Containment in Siberia

Q: Do aliens have human rights?

A: When warships are parked in Earth's orbit with all cannons aimed at the ground, aliens have plenty of human rights! Even imperial authority could be negotiable.

But if a lone alien comes to Earth, forget human rights—their treatment is roughly on par with a lab rat.

That's the reason behind the current situation of the time-traveler codenamed Ennyunuo Oding (UFO_one). A sealed, windowless room.

The environment was far from comfortable—just a bed, a washbasin, and a squat toilet. It felt a lot like the atmosphere of a prison cell from those movies and shows he'd seen.

He only said "felt like" because ordinary prisons wouldn't work so hard to paint the walls bright white, change the sheets to white, or polish the steel washbasin and toilet until they shone like mirrors.

Plus, the room was even bigger than the house he'd bought with a thirty-year mortgage in his past life! But there was no decoration or partitions, making the interior as monotonous as a bare concrete shell.

And in this room, Ennyunuo Oding didn't even have the power to turn the lights on or off. The light switch was controlled by the researchers in white coats outside.

For our protagonist, from childhood to adulthood, there were only two states of dress: naked, or wearing a white straight-cut gown. Compared to a hospital patient's surgical gown, the only difference was that he didn't have to bare his ass.

During infancy, staff helped feed him milk products. But after weaning, his food became an unchanging nutritional paste. Not enough to fill him, and terrible tasting.

But his cell was so clean that he couldn't even catch cockroaches, mice, or geckos to supplement his diet. The only thing he could grab was the shit in the toilet that hadn't been flushed yet...

Well, that was too much of a challenge. As a big-shot time-traveler, he wasn't starving enough for that, so he'd just press the flush button. That was something he could control, not taken away by the white coats, forcing him to live with his own waste.

Anyway, aside from three meals a day and the lights turning on and off marking the passage of a day, no other timekeeping or calendar items appeared in his line of sight.

The temperature barely changed; the room maintained a nearly constant climate, with no sense of the seasons shifting.

At least with that gown that felt like wearing nothing and the thin blanket on the bed, he didn't catch a chill or get sick.

Speaking of illness, in all these unknown years, he hadn't really gotten sick—neither major nor minor ailments. But he couldn't call himself healthy either; he was almost every day in a sub-health state of not starving to death but never full.

Communication with others was nearly nonexistent. Aside from being regularly dragged out for blood draws and physical exams, no one contacted him. Even when they were in front of him, the others were tight-lipped, trying not to reveal any extra information.

By the way, the "cell" was cleaned while he was away for checkups.

Anyway, no matter what marks or items he tried to leave behind—including uneaten food deliberately saved—they were all cleared away during that time. Or taken for research?

After a few rounds, the person locked inside stopped bothering with such pointless things.

Faced with this situation, the "alien" who had been transported here didn't understand at first. Why didn't anyone want to talk to him or probe for information?

Later, he figured it out. Communication requires the other party to have information you want. For someone picked up as an infant, what important intel could be in his head?

Discuss what it felt like to travel through space as a baby in that alien spacecraft?

Or interrogate him about his home planet's technology? Would they expect to get that from a being with only infant memories?

So the truly valuable things about him were probably the spacecraft that brought him to Earth and his own "alien" body.

No wonder everyone who contacted him treated him with such cautious, on-edge seriousness.

Almost everyone wore airtight protective suits when getting close to him. Those only in white coats could only be seen through thick glass windows.

He'd thought about chatting with them, expressing that he was born under the red flag, yearning for great leaders and a harmonious society...

But considering he'd experienced something as absurd as time travel, which only happened in novels, he couldn't be sure if this Earth was the one he knew.

Though what he saw were still standard Slavic people, not apes, gorillas, or baboons; the language sounded like Russian, not English, Japanese, or German.

But he really didn't dare gamble on whether their scalpels would come down, especially if they found out he somehow had knowledge of Earth from somewhere.

Because in this isolated environment, if he still had a way to get outside information, anyone would want to find a reason for it, right or wrong.

If he happened to say the wrong thing or name the wrong person, then it really would be "dissect or not dissect"—and the answer would be yes.

As the saying goes, a dead alien is a good alien.

