/ Adrian
The little room that's stifling, the smell that's absolutely not normal - mix of some tobacco smoke, the herbs, some odd aphrodisiac sweetness that makes the head spin. Liang pulls me by the hand to a side, where the curtain is. He pulls the curtain aside and we walk in, down the hall, then into another small room. There the smell is not that heavy, making me finally breathe in deeper, trying to get my head back to work.
"Too much?" - Liang asks me.
"I'm not sure…" - I begin, - "I'm not sure what to think anymore."
Liang makes me sit down on a chair in the corner of this room.
The room itself is pretty dark, the damn built of it is that of a prison cell, if I had to compare it with anything. The emptiness of it is making one think of how to end life. That or escape the reality itself. And there's just that small chair, next to a similarly small shelf that doubles as a table. Liang leans on it, as he observes me.
"Well, we're taking a bit of rest and then heading lower again." - Liang notifies me.
Lower? How much lower? Thus far I've observed things that are on the level that's absolutely heinous. The whole using people as toys for anything they can imagine - food, sex, torture, their twisted scenarios of anything. The sky would be the limit to the imagination of the twisted things I've seen. But no, with every passing room I've again and again felt like they've created even more atrocities as it went.
The room with infants being fucked by adult men, the rooms of humans being eaten alive by the elites… With screams so gut wrenching it's terrifying. The rooms of those elites just having sex with corpses that deteriorate. Rooms of elite women fucking young boys. They were aged anywhere between 3 and 12. The rooms with live torture, where elites cut into the flesh, then pull out organs one by one from a living human, then fuck the holes in the body, or even the organs themselves. The rooms where some bathed in the blood that's pouring out of hung bodies, right over the bath… Men, women, children… The ones feasting on the infants cooked in different ways…
The whole lot of it was so disgusting I barely held myself not to barf, though the sheer amount of it made me cry… Watch this whole thing and cry. Liang had to wrap my mouth with a cloth, so that I wouldn't make a sound, as we passed by these absolutely deranged things. I felt empty. I felt helpless. I knew I would not be able to help. And that - terrifies me.
"Just how… How did it… How?" - I was asking Liang.
Through this little path we took, as he watched over me the whole time, making sure to grab me by the hand and drag me further down the halls, as I had no strength left in me. How is he able to be so cold to all of this, I wonder.
"I grew up in this. Many did. It's the norm of this world." - Liang coldly replied. - "Elite take what they want. They make what they want. Keep or discard what they don't want. Either way - being picked by someone of the Elite status is a privilege. No matter what they do to you. Eat you, fuck you, kill you. It's a great honor to be selected. That's how it's been."
I sit in disbelief. There's been many different parallels I've been in. We had the damn dungeons in the Forbidden City Of Lights, though none of that atrocity I helped to pull off stands even close to what I see here.
I am aware I was a tyrant, a horrid being, but this… Would I be able to survive it here, in this world? I'd be… What would I be? Born into slavery, fucked by whomever as a brother wench with no pay, then if they found me ugly or boring - killed, eaten, tortured for fun… The most sick part is that Elites here do all this for fun. Just looking at their twisted faces as they did what they did - filled with absolute psychopathy, the love of what they do and the joy they get from it. Absolutely twisted to no feasible end.
What I did - it was mostly for research, for means to an end… Even if I try to now find excuses for it - it was still horrid. Though… I wonder if I got here to perhaps atone for my previous sins… I'm petrified. This whole thing makes me sit here, shaking like a leaf in the wind, feeling like impending doom is upon me. What if Feng flips out and Liang is taking me to be used and abused in manners yet to imagine?
I look at Liang, terrified. He shoots me a smirk, the kind that a proud assassin gives, for the imprisoned prey. It makes me shiver even more, feeling the cold of death, in this small stuffy prison cell-like room.
"Ah, I see. You're fearing for YOUR life now." - He looks at my shaking, - "That's not the order from Feng. You're to see the whole thing to the very bottom, then come back to see him. So then you can put this feeling in front of him, shaking like a bitch and begging for your life." - Liang smiles, letting out this ominous giggle. - "This is only the side dish rooms of the floor of Elites. We're yet to go through all 5 floors. Better keep it together until the end, so you won't disappoint my Lord Feng."
