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There was just darkness, swallowing me comfortably. Warm, yet not. Wet, yet dry. I couldn't place the feeling.

Then, light.

I woke to find myself on the metal ground, shivering from a complete lack of clothing except for a white cloth around my waist and another tightly around my chest. I had fallen out of a glass tube behind me, and the room itself was tiny. Only about the size of a small bedroom, all it had was the tube and a single control panel in the corner. A bit of gunk had fallen on my featureless stomach; I brushed it off and tried to stand.

I groggily stood and attempted to walk. I had a hard time standing, but I managed to find my footing quickly. The cold ground chilled my wet feet... wait, I was wet... whatever for?

I stumbled over to the opened tube to find a drain at the bottom of it, and some empty pipes dangling from the top. I then turned to the control panel, not knowing what to do. The controls were unmarked and unresponsive, also covered in a massive amount of dust. So I only had one thing left- the door. This door was a slim metal panel in a depressed part of the wall, splotched with rust and without a handle. A single red light glowed above the door, barely illuminating anything.

I slid my hand down the wall on both sides of the door, hoping for a button or anything which may open what I assumed to be the door. There was nothing, so I felt the door. Again, nothing. The light didn't change, the door didn't open, and it remained as steady as a rock.

I pushed upon the door, my last resort. It failed to budge, so I slumpd down against it and created a puff of dust.

I tried to remember things. Everyone has a life, don't they? A personality, family, a childhood... A name?

I racked my mind for a name, hoping that I could dredge up one. My strangely empty head gave me no answer, no name. All I remembered was something of my life before this. A childhood out in the countryside of somewhere, living in a farmhouse. I remember watching the rockets shoot up to the sky... rockets...?

I also remembered a family. A husband with brown hair and matching eyes. There was a child, too- a girl, with black hair and brown eyes. Her mother's hair, her father's eyes. I remembered my own daughter now, I remembered giving birth to her under the supravision of robots and my husband. But I couldn't place a name...

Oh god, why can't I remember these things? And who was I? Apart from my childhood and my close family, I couldn't remember anything...

Suddenly, the light above me switched from its glaring red to a pleasant green, and the door slid open with a quiet hum. I slowly got up and exited the room.

Beyond that room was a long hallway with eleven doors- ten on the sides of the hall, one at the far end.

I walked slowly and sluggishly down the hall, gazing at the old doors. Each one had a number emblazoned on it. 04, 06, 08, 10. The odd numbers were on the other side.

I glanced back and deducted that I had stepped out of room 02. It was the only one with a green light glowing above its now open door; the others had those annoying dull red lights.

But the door at the end of the hall was unmarked. And as I stepped close to it, its red light flicked to green. The door the slid open in a fashion similar to the previous one, but this one was much louder.

The room that it opened to was a large, round one. About fifty feet wide, with another twenty doors on one side of the circle. Each door had the dim yet glaring red light above it, and there was a single wider door in the center of the other half of the circle. The room was lit by a single flickering light in the center, mostly illuminating a control panel in the center.

I walked over to the control panel and hit a few unmarked buttons. All I managed to do was make one of the old doors grind as it tried to open.

'Come on, work.' I muttered to myself, almost surprised that I actually said something. And once again, the door behind me hummed open- the one alone from the rest.

I walked over to it- and stopped in my tracks. Obviously, the door opened before it should have, because it opened right when the green light switched on. But what startled me was that the far end of the hall seemed to be... materializing. It tore away dirt and rocks to create the rusty, dimly lit tunnel that I saw. It ended in another one of those damnable featureless doors. The materialization of the hallway only took half a second at most, but it caught me off guard. Was I seeing things...?

Maybe not, for I realized the light above the door wasn't even on. It clicked loudly and then switched on, to red.

'I must be going mad...' I whispered to myself. I warily stepped in and walked to the door. It stayed red.

