Waking up with a bright light on your face was never pleasant. Sitting up to find that the whole _room_ was a bright light was just disorienting. Fortunately, as his eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself in a really white room rather than a room full of light. Still unsettling, seeing as how it was empty of anything else, but better than lights in the face no matter where you looked. He looked down at his cryo pod, did a double take to make sure, then stood up and walked around it to make double sure.


    “Yup, not the one I went to sleep in”


    Well, crap.


    He knew that signing up for experimental cryo sleep could be risky, but they could have at least had the courtesy to leave him with his old pod, he knew how that one worked and could tinker with it. This new one they had given him looked like some kinda future tech thing he hadn’t the foggiest idea about. Very inconsiderate, whoever they happened to be.


    “Not like I would know, since there ain’t no one to say hello to!”


    He waited a moment, but it didn’t seem like yelling at the ceiling had changed anything or shamed whoever it was into coming out to say hi.


    Without much else to do at the moment, he sat down on the floor, which was slightly unpleasant given that it was metal and he was naked, and proceeded to make sure he was as in one piece as it was possible to determine. Whatever new fancy tech that pod had became very apparent when he couldn’t find any needle wounds from the injections he had needed to get for the old pod. Considering cryo was supposed to mean ‘no changing’ in his old pod, the mysterious ‘they’ either had to keep him out of cryo long enough to heal or the new pod allowed some kind of partial state. Whatever that happened to mean in cryo terms.


    Still, considering that he could still feel his heartbeat and didn’t feel like he had lost organs, not that he knew what that felt like in the first place, he figured that he was in the best shape he was going to be in, the lack of obvious food and water in the room being a pretty sharp time limit. Examining the pod in more detail uncovered insights that it was, indeed, a cryo pod.


    “Can never be too sure with mysterious white rooms.”


    It also helped that if he could recognize some of the tech, he might be able to figure out the rest. Given enough time….


    A lot of time.


    Of course, he didn’t have that time right now so onto examining the rest of the room. Determining whether he was an experiment or simply abandoned would help him know if he had to annoy the crap out of whoever was watching until they did something or if he had to try to find a way out on his own. A quick sweep of the walls up close showed nothing obvious, and the floor was equally devoid of ‘interesting things’. Scanning the tops of the walls for obvious cameras also lead nowhere other than to conclude that either the ceiling was low for a large mysterious room or he was getting taller. It took him nearly four hours of basically rubbing his entire side against the wall and slowly walking around the room for him to find anything worth getting excited for.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    One of the walls had a patch that was a lot smoother than the rest. Glass versus metal perhaps. Closer investigation found that nothing about it changed but the spot really liked it when he stuck his whole hand on it. After quite a few happy computer noises and a promise to buy it dinner later, a portion of the wall popped open.


    Seeing as how he still didn’t know what was going on but leaning towards the ‘abandoned’ idea, he slowly approached the new door and peered through the crack from a low angle. It appeared to be a hallway and either had no lights or was quite dim compared to his bright room. It would be beyond obvious to anyone in the hallway that the door was open from the light spilling out. Still, he didn’t see anyone waiting on the other side and couldn’t hear any breathing or muffled noises of living things.


    ‘I’m gonna be pissed if I get mauled by robots.’


    Seeing that no one was about to come in and he certainly couldn’t stay here, he flung open the door, which turned into more of a slow whoosh than what he had planned, and confidently strode into the hallway, a quip ready for anything waiting for his appearance.


    Unfortunately for the quip and fortunately for his dignity, he was greeted by an empty metal hallway and a lot of corners. Corners that didn’t appear to have any helpful signs or other indicators about where he should be headed next. He sniffed the air trying to get a feel for his new, dimmer, life outside the white box but it all smelled like air. No scents or chemical smells he would expect from an empty facility running on old air scrubbers.


    ‘The mystery deepens. Where the hell am I?’


    Unfortunate. He had been given training on survival in the wilds and survival in an unknown city as part of the cryo program, but empty metal halls were one of the few scenarios they hadn’t gone over.


    ‘Dunno why they hadn’t. Seems like empty facility was the most likely option for failure considering where I’m at.’


    The walls at least had some kind of marking on them, colors running in lines. Presumably following a line and seeing where it went was the best option. Well, an ok option at least, the best option was to not have a cryo experiment go wrong, but beggars couldn’t choose.


    Good thing he wasn’t a beggar because he was choosing the blue line. He liked its shade of blue and the fact it was exactly the same shape and size as the other lines.


    That and he really had to pee, so he hoped blue was some kind of water thing.


    “Can’t go wrong if even the colors travel in packs.”


    He just had to hope the colors liked the comfort of a pack rather than going for the safety. At least he could pee on anything that tried to eat him, that would show um.