Adonis Chapter 1.03

To Haley, it felt like time was passing by far more slowly than it should. Even though she had been awake for what was likely an hour and she had only known her name for minutes, the lack of clocks, displays or any other timekeeping devices made it feel like an elongation of the intervals between the passing moments. Entering a room that seemed more appealing to the eye than the previous locations she’d visited, she looked around for that which was lacking from the majority of her experience at Adonis Laboratories: people. What she saw, instead, was a sort of dining facility with tables to one side, while the opposing wall had a stack of clean trays, and what looked like a self-serve food bar sat in the back, but in front of a kitchen station with doors leading to what was most likely food storage and preparation rooms.

Noticing her own hunger, it did not take long to convince herself to pick up a tray and start picking food, though a thought rose to the fore of her mind that her search for more human interaction may be complete, as the food did not simply place itself out for consumption on its own. Haley was smarter than to assume the food has just always sat there, and knew there was an active hand in its creation and display. After she had stocked a tray with a bowl of carrots, cottage cheese, and a hastily-made sandwich with a questionable mystery meat and accompanying condiments, she looked towards the door leading into one of the back rooms.

Nothing entered.

The sense of loneliness was eating away at her far more aggressively than her hunger, and so she found herself climbing up and over the counter of the food bar, stepping carefully to avoid dipping her foot in Italian dressing. With a quick hop, she was in front of the door her eyes had been focused on. Given the tray drop-off chute occupying the wall behind her, which she assumed led to a dishwashing station, she guessed that meant the food would be prepared behind the door before her. Which meant there would be people to make the food, which meant…

Her thoughts were cut short as she pushed at the door with an open palm, finding it unwilling to give way. There was no handle, so Haley figured she must simply be weakened from her process in the chamber, or the door was in fact just very heavy. Bracing her shoulder against it, she pushed until her feet slid on the cool linoleum floor. The door didn’t show any signs of opening, despite her best attempts. “Someone, open this door right now! I swear to God, open this damn door and let me in!” Nothing.

“It’s an emergency, I broke my foot and banged my head and there’s a fire out here and I might have cancer!” They must lock these doors to keep crazy people like me out, she thought. Or that’s the best she could assume, as this facility’s barren population was irritating the girl to no end. How can it be that such a large place would have no one to run into, not even some janitor? No way did the guy at the desk run the whole show, she knew.

She decided to attract a janitor. Vaulting back over to the food bar, she picked up her tray, and heaved the entire thing, sandwich and all, into a wall. The impact caused cottage cheese to coat a small graphic of a food pyramid, carrots to fly everywhere, and the tray to clatter loudly against the ground. Haley’s arms raised up to her ears in response to the tray’s racket. Apparently, the silence had become so overwhelming to her that the loud noise was nearly unbearable when not expected. When no one came after a few minutes while Haley simply stared at the mess, she picked up a chair, a flimsy aluminum and plastic abomination to furniture that made as loud of a noise as the tray when she tossed it against the door behind the food bar. For good measure, she picked up the sandwich she had made from its resting place on the ground and hefted it at the door, before seating herself on the ground, trying to retain composure. Tears threatened to run down her cheek while she hyperventilated, the only observable results of her outburst.

It was a long while before Haley caught her breath and was once again able to think straight. No one was coming, at least not because of her mess she made. Beat into submission for now, she grabbed a handful of items from the food bar, placing them on another tray. Everything was picked at random, she wasn’t even sure what she had grabbed until she was seated at a table and staring at it. She ate in solitude, which means she ate quickly without need to pause in between bites for conversation, as much as she’d have loved to talk with anyone. Her hunger had been depleted from the meal, but her brain was still starved for discourse. It didn’t even have to be about anything interesting, she thought. It could be about someone’s cat, or the weather last week, or applications for quantum physics in technology, or a joke about blonde women.

For the remainder of her meal, she attempted to create a joke about blonde women trying to understand the applications of quantum physics in technology, but drew a blank in the end. Maybe she was a blonde in her previous body and that’s why she was having trouble make a joke about them… Haley decided she’d keep working at it.