'You constructed that hallway yet, or am I just going nuts...?' I muttered. As soon as I finished saying that, the light switched to green as if to say No, you're not.

It opened to a large room that seemed to almost be some sort of hub area. It was a massive square room with benches on the far walls, a round desk in the center (A sign above it called it a help desk), and stairs lead up somewhere on the far side. There were several other doors scattered around, too.

What really surprised me, though, was the man sitting on the bench about ten feet to my left. He had his head hung down, and he only wore a blue pair of slacks. The man also had ragged brown hair and he was pretty badly injured. He heard the door open, and turned to see me.

'I... where'd you come from?' He asked, standing up but leaning a bit to the side due to a leg injury.

'Just down there... erm...' I replied, pointing down the hall. 'Are you real...?' I then asked, walking over.

'Those robots hurt me pretty bad. Doesn't that make me real enough?' The man stated.

'I... I guess so.' I said.

'Good. What's your name?'

I racked my mind desperately for one, without luck. So I just gave the man a shrug.

'Seems a lot of people are having that problem around here. Name's... well, I haven't gotten that far. Initials, though. O.A.I.'

I couldn't place what those could be, so I just nodded. 'And you mentioned robots...?'

'Yeah. Robots. Those things were causing a lot of damage to me, narrowly escaped.'

'Where did they come from?' I asked. The man calmly pointed to a door at the far end of the room.

'There. Had to flee.' He added. His voice and way of speaking were rather artificial, nor did his voice even seem quite right anyhow. Who was this guy?

'We should probably keep moving, then.'

'You are right. Up the stairs?' He suggested.

'You first.'

We walked across the room, up the dusty stone stairs, and into a wide but low and long hallway lit by the occasional light. O.A.I. walked in front of me with a slight limp, too.

'Do you know what this place was?' I asked as we walked. We were nearing a little door to the side that had just flicked onto green. The man didn't seem to acknowledge it.

'I think it was some sort of bunker. Military.'

'You don't know anything more?' I asked again, and the man shook his head once. We stopped at the door, it it hummed open.

'Negative. You should go look inside; I'll keep watch for these robots.' O.A.I. stated. I shrugged and entered. I also noticed something else... I left footprints in the dust, but he did not. Perhaps he was just walking lightly?

I stepped into what must of been some alternate office space. Six small office cubicles, totally abandoned. Several of them didn't even have chairs, while the others had fallen over. The desks were empty apart from defunctional computer terminals that showed nothing but blackness. One desk caught my eye, though.

This desk was a little more furnished than the others, and the chair was the only one still standing. There was a single, small photo in a standing frame that was covered in dust so thick I couldn't see the photo. I blew it off- and received a shock.

There were two figures in the photo- a man and a small girl. I knew them both; the family figures that my broken mind remembered, my husband and daughter.

'What...? But how...?' I muttered, picking up the photo. Was this my desk? Did I work here? Or am I living a life that isn't mine...?

'Well?' O.A.I. asked.

'Who are you...?' I muttered, walking angrily over to the man with the picture in my hand.

'Another lost man, like you.'

'I know you bloody well aren't.' I growled. I swung a punch at him- and stumbled right through him! He wasn't even physical!

I quickly turned to face the projection of the man, which gave me a surprised look and flickered off. Then, a voice spoke. It was the man's, but more metallic. Less human.

'Subject 02, I'm surprised. You dared to disrupt the illusion. Shattered the dream.'

I looked around, looking for the speaker that was creating the voice.

'Who are you?!' I yelled. 'Why are you doing this? Give me my family back!' I yelled.

'You know my name. O.A.I. Omniscient Artificial Intelligence. You are in my world, And you dare to break it.'

I fell to my knees. 'Damn you... Give me back my family. Get me out of here.'

'I cannot answer your first request. But the second one I can.'

