Cold bit first; then weight; then the absence of it.
Nick came to himself suspended in the dark, arms wrenched overhead, wrists pinched by iron rings that had once been tight and now felt merely spiteful. Chains ran from his shackles into the rafters, or what passed for rafters in a space that did not behave like any warehouse he had ever toured on a school trip. The air tasted of metal filings and old smoke. The smell reminded him of a chemistry prep room after an accident, except there was no sharpness, just a tired, scorched residue that had soaked into concrete for years.
He tried to inhale properly and found his chest moving with a smoothness that unsettled him. Breathing should have had friction. Breathing should have carried a little cough with it, a reminder that you were soft and full of inconvenient moisture. Instead, the breath came and went like a bellows built by someone who did not care about lungs.
His head hung forward. He forced it up.
Light existed, but it did not come from lamps. It seeped from cracks in distant walls, thin bands of grey-blue that cut through the dark. The facility stretched away in silence, too large to be merely a room. He could not see the ceiling. He could not see the far end. What he could see were columns, broken gantries, and the vague geometry of machinery that looked both industrial and ceremonial, as if a factory had tried to masquerade as a temple.
Panic arrived in the orderly way it always did, like a timetable. First, the body flinched. Then the mind supplied a story.
'I have been kidnapped.'
'No.'
'I have been captured.'
Nick tried to speak. His mouth moved; his voice came out rough, too loud in the stillness.
"Hello?" he called. The word bounced outward, returned in thin layers, and died. No answering footstep. No irritated voice. No laugh from a corner. Nothing.
He flexed his fingers. The chain links above him creaked. Something flaked away; orange dust drifted down and vanished before it hit the ground, or perhaps it did hit, and he could not track it in the dark.
He tested the restraints more carefully, as if he were assessing a stubborn cupboard hinge at work. Professional habit slipped in, uninvited. You did not force something until you knew how it wanted to fail.
He pulled again, slightly harder.
The iron at his wrists grated. The sound went through him, up his forearms, into his teeth. It should have hurt. It did not; it merely registered. That fact frightened him more than pain would have. Pain would have been familiar. Pain would have been a friendly shout from flesh. This was the only information.
Nick pulled once more, and the chains answered with a sudden, ugly give. Rusted links snapped not with a clean break but with a tearing complaint. The sensation in his arms changed from taut suspension to free fall.
He dropped.
Steel and flesh slammed into the concrete. The echo flared across the facility like a thrown stone on a frozen lake. He lay there for a moment, stunned by the finality of impact and by the absence of the expected agony. His shoulders throbbed, but the throb felt like an imitation of a throb, a rehearsed performance done from memory.
Silence rushed back in, quicker than it had any right to.
Nick rolled onto his side and coughed because his mind insisted he should. The cough sounded wrong, too precise. He pressed his palms against the floor to push himself up.
His palms.
They were not palms.
They looked like hands, in the way that a mannequin looks like a person from a distance. The structure was correct, the proportions nearly right, but the surfaces were wrong. His skin had a faint sheen, as if his body had been lacquered. At his wrists, where the shackles had bitten, some grooves and abrasions should have wept blood. Instead, they held a darker smear, like oil mixed with old dirt.
"No," he said, and his voice obeyed without hesitation, which also felt wrong.
He pushed again, got his knees under him, and tried to stand.
His legs did not cooperate because they were not his legs.
They unfolded beneath him with a mechanical grace. Thick metal supports, jointed backwards like a raven's, planted on the concrete with a dull click. The shape was avian and predatory; it belonged to a creature designed to perch, to spring, to tear. The feet were segmented, talon-like plates rather than toes. When he shifted his weight, the joints adjusted with tiny compensations, as if a hidden intelligence managed balance for him.
Nick froze, half standing, half crouched. His mind ran through explanations with the briskness of a man marking essays at midnight. Shock hallucination. Experimental prosthetics. A nightmare stitched from recent news and old anxieties.
