Q: Do aliens have human rights?
A: When their warships hovered in Earth's orbit, with every gun aimed at the ground, aliens had plenty of human rights! Even wanting imperial power was negotiable.
But if one came to Earth alone, then forget human rights—its treatment would probably be on the same level as a lab rat's.
That was why the transmigrator codenamed Ennu No Odin (НЛО_один) now found himself in a windowless sealed room.
The environment could not exactly be called comfortable. There was only a bed, a washbasin, and a sitting toilet. It felt much like the individual cells in prison scenes from films and television shows he had watched.
He only said it felt similar because ordinary prisons would not go to such lengths to repaint everything white, replace the sheets with white ones, and polish the steel washbasin and toilet until they gleamed like mirrors.
The room was even larger than the apartment he had spent thirty years paying off a mortgage for in his previous life! It simply had no decoration or partitions, leaving the interior as monotonous as an unfinished shell.
And in this room, Ennu No Odin did not even have the right to turn the lights on or off. The switches were controlled by the researchers in white coats outside.
Their protagonist had only ever had two states of dress since childhood: naked, or wearing a white, straight-cut one-piece gown. Compared to a hospital patient's surgical gown, the only difference was that his did not leave his butt exposed.
During infancy, someone had helped feed him dairy products. But after he was weaned, all he got was the same nutrition meals every day. Never enough to fill him, and disgusting besides.
His cell was simply too clean. He could not even catch cockroaches, rats, geckos, or anything else to fill his stomach. The only thing he could fish out was the shit that had not yet been flushed down the toilet...
All right, that was asking too much of himself. This great transmigrator was not starving to that extent yet, so he pressed the flush button. That was at least something he could control, something the white coats had not taken from him to force him to live alongside shit.
In short, apart from the three meals and the lights turning on and off marking the passage of a day, there was nothing else within sight that could track time or dates.
The temperature barely changed. The room was maintained at an almost constant temperature, leaving him unable to sense the changing seasons.
In any case, with that straight-cut gown that was barely better than being naked, along with the thin blanket on the bed, he would not catch a chill or fall ill.
Speaking of illness, in all this time without any sense of the date, he had not actually gotten sick—not with anything major or minor. But he could not be called healthy either. Almost every day, he remained in a subhealthy state: not starving to death, but never eating enough.
He had almost no communication with anyone else. Other than being periodically taken out for blood draws and physical examinations, no one made contact with him. Even when they stood before him, they spoke and acted cautiously, doing their best not to reveal any unnecessary information.
Incidentally, his "cell" was cleaned while he was away for medical examinations.
No matter what marks or objects he tried to leave behind, including food he deliberately saved instead of eating, they would all be cleared away at that time. Or taken away for research?
After experiencing that a few times, the person locked inside stopped doing such pointless things.
At first, this "alien" who had transmigrated here did not understand the situation either. Why did no one want to talk to him or pry information out of him?
Later, he figured it out. The premise of communication was that the other party possessed information one wanted to know. What important information could someone found as an infant possibly have in his head?
Were they supposed to discuss what it felt like to travel through space as a baby aboard that spacecraft?
Or interrogate him about his home planet's technology? Would they expect to get such things from a creature whose memories only went back to infancy?
So the things that truly held value were the craft that had carried him to Earth, and this "alien" himself.
No wonder everyone treated contact with him as though they were facing a formidable enemy.
Almost everyone who approached him at close range wore airtight protective suits. Those merely wearing white coats could only see him through huge glass windows.
It was not as though he had never considered chatting with them, telling them he had been born under the red flag and yearned for great leaders and a harmonious society...
But considering he had already experienced something as absurd as transmigration, something that only appeared in novels, he could not be sure whether this Earth was still the Earth he knew.
The people he saw were still standard Slavs, not apes, chimpanzees, or baboons. The language they spoke also sounded like Russian, not English, Japanese, or German.
But he truly did not dare gamble on whether their scalpels would come down if they learned that he somehow possessed information about Earth.
Because in such an isolated environment, the fact that he could somehow know about the outside world would make anyone want to find an explanation, whether it was right or wrong.
If he happened to describe something incorrectly or mention the wrong person, then even if they had not wanted to dissect him, they would have no choice but to do so.
How did that saying go? Only a dead alien was a good alien.
