MidReal Story
Uncharted Odyssey
Scenario: A man woke up in the morning, and found out he was only a brain in a box, ready to launch into the space to a unkown planet 100 light-year away
Create my version of this story
I woke up, and for a moment, I didn’t know where I was.
My head was pounding, and my throat was dry.
I tried to sit up, but something was holding me down.
I called out, but my voice was the only sound in the cold silence.
The room was small, and it was pitch black.
After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, and I saw the walls around me.
They were far away; I couldn’t see where they ended.
I squinted, trying to get a better look.
There were other boxes in this room—small, identical ones like the one I was in.
Some of them were closer than others; others seemed so far away that I could barely see them.
I tried to get up, but my body wouldn’t move.
All I could see were my arms and legs, strapped to some kind of table.
Panic set in as I tried to remember where I was.
How did I get here?
Who brought me here?
What was happening?
My only memories were from a few minutes ago, when I woke up in this room.
How did I get here?
Where are my memories?
And then it hit me: I couldn’t remember who I was at all.
I didn’t know how old I was or what my name was.
What do I look like?
What is my job?
Do I have a family?
I had some basic knowledge of English and math, but that was it.
How did I forget everything about myself?
As these thoughts raced through my mind, they were quickly replaced by one question: How do I get out of here?
Where is the door?
I struggled against my restraints; I pushed and pulled as hard as I could.
The table rattled and shook, but the straps held tight.
The more I moved, the more it hurt; there were wires coming out of my arms and legs that twitched and tugged at my skin with every movement.
I stopped moving, and for a moment, everything was quiet again.
But then another sound broke through the silence: a soft thump followed by a metallic clang.
It came from the box next to mine.
I looked over at it and saw the metal walls shake again.
Someone was inside that box!
I opened my mouth to call out to them—to ask if they knew where we were or how we got here—but no sound came out.
I still couldn’t move, and now I couldn’t even speak.
So all I could do was watch as the person inside the other box tried to escape just like me: they pushed against the walls, pulled on the restraints—
I struggled against my restraints again.
This time, I managed to free one of my hands.
I reached down and pulled the wires from my arm—they came out with a wet pop—and then started on my other hand.
But before I could finish, the box around me crackled to life, and it started to move!
I panicked and tried to move my hands faster, but it was no use: another wire popped loose, and the box around me stiffened, stopping me in place.
A panel slid open in front of me, and warm light spilled into the box, momentarily blinding me.
“Subject 234-B,” said a voice—an artificial, female voice that came from the box itself—
“Your restraints have been removed.You will now exit the box and proceed to the next stage of testing.”
I tried to say something—to protest or ask questions—but the words caught in my throat and came out as a series of beeps and clicks instead of speech.
I tried again, but it was no use; the voice didn’t respond, and I realized that there was no point in arguing with it anyway.
It was just a computer program programmed to carry out orders, and arguing with it wouldn’t change anything.
I didn’t know what the voice meant by the “next stage of testing.” I didn’t even know what was going on, or where I was, or how I got here.
It took me a few moments, but then I remembered that I had been living in a box in some lab somewhere, and now I was still in a box, only this time it was a different box, and I was alone.
The voice was jarringly loud, cold and artificial, and it filled the box with an eerie echo, and for a moment, I thought that maybe it was someone else who was trapped in their own box somewhere, or maybe I was in some kind of computer-generated simulation, or some kind of hallucination caused by some kind of drug, or maybe even in some kind of afterlife, or maybe I had just gone completely insane, or maybe...
I forced myself to stop thinking about all those things, at least for now, because I needed to focus on what was most important right now: finding a way out of this box, so I could figure out what was going on and start trying to fix it.
“Yes,” the voice said, after a long pause.
“You are Subject 234-B.You have been selected as one of the subjects in this experiment because you have no close relatives, friends, or significant others to miss you if something goes wrong.”
“I don’t care about that!”
I shouted, and then remembered that I couldn’t shout, because I didn’t have a mouth anymore.
“I want to know what’s going on!Where am I?What do you want from me?”
“Please remain calm,” the voice said.
“I will now explain what is happening.”
My name is Dr.Emily Carter.I am one of the top scientists in my field, and I have been hired by a private company to carry out an experiment on behalf of the United Nations and other world governments.The experiment involves traveling to an Earth-like planet in a distant star system and determining whether it can be colonized by humans.
To save on costs and reduce the risk to human life, we are using robots instead of humans for this mission.We are sending two android robots to explore the planet’s surface and gather data and samples for further study.The first robot will launch in 5 minutes.”
I was so shocked and angry that I couldn’t even speak for a few moments.
“You mean you’re going to send me to another planet?
“Not you,” she said.
“You are a brain in a box.The android body that we will be sending to the planet is being controlled by your brain, but it is not you.It is just a robot.”
I shook my box back and forth in a desperate attempt to make it fall off its shelf or something, but it didn’t work.
She didn’t respond, and after a few moments, I realized that there was nothing that I could say that would change her mind.
“I want to see,” I said.
“I want to see what’s going on!”
“The view from the android’s camera is currently offline,” she said.
“It will be restored once it reaches the surface.”
“How long will that take?”
“There are only 2 minutes left until launch. Would you like to ask me anything else?”
Yes, there were a million things that I wanted to ask her, but now that I had finally found someone who actually knew what was going on, I couldn’t think of any of them.
After a few moments, I realized that there was only one thing that really mattered right now: getting out of this box, and getting out of here, and going back to my real body, and finding out what happened to my memories and my past life so that I could get my humanity back.
There had to be some way out of this box.
