FOLLOW HIM
With a repressed sigh, you fall into step once more behind the creature, and follow him out through
the easily ascending door, feeling a little weaker upon your legs than before, and a little as though
you had been napping for a long, long time. What did they do to me? Should I be more scared now,
or less?
After a long walk down a corridor not unlike the one that had led you to the room in which you had
lain upon the chair, you come to another door which slides open in a similar fashion to all those that
you had passed through already.
This next room beyond seemed to be a of a different build than the rest, a different metal making up
the floor, and a series of somewhat more comfortable-seeming chairs and couches arranged about
the space, all pointing towards one wall to the direct left of the doorway you were walking through
with the creature just in front of you. The wall in question appeared to be glass lined on the outside
with a kind of metal not unlike an electric window shade, built with interlocking chains that seemed
to be for strength. What exactly is it keeping out, you wonder.
The creature stopped in the centre of the room, and moved its hand down to a small pedestal
between two of the middlemost couches, where a single button glowed out on the white steel. “Now
look.”
The metal shade begun to slide up into the roof outside the glass much like the doors, revealing a
well lit and wide space beyond, filled with some piece of furniture like those behind you, and with
many, many dark figures; some moving to and fro, and others sitting in various positions. At first,
you assumed that they would be more like the tall, lean creature next to you and the other that you
had met so far, but it didn’t take you long to realise that in no way this was the case.
For a long, long moment, you gaze down upon the milling figures, utterly entranced as you
observed them, and stunned to silence yet again. They were almost... animalistic, in a way, though
they all walked on only two feet, and you could see that they possessed muzzles, ears, and loping
legs, clothed only in scraps of what you could only assume had been white coats – doing a
miserable job of covering the various colors and shades of fur that lay beneath.
The closer you looked, the more of a haunting feeling you got, until finally it struck you. They look
exactly like me.
Your shock was forestalled by the creature’s speech, as it walked next to you to stare down at the
figure milling below in turn. “A long, long time ago, our planet was destroyed by a virus. It took the
adults of the world and turned them into raving, insane monsters, focused on nothing but creating
destruction and killing everything that put itself in their path. We were young then, all of us. Things
were much different. But we realised before long that things would have to stay that way.”
The creature turned to you with it’s cold eyes and pale skin, meeting yours uncomfortably and
seeming somehow even more grave than before. “We would have to stay just as young as we were.
Forever, so we did so. But that's where you come in.”
Your brain spun with confusion as the thing paced away from you as it spoke. So we are truly in
space, and this is truly happening. This was all too much information for you to process, but it
doesn’t seem like your ‘captor’ has finished just yet. “Our bodies still grow old inside, and we still
die, nonetheless, for our bodies cannot exist forever without developing to the stage where the virus
will take us. We began modifying ourselves, our people, making them as different as they can be
from our own bodies while remaining, at the core, inhabitable for our minds.”
However, before the creature can continue speaking, it is interrupted by a loud, ear-splitting screech
that seems to come from all around, and wails up and down with a strong, artificial tone. The
creature jumps in surprise just as much as you do and looks around in fear – probably the first and
strongest expression of emotion that you have seen it give of so far. You glance down through the
window and see a similar disorganised reaction in the animal-creatures below as well. Yet the
longer you look, the more a pattern becomes apparent to you. The things below seem to be fleeing
from one particular corner of the room, and before long you can hear sounds of breaking and yells
just out of sight, causing the figures to scatter and run with increased speed, though it remains
unclear why.
The creature looks to you urgently. “I will explain more later. It’s happening again. Come.”
Without hesitation, you and follow the creature once more to the opposite side of the room where
another door sits, and press on at speed to the corridor beyond, leaving the room behind, and
causing you to soon be joined by several other creatures almost entirely identical to the one that had
been leading you about so far, wordlessly joining the urgent pace onwards.
The group of fleeing figures rapidly grows and grows, each new member giving you strange, half-
fearful glance after half-fearful glance before merely continuing to run in stride with the rest,
pressing on down featureless corridor after featureless corridor.
Eventually, the crowd grows too dense for you, and the ankle of one of the creatures catches at your
own, causing you to stumble and hit the smooth, featureless floor with an explosion of pain, eyes
blinded and shut until you manage to scramble to your feet, and pull yourself together, nursing your
foreign body as you struggle up.
In the moment of panic that follows, you realise that you have lost track of the figure in particular
that you were following – and at the worst possible moment, too. Before you lays a fork in the way,
and behind you lays nothing but the intimidatingly empty walkway that you had run down,
populated only by sounds of breaking and smashing in the far, far distance. The creatures are
splitting and going body ways entirely indiscriminately, seeming much more unsure and panicked
than even before, leaving you with only one choice. Who to follow?
Written by Doppelfoxx on 07 August 2022
