Awakening

"Wake up, Liam." This inexplicable voice was the last thing that a young man who lived alone in a cramped single bedroom apartment would expect to hear upon waking up.

Or rather, almost waking up.

This mysterious voice's sole attainment by calling him was turning the soundlessly sleeping Liam into the living embodiment of a zombie. Not that this would be any different from his usual morning routine, which always involved being half awakened and mildly annoyed.

That mild annoyance didn't take long to loose its mildness aspect though. Since, the moment he tried to open his eyes, his eyelids seemed to be glued together like siamese twins.

Moreover, upon trying to use his hands to force them to open, a weird feeling of impotence was all he got in return. As, despite being able to feel them, there was no sign of movement to compensate for his intense effort.

In addition to all of that, something he hadn't noticed up until that moment also made the whole experience even more frightening — the familiar softness and coziness provided by his bed was nowhere to be felt.

Could he be experiencing that sleep paralysis thing that he read about on the internet in one of the countless wasted hours he had spent looking at his phone's screen?

Before Liam could have time to ask himself more questions, he heard that same voice again. This time clearly. "Can you hear me?"

Not knowing what else to do, Liam tried speak. To his utter surprise, it worked. "Why can't I open my eyes? Why can't I move my arms? What the fuck is going on here?"

"Calm down! Your body has just been printed, it's normal that you can't move freely yet. Give some time to the cells from your nervous system to become completely active and you are going to be able to move normally." Liam was able to hear every single one of those words clearly, but to him, that whole sentence didn't make any sense.

So, instead of pointlessly keeping on asking questions, he tried to use all his force to move his arms once more. In this instance, however, he felt some movement in one of his little fingers.

From there to regain full control of his hands and arms was just a matter of keep trying, which he did instinctively.

Upon succeeding, he used his hands to reach his eyes and force them open. Surprisingly, there was no resistance and the feeling that his eyes were glued together turned out to be nothing but a mistake from his own senses.

Upon opening them, his obscured vision only gave him a blurred image of predominant white light with what seemed to be the outline of a person in the center of his field of view not too far away from him. Out of pure instinct, Liam began to blink frantically hoping that everything went back to normal.

Each time he opened and closed his eyes, the image of the person before him became clearer and clearer alongside with the rest of the room that looked nothing like his bedroom.

But the girl before him was definitely more successful into catching his attention than some white walls with nothing in them.

She was a young woman who looked no older than twenty. She had her black hair in a ponytail which highlighted her light blue eyes that seemed to be filled with some streaks of an unusual color at the iris. As for clothing, she was wearing a white lab coat with a name tag attached on the chest area.

Of course, Liam didn't bother reading that and straightforwardly sputtered out. "Who the fuck are you? This is not my bedroom! What the fuck is going on here!?"

"You have been successfully extracted from the simulation. The world you had been living in for all of your life, strictly speaking, is not the real world." Said the young woman in a nonchalant tone.

"Not real? Is this some kind of elaborate prank or something? How could a sane person possibly believe all this bullshit you're saying." Said Liam in a loud and clear voice not making any effort to hide his outrage.

The young woman remained mostly unfazed at his outburst of anger, and just shifted her gaze to the floor with an ambiguous expression on her face that a keen observer would have interpreted as a hint of guilt.

But that observer, of course, wasn't Liam. Not at that moment at least, due to the whole situation that he suddenly found himself involved with being completely outside of his scope of understanding.

"If you take a look at your feet perhaps you'll believe me." Suggested the young woman.

Her calm voice alongside with the sheer simplicity of her proposal made Liam not even think before complying.

Below his feet, there was some sort of cylindrical platform made of some kind of metal with hundreds of unusual shining symbols carved into it. But that was not what almost made Liam lose his mind and scream at top of his lungs.

His feet were not actually touching that platform.

Upon seeing that, his first reaction was to seek a plausible explanation like his body being suspended by ropes or having some sort of support attached to his back. But no matter how much he looked around and inspected his body, none of those things could be found anywhere. And on the top of all of that, now that he had inspected all of his close surroundings, he found some scraps of things he vaguely recognized as being small pieces of his mattress floating about around him.

With all the evidence before his eyes, he had no other option but to accept that for some reason he really was floating.

Well, that or he actually went crazy. The latter being way more likely according to his flawed reasoning byproduct of his rushed judgment of the situation.

Had he noticed sooner that he had been facing the young woman from a higher up point of view from the start, Liam would have likely freaked out before any meaningful sentence could have left his mouth.

But even though that had not been the case, the sheer shock he received from the absurdity of his current predicament was only slightly reduced, affecting him to the extent that it took a couple of minutes for his thoughts to drift back to the young woman in front of him.

She had waited patiently for Liam to take the initiative to talk to her for the sake of giving him some time to process his new reality.

And that indeed helped him to at least realize that panicking wouldn't make him stop floating, nor would it help him to get rid of that awful feeling of being trapped inside an invisible cage.

Even though it was only natural for Liam to be distrustful of the things he had been told, the thought of all of that being true also became somewhat acceptable after what he saw.

But, even so, at the moment, there was a way more important issue that was bothering him. "How can I get out of here? This feeling of weightlessness is driving me crazy."

"You can't, unless I turn off the gravity field, which I will gladly do if you stop moving so much." Said the young woman.

As she said that, the many shining symbols on the cylindrical platform began to rapidly dull their colors.

Liam, despite being clueless about what was going on with the platform, instinctively prepared himself for the fall. Not that falling from such height would be scary in any way, as his feet were not even 30 centimeters above the platform.

But in the end, the fall he expected never happened, as a blue aura suddenly enshrouded his body, timely moving him away from the platform and placing him on solid ground.

Liam was dumbfounded. He couldn't believe his eyes and kept staring at the young woman not even bothering to close his mouth.

At the sight of the shocked man, she only sighed and said. "It was too soon to show you this, I know, but I couldn't risk your fall to break the artifact that printed your body. It's one of a kind after all."

There were hundreds of questions flooding Liam's mind all at once at that moment. So much so that it was starting to give him an actual headache.

His unconscious reaction to all of that, as a way his mind found to cope with the situation, was to say something rather trivial instead of trying to understand the complex things happening around him. "You look like you don't sleep for two nights in a row, you should take some time to rest."

This time, the young woman was the one who had been caught out of guard and didn't know what to say at his rude remark.

The fact that she needed some rest was more than obvious taking into account the black circles around her eyes, but the accuracy of Liam's guess of how many nights she had skipped sleeping was not as much.

"Is your name Sally Moria as it says in there? And what are those weird symbols below the name?" Liam asked two questions while pointing at the tag in her chest while flinching his left eye.

Liam hadn't even considered asking more important questions such as why he was able to read that name, or why they were even speaking English — the language of a simulated world, if her claim was to be believed.

"Yes, and it's better if you only think of those as something I use to open doors for now." Replied Sally, turning a blind eye to his previous remark.

She didn't miss the fact that Liam's left eyes flinched every time he asked a question. From that, she concluded that he was at the verge of a breakdown and it would be better to avoid the topic of anything unfamiliar to him for the time being.

If only she had a say in what was going to happen after they left that room, that was what she would do at least.