Escape from Nahnia

Ben's head spun around him as the guards lowered him onto a chair. He felt weak, limp. The guards pushed the chair against a table and Ben took the chance to slump as comfortably as he could over hard, flat surface. He smiled to himself as he allowed his body to relax, even though he felt that he was being watched.

A figure across the table clicked on the table lamp, throwing light into the dark room. Ben's retinas burned despite his best efforts to scrunch his eyes close. His headache grew worse, a deep throbbing that seemed to increase in tempo before slowly fading away. He couldn't tell if it had really gone or that it was his body's way of saying that it had adjusted to the light. He cranked an eye open just a bit to acknowledge the figure at the other side.

"State your name, please." The figure spoke in deliberate tones.

Ben's throat was parched, he croaked a monosyllabic word that sounded roughly like his name. He noticed the figure cocking his head to one side, signalling Ben to something. He saw a glass of water, half empty, within an arm's reach. He emptied the half glass in a gulp.

The figure didn't allow Ben the time to enjoy the sensation of fluids cooling off the burning in his throat. He asked again, "Your name."

"Ben Goh," he replied. His lips curled into a smile as his thoughts wandered. "My friends called me Benji. Ben-G."

"What was your last memory?"

"I was held in a prison. Or a mental institution? How long was I inside?" Ben was surprised how quickly the words blurted out, when he was nursing a heavy head and a stiff tongue just moments ago. The thought that the half empty glass was water was actually a truth drug did occur to him, but he could never hold his concentration on that train of thought.

"What did you remember about the place, Ben?"

Ben's brain suddenly came alive with images, sounds, faces. Memories were suddenly unlocked and playing in front of his eyes. Ben felt himself being driven mad by the sensations of his memories and quickly, desperately, grabbed one particular image and focused on it. As the other memories faded out of focus, Ben felt his coherence come to him.

"The food was horrible. We were given chicken spare parts, chopped up beyond recognition. Duck meat always had feathers left on it. All the pork we were provided was fatty and oily. Oil! That's what coated everything that was served there. We'd see the same oily vegetables everyday."

"What else did you see everyday that didn't change?"

Ben felt that the interrogation was trying to lead him to saying something, but that damn truth serum was making it hard for Ben to formulate questions to ask in return. In fact, his mind would focus on the answers for each question the interrogator gave.

"We all had rooms, or cells. The whole building had cells that looked exactly the same. We couldn't do anything everyday. We'd stare at the walls that looked exactly the same all day, everyday. Hmm, I remember seeing a clock in the dining room. But it always showed the same time. It was probably broken."

The figure slid something across the table. Ben recognised his wristwatch wrapped neatly in a ziploc bag. Except it couldn't have been his watch. "Is this a trick? It looks exactly like my watch, it even has my name engraved on the back. But my watch stopped on the day I was brought in to the prison. It showed one thirty in my entire stay there. I was cursing my bad luck to have my watch stop on the first day entering prison. Why is this watch working again?"

"Do you remember who headed the facility you were in?"

Ben's thoughts immediately shifted from the questions about his watch to a particular face: "Superintendent Paul."

"We called him Super Paul. We obviously couldn't drink alcohol in the prison and there were signs everywhere reminding us that alcohol was not allowed on premises. However, we would see him drink merrily in his room. It's like he's deliberately taunting us. I also remember that he's obsessed about cost cutting. We used to get newspapers, but he stopped them. Some of the guards complained that their lack of inventory was hurting the experiment, but he brushed them off and said cost cutting was more important."

Another face appeared in Ben's mind. The chubby cheeks and neatly combed moustache was unmistakable.

"Super Paul was aided by his lackey Warden Kim Jong Phil. This character always gave empty promises and false hopes. I was told that I would only spend 44 weeks in, but 14 months later he was still promising 44 weeks! He promised me that the 'Golf project' was my ticket to get out, for 3 months he said it would be ready in the next week or so. The last I heard, the 'Gold project' never took off. 2 weeks ago, he told me I was to be released, but it turned out to be a hoax as well."

Talking about Kim Jong Phil, Ben's memories suddenly clicked into place. Phil was the last piece of the puzzle in Ben's mind. A spark lit in his eyes and he slowly lifted his head and looked directly towards the glaring table lamp. The words that he had just recited fell in order. Experiment. Time stopped. Psychological effects. Wanting out. 

The interrogator nudged Ben along with a few key words. "Do you remember signing up for the Nahnia project? You've just returned to the real world."

The Nahnia project was meant to observe candidates as they were put through an alternate reality. Based on Einstein's theory of relativity, time is not a constant. When a unit amount of time was observed in 2 different places that travelled at different speeds across space, both time pieces would show different results. Nahnia created a place, an alternate reality, where time stopped entirely relative to the rest of the world. The project was meant to study the psychological effects on humans held in such a place. Ben had signed up as a test subject but did not anticipate the boredom of being trapped in a prison cell the entire day. He wanted out, but release required a final psychological profiling that kept being delayed for months.

Ben's mind could finally coherently string a question, which he promptly asked, "Where am I? What is this place?"

The interrogator did not skimp on detail, perhaps because he knew such detail was safe to reveal.

"You finally made it through the psychological profiling. However, to keep the details of the Nahnia project from leaking to our competitors' hands, we kept you at this holding facility while your memories of the test were wiped out. The drugs left you feeling weak, nauseous and dehydrated. Welcome back to the real world. You make take your watch, it's working again."

Ben was led out to a waiting area, where he immediately spotted his girlfriend. She had a worried look as she waited silently for him to be brought out. Ben noticed that she no longer looked like the youthful student she was when she accompanied him to Nahnia's in-processing lab. She was dressed in a blazer with matching pencil skirt and wore high heels.

She greeted him with a kiss, to which Ben responded sheepishly, "Hey, dear."

"How's school been, dear?"

She looked offended. "Dear, the year is 2012. In our time apart, I've graduated and have stared working. I'm no longer the school girl you dated before Nahnia."

A pang of regret shot through Ben's heart. He had been so eager to depart for Nahnia that he had ignored the effect his decision would have on the people around him. Ben looked at the working watch he had on his wrist and overcame the regret with positive thoughts. "Don't worry dear, we still have a lot of time. I won't leave you again."