Chapter 1

There is nothing more unnerving than waking up somewhere other than your own bedroom. There’s always a moment of confusion as your body starts acting on memory while it waits for your conscious mind to catch up. That can be a bit of a problem if, say, you were to go camping and try to swing your legs out of a bed that’s not actually there and end up kicking your little brother in the face instead.

It’s even worse when you wake up buck ass naked in the middle of a large metal room.

The first thing my body registered was cold. That brought my mind a-runnin’ as I sat bolt upright, and that was when I realized I was completely starkers. Fear blanked my thoughts as I stared at my surroundings, trying to piece together what the Hell was going on. Problem was, there wasn’t damned thing to see except for featureless metal walls. And I do mean nothing. Real quick, look around you. Where’s the light? If you’re outside, it is the sun. If you’re inside, it could be on the ceiling, mounted to the wall, or built into a table side lamp. It’s also possible that you’re the sort like me to be reading this in the dark well past your bedtime, which means the light is coming from your device of choice.

There were no lights.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it was dark. Truthfully, it was bright enough to be a summer afternoon. But there weren’t any lights. No, the walls weren’t glowing. No, there wasn’t some stupid fairy thing hovering next to my head trying to be a helpful guide. There weren’t any fucking lights. And if you can’t believe that, then you might as well just stop reading now because this story just gets stranger from here.

“What the fuck is going on?” I demanded as I scrambled to my feet. At least I had feet. A quick pat down revealed yup, everything was just as intact as it had been when I fell asleep. The last thing I remember was passing out in bed, having spent the previous three hours cramming for an algebra exam I was supposed to be taking the next morning. I had been in my bed, in my home, just like any other sixteen year old boy. And now I wasn’t.

As if my demand were it’s cue, a metal cylinder rose out of the floor off to my left. It was about four feet tall, maybe a foot across, and seemed to be made out of the same material as the floor. There weren’t any visible seams to mark where one ended and the other began. Just boop, there it was. Hoping it was some sort of clue or explanation about my predicament, I walked over to investigate.

Sitting in the center of the cylinder was a small black dome, like the sort used to disguise security cameras in department stores. Arranged around it were three buttons, each a different color. Green, Red, and Purple Glitter. Yes, purple glitter. I told you this story got stranger. The green button was blinking, so not having any better ideas I went ahead and pressed it.

Four shapes popped up above the black dome, separated in the middle by a space. The first two shapes were a triangle and a horizontal line, while the other pair consisted of a vertical line and a pentagon. The space in the middle was glowing, as if something were supposed to be there. All I could do was stare at in bafflement. After a few seconds passed the red button began to blink, but I just ignored it. I knew a test when I saw one and figured the red button was some sort of quit option. There was no way that I was going to just give up on the very first question, however confusing it seemed.

“Can I phone a friend?” I muttered as I walked around the puzzle. As I turned, so did the puzzle, ensuring that the four symbols always stayed in the same pattern. That meant their order was important. But what was the question, and more important, how was I supposed to answer it? Triangle, line, space, line, pentagon. It had to be something mathematical. Could have been an art test, but art was too abstract, too variable. My mom was a huge Jackson Pollock fan, but I figured I made more impressive modern art just jacking off in the shower. Give me a Boris Vallejo or Luis Royo any day of the week. Now that was art. Shapes, not numbers. But would whatever had kidnapped me understand Arabic numerals? Mayans and Egyptians both used hieroglyphics, but that doesn’t mean one was the same as the other. No matter where you went on Earth, a triangle always had three sides.

Acting on impulse, I reached out and touched the glowing spot. Three shapes popped up in it’s place, a two sided arrow, a square, and a hexagon. Realization dawned, and I tapped the picture of the square. The glow vanished as the shape fit itself into the pattern, and the sparkling purple button began to glow. I gave it a quick tap.

Zwhim

I turned towards the odd noise and was surprised to discover that the featureless room was no longer featureless. Now there was a king sized four-post bed occupying a decent chunk of space. It was a ridiculous thing, straight out of some Victorian melodrama, complete with bunting, half a dozen bedspreads, and enough pillows to stock a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. When I turned back to the cylinder, the green button had lit up again.

