A man awakens disoriented to a female-voiced computer repeatedly asking math questions. He forces his eyes open, regains limited speech, and realizes he is in an oval bed within a round room, hooked to numerous tubes and electrodes beneath watching cameras and robot arms. He answers “two” to basic prompts, proving cognitive function, but fails to recall his own name and is sedated.

On waking again, the arms remove most tubes. Frustrated, he pulls the IV and accidentally yanks out a still-inflated catheter, causing severe pain and forcing him to hide under another bed while the arms wait. There, a flash memory surfaces: breakfast in San Francisco and an email from Dr. Irina Petrova describing a faint, constant-wavelength infrared “line” arcing from the Sun toward Venus, confirmed by Atacama.

Emerging, he sees the other two patients are long-dead, desiccated corpses, implying prolonged isolation. He suspects a coma, wonders at his well-toned muscles despite weakness, and attempts the ladder to a ceiling hatch. He falls, but the arms catch him, and he senses something “wrong” about how he fell.

The computer feeds him a tube meal, after which he wraps a sheet into a toga and reaches the hatch, opening it to a spotless, fully bolted laboratory. He recognizes advanced equipment and realizes he is a scientist. An upper hatch demands his name; he can’t provide it. He slips, crashes onto the lab table and floor, and again feels that falling seems off.

Using a tape measure, stopwatch, and test tubes, he times falls from a known height, averages trials, and calculates local acceleration at about 15 m/s². This explains his fatigue and the heavy feel of objects. Since Earth’s gravity is 9.8 m/s², he concludes he is not on Earth.