Where Am I?

The Corridor

She stopped. The voice had told her to stop. It sounded like an animatronic creature whose cogs were rusted and sticking, and it frightened her.

She had been looking at the greyness through the windows in the corridor. She thought she was alone, but that voice spoke.

She had forgotten whether she was visiting someone in this facility or if she was a resident here.

Her memories were foggy, but the metallic voice was clear in that it told her what to do.

She turned to look at the grey breezeblock wall, where the sound seemed to come from.

The voice sounded again, but the words seemed to be nothing but metallic scraping sounds. Looking at the wall, she thought it was moving. She thought she could see a face there. The wall was instructing her with words she could not hear or understand.

She touched the grey wall, and it felt cold and like rusty iron, dust falling from where her fingers had touched it.

Did the wall, or the voice of the wall, want her, or was it warning her?

There was silence. Quiet. Had the voice been silenced? Or was she imagining it?

She was cold and scared.

She did not know why she was here or how she had got here.

She was the only one in the corridor, and there was no sign of any other person.

She turned back, and as she walked, she noticed that the corridor had a slight curve, not much, but it was not straight.

She looked out of the corridor windows again and realised she could see nothing, except maybe a grey fog.

She walked, it seemed like days, and nothing changed.

To her left were the windows and nothing, to her right the wall where she heard the voice.

It started to become clear that the corridor was a vast circle as she noticed dust on the floor. This was where she had touched the wall, and the voice started again, telling her to stop, then descending into a metallic noise.

She had no tools, so she hammered at the wall till her fists bled, but all that it did was dislodge a little more block dust. It did give her a point of reference, but that was not much use to her except to confirm that she was alone in a huge circular corridor.

She wondered if she could smash the windows. After all, glass would be more fragile than the wall.

Twenty minutes later, there was just her blood staining the window. The glass would not give way.

She wondered why she wasn't hungry or needed a drink.

How long had she been here?

Was she going mad, or had she gone mad?

Was this some kind of purgatory? She thought it was closer to hell, but she was determined to find out where she was and to find a way out.

The Watchers

In the laboratory, her body was strapped to a table with wires and sensors on her head transmitting her thoughts to the technicians (all men) in the room.

This one has lasted a long time. She is displaying inordinate strength, but we don't want strength; we want subordinance. We used the voice of god told her to kneel and die at the wall, but after she stopped, her mind could not hear, or else it ignored the voice"

Switch her off now and drop the body in the garbage. We will take another for our experiment.

Observation

Whenever the men were asked why they treated women as chattels to use and abuse, they always opened theirholy booksand quoted lines like these: