or deny?” He repeated, setting up his laptop.
“I… I don’t have that kind of money.”
His eyes met mine, clearly waiting for the specific answer to the very specific question he’d asked.
“But I didn’t sell anything! It’s still right there in my apartment. We can go and get it right now,” I said, knowing that was probably the one way to get out of this. I wasn’t built for a life in prison. I was barely built for a life outside prison.
Mr. Sweet only responded by turning the laptop screen to face me.
That’s the moment I saw my whole life go up in flames.
Right there on the screen. A local news broadcast showing my actual apartment building smothered in flames, with firefighters fighting a losing battle to keep it under control. The audio on the video was muted but I imagined the reporter was basically telling me I was fucked. Though, she seemed to be using a lot more words to say it.
“Mr. Parish, this is your residence,” Mr. Sweet said.
“C-confirm,” I stammered, without realising he hadn’t even asked the question. He was simply telling me, without a single shred of empathy, and yet like a trained monkey, I responded exactly how he wanted.
“Everything you own, everything you achieved in your life up until this point in time, was in that residence,” Mr. Parish said, shutting the laptop. “You have no close relatives, no life partner, and a very small friend group. You are, essentially, alone. Confirm or deny?”
I wanted to punch him. I was never a violent man and any fists I’d thrown in the past had always been in self-defense. But hearing his unfeeling tone and seeing those dark, dead eyes just made me want to leap out of that chair and smack some feelings into his face.
And yet, he wasn’t wrong. I’d left my family behind over two decades ago and hadn’t had contact with them for at least five years now. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for them, it’s more that I didn’t care for the drama they seemed to thrive in. Every day a new problem came and when one didn’t land in their laps, they created one. Every conversation strained and every interaction a minefield. So much history smothered by so much trauma. I just couldn’t bare to live like that any longer, with every breath drawn feeling like a struggle to survive.
I never went to therapy but I assumed it would tell me what I already knew, that my fucked-up childhood prevented me from creating meaningful relationships in my adulthood. Sure, I’d had casual friends, acquaintances, social colleagues. But none of them really knew who I was, what I thought, how I navigated this world. Any that came close to that eventually got too frustrated with everything I lacked and ended up enforcing their own boundaries on me. I’m sure a therapist would have told me that boundaries are healthy but they really don’t seem that way when you’re always on the other side of them.
So, sure. I was alone. “Confirm.”
“This is quite a predicament, Mr. Parish, but I am here to offer you a way out of this on behalf of the Company,” Mr. Sweet said as he pushed some papers over to me. “In front of you is a contract. Should you sign the contract, your theft will be disregarded and your debt of three million two hundred thousand dollars will be cleared.”
I grabbed the papers and began skimming the paragraphs. Lots of legal jargon I couldn’t really understand but a few words jumped out at me. “This is a… a study? An experiment? What is… you want to experiment on me?”
“You would be participating in a study of observation. There is no experimentation on you or your body, though the study itself is—by its very nature—experimental,” he said. “You will not be given the purpose of the study or specific details. You will spend precisely forty-two days in a facility and you will have no contact with the outside world. Contact with other participants is also strictly forbidden.”
“I’d be alone,” I said, suddenly realising why that was such an important thing for me to affirm before. He was prepping me for this scenario, manipulating me towards the outcome he wanted. “I’m nobody’s guinea pig.”
I slid the contract back to Mr. Sweet but he suddenly slammed his hand down on mine. So cold and… damp. The veins running from his skinny fingers were protruding so much I thought the thin skin over them would burst open. And for a man that was basically a skeleton in a suit, he was really fucking strong.
“Mr. Parish, I am not here to coerce you into anything you do not wish to do. Your compliance… your consent is of the utmost importance to Obsidn Dynamics.”
“Sure doesn’t feel like that,” I said through gritted teeth, eyeing his hand.
“Apologies,” he said, finally releasing my hand from under his. He leaned back into his chair and regained his rigid composure. “I must remind you that declining this offer would also mean the Company must pursue a legal path in regards to your criminal actions. You would not only be convicted and incarcerated but you would be paying off your debt for the rest of your natural life. I cannot fathom this being the better option for you.”
“Sounds like I’d be in a prison either way.”
“We are not in the habit of holding prisoners,” Mr. Sweet said. “And it would only be for forty-two days.”
It took about an hour to read over the contract properly while I digested the enourmously fucked up situation I’d found myself in. Whatever his intentions and however much I knew I was being forced into something against my will—regardless of how Mr. Sweet spun it—I knew he was right. If I ever wanted to live a life as a free man, I had to become their property.
Mr. Sweet took the signed contract and filed it away in his briefcase before showing me the first sign of emotion since he’d entered the room. He grinned. It was too wide, too curved, too uncanny. I wanted him to leave immediately so that I wouldn’t need to look at it a second longer but something had been nagging at me the whole time we’d been talking.
“Nine days,” I finally said.
He didn’t lose the grin, only shifted it into a pained smile, like he knew exactly where this was going.
“You knew I was stealing company property for nine days and nobody stopped me before now,” I said, feeling my heart racing as I vocalised it. “I’ve worked here for seven months and I’ve never met an incompetent employee. So either somebody fucked up—every day for those nine days—or… or you let it go on until I’d racked up an amount of debt so huge I could never overcome it.”
He stood glaring at me again. The faintest of twitches trembling under his forced smile.
I kept my eyes on his, defiant. “Confirm or deny?”
