The Experiment

The room was large, rectangular and white. It was about 30 metres long, but the white floors and walls gave an impression of it being much larger. The only visible entrance was an oxidised steel door at the far end of the room, and in the centre of the room there stood an altar-like table, also hospital-white.  Beside the table stood a few metallic objects of unknown purpose and a lamp, menacingly hunched over the table like a bird of prey.  It produced only a small circle of light, leaving the sides of the room in utter darkness.
Suddenly, painfully bright overhead lights began to flicker on, producing a faint buzzing noise.  Someone - a woman with dark, pulled back brown hair covered in a white lab coat - entered the room, her motion broken by the strobe light.  Behind her were four others – men, judging from their movements and appearance, all dressed in identical lab coats and face-masks.  Finally, the flickering stopped.
The group appeared inhuman, almost robotic, as they moved together towards the upper-right corner of the room. Their only human features were their eyes, but even these remained painfully cold and cruel.
With the lights fully on, the walls of the room became visible. Hanging from them were twenty humans, five on each of the walls. They remained so still that, had they not been the only colourful element of the room, they would have been indistinguishable from the wall. It was a grotesque and unnatural sight - their wrists, by which they were hanging from the walls, were red and swollen.
Thankfully, the men were unconscious.
After issuing brief instructions to two of the men, the leader approached one of the humans hanging from the wall, and, with the help of the remaining two men, began to unshackle him.  A dull, sickening thud resounded as the human fell to the floor.
The two masked men roughly dragged him to the table and placed him on it. As they did this, his head accidentally hit the lamp, which drew a hiss from the woman,
“Careful. If he is damaged in any way...” Her sharp eyes briefly swept around the room, and she went back to making notes on her clipboard.
The human was now strapped to the table, lying on his stomach. There were metal cuffs on his wrists, arms, ankles and thighs, ensuring that he could not move and strap made of something slightly softer fastened his neck to the surface.
Another series of commands from the leader and one of the men removed the lid from a box. Its contents, a selection of sharp tools that glimmered in the light, were sprayed with a strong-smelling disinfectant, and the box closed. The other man began removing the human’s burgundy t-shirt.
“Name?” asked the woman in a commanding tone.
The other two men, who had, because of the command from the leader, been inspecting the humans hanging on the walls, now came over. One of them turned the human’s arm slightly, revealing a label stitched into his skin.
“Hewitt, Jonathan,” replied the man in a surprisingly high, frightened, voice. The woman then asked for his serial number, and was given another reply.
“28, lived in Chicago...” she muttered more to herself than to the others. Her eyes darted from her clipboard to the motionless human, then back again. She carefully stepped in front of the box, her shoes producing a sharp click on the tiled floor. She then removed the lid, placing it carefully beside the box, and scanned the box’s contents. Subsequently, she removed a surgical knife from it with extreme care, and everything seemed to go silent. Even the rustle of her sleeve, as she handed the knife to the man with the high pitched voice, was audible.
The man to whom she handed the knife began to tremble subtly. He diffidently approached the man lying face down on the table, Jonathan Hewitt. Before, it had all seemed so easy to him, but now things were different.  Now he knew the man’s name, and where his home was. He probably had a family, someone who was wondering why he wasn’t at home.
The man with the high-pitched  voice shook violently, drawing disapproving stares from his colleagues. The stare coming from the leader, as she snatched the knife from him, was even harsher than the rest, and entirely unsympathetic.
She passed the knife to another one of the men, one with a large, towering body and callous eyes. The woman was then handed a syringe full of anaesthetic. She glanced irately at the trembling man, who was now facing away, and eagerly slid the syringe into Jonathan Hewitt’s’ upper arm. As soon as she pulled out the syringe, the leader dropped it beside the box, fervently gesturing towards the man holding the knife. As everyone watched him keenly, he leant over the unconscious man, pressing the knife into his back, and...

My eyes blinked twice and opened, revealing the pale blue ceiling of my room and a ray of sunlight peeking out from behind the window curtains.