“Okay, answer stupid questions, win fun prizes,” I muttered as I once again tapped the green button. I didn’t know if there was anything watching me or listening to me, but the sound of my own voice was oddly reassuring. The dome lit up again, this time asking me to play a game of tic-tact-toe. I got the start each time, and the first two times I played to the center and ended up tying. The third game I gambled on a corner and managed to win. It was only tic-tact-toe, though, and I figured that I had to have been playing against the computer, so figured it was a gimme win. Once again the purple button lit up.

Zwhim

And that was how I got my refrigerator. I stepped away from the cylinder and opened the fridge door. Sure enough, it was packed with food. Milk, eggs, various fruits, veggies, and meats. All raw ingredients, and not a damned bit of junk food in sight. That was actually kind of disappointing. My head was starting to hurt from the odd lighting, and I would have killed for a bit of caffeine to help deal with the headache.

“Maybe on the next go around,” I said as I stepped back to the cylinder. Yup, there was the green button, ready and waiting. Another tap, and I found myself using nuts and washers to raise the water level of a glass to the point where I could grab a toy boat. Once again, the sparkling purple button lit up.

No zhwim.

This time, the black dome lit up again. Hovering above it were pictures of a sword, mace, or ax. I’d done a bit of LARPing over the summer, where I’d been role playing a member of a barbarian horde. It was hardly the weapon of a more civilized age, but I had the feeling that there wasn’t much civilized about my current situation so I tapped the ax.

Still no zwhim.

“I guess it would be too much to ask that my kidnappers give me a weapon,” I laughed as the green button came back on. Another math problem popped up, asking me to match two triangles to a hexagon. My reward for having graduated kindergarten was a stove and built in oven. The next question got me the pots and pans it would actually take to cook the food, and my sixth question won me a table to eat at. Like a rat in a cage, I kept pressing the green button every time it lit up. The questions were random, sometimes asking me to solve math problems, other times to identify patterns or find a solution for some situational based puzzle. By the end of the first half hour, I had managed to acquire enough furniture for a decent apartment, though none of it really matched. The bed was Victorian, the table IKEA. My TV looked like something dreamed up in the 60s, but played high definition like a modern flat screen. Meanwhile, the couch and easy chairs were straight out of one of Scientific Americans Where We’ll Be In Fifty Years articles.

The furniture didn’t all come in order, however. Every three to five questions I would get another one of those Choose Your Own options that never seemed to materialize. Would I prefer a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher? Battle mech or tank? Armor or what I thought might have been some sort of magic spell? It didn’t matter what the choices were, they all seemed to have something to do with combat or fighting. I couldn’t tell what the point of those choices were, and there never seemed to be a pacifist option.

The farther I went, the harder the questions became, but they also became more human at the same time. Shapes were replaced by actual numbers and digital avatars would ask questions and demand answers in English. The first time it caught me off guard, when the computer posed the traditional Knights and Knaves dilemma. I was so surprised that at first I missed the fact that it was a timed question and nearly failed it. I did fail the next math question, then the one that followed that as well. There was no punishment for failure, however, and when the next one popped up with a formula consisting of nothing but letters and Greek symbols I tapped the red button. The question obligingly vanished, but the sparkling purple button didn’t light up, either. I skipped the following five math questions as well. The system didn’t care that I skipped them, but neither did it make them any easier going forward. Instead it treated things as if I had answered the question correctly and increased the difficulty of the ones that followed, right up until I skipped the fifth.

After having skipped five math questions in a row, there was a pause as the system seemed to be evaluating things. I got two more logic puzzles and a riddle before it decided to throw me a curve ball. Right after that a man in ancient Chinese garb materialized and asked, “What is the sound of the sun rising?”

I blinked and asked, “What?”