Then he moved his left leg again, not out of curiosity but out of disbelief, and watched the metal respond as smoothly as flesh would have. There was no delay. No clumsiness. No learning curve.
That was when terror finally found its voice in him, a clean, awful note.
He brought his hands to his face.
His fingertips touched cheekbones that felt hard beneath a thin outer layer. His jawline was too sharp. His lips were there, but the texture felt manufactured, like rubber made to mimic warmth. He drew a shaky breath and tried to steady himself by doing what he always did when things went wrong. He named the facts.
'I am awake.'
'I am in a large facility.'
'I was suspended by chains.'
'I have mechanical legs.'
'My hands are not my hands.'
He closed his eyes.
Behind the eyelids, darkness did not arrive. Instead, he saw.
He saw heat as a slow gradient across distant machinery. He saw cold concrete as a flat absence. He saw narrow lines of ultraviolet leaking from cracks that his old eyes would never have noticed. He opened his eyes again, hoping the intrusion would stop, and the world did not return to normal. It expanded.
Sound took shape.
The small settling creaks of cooling metal became visible ripples at the edge of his vision. His own breathing traced pale oscillations. When he swallowed, the motion left a brief pattern in the air, as if the world had become a blackboard and the physics had started drawing themselves in chalk.
Nick stared, overwhelmed by the indecency of it. No one should see sound. No one should see this much at once. It was like walking into a staff meeting and being forced to hear every private thought in the room, every unspoken judgement, every petty fear, all at full volume.
He tried to look away and realised there was nowhere to look away to. Information was everywhere. The facility hummed with it, a dense fog of data his mind could not prioritise.
His knees buckled. Not from weakness, from overload. The metal legs folded anyway, obeying some automatic safety that did not ask his permission.
He heard himself say, very quietly, "This is not possible."
Then everything went black.
Not a gentle fade. A hard cut. One moment, he was drowning in spectra and waves; the next, he was gone.
When awareness returned, it did so without drama. He lay on cold concrete, cheek against the floor, the taste of dust in his mouth. He blinked, and the world settled into a more tolerable mode, though "tolerable" felt like an insult to the word. The strange vision remained, but it had narrowed, filtered, as if some internal system had decided he could not be trusted with the full feed.
Nick pushed himself up again, slower this time, as if he were coaxing a frightened animal. His arms worked. His legs worked. He rose to his feet and stood, unsteady, listening.
Nothing answered him.
He turned in place, scanning the room with the careful attention of someone trying to remember where he had left his car in a multistorey car park. The space around him was littered with debris. Not the neat debris of a controlled shutdown, but the scattered remains of abandonment and violence. Bent metal frames. Shattered glass that had been ground into glittering grit. A tangle of cables trailing from a collapsed conduit, like dead vines.
Then he saw the bones.
Human skeletons lay slumped against a wall, half buried under dust and fallen fragments. There were several, their ribs open like broken umbrellas, their skulls tilted as if they had died looking for an exit that never came. Clothing had rotted to thin tatters, leaving only hints of fabric and the faint, sour smell of decay long past its prime.
Nick did not approach immediately. He could not decide whether reverence or fear should lead. He took a step, then another, and paused beside the nearest remains. He expected, absurdly, to feel the human response, the involuntary flinch, the tightness in the throat. Instead, he felt a different kind of pressure, an awareness of chemical traces in the dust, of old smoke, of oxidised metal. The grief did not vanish, but it arrived late, filtered through intellect.
"I'm sorry," he said, because he did not know what else to say to the dead.
Beyond the human bones, something larger dominated the far side of the room. At first, it looked like wreckage from a vehicle, a collapsed mass of dark beams. Then his eyes adjusted, and the shape resolved into a skeleton. Not human.
It was a beast, three times larger than him, charred black. The bones were thicker, warped in places as if heat had tried to melt them. A ribcage like a cage, a spine like a segmented bridge. The skull was elongated, jaw open in a permanent snarl.