In a harmonious society, not challenging the authorities' iron fist was the only sure way to keep surviving.
As a workhorse accustomed to swallowing hardship, someone who had nearly worked 996 into 007, he naturally lacked the French romanticism of rising up at the drop of a hat. He had worked hard his entire life, only to discover in the end that getting kept by a rich older woman was the true path.
Now, he was not being kept by a rich older woman. There was no anime to watch, no games to play, no phone to make awkward small talk on, no Otaku happy water, fried food, or grilled skewers to heal his life. But there was nothing to rail against, either.
He had thought that this isolated life of regular examinations and blood draws would continue until he died naturally. He had not expected things to change once his body's development reached a bottleneck.
The white coats seemed to have lifted some kind of restriction and began going all out on the alien.
Blunt injuries, cuts, puncture wounds, burns and scalds—every torture method he had heard of but never seen, even methods he had never heard of at all, was used on him one after another. The instruments of torture were, of course, equally bizarre.
The white coats were not trying to interrogate him. The torture itself was their goal. Or rather, they wanted to learn more detailed information about the alien's physical functions, such as his recovery ability and immunity.
For example, his tolerance for electric torture was not among their concerns. The white coats merely wanted to test what voltage would char the point of contact or electrocute someone into unconsciousness.
At first, the injuries remained minor. They were simply testing different areas of his limbs and torso. Then the damage became increasingly severe. They even broke the bones in his arms and legs, merely to observe how well they healed.
As a veteran workhorse, how could this transmigrator have ever experienced anything like that? Before transmigrating, all he had endured was accumulated fatigue and mental pressure, along with anxiety about life. That was all.
Looking back now, that little pressure truly had been insignificant. So long as he relaxed and endured, he could adapt to that kind of life. But direct physical harm was truly different!
And judging from how the severity of the injuries was steadily escalating, although they were currently all nonpermanent injuries that could heal, it would not be surprising if they someday removed his limbs or took out one of his organs.
Or perhaps they would begin treating him like a breeding vessel, tormenting him with every kind of bacteria and virus.
In the very end, there would only be two options: turn him into a specimen, or turn him into sliced specimens. Disappointingly, the choice would not be in his hands.
But honestly, it was hard to say which was more painful: the isolated loneliness of his childhood, or this endless physical torment.
Tom Hanks in Cast Away had at least had a volleyball named Wilson for company. He had nothing.
If not for the memories of his previous life, for repeatedly and dearly revisiting films, anime, novels, music, and other artistic or entertainment works once regarded as spiritual poison, he did not know how he would have endured that time without going insane.
But this physical torture only made the transmigrator, whose mind had already been teetering on the verge of collapse, jump from one abyss into another. Despair began to brew.
So after studying hard for more than ten years and becoming a veteran workhorse after entering society, I was still burdened with grave sins? Was King Yama making me repay them in such a miserable way in this life?
Ennu No Odin, the transmigrator, had no idea how long he had been in this world.
He only knew that one day, the lights stopped turning off, and no food was delivered. It was as if he had been abandoned.
Although the tap water was enough to keep him hydrated, losing every other source of food left him with a hunger so fierce that his chest seemed to press against his back. It finally crushed this body that had long been malnourished and tortured. His arm was still in a splint.
On top of that, although the lights that never turned off were not as bright as the high-wattage lamps used for interrogation, the mental exhaustion from being unable to rest properly also pushed him to the limit.
At times like this, people perversely began to miss the days not long ago when they had been tortured until they wished they were dead.
If someone could hear him, he truly wanted to shout in the language of his homeland, "Kill me or carve me up, do whatever you want, but at least give me one last meal!" In this godforsaken place, he could not even dig up grass roots, chew tree bark, or eat clay.
It was only at this stage that he remembered he could eat his own flesh. But not only was there little meat to gnaw from his scrawny hands and feet, he no longer even had the strength to bite. He could not eat himself even if he wanted to.
His thoughts cut off without warning, and he abruptly fainted. Both his heartbeat and breathing gradually slowed.
As this continued, his heart eventually stopped beating completely, and he stopped breathing. The only thing worth being thankful for was that he had already passed out and did not have to experience that slow death.
His previous life had been better. Once he realized it, the next instant, he felt nothing at all.
The final impression of this life was only one sentence: So hungry.