Chapter 1

My head was pounding and my eyelids were little protection from the strong light that was shining through them.

"6:30am! All prisoners will get out of bed immediately," some voice called out, just as I reached up with my hand to try to shield my eyes from the light.

"6:30am? Its too early," I thought to myself, before I finished processing the rest of the sentence. Prisoners? What had I gotten myself into? I tried to focus through the pounding in my head and onto my last memory. What had I done? Could I really be in some jail somewhere?

No, I was sure that was impossible. I could remember having turned off the interstate when I saw the burning flames shooting through the sky. Whatever it was, and I had guessed that it was some aircraft in trouble, had seemed to have gone down behind some hills just to the left of me. I knew it would be hard to judge the distance of something shooting through the sky like that, but it really hadn't seemed like it was very far away. It was getting late in the evening and I was in a quite remote location with no other vehicles in sight, it was my civic duty to investigate and see if I could offer any help. After leaving the interstate, my memory was foggy, well actually it was missing, but how could I have got from driving to the rescue of a crashing aircraft, to being in jail. It just didn't seem believable.

Having ruled out being in jail, I started to open my eyes to see where I actually was.

"What the... ?" I yelled out as I felt whatever I was laying on, starting to move.

"Prisoner's beds are now retracting, stay clear," the same voice called out.

Thinking that it seemed likely that I was laying on one of these prisoner beds, I thought it was best to get off it as quickly as I could. As I finished opening my eyes, but with no time to have a look around first, I swung my legs in the opposite direction to which the bed was moving.

Well it didn't look like any jail cell that I had ever seen on TV. So looks like I was right to have ruled out being in jail. I was in a quite small room, at a guess it was about thirteen feet by ten feet. A bright light was shinning down from the white ceiling, directly onto the narrow bed that was now retracting into one of the wooden panel covered walls. All four walls were covered with those same wooden panels; I had never been good at telling one wood from another but I would have guessed they were oak. Along the wall opposite to the retracting bed, was a long desk and a chair. One of the shorter walls had a steel looking door in it. While a black couch stretched along the last wall.

Apart from the retreating bed, the desk was the item that caught my attention. One section of it looked like any other desk, with a set of drawers below the desktop, and a small white notepad sitting on the desktop. However the section of the desktop nearest to the door, was curved, starting as a flat surface like the other section, it remained flat for about one and half feet and then it started a gentle curve up towards the wall until it reached the wall, which was another one and half feet further back, where it was then vertical and continued up the wall about two feet. The other strange thing about this section was that it looked a much darker shade of wood to the rest of the desk, which coincidentally matched the chair and the wall panels.

Thinking that it couldn't do any harm, I touched the darker section.

The three ear piercing bleeps that rung out around the room, the split second after I had touched that panel, was an indication that I really shouldn't do much thinking with this pounding head.

"Female prisoners will adopt the waiting position," that voice called out less than a second after the bleeps had finished. The voice was male but it also sounded slightly robotic, so I decided that it was likely to be computer generated.

Just as I was about turn away from the desk, the whole of the darker section lit up, turning bright white with various blue symbols on it.

"It's some kind of LCD screen," I thought to myself, but had no idea what the symbols were. They looked like they might have been some type of hieroglyphics. After what those three loud bleeps had done to my pounding head, there was no way I was going to start touching those symbols.

Instead I decided to see if this really was some prison, by seeing if the door was locked. Surely a cell door should be locked, so the door sliding open as soon as I got within a couple of feet of it, was a reassuring sign that my initial thoughts had been correct and there was no way I could be in jail. Although that didn't really help to answer the just as important question of where the hell I was then.

Outside the door, was a small narrow corridor. There was a steel door to the right and another one directly opposite me. To the left the corridor continued for about ten feet before taking a turn to the right. Each of the two doors had some kind of white panel next to them, and no sign of any door handle. Deciding that I really didn't want to touch any more panels, I headed along the corridor to the left. Once around the corner, I was faced with yet another steel door, the same white panel embedded into the wall next to it.