In a harmonious society, don't challenge the official iron fist—that's the only way to survive by lying low.

A lifelong beast of burden, used to taking things lying down, working 996 until it felt like 007, naturally wouldn't have the romantic French tendency to rise up at the drop of a hat. After a lifetime of effort, he'd realized that finding a sugar mommy was the real way to go.

Now, though he wasn't being kept by a sugar mommy, had no anime to watch, no games to play, no phone for awkward chats, no otaku happy water or fried food or skewers to heal his soul, there was nothing to complain about.

He thought this isolated life of regular checkups and blood draws would continue until he died of natural causes. But unexpectedly, once his body development hit a plateau, things changed.

The white coats seemed to lift some restriction and went all out on the alien.

Bruises, cuts, puncture wounds, burns—every kind of torture he'd heard of but never seen, and even ones he'd never heard of, were applied one by one. The instruments were, of course, bizarre and varied.

The white coats' goal wasn't to interrogate anything; torture itself was their purpose. Or rather, they wanted to know more about the alien's recovery abilities, immune system, and other bodily functions.

For example, with electric torture, endurance wasn't a factor in their considerations. The white coats just wanted to test what voltage would char the contact area or knock him unconscious.

At first, the injuries were minor, tested on different parts like limbs and torso. Then the severity increased, even breaking arm and leg bones just to see how bones healed.

As a veteran beast of burden, the time-traveler had never experienced anything like this. Before his journey, his suffering was just accumulated fatigue, mental stress, and anxiety about life—that was all.

Looking back now, that stress was truly insignificant. At least he could relax his mindset, take things lying down, and adapt to that life. But direct physical harm? That was really different!

And from the gradually worsening injuries, though they were still non-permanent wounds that could heal, it wouldn't be surprising if they started cutting off limbs or digging out organs at any point.

Or maybe they'd start using him as a culture dish, injecting all kinds of bacteria and viruses.

In the end, there were only two choices: being made into a specimen or sliced into slides. Disappointingly, the choice wouldn't be his either.

But honestly, compared to the isolated loneliness of his growth period, it was hard to say which was more painful—that or the endless physical torment now.

Tom Hanks had at least a volleyball named Wilson for company on his deserted island. He had nothing.

If not for the memories of her past life still lingering in her mind—those films, anime, novels, music, and other artistic or entertainment works once dismissed as spiritual poison, now cherished and replayed over and over—she truly didn't know how she would have gotten through that time without going mad.

But now, this physical torment inflicted on her body only pushed the transmigrator, whose spirit was already teetering on the brink of collapse, from one abyss into another. A sense of despair began to brew.

So, after over a decade of hard study and becoming a seasoned workhorse in society, I'm still laden with sin. Is the King of Hell making me atone in this life through such a brutal method?

How long had it been since she arrived in this world? Even the transmigrator code-named Ennyunuo Oding didn't know.

She only remembered that on some day, the lights stopped being turned off, and no food was delivered anymore. It was as if she had been abandoned.

Though the water from the tap was enough to fill her stomach, the loss of any other food source meant that gnawing hunger still broke down this body, already suffering from long-term malnutrition and relentless torment. Her arm was still in a splint.

Add to that the lights that never went out—though not as blinding as the high-wattage interrogation lamps—the mental fatigue from being unable to rest properly pushed her to the brink.

At times like this, people were pathetic enough to miss the days when they were being tortured to the point of ecstasy.

If anyone could hear her, she would have wanted to shout in her native tongue: Do whatever you want—kill me, cut me up—but at least give me a last meal. In this godforsaken place, she couldn't even dig up grass roots, gnaw on tree bark, or eat clay.

Actually, at this stage, it occurred to her that she could eat her own flesh. But not only was there little meat on her scrawny arms or legs to chew, she no longer had the strength to bite. Even eating herself was out of reach.

The thread of her thoughts snapped without warning, and she abruptly blacked out. Both her heartbeat and breathing gradually slowed.

This state continued until her heart finally stopped beating entirely, and she stopped breathing. The only silver lining was that she had already lost consciousness, spared from experiencing this slow death.

The past life was still better. By the time she realized it, in the next instant, she felt nothing at all.

The last impression of this life was just one word: "Hungry."