CHAPTER - 12
One thing that always made me laugh in stories was that one trope where the big, buff hero who could tank swords, punch dragons, maybe blow up a city…yet instantly shivered the moment a nurse pulled out a syringe
That dynamic contrast always made me laugh. How could an invincible demi-god afraid of a tiny needle?
It was funny. Well…until today.
Because now, strangled inside the pod like a sacrificial lamb, with injectors moving towards me, I perfectly understood that fear.
Needles are terrifying. Undoubtedly.
It had been an hour since I arrived at the IHSS research center, courtesy of my dear teacher: Miss Natalia Sanchez. About twelve kilometers from our campus, tucked near a low tier market. It was a ten-storey tall building, built entirely of special alloy called carbonyte. A fusion of carbon steel and poly-silicate resin.
Carbonyte wasn’t the dramatic metal you’d expect in a sci-fi setting. It didn’t shine. It just absorbed light as if even the metal had grown tired of reflecting the world. The carbonyte walls weren’t smooth. They were built from rectangular plates, each fused at the edges, forming a lattice that climbed from floor to ceiling. In that sense, it looked less like architecture and more like machinery, giving the building a feel that it had been assembled rather than built.
Contrastingly, the floor felt alive. Layered steel - polymer composite flooring. It wasn’t the usual dull metal or concrete, but a material that was optically diffusive i.e. it absorbed light, then released it slowly; thin ripples of pale blue chased footsteps before fading back into the dark.
While the ground floor had no humans. Just silent reception robots, checking IDs, scanning vitals for security and guiding subjects like me with unsettling politeness.
The Serum Implantation procedure was on the second floor. Room 020. A caretaker robot guiding me there.
Honestly, the facility felt less like a research center and more like a living organism. The air smelled faintly of biochemicals. Electricity hummed constantly, while thin, soft gleam crawled across the walls like veins.
By the time I reached the room, it felt like I was walking through the inside of a metallic giant.
Inside the room, white-coat researchers moved about like ghosts. Instruments, so advanced and big, I couldn’t even name lined up walls. Transparent holographic panels floated mid-air near large cylindrical bio-tanks, their contents rippling with faint blue luminescence.
It was surreal, like stepping into a high budget Hollywood sci-lab scene, just without… heroic background music.
To explain the procedure, at least to an extent I understood it. Serum Implantation was a systematic rewriting of genetic code.
Firstly, they started with a fresh round of blood tests. After that, implantation began. They used a specialized injector rig — the implantation machine to deliver the serum into ten major parts of body: (Occipital i.e. (base of skull), Cervical Spinal Junction, Subclavian Port, Pericardial vicinity, Thoracic vertebrae, lumbar, Mesenteric, Femoral Region, Antecubital, Upper Arm Muscle.)
The implantation followed a multi-pattern injection system i.e. the ten parts were injected multiple times, delivering multiple doses across four phases – A, B, C, and D. The maximum was ten shots to the Deltoid and minimum was one to the skull.
Talk about how to terrify people.
That aside, after implantation, you are submerged in a bio-tank filled with somatic fluid for one full day. After than once you wake up; assuming you wake up, another series of tests is followed confirm to biological changes and identifying rejections. The ability itself manifested randomly. That could be either immediately or several days later. Hence, follow up checkups were made mandatory.
Just as I was reviewing everything I remembered from the handbook, a woman approached. Blue short hair, round face, small eyes, draped in a shirt and pants with a white coat. She looked more like house cat than a mad scientist if you ask me.
“Renard Kurozawa? From Vidya school of Mayatech?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
She scanned me head to toe like she was grading a vegetable in a grocery mart.
“Good. Follow me.” She spoke. Not a word of welcome or a smile. Now I could see the scientist in her.
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“We’ve calibrated the equipment. You’ll undergo preliminary scans, then move into the SI program,” she continued while walking.
She led me into another room (connected to room 020), it was massive, big enough to be a school gym. It was partitioned into labs, research points, biometric scanners, surgical pods. In it, the white coats moved with mechanical rhythm, each focused on their task.
“Kugole, the Z-subject is here. Start precursor protocols. Yasmine, prep the pod.”
Z subject? A code name.
I didn’t even get to ask before I was pulled into tests. Thankfully, future normal needles really didn’t hurt, sample was taken, result registered, all in under a minute. Humanity truly peaked in the needle department in this world. Can’t say that for everything else though…
But then we reached the pod.
