The Dining Room and Experiments

Meals here have never made me look forward to food.

They consisted of some nutritional slop that always tasted similar to what the color gray looks like and there was some variant between meals.

Today's breakfast had the said slop, something that resembled bread, but was hard. We also had a reflective plastic packet of which's contents I was unaware of.

I opened the packet and some watery, chunky substance came out, judging by the scent and color I concluded that it was meant to be carrots.

We were given a carton of milk and a glass of water to wash it down, I'd learned that if I took a sip of the drink we were given and then took a spoonful of the meal the flavor would be suspended in the liquid long enough for me to swallow and not taste it as much, if done correctly, I could get through the meal with barely any flavors and no chunks.

Food isn't as much of a passion for me as it is for Rose, I looked over at her, across the room from me and I could see how upset eating the food here made her.

I never understood how she could read those old cookbooks without suffering, or maybe that was part of the beauty she found in it?

The fact that a meal could change someone's day completely? Shift their mood?

I looked down at my sad plate and thought about the food Rose cooked today, I decided to sink into the flavor for once, living is about sensing things and feeling emotions after all, if I never get to taste the chalky, almost cardboard-like food in front of me I'd never been able to appreciate real food, maybe one day when I get out of this place I could have one of Rose's delicacies.

She could open a restaurant and we would own a little house and have pets...

When I finished my meal count started, several times throughout the day, the supervisors would call out each person's number and they had to be there.

I took my tray back to the station and piled it up with the rest for them to be washed and ready for the next meal, when I looked over where the supervisors would stay normally, I saw someone new.

A younger-looking man, sharp features and blonde hair under the uniform's green hat, he had a different aura to him, I couldn't quite understand it but he seemed happier than any other supervisor I'd met.

Not exactly "happy" but maybe excited.

He counted and as always, everyone was present.

Next was sorting, people would be sent to different "stations" where the tests would be performed, we got stuff injected into us, or we had to swallow pills, a lot of different things were done.

I'd never gotten anything drastic done to me, I wasn't told what was done to me but I always judged by the way I felt afterward.

Compared to other people, I'd had a very easy life.

Today I was sent to station 3, I sat down on a medical bed with a gown on, they connected some wires to my body and plugged other stuff into me.

I saw a man sitting in front of a computer near me, he typed some stuff into the keyboard and an assistant came into the room, he took one of the tubes attached to my body and plugged something into it, I saw a blue liquid go into it and then some of my blood left my body through another tube and it went into a bag.

I had fallen asleep and woke up when I felt the medical equipment being pulled off.

"You may leave now"

I looked around the room and felt my head pounding, I wonder what the liquid was.

Leaving the room I wondered what was done to the other people, there were many of us.

There was a section dedicated to the younger kids since they're newborns until they start puberty, the ages are kept track of but none of us know our ages, people don't live as long as they would outside, after a long time of tests and experiments people wear out, their body isn't what it used to be and they're practically useless to the testers. Or they die.

After a person has lived long enough they're injected with something that kills them, after all the pain they've had to endure they deserve to be able to die in peace.

How do people get here? Easy, when two people have a child they don't want whoever these people are, manage to contact them and offer to take the child away.

They take the child away once born, they don't get a good quality of life but the parents no longer have to care for them.

Thinking about this, I wondered about my own parents, what would have they been like? I tried to imagine how their faces looked, trying to tear apart my own features to imagine what theirs would look like.

Someone called my name... I'd been standing in a hallway for a long time, before I could turn around, everything went black.