I was jolted awake. Around me was the dull buzzing of electronics. I felt a hand upon my shoulder. I jumped in fear, and flew out of the seat I suddenly found myself sitting in. I saw the flash of a figure drabbed in blue and white. My right hand grabbed them, and my left was spinning, cocked back ready to strike.

  “I-I apologize to have startled you, ma'am.”, The figure began to speak, “But I needed to wake you up for orientation.”

  I was holding onto the collar of an older woman. She may have been mid fifties to just a little older than Alex. I noticed more than one faded scar on her face. Considering I was currently threatening her, she was fairly calm.

  I took in a breath and blinked a few times. I looked around, seeing tan walls, accented in sea-foam green. I relaxed, exhaling and letting go of the woman at the same time. She took a step back.

  “Wha-Where am I? How'd I get here?”, I barely managed to get the words out, before I added one last question, “Who are you?”

  Smiling, the woman spoke, “You are in the waiting room for the Ono Arcology Project. You aren't the only one who has forgotten after waking up.”

  The woman laughed while walking to the door. She reached and spun a dial, prompting the lights to raise.

  She turned back to me, speaking, “As for the who am I? I am Doctor Inessa Antanova. I will be looking over your integration over the next few months.”

  I crossed my arms. I felt coarse tweed run under my right hand's fingers. I looked down, and saw myself draped in a dark tweed suit, a white dress shirt, and a black tie.

  “Come on, let's go. I'm sure you'd like to get moved into your room and be able to start getting your bearings around here.”, Dr. Antonova said.

  I followed Dr. Anotonova as she left through the door. We entered a larger square room with a conference table and a projector pointing at the wall. There were four chairs on either side of the table, two were empty. Us newcomers were sat in the center of the table. There was a bowl of fresh fruit to eat and to drink was coffee and water.

  I smiled and waved at my three co-workers and took my seat. Dr. Antonova turned the lights down, while someone sat next to James turned on the projector. Once the machine was warmed up, a video began to play.

  A woman walked into frame while an industrial lo-fi track played. She stopped next to a large rhombus shaped plumbob on a plinth.

  Hitting her mark, she turned to the camera, “Oh, I didn't see you there. Hi, I'm Dr. Eula Larson. I'm here to help you with your first day in Ono Arcology Laboratories, and what to expect in the coming few days.”

  Dr. Larson hit something on the back of the rhombus, causing it to split in two. The top half lifted, and after raising about a meter in the air a holographic display of a larger rhomboid emitted between the two halves. Text boxes with descriptions pointed to several areas on the holographic rhombus.

  The holographic rhombus was separated into several platters. Living areas were at the top. Further down were recreational areas. The largest platter was for food production, which made sense with how far down we must have been. The bottom two sections were taken up by engineering and biology research and production spaces.

  The camera zoomed in to the top text box, which transitioned to view of the living area. A person crashed from the ceiling into the floor. The person stood up, and he was covered in a comical amount of dust. After shaking it off, not unlike a dog drying off, he turned to the camera.

  “Thank's Dr. Larson, but next time... Try to be more careful”, he said with a smile. “Hi everyone, I'm Arlington Hink, facility manager for The Arcology Project. I'm here to introduce you to your living quarters.

  The rest of this section was fairly uneventful except for three pieces. Lucky for me, I would be housed with one of the new members, so one of my fellow officers. The apartments were all interconnected via a series of pneumatic tubes. This was their solution to needing mail delivered. The final portion that stood out to me was the windows and balcony doors in the bedrooms being blocked off. Mr. Hink said he “didn't want to ruin the surprise.”

  “Anyway folks, that's enough of me gabbing on about where you can live. I think I heard Ol' Farmer John going on about something a little further below”, Arlington said, before pulling out a bouncy ball and throwing it down.

  The scene wiped, and the ball fell down, into a massive hydroponic garden. A man wearing a shirt in a blue and white gingham, blue jeans, and a straw hat caught the ball.

  “Hi, I'm Johnathan Klinkman. I am the head researcher in the field of hydroponics down here. I help plan and produce all food grown and eaten down here. You will be able to enjoy most foods down here, plus many more we've created”, Johnathan said, picking a hefty strawberry off a plant and taking a large bite out of it, before continuing, “Yum, taste that delicious strawcherry flavor! See you on the next level, Farmer John!”

  The man dropped the fruit. It fell off the frame, and cut to a new one. The fruit landed in the same man's hands, but instead of a hydroponics chamber, we were in a large industrial room.

  The man finished eating the fruit, and began to speak, “Thank's for the snack, Farmer John. It took a minute to walk to our factory meat printers, where fresh cuts of your favorite meat are printed fiber by fiber.”

  The man continued on for some time talking about the intense food production chain. After showing us the production, it moved onto how that food got to us. There were communal canteens that served meals four times a day. If you wanted to cook your own food, you were allowed to instead get groceries sent via the pneumatic tubes up to your flat. Very fancy stuff.

  My eyes glazed over until after they stopped waffling on about the amenities. Frankly, there was no way an underground lab's ski lift could have been that good, anyway.