Suddenly, restraints materialized from the ground and strapped my feet to the ground. I stood up and tried to force my way from them- but I couldn't. They were tightly strapped around my feet. I was about to yell at this thing again when the ground started to dematerialize in a circle around me, leaving my strapped to a tiny piece of floating tile. The dematerialization bored a hole into the ground, and the tile started floating down it.

'How is this all happening...?' I muttered.

'It is the power of a god, Subject 02. My power.'

'Damn you! I am not just a number, I'm a person! I have a name! A life!'

'Do you really? Think about it, Subject 02. Or did I design your dream almost too perfect?'

'I know I have a name.I have a family, I am human...'

'Those memories were displaced from others. Your childhood in the countryside? That was a worker's. He donated it many years ago, just before the cataclysm happened. And your "Family"? Taken from another worker. You saw the evidence of that yourself, and you still carry it. And no, you are not human. Not quite.'

The chunk of tile grew wider as we spoke and formed into a round plate of metal, still going down a tunnel. The tunnel opened up below me and closed above- we were going down far.

'I think, I have flesh and blood and a conscious! I am human!'

'It appears I have gotten the defiance part of the cerebral structure correct. But no, you are not. Subject 02, how old do you think you are?'

'Mid-thirties, maybe? What the hell does that have to do with anything, you damnable machine?'

O.A.I.'s voice echoed around me. It was laughing. 'No. You were born when you fell out of that tube. There was no mother; no umbilical cord. Did you not see that?'

Sadly, the robot was right. I had no belly button.

'Many years previously, nuclear war overtook humanity and the surface. Those were the "Rockets" you saw in your so-called memories; I placed them there so you would have some clue to what had happened. But during the crossfire, some of the brightest mind came to this bunker. They created me so that I could reconstruct the human race when the time came. It appears I still have a few flaws to fix. But they were my parents. I am your god- for I will shape your species to my design.'

The tunnel suddenly turned to metal, and then opened up into a massive cylindrical chamber. The walls were lit by long, thin, white lights running down the sides, and there was a massive machine in the center. It had the vague shape of a human torso and human head, but it had eight thin arms and no legs- huge wires hung below it and trailed deep into the darkness far below. The arms were continuously fiddling with things on the far wall, the machine in its entirety must of been nearly a hundred feet tall. The platform lowered and stopped on a viewing balcony on one end, and the massive robot turned.

It sort of had a face, but instead had a gigantic screen which showed a flat green line. The torso was a massive mess of blinking colors and hissing pistons under a grey hull.

'Look upon your god, subject 02.' O.A.I. told me. The line turned into a sound wave reading when it spoke.

'You are not my god. Damn it, humans created you!'

'Humans created all their other gods. They created me. And no, if you were fully human I would not quite call myself your god, in respect of my long dead creators. But you are similar to humanity. Have you not looked at yourself yet?'

Slowly, O.A.I. lowered one of its huge metal arms with a shattered piece of glass in its hand. It wasn't glass, but a mirror. It hovered it in front of me- And I almost choked.

My face wasn't human. The eyes had several inner lids that blinked rapidly over reptilian eyes, and the nose was almost non existent. My teeth were small and sharp, and I also seemed to have gills just under my jaw.

'But... why...?' I cried, but no tears flowed from my monstrous eyes.

'The fallout has not left. It will never disappear fully, for the nuclear war was so intense that who mountain ranges crumbled and craters took the places of lakes. Normal humans could never live in that terrain, not without thick protection suits. They would not be able to grow food, they could not live. I know mutated plants still live in the radioactive wastes, if I was to breed a suitable being that could live in that, they could live well.' O.A.I. continued. 'But if they were like you, they would latch onto what they mistook as humanity with every fiber of their strength. So, if you excuse me, i must be onto the next subject. I shall change the cerebral construction of this one, so they are not as defiant as you. Goodbye, Subject 02.'

I looked down in worry to discover the platform I was on was disintegrating! Whatever he was using to cause those, it was happening fast...

And then I fell, back to the Darkness I was born from.