The room was a cavern. Dozens of exercise bicycles sat in neat rows, each connected by thick cables to a central mainframe. Their seats were worn, their pedals scuffed—but no one was riding them. Instead, each bike’s crankset was attached to a small electric motor that turned the pedals in slow, mechanical revolutions. A silent, automated peloton.
Elias moved down the row. Each screen showed a different person—different ages, different builds, all pedaling. All asleep. All with neural upload percentages ranging from 3% to 91%. bicycle confinement laboratory
Not the rusty commuters chained to lampposts, but the ones in the basement of the old Humbert Pharmaceuticals building. He’d been hired as a night security guard after the lab downsized—a skeleton crew maintaining a skeleton facility. His only job: walk the perimeter every two hours, swipe his card at checkpoints, and ignore the distant hum of machinery that never quite shut down. The room was a cavern
Elias looked at the bicycle in front of him—the one in the lab, not the feed. Its motor hummed. Its pedals turned. On the handlebars, a port glowed blue, labeled: . Instead, each bike’s crankset was attached to a