The electromagnetic restraints release with a synchronized click that echoes through the sterile space. Before you can process the sudden freedom, hands grip your shoulders—security personnel in tactical gear, their faces obscured by black balaclavas. Your muscles respond immediately, trained reflexes attempting to execute counter-moves, but your body doesn't obey with its usual precision. The primer injection has done something to your proprioception, making distances feel wrong, timing feel off.
"我不会去!" The words burst from your throat—furious, defiant—but hearing Mandarin instead of English creates a disorienting cognitive split. Your thoughts form perfectly in English: I won't go. But your vocal cords betray you. "放开我! 你们没有权利这样做!"
The guards drag you from the chair. Your legs work against you, coordination compromised by whatever neurological interference the primer has caused. Dr. Voss walks ahead, her white coat pristine under the corridor's harsh LED strips, tablet held casually in one hand.
"Subject resistance is primarily psychological at this stage," she dictates into a recording device clipped to her collar. "Motor function degradation at approximately twenty-three percent. Linguistic remapping holding stable."
The corridor stretches before you—industrial grey walls, sealed doors every ten meters, each marked with biohazard warnings and numerical designations. Your detective's mind catalogs everything despite the chaos: security camera positions, door mechanisms, the faint chemical smell underlying the antiseptic.
"你们在毁掉一个人!" You struggle against their grip, and the words come out with perfect tonal accuracy even as your mind screams in English. They're destroying a person. "这是谋杀! 这是—" Murder. This is—
"Subject Forty-Four continues verbal protest," Voss notes clinically. She stops before a reinforced door marked "TRANSFORMATION SUITE 3 - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY." Her palm presses against a biometric scanner. Servos whir. The door splits open vertically, revealing a chamber beyond that gleams with surgical steel and complex machinery.
"不! 住手!" Your voice cracks with genuine desperation now, the Mandarin flowing despite every effort to force English past your lips. No. Stop. "求求你们!" Please.
But they're already pulling you across the threshold into the chamber's cold fluorescent glare, and the door begins its inexorable seal behind you.