  The final portions of the video showed the different lab settings. There were different biology labs, including high bio-safety level labs. In engineering were several scales. I was a big fan of the robot fighting league they showed off. The final presenter signed off, and sent the video back to Dr. Larson. She said a cheesy line about breaking the chains that bind you, then said goodbye.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The video ended, and Inessa brought the lights back up. After, she sat back down at the table.

  Across from her, an older gentleman, maybe late 60's, began to speak, “Good morning, everyone. I'm glad we could get everyone awake so quickly. I must truly apologize, but for security reasons, we must bring you all in while you're asleep.”

  The man brought his hands together, clapping once. He then pointed his hands out, toward the rest of us.

  “I am Doctor Robert Aldrich. These three with me are Doctor Coy Goldsborough, Adeline Mace, and Doctor Inessa Antonova. We are all to help integrate you into the day to day running of the arcology. Now, would you all introduce yourselves?”

  Alex, James, Max, and I each introduced ourselves. We all pretended to be meeting for the first time, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Inessa staring daggers at Alex. Beyond the quick flash I caught, I thought we slipped by pretty easy.

  Once our introductions were over, we headed to back to the individual breakout rooms attached to the conference room. On the way out, I grabbed a strawcherry from the bowl. I had to see what Farmer John was on about.

  Back in the breakout room, Inessa folded a piece of the wall. From a hanging panel, it turned into a table and benches. She sat down and invited me to join her. I sat as she pulled two large manuals out of a messenger bag.

  I was informed that for the short future, these were my job. One was a manual on the operation of the Cold fusion reactor, and the other was a manual on the production and maintenance of the bio-network cables. The former was for our once a quarter facility maintenance requirement. Three months a year we worked in our departmental maintenance section, and one month a year we cooked and cleaned. The manual labor month was just to humble all the mad scientists. The latter was for our integration period where we joined our integration member and assisted with their projects.

  She went over the two manuals a bit, telling me which sections to start with. For the reactor, she said not to worry too much about it. Nobody expected me to learn all that much about it in the first few months down here. We spent the rest of what I believe was the morning in a guided study, while I ate the strawcherry.

  Not half bad.

  Eventually, when Dr. Anotnova had finished her spiel, she took me to one of the canteens for a proper lunch. She had invited all the cable dogs to join us. There were maybe fifteen of them there, but I didn't get all of their names. I paid more attention to the lab grown fish I'd gotten to eat.

  One guy named Vic Lee, upon hearing me say I was feeling kinda blue, said, “Nonsense! You can't be that sad. You've not even had a sad little bark.”

  He was right. I didn't say a sad little bark.

  We were just shooting the shit after fishing our meal, when Dr. Aldridch stopped by to get me my key-card and apartment number. After a bit more conversation, Inessa took me to my apartment. She left me with the manuals, wishing me to have a good rest of my day.

  I pressed the key-card to the raised lock. With a beep and a click, I was in. The room was dark, lit by only nixie tubes on the far wall, and something further in the room. Alex had beaten me here, but at least I knew who I was rooming with now. He was smoking a cigarette, lying back in a square conversation pit. He welcomed me in.

  “Don't our lungs have filters that neutralize everything in that?”, I asked him.

  “Yeah, why?”, he answered.

  “Well why smoke a cigarette... Wait where the fuck did you get a cigarette down here?”, I asked, rapidly losing my mind.

  “It's just a little ritual more than anything, but to answer your second question, I merely asked some botanists.”

  I laughed and left him alone, with getting out of this itchy jacket proving more important.

  “You take a bedroom?”, I asked, heading down the hall opposite of the entrance.

  “Yeah, I took the left.”, he answered.

  I went into my room, took off my coat, and threw it on the bed. I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like a poorly disguised spy from a cold war show. I took a good look at myself, knowing how much had changed in the last year. I let the tension out of my shoulders, when I noticed the rouladen at the window.

  I decided to look outside. Pressing the button to roll the blinds up, light slowly filled the room. It was a shimmering wave of color amidst a dark sea. I was truly shocked by what I saw.

  Outside, was an empty shaft, with a large central spire sitting in the middle. The distance between the balcony and that spire was maybe a kilometer. The central spire stretched endlessly into the sky and the depths. Flying buttresses emanated from the central spire in a helical fashion. Atop every buttress was an endless array of planter boxes, flowers of all varieties filling them. Vines and lichens of multiple colors grew up the side of the central shaft and the buttresses.

  The color of the flowers seemed to shift, changing between hues. They slowly changed between the colors of the rainbow, like the sands of a beach shifting with the tide. Patterns emerged in the changing colors. I could see figures moving, but its purpose eluded me.

  Tens of thousands of butterflies glittered the air. They flew in an chaotic mess, but all the same it was beautiful. They made the air around a kaleidoscope of chaos as butterflies of all hues darted about. Amid the butterflies was the occasional bird. I saw a bluejay, a cardinal, a white puffball looking bird, and kestrel of some kind.

  It was beautiful.

  It was intoxicating.

  It was far, far too much.

  I quickly brought the blinds down, and lied down in bed. Once I calmed down again, and closed my eyes for a nap. Moments before I fell asleep, I was ripped away from peace.

  I realized I had lied to my cat.