Bicycle Confinement Laboratory Updated -

Elias stepped closer to the nearest screen. It read:

Then he looked at the woman on Screen 12, still mouthing help , still at 91.7%—just over eight percent from oblivion. bicycle confinement laboratory

Help.

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. Elias stepped closer to the nearest screen

The rain had been falling for three weeks when Elias first noticed the bicycles. Not the rusty commuters chained to lampposts, but

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.

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%?