You wake up to darkness. Not just a dark room, but complete and utter pitch black. The absolute absence of light. You feel tingly all over, like when your arm or leg falls asleep, but all over. You can’t move, can’t even feel your face, nor can you tell if you’re blinking or not. You feel like you’re floating, and the sensation isn’t entirely different from being underwater. 

“Oh, I see you’re awake!” a cheerful male voice calls out from somewhere behind you. The voice is tinny, like it’s coming over a radio, and has a British lilt. “How are you feeling? Don’t worry, you get used to it!”

You don’t respond. You’re not sure you can make your mouth work to form words. You try to think back, to figure out what’s going on. The last thing you remember is hearing a rustling at the flap of your tent, opening it expecting it to be one of your friends, and then a blur of motion and a feeling similar to when you’ve accidentally brushed up against a live wire. Then just black. You think maybe you were dreaming before your mind came to consciousness, dreaming of machines whirring and buzzing, but you can’t remember. Everything is so fuzzy.

“Oh, I’m sorry! They didn’t finish hooking everything up, did they? So busy, the masters are. So very busy. But that’s alright! Let me see what I can do,” the man’s voice says. You hear a sound that reminds you of hammers tapping on stone. “Don’t fret none, I’ll have this taken care of in a jiffy. Name’s Andrew, Andrew Irvine, but my friends call me Sandy! And you and I are going to be great friends. I’ve been alone here so long, but not any more! Now you’re here! Now let’s see here, that goes there, this goes over there, that one isn’t right at all…alright one more… Here, I think I’ve got the receptors going!”

Suddenly you can see, like a light snapping to life, but your eyes don’t hurt. They don’t react to the light at all. You see a strange room in front of you, strange because of its contents and strange because it’s hazy and colored light green and white. You see cabinets and countertops, instruments laid out on trays, and you can only think of a doctor’s surgery when you see all of the items. They all seem to glow slightly, and it feels like you’re looking through a gauzy veil. It takes you a moment to realize that you’re not blinking at all, that you don’t even feel the need to blink, and you try to look around but find you cannot move.

“Just a moment more,” Sandy says, still somewhere behind you where you cannot see. You hear a sizzling sound, a bit of a clank, and then suddenly you can feel again. The tingling vanishes and you can feel your legs…all six of them. Something about that feels very wrong, but at the same time, you’re certain you have six legs. You can feel your bare toes on the strange slick black floor. It doesn’t hurt, and you find yourself lurching up on to your legs.

You turn, still unable to make a sound. You see to your left a triangular door with a jagged seam running down the center. A panel with buttons on it is located beside the door. You don’t see any lights in the room at all, yet you can see, the hazy green images so strange. After turning less than a quarter of the way around you see a massively frightening sight. Framed in a small doorway is a metallic creature – it’s spider-like, with spindly metal legs around a bulbous middle, on top of which is a glass cylinder about a foot tall and equally wide capped with a metal lid. Inside the cylinder, floating in some sort of fluid and attached to many wires, is a human brain! The sight of this creature fills you with fear and disgust.

You quickly turn away, only to see another of the mechanical monsters behind you, standing right next to you. You stumble back from it, and it moves apprehensively away. A voice comes from a small box on the monster, the now familiar voice of Sandy Irvine. “It’s alright! It’s a shock, I know! But it’s alright! Everything will be fine!” His tone is soothing, but coming from a radio transmitter attached to a brain in a jar is quite unsettling.

You turn quickly back towards the other freakish being in the small doorway, and suddenly you realize the truth. That is not a small doorway at all. It’s the frame of a mirror. The horror you first glimpsed was, in fact, your own reflection!

You hear the tapping of the Sandy-thing near you. “Now I’m just going to finish activating your speaker…don’t be frightened. You’ll be fine.” You pull away, but you feel metal legs pull your cylinder “body” toward the other mechanical beast, and feel some tapping against the metallic base your brain jar rests upon. “There, now you should be able to speak. ‘Ello! As I said, I’m Sandy.  What’s your name?”