I feel like my blood drains from my face, as I listen to him. This is just the Elites floor… Just what the hell is going down under? Is it worse than this?
Liang then pulls me up by the hand, though I fall down, as my feet are giving out.
"Come on Adrian, we're still at the start of the journey. Get up." - Liang is cold, commanding.
I managed to get up, with my shaky legs, follow him, as he grabbed my arm, pulling me along further.
After these rooms that remind us of prison cells, we end up in some back tunnel, then down the stairs that seem like we're heading into some dungeon, although around 5 minutes later - the whole way down gives a faint sense of military base.
As we enter that level and go through the massive metal door, we end up in a world that looks like a mixture of office clerks and military training units. The barracks of soldiers, the offices of the workers. There's gun-like things on every point, the people in military uniforms walking around the place armed. The others - like an obeying amount of brainwashed lot. As we walk - there's a translation to every screen and holographic screen possible.
A man shows up in the chair, his voice authoritative, intimidating. "Citizens, today again we've upheld the grace and wisdom of our city. The great lengths of our efforts will bring us glory. Maintaining the great order is how we survive. Give our all today, give our all tomorrow. With our strength we won't perish to the harsh atrocities of the outside world. Glory to our nation!" - Says the most cliche'd speech of the man on the screen.
"Glory to our nation!" - The voices of the soldiers and clerks boom across the whole place. Then the screens turn off and the busy-bee work resumes.
Liang pulls me along to the servers-side pathway. There again - here the similar rooms occur - similar things shown in them. This time though - what makes my skin crawl is how they're all angry. If the Elites did what they did for pleasure, here the Military did what they did to get their anger out.
"They like the whole idea of beating someone with fists or using firearms to kill. It's how they get off on it." - Liang whispers in my ear, as once again - the cloth is over my mouth, wrapped, so I won't make any noise.
As we go through the corridor, I notice one room in particular that for some reason draws me in - the man, large not that old by the looks of it, standing there in front of a small girl no older than maybe 9-10 years of age. I halt next to the window, that lets you look into the room. He chats with her, by the looks of it. She's smiling. He makes her drink something. She does, then becomes docile, out of it - drugged. He undresses her, stands in front of her, then pulls out a grenade from his back pocket, shoving it inside her from the bottom. He walks back from her, as he makes her stand there, on the other end of the room. A few moments later - that girl is blown apart by the grenade. He stands there, covered in pieces of her, faintly smiling. The face, the eyes of that man - like he's been dead for a very long while, but the second, the very moment that girl blew up in front of him - for a split second he seemed to be happy.
I stood there, stunned, the bits of blood and her remains were all over the room. The man then turned to push a button on the wall, opening the door on the other side, with another girl, pretty much the same age, walking in though already drugged. This man then repeats the same thing. Another girl blows up.
By this point Liang yanks me away, dragging me with him along. I feel the anger boil up, the wish to kill that bastard just swallowing me whole. My mouth gagged by the cloth, with Liang having a hard grip on me as he dragged me away, to the servants area.
Once we got there, he walked to a room, the same type of prison quarters, throwing me against the far wall. I get up and try to push him away, trying to go and save another girl from being this obliterated. The damn gag is still in my mouth. Liang gives me a punch to the gut. A kind that knocks your lights out. And I did fall to my knees, as I wept like a child. My hands reached for the gag, but Liang just slapped them away.
"You think you can save them? You? Pfft. That man, Harringhey, he's known to kill a dozen in a day. I told you to keep your shit together. We're not done yet." - Liang coldly tells me.
I do hear him, shouting into the gag, as it muffles me, crying and punching the floor. This!
THIS!!! This level of helplessness!!! This is heavily too much to take! This is torture! I want it to stop! Please! It feels like I'm in hell, trying to bargain with the Devil himself. Are they showing it to me to break me? Are they showing it to me to beat me into submission? This is utter torture!
After some time Liang pulls the gag and the wrapping off of my mouth. I breath in, tired from all this. For some reason this whole thing made me feel empty. Like I died in the moment.
"It's not the end, Adrian. A few floors to go." - Liang tells me. - "You have to keep your mouth shut as we go. I'll have to put the gag back on, before we leave."
Somehow he seems a bit nicer. I don't know how. But his tone seems nicer.
