Chapter 2: Confined in Siberia

Question: Do aliens have human rights?

Answer: When warships hover in Earth's orbit with all cannons aimed at the ground, aliens certainly have human rights! Even imperial power could be negotiated.

But if a lone individual arrives on Earth, let alone human rights, their treatment would likely be on par with a laboratory mouse.

This is the reason why the time-traveler codenamed En-Nyu-No-O-Ding (НЛО_один) finds himself in his current environment: a sealed room with no access to daylight.

The environment is far from comfortable, containing only a bed, a washbasin, and a toilet. The atmosphere closely resembles that of a prison cell seen in films and television.

The reason I say the atmosphere is merely similar is that ordinary prisons do not work so hard to paint everything white, change to white sheets, and polish the steel washbasin and toilet until they shine like mirrors.

Moreover, the room is actually larger than the house I mortgaged for thirty years in my previous life! It just lacks decoration or partitions, making the interior as monotonous as an unfinished shell.

And in this room, En-Nyu-No-O-Ding does not even have the power to turn the lights on or off. The light switch is controlled by the researchers in white coats outside.

Our protagonist has had only two states of dress from childhood to adulthood: either naked or wearing a white straight-cut one-piece dress. Compared to a hospital patient's surgical gown, the only difference is that he doesn't have to expose his buttocks.

During infancy, staff assisted in feeding him dairy products. But after weaning, his food became an unchanging nutritional meal. It was neither filling nor tasty.

However, his cell was so clean that he couldn't even catch cockroaches, rats, or geckos to stave off hunger. The only thing he could get his hands on was the feces in the toilet that hadn't been flushed yet...

Alright, this really tests one's limits. We time-travelers haven't starved to this extent, so I still pressed the flush switch. This was something I could control; the white coats hadn't stripped me of it to force me to remain accompanied by feces.

In short, aside from three meals and the lights turning on and off to indicate a day had passed, nothing else for measuring time or days appeared within his line of sight.

The temperature remained basically unchanged; the room maintained an almost constant heat, making it impossible to feel the changes of spring, summer, autumn, or winter.

Anyway, relying on that straight-cut dress which was no different from being naked, and the thin quilt on the bed, he wouldn't catch a cold or fall ill.

Speaking of illness, in this time of unknown years, he truly hadn't fallen sick with anything; neither major nor minor illnesses. But he couldn't be called healthy either; he was almost every day in a sub-healthy state of not starving to death but never full.

Communication with others was almost non-existent; aside from being dragged out regularly for blood draws and physical exams, no one had any contact with him. Even when others were right in front of him, they spoke and acted cautiously, trying their best not to reveal any extra information.

By the way, the cleaning of the 'cell' was performed by others while he was away for his physical exam.

Anyway, no matter what mark or item he wanted to leave behind, including uneaten food deliberately left, it would be cleaned away during that time. Or perhaps taken away for research?

After experiencing this a few times, the person locked inside stopped doing such superfluous things.

Regarding this situation, this 'alien' brought through time initially didn't understand why no one wanted to talk to him or probe for information.

Later, he figured it out. The premise of communication is that the other party has information he wants to know; for someone picked up during infancy, what important information could possibly be in his brain?

Should they discuss the feeling of traveling through space in an infant state inside that spacecraft?

Or should they interrogate him about the technology of his home planet? Would anyone expect to extract such things from a being with only infant memories?

So the truly valuable things about him were actually that spacecraft which brought him to Earth, and his 'alien' self, right?

No wonder everyone who contacted him treated him with the caution of facing a great enemy.

Almost all of them wore airtight protective suits to make close contact with him. Those who wore only white coats could only be seen through large glass windows.

He hadn't thought about chatting a couple of sentences with them, expressing that he was born under the red flag and longed for great men and a harmonious society...

Thinking that he had experienced time travel, something so absurd that it only appears in novels, it was hard to say whether this Earth was the Earth he was familiar with.

Although what he saw were still standard Slavic people, not apes, gorillas, or baboons; and what they spoke sounded like Russian, not English, Japanese, or German.

But he really didn't dare to gamble on whether their scalpels would come down if they found out he had obtained information about Earth from somewhere unknown.

Because in such an isolated environment, if he still had a way to obtain outside information, anyone would want to find a reason for it, regardless of whether it was right or wrong.

If he happened to say the wrong situation or name the wrong person, then he would really have to be dissected even if he didn't want to be.

How did that saying go? Only a dead alien is a good alien.