Nick stood very still.
He could not name the creature. It did not fit the catalogue of things he knew, and he knew enough to admit it. He had taught literature, not zoology, but he had the basic sense of what belonged on Earth. This did not.
His mind reached for the safest explanation again. Some kind of experimental animal. A hoax. A nightmare that had remembered to include details.
He turned away because looking at it felt like looking at a question you could not answer.
A faint sound touched his hearing. Not a footstep. Not a voice. A single, precise ping.
Nick's head snapped towards it, too fast, too animal. The sound had direction, and he followed it across the room.
A terminal sat against a pillar, half covered by a drape of dust and torn insulation. It was massive, old-fashioned in shape, a heavy workstation that belonged to an earlier era of computing. Its screen was dark, but a small indicator light blinked with stubborn life, as if it had been waiting for years and did not mind waiting longer.
He approached cautiously. Each step of his raven legs clicked, the sound crisp and uncomfortably loud. He imagined someone hearing him from the far end of the facility and coming to investigate, and the idea made his throat tighten, though he did not know who would come. People. Machines. Monsters.
Nick reached out and touched the edge of the terminal. Dust came away on his fingers, leaving streaks that looked like soot.
The chair in front of the terminal scraped slightly as he moved, although he had not touched it. He frowned, then watched as his body lowered itself into the seat with a smooth, automatic motion.
"I didn't," he began, then stopped, because the sentence had nowhere honest to go.
His hands settled on the console as if they belonged there. His spine straightened. He felt a faint vibration through his fingertips, a handshake between him and the machine. The terminal woke.
The screen flared to life. Pale text appeared, stark against the dark.
It did not ask for a password. It did not offer a menu. It stated a fact, as bluntly as a register.
- You are Nick -
He stared at the words until they blurred, then sharpened again.
"I am," he whispered.
A second line appeared, slower, as if the terminal were choosing its pace for effect.
- Identity confirmation: human cognitive pattern detected -
Nick's mouth went dry, which was ridiculous, because he was not sure his mouth could still produce saliva. He swallowed anyway and watched the sound ripple faintly at the edge of his vision.
The terminal continued, each line arriving with a soft ping that made his shoulders tense.
- Origin: Himalayan subfacility -
- Status: hybrid chassis online -
- Temporal marker: two years before the global omnic sentience event -
Nick read the last line twice, then a third time, because it did not mean anything, and yet his mind insisted it did. Words like "temporal marker" and "global event" belonged to news reports and speculative fiction, not to a man who had been worried about Ofsted and lesson plans.
His mind tried to pull in memory, to anchor itself. The last clear thing he remembered was walking home in the rain, thinking about marking, thinking about whether he had been too harsh on a pupil who had mixed up "affect" and "effect." Then there was nothing.
He looked down at his hands on the console, at the faint lines where metal met synthetic skin, and felt a sudden, furious betrayal.
"How?" he demanded, and the question came out sharper than he intended. "What have you done to me?"
The screen did not answer in the way a person would. It simply displayed more of the world, as if that was the answer, and he ought to be grateful.
A map unfolded in clean outlines. Names appeared that he knew only from games, from pop culture, from a universe he had treated as entertainment on evenings when he had wanted his brain to stop working.
- Gibraltar -
- Watchpoint -
- Omnica -
Nick's breath caught. He stared until the letters felt carved into him. His mind tried to laugh it off, tried to insist that coincidence existed, that names repeated, that he was tired and concussed and hallucinating.
Then another line appeared, unadorned.
- Omnic Crisis: %pending% -
And with that, the facility around him stopped being merely a strange room. It became a location. A stage. A piece of history he recognised, but had never belonged to.
Nick sat very still in the chair, hands resting on the console like a man posed for judgment, and understood one thing with bleak clarity.
Whatever he was, he was awake at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in a world that did not require him or the knowledge he has.