He smiled pleasantly and bowed his head. “Your answer is accepted.” The purple button lit up as he vanished, and this time when I tapped it I got another selection of weapons, this one asking me to pick between what looked like a lightsaber and some sort of starfish shaped thing with blades at the end of each arm. It was a decision that was no decision. I picked the lightsaber, duh.

Decision made, I stepped back and stared at the blinking green button. Just what sort of question was that, anyway? It was the sort of thing I expected to find in a cheap fortune cookie. And why had it accepted ‘What?’ as an answer? It wasn’t intended to be one, but was just a statement of confusion. Had the machine decided that me being confused was the answer?

“What the Hell is the point of all this, anyway?” I demanded of the empty room. I pointed angrily at the ceiling, as if intending to scold God. “Just who the fuck is running this little game? Do I get to meet you at all, or is this just some elaborate experiment to see how long it takes see if I break? Well, guess what? Fuck you! Find someone else to plug into your little Skinner box!”

A Skinner box. I winced as soon as I said the words, realizing that was exactly what I had found myself trapped in. It was high school psychology. B.F. Skinner, grandfather of behavioral psychology. Take a rat, stick it in a box with a lever. Connect the lever to a food dispenser, then count how many times the rat presses the lever. Or, conversely, hook it up to some sort of electric shock and count how many tries it takes before the rat avoids the lever altogether. If you want to make it more complicated, put both levers in the box and watch the rat try to figure out which one is which.

“Okay, so if the questions are the food lever, where is the shock lever?” I murmured under my breath. By that point I was absolutely convinced that I was being watched in one way or another. My captors hadn’t bothered to communicate with me yet, at least not outside of my interactions with the cylinder. But even that was a form of communication in a way. They were learning my responses, but when I stopped to think about I realized they’d been giving me information in return.

I stepped away from the cylinder and wandered over to the couch they had given me. I turned on the TV and started flipping through channels. All the major cable networks were there, including the movie channels. Yes, even the adult ones. The local channels were missing, though. I considered wanking off, but decided to let that wait for later. Instead I flipped it back to CNN. Had my disappearance made the news? It didn’t look like it. The talking heads were talking about the war in Afghanistan, as if it were some hot breaking thing. I watched the ticker roll by on the bottom, waiting to see if my name went across the screen. That was when I noticed the time. October 16^th, 2001.

2001.

Ice chilled my veins as I realized the news I was watching was over two years old. The reason the newscasters were so hyped up about the war in Afghanistan was because, to them, it was a new thing. How long had whatever been watching us that this was the news? Had they been there two years ago when we invaded? Or were they just picking this up now? They must have had access to popular entertainment if they knew what a lightsaber was, but were they aware it was fiction? I’d read far too many SF stories were the aliens hadn’t had a concept of fiction and so either under or over estimated humanity’s capability. Was my abduction an experiment or a prelude to invasion? I hoped it wasn’t the latter; an enemy with stealth, FTL, teleporters, and whatever else it would have taken to abduct me without being caught or stopped would likely be able to take out a good chunk of the planet if they were so inclined. What if my answers to the nonsense questions were the only thing keeping humanity safe? What if they were judging us based off my reactions?

I was sixteen. That was way too young to have the fate of the world heaped on my shoulders, but I really couldn’t see any way around it. The aliens, and that point I was absolutely convinced it had to be aliens who had kidnapped me, had put me in my box for a reason. If they wanted to use me as a guinea pig in their little experiments, then I’d be a happy little guinea pig and just pray that they weren’t going to need to do any autopsies.

“No probing!” I shouted to the room as my anxiety got the better of me and I got up off the couch to head back to the cylinder. I stabbed my middle finger at the ceiling. “I mean it! If you really want to figure out how the human body works, go steal a biology textbook! We already did the work for you!”

When I got back to the cylinder I discovered that it had changed. The green and red buttons had been removed, replaced with a glowing yellow one. The sparkling purple button was still there, but it had gone dim. The black dome had also changed, now a faintly pulsing blue. I frowned as I considered the differences.

“Not really much of an option, is there?” I asked as my hand reached for the yellow button.

