You are lying on your back on a hard surface. Your eyes are open, but you see nothing. Pure black. The air smells of rust, stale coolant, and something else—something sharp and chemical, long faded but not forgotten.

A memory, thin as a wire, pulls taut in your mind: a white room, a needle, a voice saying volunteer. Then, nothing. A void. How long?

You try to move your fingers. They obey, stiff and tingling. You push yourself up onto your elbows. The movement echoes faintly. Your head throbs with a low, persistent ache, a drumbeat behind your eyes. Your heart is a heavy, sluggish weight in your chest.

As your eyes adjust, shapes emerge from the gloom. You are in a chamber. A large, circular room with curved walls of dark metal. Banks of dead monitors line one side, their screens blank and dusty. In the center of the room is what you were lying on: a raised platform, like an operating table, connected to a tangle of severed cables and conduits.

To your left, a massive cylindrical pod stands open, its glass front frosted and cracked. Inside, you can see the silhouette of a reclined seat and more dangling wires. Cryofreeze. The word surfaces from the murk of your mind, cold and certain.

A single, dim emergency light glows red high above, casting long, distorted shadows across the floor. Your shadow, stretched and thin, moves as you do. But for a second, it seems to lag—a half-breath behind your motion. You blink, and it’s normal.

The only exit appears to be a heavy vault door on the far side of the chamber. It’s sealed, with no visible handle or control panel on this side. There are no sounds of life. No hum of machinery, no footsteps, no voices. Just the drip, and the beat of your own heart.

You are alone. You are cold. You have no idea how long you’ve been here, or why the pod opened, or where everyone has gone. The last clear memory you have is of a brownstone in Brooklyn, and a boy with a smirk telling you not to follow him into a fight. His name is… it’s on the tip of your tongue, aching like the throb in your head.