Those few seconds of deafening silence felt like they were smothering me. We were locked in a battle I had no hope of winning, yet I still had this urge to see it through, to see where it would lead. For a moment I could see the pressure building in his face as those veins creeped and popped, filling every hollow crevice, slithering under his pale skin like earthworms while he furiously tried to maintain that tortured smile. And when I thought his entire head might actually erupt in a flurry of blood and brain-matter…
He burst into a howling, screeching laughter.
He cackled like somebody who had never actually laughed before, as if he’d only ever seen it on TV and was purely imitating it. He doubled over, stamped his feet on the ground, and bellowed like an old hag.
Until he snapped out of it just as suddenly as it had begun. His eyes met with mine before he waved me away like some foolish child. “My, my, Mr. Parish, what an imagination you have.”
When he left the room, I thought I would be relieved. I wish I had been. I wish I’d just taken a moment to breathe and appreciate that my life—even at its lowest—was my own life. Because that was the last time I would ever feel that way again.
*
The whole time I had been marched through the building and labyrinth of corridors, elevators, and stairs, I was blindfolded. At first, I’d tried to commit our movements to memory.
Left, right, down one level, right, right, up in the elevator for thirty-seven seconds.
But this went on and on for what seemed like an eternity. While the Obsidn Dynamics building was one of the biggest I’d ever worked—and I’d only ever been assigned to clean one isolated section of it—I suspected they were looping around to confuse me.
When we finally stopped, I heard the door behind us aggressively seal and lock, and the only thing I could think of was how much it smelled of oranges and… the local swimming pool?
The blindfold came off and I recoiled from the light as it filled my vision. The lights dimmed with a tint of red, giving my eyes some reprieve. I realised we were in a beige-paneled corridor and this one stretched on for what seemed like forever. On either side were walnut-veneer doors with nothing to identify them but the brass numbered plaques.
Mr. Sweet walked ahead, his movements awkward in their stiffness. I was tugged along by the lone security guard. She was taller than me and clearly hit the gym more times a week than I did which, honestly, given I was like a ninja in the gym—you’d never see me there—wasn’t too hard. Either way, even if I thought I could escape through the locked door behind us, I wasn’t going to mess with her.
“Mr. Parish, I’d like you to meet Ava,” Mr. Sweet said. “She will be your Handler during your stay with us.”
Stay. Like this was some kind of yoga retreat in the wilderness.
“From this point on, your only interactions outside your Conversation Room will be with myself and Ava.”
“Conversation Room?” I asked.
“You have two dedicated spaces within the facility. One will be where you rest—your Quarters—the other is where you will participate in The Conversations,” he said. “You have been assigned Room Nine.”
I’d been so scattered I hadn’t really looked at the room numbers as we walked through the corridor. We were at Room Twenty-Six and were coming up to Room Twenty-Five. Shit. How many rooms had I already passed? How many people were locked up down here?
We stopped suddenly at the sound of a mechanical lock.
Up ahead, another Handler stepped out of a room and into the corridor, his footsteps pounding through the silence. He lifted his head and saw us and while he was quite far away, I could still make out his horrified face upon seeing us. And when a woman appeared behind him, his face only got worse.
She was young, long red hair hiding most of her face, and trailing down to her tracksuit; brown with a single yellow striped running from collar to ankle. When her Handler put his arm out across her chest to stop her walking further, she stopped and rubbed her hands together.
I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could see her lips muttering something. Just like her hands rubbing, they were slow and steady, until they started to get faster and faster, rapidly and aggressively rubbing against each other. Her hands, her lips, violently smacking, until-
“It won’t stop coming!”
I must have let out a sound because Ava tightened her grip on my bicep and shook her head at me with wide eyes. But her glare wasn’t like the one I’d experienced with Mr. Sweet. It was… concerned? A warning?
When I looked back ahead I saw the Handler shuffling the redhead to the room directly opposite the one they’d appeared from. His panicked desperation to unlock the door with his security tag only made me think of how horrifying Mr. Sweet’s expression must be. I thought I’d already seen the limit of how unnerving his face was when he cackled like a deranged witch but I realised then that it’s possible there was no limit at all.
The mechanical lock sounded again as the Handler finally unlocked the door but he must have been so distracted he’d loosened his grip because the redhead broke free and sprinted towards us like a deer escaping her predator.
Ava’s grip remained tight but both she and Mr. Sweet stood firm.
The redhead got closer and closer, her Handler desperately trying to catch up but obviously taken by surprise.
I could see her eyes, filled with tears.
Her hair clung to her clammy face like tendrils.
She pounded the concrete until she got so close I thought she’d barrel right through us. But she didn’t. Instead, she fell to her knees in front of us and looked right up at Mr. Sweet with eyes so desperate I just wanted to reach out with my hand and take hers.
“Please,” she gasped, grabbing Mr. Sweet’s pants. “It’s too much.”
Mr. Sweet remained still as the Handler finally reached us and grabbed the redhead from behind. All I wanted to do was help her. I wanted to break free of Ava’s grip, finally give Mr. Sweet that punch I knew I wouldn’t be able to land properly, and try to make a run for it with her. But I couldn’t move.
I was completely frozen.
And then the redhead finally acknowledged me, her face contorting into some kind of twisted euphoria. It was like the whole world stopped and everything faded away around us until it was just me and her staring into each other’s souls.
She gasped and whispered…
“It’s making me so wet.”