It took me a few gruesome minutes as I felt the whole room spin around me, but eventually, the nausea faded, leaving me with just a sensation of being bloated. I really didn’t understand what was happening. Did some secret government research facility kidnap me? Or is this the lab of a mad scientist who experimented on me?

  Getting up off the floor, I exited the room that resembled mine and walked to the door to my laundry area, or better, the laboratory door in place of my laundry area. I had seen it before, but I hadn’t put much thought into it. Now looking directly at it, I could feel a strange sensation coming from inside. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  The door itself had a distinctly sci-fi feel. It was the reason why I was thinking a secret organization had kidnapped me and they were experimenting on me. But honestly? I wasn’t sure I was even myself anymore. My body had disintegrated when I crossed the door threshold. So, for all that I knew, I could be a clone in the future, and the future human society was using me to study their past. Who knows? Maybe I was the homework of a child.

  There was a button right next to the door. Clicking on it, the door slid to the side soundlessly, revealing what I could only describe as the laboratory of a mad scientist. There was a lot of machinery all around the room filled with holographic screens, and in the middle of the room, there was what looked like a glass cylinder with a glowing sphere of light that seemed to power everything else, with cables being run from the top and bottom parts of the cylinder to the ground.

  Maybe I had discovered the control room of the simulation I was in… or not, I still didn’t know what was happening.

  Looking around before fully stepping foot in the room to be sure there wasn’t someone in there already, I approached one of the various screens that filled almost every machine.

  Quantum Flux Flow: 5.000/s

  Quantum Flux Saturation: 1%

  Aura Influx: 10.875,36/s

  Aura Saturation: 36%

  Conversion Rate: 1/s

  I had no idea what those numbers meant, or words, for that matter. Looking at other screens, they all had something written on them, like a monitoring system, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what those were or what they were monitoring. Arriving at the central screen, the one next to the cylinder holding the glowing orb, I saw it was different from the others.

  While the screens all around were like a monitoring system, this one was like a computer terminal. I saw various buttons that I could press, as well as a keyboard and a console open. There was one button that drew my attention, though, it was a “Help” button, and it was blinking slowly. I hesitated for a while, not sure what would happen if I pressed it.

  Deciding to ignore it for now, I explored a bit more of the replica of my house. I stopped in front of the exit door and stared at it. I moved to open it, but stopped when my hand was on the handle. The weird gas on the other side, and how my body had disintegrated the moment I crossed the door, were still fresh on my mind. There were too many unknown factors at play, and I hesitated to open the door again

  The rest of the house was how I remembered, mostly. Except for the complete lack of windows and how everything felt hollow, like they were just objects painted on papier-maché instead of actual things.

  While I was in the kitchen, I opened the drawer and grabbed one of the knives. It wasn’t the most thought-out plan, but I just needed to know. Positioning my hand over the counter, I slightly slashed across the palm of my hand, expecting a sharp pain to hit me and blood to start spewing out, but I was hit with nothing but the sense of the edge of the blade passing through my hand, without actually doing anything.

  I stared at the lack of a cut on my hand for a moment, then I tried it again and again, each time putting more pressure on the knife. My mind still expected my skin to be torn open and blood to flow from it, but every time, nothing happened. I knew how sharp this knife was, I had some incidents while preparing food. I even tested the sharpness with my finger, so I knew it was just as sharp as I remembered.

  I moved the knife so I was holding it with the blade pointing down. I looked over at my hand, then at the knife, then at my hand again. “What happens, happens,” I muttered and, while holding my breath and closing my eyes, preparing for it to hurt a lot, I stabbed the knife through my hand, with force.

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  I expected it to hurt, so I was left mostly confused as the weird sensation of touch passed through my hand, and the dry thud of the sharp point of the knife hitting the counter reached my mind. Opening my eyes, I saw the knife had actually gone straight through my hand, but no blood was seeping out of the wound, and when I touched the knife, only the sensation of it moving could be felt. No sensation of pain at all.

  I even moved my hand near my face, the knife coming with it, and saw that it went through it as I could see the point of it coming out of my hand. I grabbed the knife and pulled it back and saw the small hole it left behind, but what made me very scared was that I could see inside my own hand, and instead of blood, flesh, and bones, there was nothing there. As I stared at the hole, I saw the edges of it turn a rainbow-like color, and then the hole closed.