As I sit on the floor in defeat, Liang goes off somewhere. Then after about 10 minutes, maybe more, he returns, bringing me some water. I drink it, feeling no sense of it. Like the liquid just pours into a vessel. No taste, no texture. I'm wondering only about one thing - when does this end?
I finish the water, get up, Liang puts the gag back in, wrapping it around my mouth. Then once more takes me by the hand and we move on. Another set of pathways, corridors that seem endless. They are not wide at all, if two people should pass by - they'd have to do it sideways. That's what I noticed of all the servants' pathways - very narrow, poorly lit. But in the damn existence.
Another stairway down. Feels like this is another layer to hell. I wonder if the lowest shall be the Ice hell that writers have spoken of. Instead we get to the end of the stairway, another metal door opening and we step out into what feels like a ghost city. Not a soul on the streets. Endless robots whirring from place to place. Glass walls everywhere, with people sitting inside, head gear, body gear, managing the computer systems, is what it feels like. Connected by wires and tubes. The robots just deposit some new packs of liquids, remove filled packs of liquids and on and on they go.
It's like the whole place is an incubator with half-naked people in the wires and setups that endlessly go something in the system. We walk in silence, as I observe this thing. I halt at one sight - the robots disconnecting and removing a human from the setup. Absolutely looking like a half-mummified thing. Then the robots carrying this human put him in a box-like thing and take it away. Another human is then rolled in in that mummified human place and connected to the system. The person seems to wake up from slumber, as he gets connected and starts off working right away.
Liang just pulls me along with him, further to the side of the servants pathway. As we walk, I notice more and more similar situations appear. With disregarded mummies and newly installed humans taking the place in their stead.
Once more we reached the 'play' rooms, which we got across on each floor. Here in the rooms, the people all wear the head gear and the body gear, some connected to a robot, some with a box-like thing pretty small in size. They all seem to have same thing in common - they are in these rooms, being touched by the robots, being fucked by the robots, some more android looking, some just plain sets with attached silicone bits that these geared humans interact with. And these geared ones - their hands never leave their sides. As if stuck to them, letting the android or the robot do them in various ways.
That's quite the stark difference from previous levels.
We walk with Liang to the similar prison looking rooms, there he takes off wraps and the gag.
"I see you have questions now." - Liang looks at me. - "Go on, I'll answer."
"What was that?" - I ask.
"This is the tech level. Here people are made to work for the maintenance of the whole city. All the robots, all technologies, all that's tech - that's this level." - Liang answers.
"What do you mean they are made here?" - I ask.
"We passed by multiple rooms with egg-like pods, remember?" - Liang asks me. I nod. - "That's where they're being grown. These humans that operate this floor. From an embryo to the full human until age 16 or so, then taken out to work the system, as they're trained from infancy here to understand the system and work it. They never leave there."
"The rooms though… The…" - I try to find words.
"Ah, yes, some do find out about the sex content through what they maintain in the system. That's how they manage to even discover that the floor has these rooms and go there to try out the whole experience. These people here - they've never seen other humans. Not one checked to see others. Head gear is pretty much embedded into the head itself. It would be rather hard and excruciatingly painful to try and remove the gear. They're connected to the wiring and through the wiring. Robots maintain their eating through special IV and take care of their excrements, as you've seen. They're a doll that's never been touched. So the system keeps it so with androids and robots - to only limit them to what they've known." - Liang explains.
"But they're human." - I retorted.
"Mhm, a lab grown human. A pet with no senses for most part. That is why even with silicone up their ass or vagina - they don't feel anything. They were produced in such a way to try it, if they want it - but they have no feeling of how it is. Lab grown stock with the sole purpose to do their work. If it dies - it's then thrown out, with a new one to be put in their place. Simple." - Liang lets out, as he observes me.
"But upstairs the people… They use other people." - I say.
"Yeah, because they're aware they can do that. From here and down lower - that's not an option. You'll see what I mean." - Liang says, then shows me the gag. - "You gonna be able to keep your mouth shut on your own or should I put this in?"
I'm not sure I'll be able to keep quiet. I don't feel like I can trust myself with that.
"Put it in." - I replied to Liang. He gags me, wrapping me with cloth around again.
"Let's go. Few more left." - He says.