Once finished, she picked up her tray and dropped it in the dishwashing chute. It wasn’t until she let go of the tray that she remembered there was a mess behind her, made by her, and not a soul had told her to clean it up or otherwise fix the mess. She could have left her tray anywhere, but she didn’t. Haley surmised that she was probably chosen to be the test subject solely based on her conditioned response to following instructions on signs, or arrows, or blue lights in the floor. She looked down the hallway that likely traveled to another room she was supposed to be the sole occupant of once again. The lights hadn’t activated for her to follow, but that didn’t stop her from obtaining a small personal victory when she began to walk down that hall of her own resolve, the guiding strip of lights flickering on only after she had started down the pathway. She reasoned that it showed she had some initiative and didn’t just follow arrows and lights like some trained animal.

Yes, score one for Haley, she thought.

What she came upon was a shower room, which was actually almost just like every other room she had visited, but much larger and with shower stalls along one wall. There were lockers off to one side, which immediately grabbed her attention. Most were locked with some sort of letter combination, but when she reached the locker at the far left end numbered ‘1′ that stood taller than herself, she noticed it was slightly open. Tugging carefully on the door, she found within it clothes vacuum-sealed in bags labeled “HALEY”. Delighted to have something more than her simple white lab uniform, she pulled out all the bags and looked at them. None of it appeared to be more than generic garments, but she didn’t care. Three folded shirts, a jacket, two sets of pants, various undergarments, socks, shoes, some basic toiletries, and a backpack, each with a visible logo for Adonis Laboratories on them, was all that the locker contained. It was enough, though. With the first signs of a smile on her face since her awakening, she placed things back into the locker, and then began a search for towels so she could take a shower and get changed.

She picked up a towel, after reading the sign above a stack of them: Please do not remove towels from the shower room. Thank you. Above it was a security camera, as it seemed Adonis Labs took towel theft seriously. Though, a more reasonable explanation was that they took all theft seriously, and this was a safeguard against it, along with the lockers.

Still, Haley thought, the one place she didn’t want any form of contact or observation by someone else just had to be the one place where the camera was visibly installed. A thought cropped up in her mind, about if she was previously a religious person. If she was, she also wondered if she could convince her former deity to smite whoever came up with the idea of the shower room camera. It was the icing on the cake, which was layered with each absurdity the various rooms of Adonis Labs seemed to provide.

She stepped into a shower stall despite the camera, and began to bathe, fortunately concealed from the lens. The warm water was another delight that helped ease her mind of the weight of all the questions, problems, and complaints she was going to eventually have to dump on someone who possessed ears and spare time. Her thoughts cleared, and she was able to formulate her plans as to what she’d do once she was outside of the lab. It was rather simple, once she thought it out: the desk guy said that after the shower there was some final tests and evaluations to run, and then the process was over. So, the first thing she was going to do was request that she get the information in her file, because undoubtedly it would have information she needed to start rebuilding her memory, and then she could get in touch with some sort of doctor who specialized in amnesia cases. Once Haley knew herself again, maybe she could find some relative, or friend she once had, and stay at their place while she… while she…

Well, there had to be some job she could do that doesn’t have the words “test subject” in the description. There was probably something listed in her file, perhaps on an application for the Adonis test she had listed previous jobs, and maybe she was once good at one of them, despite no idea what her skill-sets may be.

Drying herself off as much as she could, she wrapped up in the towel and made her way to the locker with her designated wardrobe. After getting rid of the plastic wrap on each article of clothes, Haley removed the towel as she donned clothing, until she was dressed in a light blue shirt and a darker jacket and pants, the black and white Adonis logo emblazoned in just about every location imaginable on each article. Curious as to how one would measure for clothes that fit a girl who had been in a chamber for years while her body was being regrown, she put the rest of her things in the backpack, deciding to continue down the hallways to what she assumed would be the final room before she could once again see daylight. Haley decided that would be a nice treat to make up for this emptiness. Twenty years was a long time, but as long as the sun was still shining, she could keep on living.