  “What…What did they do to me?” I asked with a trembling voice.

  I dashed to the exit door and yanked it open. I was still apprehensive about the gas, but I needed to test something. Just outside the door, there was the bare bones floor of an under-construction building. I didn’t dwell on what was outside and shoved my hand through the door.

  Immediately after crossing the threshold, I felt it going numb. I could still somewhat move it, but it felt sluggish. It was as if I were trying to control something with very high latency.

  From the tip of my fingers, I saw rainbow colored cracks begin to form over my skin. They continued to grow until every part outside of the door was covered with colored cracks. Then, without any warning, my hand shattered into a million multicolored particles that dissipated in the air.

  I pulled it back and closed the door when I saw the weird gas starting to enter again. I looked at my now-gone arm and saw the hole left behind. There was absolutely nothing inside it. It was like a computer model where only the outside has texture while the inside is completely void. I saw it start to regenerate, the same rainbow colored energy in the edges of my arms as it recovered a few centimeters per second.

  My legs gave out, and I fell to the floor. I didn’t know what to think. The night before, I was partying with my best friend, and now I was something completely inhuman. What was I? I couldn’t be a hologram, I could touch stuff, and I couldn’t be a robot, as my arm wouldn’t have exploded into a million pieces… Unless I was now a swarm of nanites? I think I read somewhere about grey goo and stuff.

  How much time had I missed? They couldn’t do everything here in just a few hours. Was I a brain scan of myself shoved inside a robot body in the middle of the ocean? But why did they rebuild my house? So many questions that needed answers, and nobody was around to answer them.

  “…No. There might be one place with answers,” I said as I used the handle on the door to pull myself upwards and walked to the weird machine room. In the console in the middle of the room stood the blinking “help” button. I didn’t know if it would open a question-and-answer section and would have me just scroll through various and various pages of information, or would call for someone, but any help was better than nothing. I pressed the button.

  A hissing sound came from one of the machines as its parts moved and rearranged themselves, opening a small compartment that released a small, glowing golden orb. I didn’t know how or why, but I could feel this small orb held so much energy that it was kind of scary to think about, but at the same time, it was mesmerizing to watch.

  I stood there, watching as the orb floated through the room in a direct path to the one in the center of the room, the one inside the glass cylinder. But it suddenly stopped, and I felt the world around me ripple and tremble. I saw some of the weird gas that was still around stuck to the golden orb and was sucked into it. Then, all of the remaining gas that was in the room, that I had missed until this very moment, rushed into the orb as it devoured every single particle of it.

  Then, the golden orb started to absorb a rainbow colored light that seemed to appear out of nowhere. It first started from the air itself, but then I saw as the rainbow energy start to drip from the cables coming out of the main cylinder and drip into the orb like it had a gravity of its own. I started to feel very hungry as this happened.

  After a while, it stopped. The golden glow that the orb once had was replaced by a pinkish color that seemed to oscillate every few seconds, almost like a heartbeat. I was about to touch it when it exploded like a flashbang, blinding me with pink light for a few moments.

  “I am alive!” A high-pitched voice echoed in the room as my vision recovered. I could hear something small whooshing through the air in an energetic manner, and once my vision recovered, I saw a pinkish trail of energy being left behind what I could only describe as a miniature human with insect wings that glowed pink.

  “What?” I had to ask. I was completely lost. Was this the person I called when asking for help?

  “Oh, Right!” The small creature said and flew right next to my face, almost making me jump back in reflex. With how close it was to my face, I could see more details.

  It was a miniature human, as I could see before, wearing a pink dress that had golden lines etched into it, making it seem like golden rivers on an ocean of pink. She, it was a woman for all I could see, wasn’t wearing any type of shoes, had butterfly-like wings that were pinkish with a bit of black pattern on them. She had golden hair and pink pupils. Judging by the face, I would estimate her to be around 20 years old if she were human-sized. She was at least 5 centimeters, but no more than 7… I didn’t have a ruler with me to size her up, you know?

  “Hi… what is the word again? Hummm. Oh, right! Hi, dad!” She half-shouted with a smiling face.

  “I…What?!” I half-shouted myself, my brain entering in short-circuit as the small creature in front of me called me her father. “What do you mean by that?!”

  “Huh? I mean. You created me. Isn’t this the right word when you give life to a new being?”

  “...What?!”