A literal human size coffin. That was honestly the best description. The back plating was deep red, while the translucent front door closed. Probably made up of Vitrafer – glass like metal. It was ominous yet elegantly designed, the transparent front let you see the world while being pierced by ten different needles.
“Remove your clothes down to undergarments,” the technician said.
Nice.
In my previous world, I was a high-school biology teacher. Now I was a lab rat in sci-fi underwear. Progression
Yet what came next yanked my depreciative self out of me.
“Your collar needs to come off as well. Immersion fluids can disrupt its interface.”
My collar.
It hit me then how normal it had become. The nanocarbon restraint every citizen wore from childhood. So normal that even after remembering my past life, I hadn’t questioned it. Like breathing, eating, sleeping…it was an essential, so you accepted it.
It reminded me of something important — something this world carved into the bones. The people in this world weren’t living. They were managed.
They weren’t free, they just pretended well. A carrot dangling forever just beyond reach, and we marched after it like obedient mules convinced the leash was a ribbon.
They removed the collar.
For a second, I touched where it had been, as if my neck should feel lighter, freer. It didn’t. The metal was gone, yet the weight stayed.
I shoved that feeling aside and stepped into the pod.
The glass sealed shut, and then the chamber tilted, lowering me from upright to horizontal. Mechanical clamps locked around my wrists, ankles and chest. Cold metal met my bare skin. The pod rose, suspending me in the air, and tilted back to a vertical position before a pillar-machine. A giant spine of steel and biotech. A thing that turned children into weapons and called it a gift.
Then the injectors arm slid out. Two at first, like fangs emerging from a serpent’s jaw.
My heartbeat rose, beating like a drum. An instinct older than reincarnation, older than hero fantasies. It didn’t matter If I had memories of the old world or if I someone with ‘plot armor’. What I felt was primal, one thing that all living organisms felt.
FEAR.
Phase A began.
The first injector punched into the deltoid, the upper arm muscle.
Pain came slowly, not sharp. Spreading. Burning. And then —
AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!
It hurt like hell. I gasped. My breath ripped from my lungs. It wasn’t the needle. It was the serum. Like hot sulphuric acid forced into veins. The upper arm burned, muscle fibers humming as if each strand had learned to sing. A song of pain.
But that cry didn’t flinch anyone. No one asked if I was okay. It didn’t matter if I was fourteen or twenty-one. In this world, I was a subject.
The second injector sank into my inner elbow (antecubital vein).
This one was worse.
A sharp pinch, then a soft pulse rippling to my fingertips, as if electricity of thousands of volts ran through them trying to break through my body.
AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH
I screamed again, my voice horsed and ragged. It was painful but it was normal. This was a procedure that every child of my age went through. They had to for survival.
I felt something trickle down my face. But it didn’t matter. Nothing changed. This phase wouldn’t end till ten injections to the deltoid and nine to antecubital vein were shot. All I could do was endure
Another shot.
AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH
My vision blurred. Below shapes warped, white coats melted into each other like ghosts in fog. I tried to hold consciousness, tried to breathe, tried not to black out.
Another needle.
AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH!AAAAAAAAAARGH AAA
My voice gave out before my will did. I opened my mouth, but no sound came just a shaking gasp and choked whimper. The room spun and lights smeared into streaks.
Please…stop… I wanted to whisper but I couldn’t so I just thought of it. But the machine didn’t care. I started thinking of random things. Anything to cling to while my body shook and burned in pain. Like the smudged light from the pillar. The buzz of electricity rang in my ears. Rainbow across my eyes. And number of times the injectors injected the serum.
In that instant, it came to me. Kiara didn’t wear a collar.
I didn’t drown in pain. Metal kept hissing, kept working. I lost track of time, lost the will to screams. At some point, even reacting to pain didn’t matter.
A total of forty-seven injections under four phases. Though, the pain had subsided after the nineteenth, everything after that felt numb and strange.
My body felt like it belonged to someone else. From bones, to joints, to muscles. Everything felt frozen. Even the act of thinking was tedious. I could only stare upward, half conscious, at the last injector waiting for me.
The final needle.
Neural anchor, the brain stem – the occipital. I knew all that, I wanted to prepare for it but I couldn’t even blink on purpose anymore. My mind was a thin string.
The injector moved. Closer. It closed past beside my eyes and in the last moment I saw it split into two.
BAAM.
A shock tore through my skull. A cold flash behind my eyes, thoughts and light faded into the white noise. And the world dissolved. Colors vanished, sound disappeared and then my body followed, then myself.
A world of perfect nothing. A white world yet swallowed by darkness.