Zwhim

One second I was standing in my Skinner Box and the next I was standing out in the middle of an open field, about fifty feet across, surrounded by trees on all side. The sky was an off shade of green, and the sun was a dim white, so weak that I could look straight at it with no problems. The air was thick and tasted slightly bitter, like I’d been eating too many almonds. A tall, flat rock stood next to me, with an ax resting across the top of it. It was a huge, two-handed, double-headed thing with a silver skull mounted at the top between the two blades. I looked at the ax, looked at the sky, and blurted, “You have got to be kidding me!”

As if in answer, a bolt of blue lightning streaked out of the sky to silently strike the far side of the field. It left behind a squat, green skinned, toad-like alien with four arms mounted in alternating shoulders. The two upper arms were short, stubby little things not much longer than a toddler’s. The lower pair were much more heavily muscled and quite a bit longer to boot. The lower hands held a two-handed sword. The Toadian crouched on its hind legs as it scanned the field, and when it spotted me it tipped its head back and let out a a high pitched shriek like a steam engine fucking an air raid siren.

Then the fucker jumped.

Look, NBA teams would have paid a fortune for this guy. He managed to clear the field in two long hops that barely left me enough time to grab my ax off the rock. The thing was even uglier up close and personal, with flat, milky-white oval shaped eyes that never blinked and random brown spotting that made it look like his flesh was rotting off his body. His sword came down in an over hand chop that would have cut me in two if I hadn’t dived out of the way.

I ended up face down in the mud, but had managed to hold on to my ax. I didn’t try to look back, but instead rolled on to my back and lifted the ax sideways to block the swing that I knew was coming. Too many people look back, as if unsure that their opponent is still there. Of course they’re still there. And yes, they’re still trying to kill you. Don’t look. Fight.

Sure enough, the Toadian tried another overhead strike. This one wasn’t as powerful as the first, since he’d only bunny hopped forward. Still, I felt my bones jar together as his blade smacked off the ax’s long handle. I kicked out, and my bare foot pounded against rubbery skin. You know how some species of frogs have poisonous skin, so that predators don’t eat them? Well, this jackass had acidic skin and I screamed like a whiny bitch as the sole of my foot started to burn. There wasn’t smoke, but I swear there was smoke. I yanked my foot back almost as quickly as I had lashed out with it.

I must have hurt him, too, as the Toadian hopped backwards. He landed funny, listing sideways in the direction of the leg I had kicked. Found out later that Toadians have bird-like bone structures, one of the reasons they can leap so high, and I’d basically shattered the equivalent of his tibia. That gave me enough time to get back to my feet, though it hurt like hell when I placed any weight on my burned foot.

We shuffled in a circle, each trying to figure out the best way to get at the other. I had no idea why he was trying to kill me, but I also wasn’t in the mood to ask any questions, not right then. I figured it was very much a Do Unto Others sort of situation, especially since he seemed rather adamant about doing unto me. Unfortunately, all the weapons I had ever fought with had been made out of foam, and while you could give someone a good smacking if you hit them hard enough, they had never really been intended to be dangerous. It didn’t take an IQ of 130 to figure out that the Toadian’s sword was made out Sharp and Deadly and that getting stuck with it would have made a mince out of me.

Funny thing about Toadians. That double arm structure of theirs required some odd trade offs when it came time to evolve. While the upper arms are smaller and weaker, they also have almost a full range of motion. The lower arms, while longer and more powerful, are also more limited. Most theories I’ve heard are that they evolved from what were effectively a second pair of legs, and were mostly used to get around while the upper arms were used to gather food. And that was pretty much the only reason I managed to win the fight. Because while the Toadian had an extremely powerful chop, he had pretty much no swing. So when he came in for his next attack, I was ready for him. I thrust my ax up, leading not with the blades, but with the space between them. I twisted my grip as his sword fell between the two ax heads, slamming them sideways into the length of his blade. It was a trick I’d learned at the LARP, and was particularly useful for disarming people. In this case, the Toadian’s grip was too powerful for me to rip the sword out of his hands. The sword itself, however, was made of weaker stuff and shattered under the applied forces.