Bicycle Confinement - Laboratory

Not the rusty commuters chained to lampposts, but the ones in the basement of the old Humbert Pharmaceuticals building. He’d been hired as a night security guard after the lab downsized—a skeleton crew maintaining a skeleton facility. His only job: walk the perimeter every two hours, swipe his card at checkpoints, and ignore the distant hum of machinery that never quite shut down.

He understood then. The bicycles weren’t for exercise. They were for extraction. Pedal by pedal, the machine was translating the prisoners’ physical motion into digital data—their memories, their personalities, their very awareness—and uploading it to the central mainframe. And when a subject reached 100%? bicycle confinement laboratory

Elias moved down the row. Each screen showed a different person—different ages, different builds, all pedaling. All asleep. All with neural upload percentages ranging from 3% to 91%. Not the rusty commuters chained to lampposts, but

Then alarms blared, and the basement doors began to seal. He understood then

Elias had eight minutes until the air ran out. But for the first time in three weeks, the rain didn’t matter. He had a story to get out.

Below the data, a live video feed showed a bare room with white walls. Inside, a man in a gray jumpsuit sat on an identical bicycle, pedaling steadily. His eyes were closed. His lips moved, but no sound came through. Behind him, a robotic arm periodically extended a water bottle to his mouth. He drank without waking.