In a harmonious society, not challenging the official iron fist is the only way to survive.

Cattle and horses accustomed to submitting to adversity, working 996 until it becomes 007, certainly won't have the romance of the French who rise up at the slightest provocation. After working hard for a lifetime, one eventually realizes that seeking an auntie to keep you is the true way.

Now, although he wasn't being kept by an auntie, had no anime to watch, no games to play, no phone to awkwardly chat on, no fatty's happy water, and no fried foods or skewers to heal his life, there was nothing to complain about.

He originally thought that this life of isolation, regular physical exams, and blood draws would continue until his natural death. He didn't expect that after his body developed to a bottleneck, things would change.

The white coats seemed to lift some restriction and started torturing the alien relentlessly.

Blunt force injuries, cuts, puncture wounds, burns—various torture techniques, some heard of, some unseen, and some never even heard of, were applied one by one. The torture instruments were naturally equally bizarre.

The white coats' goal was naturally not to interrogate anything; the torture itself was their objective. Or rather, they wanted to know more detailed bodily functions of the alien, such as regenerative ability and immune capacity.

For instance, with electrocution, endurance was not within their consideration. The white coats just wanted to test at what voltage the contact area would be burned black or the person would be electrocuted into unconsciousness.

Initially, the injuries were within the range of minor wounds, just experimenting on different parts like the limbs and torso. Then the severity of the injuries increased, even breaking arm and leg bones, just to see the healing ability of the bones.

As a veteran time-traveler who was a cattle and horse, where had he ever experienced such things? Before his time travel, what he suffered was merely the accumulation of various fatigues and mental pressures, along with anxiety about life, that was all.

Looking back now, that pressure was truly insignificant. At least, by relaxing his mindset and submitting to adversity, he could adapt to that life. But direct physical harm is truly different!

Moreover, judging from the gradually increasing severity of the injuries, although at the current stage they were still non-permanent injuries capable of healing, it wouldn't be surprising if they eventually removed his limbs or gouged out an organ.

Or perhaps start treating him like a gu vessel, relentlessly torturing him with various bacteria and viruses.

In the very end, there would only be two choices: to be made into a specimen or a slide specimen. It is very disappointing that the choice would not be in his hands anyway.

But to be honest, between the isolation of the growth period and this unceasing physical torture, which is more painful is truly hard to say.

Tom Hanks' Cast Away had at least a volleyball named Wilson for company. He had nothing.

If it weren't for the memories of his previous life in his mind, the films, anime, novels, music, and other artistic or entertainment works once regarded as spiritual poison, which he cherished and recalled again and again, he truly didn't know how he would have survived that time without going mad.

But now, this physical pain and torture inflicted upon him only made the time-traveler, whose spirit was already on the verge of collapse, jump from one abyss to another. Despair began to brew.

So I studied hard for over ten years, entered society and became a veteran cattle and horse, yet I am still full of sin. So does the King of Hell want me to repay in this life in such a tragic way?

Exactly how long he had been in this world, the time-traveler codenamed En-Nyu-No-O-Ding was not clear.

He only knew that on a certain day, the lights no longer turned off, and no food was delivered. He was just like someone abandoned.

Although the water from the faucet was plentiful, losing other food sources, that hunger where the front chest sticks to the back still overwhelmed this body that had long suffered malnutrition and torture. His arm was still in a splint.

Plus, the lights that never turned off, although not as bright as the high-wattage interrogation lamps, the mental fatigue caused by the inability to rest properly pushed the person to the limit.

At such a time, a person actually shamefully began to miss the days not long ago when he was tortured to the point of ecstasy.

If anyone heard him, he really wanted to shout in his native language: Kill me or flay me, just come and do it, but give me a last meal to eat! In this broken place, even digging for wild roots, gnawing on tree bark, or eating Guanyin earth was impossible.

Actually, at this stage, he only then remembered that he could eat his own flesh. But not to mention how much flesh there was to gnaw on in those thin arms or legs, he didn't even have the strength to bite; he couldn't eat himself even if he wanted to.

His train of thought snapped without warning, and he simply passed out so abruptly. Both his heartbeat and breathing gradually slowed.

This state continued to develop, until finally his heart stopped beating entirely and he stopped breathing. The only thing worth being grateful for was that he had already lost consciousness, so he didn't have to taste this slow death.

The previous life was better, after all. By the time he realized it, the very next instant, he couldn't feel a thing anymore.

The last impression of this life was nothing more than a single sentence: "So hungry."

(End of chapter)