Disclaimer: I don't own the Big Bang Theory, or any of the characters. I just like to borrow them sometimes.

A/N: This one's weird. You've been warned. It takes place sometime after the season five episode "The Beta Test Initiation."

Chapter 1

Penny had a throbbing headache. She lay very still, hoping to ease the pounding behind her eyes while she tried to remember how she had gotten herself in such a state. The last thing she remembered was… driving Sheldon to the comic book store. How had that led to such a terrible hangover? She moaned and rolled over, only to feel a shock of panic. She was lying on a cold, hard floor. Her eyes flew open, and then she sat up with a gasp. Something was wrong... very, very wrong. She was in some sort of room where the walls and floor glowed with a violet light. Looking down, she realized she was naked, no clothing anywhere in sight, lying on a glowing purple floor. Penny started screaming, and then everything faded to black.

She awoke again to hear someone calling her name and tapping on the floor in triplicate near her ear. She opened her eyes slowly, hoping it had been some bizarre dream. Glowing purple walls—or was that the ceiling?—framed Sheldon's worried visage. She pushed herself up into a half-sitting position, propped up on her elbows. "Sheldon… what happened? Where are we?"

He leaned back in an odd, hunched-over posture. Penny's eyes followed the movement until the realization hit her brain, and she looked away, blushing. They had taken his clothes too. His pale skin reflected the violet glow of the walls. Averting her eyes, Penny sat up, hugging her knees to her chest. It was the best she could do for modesty at the moment.

"Sheldon? You can look now… I guess. Do you remember what happened? How did we get here? And where is here?" Her voice started to rise in panic again.

He scooted closer, and crouching near her awkwardly, he patted her shoulder, murmuring "There, there, Sheldon's here," in what was meant to be a soothing tone. But Penny could tell from the tremor in his voice that he wasn't handling this much better than she was.

"I do not have enough evidence to support a logical hypothesis," Sheldon said after a moment. "But this would appear to be too elaborate a set-up for a practical joke."

"Well then, Dr. Whackadoodle, I suggest we go gather some evidence," Penny said, the quaver in her voice belying her matter-of-fact words.

They spent the better part of an hour exploring the area in which they were confined. It was a large room, roughly twenty by thirty feet, with walls that sloped gradually upwards to a domed ceiling perhaps twenty feet high. (An inefficient design, Sheldon muttered darkly.) In one corner was an alcove about six feet square with a low ceiling. The floor of the alcove was soft and yielding to the touch, and the walls of the niche were dark. A sleeping area, they agreed, which made Penny feel even more panicked at the thought of being in this place for an extended time. The only other features in the room were a strange sunken pit and a smaller, shallow depression, both filled with a viscous teal fluid. Sheldon suggested they were a bathing area and some sort of latrine, which Penny found thoroughly revolting and tried to put it out of her mind. Other than the alcove and the pools, however, the room was completely homogenous. The purple walls were cool to the touch, seamless, and glowed with a soft light in shades from magenta to violet. There was no evidence of a door, a window, a ventilation shaft, or any other opening to mar the smooth surface of the purple walls.

Penny finally sank to the floor in defeat. There seemed to be no way out and nothing they could do but wait and see what would happen. She glanced idly over at Sheldon, who was still examining the walls. She noted with some surprise that he wasn't all bone and skin as she had always assumed he was underneath all those layers. He was thin, of course, but he had some muscle definition in his arms and back. Her gaze drifted lower, and then blushing, she looked away. This was Sheldon. What was she thinking, checking him out? Then as she glanced back at him, she drew in her breath sharply. "Sheldon, your head," she cried. She rushed to his side and lifted trembling fingers to his scalp.

His eyes were wide with alarm as she smoothed her fingers over a spot just above his temple. He felt her fingers brush against smooth skin, and his hand automatically flew to the same place. There was a thin, pink, hairless line along his scalp a few inches above his left ear, visible because the hair had been shaved from around the incision.

"Holy crap on a cracker," she whispered, "I think they did something to you, Sheldon."

Abruptly she jumped up, hands balled into fists. "This isn't funny!" she yelled at the air. She pounded on the walls with her fists. "Show your face, you frigging cowards! How dare you keep us locked up like this! I'm gonna hogtie and castrate all of you!" The strain of the situation had finally gotten the best of her. She kept yelling and screaming for quite some time until she finally collapsed, sobbing, onto the floor.

Sheldon had been staring unseeing at the wall as he contemplated the meaning of the healed-over scar near his temporal lobe. His mind whirled with possibilities, but there were simply too many variables to form any solid hypothesis. After some time, he noticed that the noise had subsided. He looked over at Penny, slumped in semi-conscious exhaustion on the floor. He realized with surprise that her tantrum had been precipitated by the knowledge that he may have been harmed. Feeling completely enervated, he curled up on the floor nearby. He was drained, both mentally and emotionally, but his mind kept racing in circles, trying to analyze their situation, until finally he too succumbed to fatigue.

Penny awoke a few hours later. She stifled a scream as she opened her eyes and realized that the events of last night were not some terrible nightmare. Sheldon sat bolt upright at her cry, yelling, "Danger! Danger!" which Penny found bizarrely apropos.

"Did anyone come into the room? Did you see anyone?" Penny quavered. Sheldon shook his head.

"Why are we here?" Penny moaned. "Whose sick idea of a joke is this?"

Sheldon, who had always been more open to the possibility of alien intelligence, opened his mouth to tell her the conclusions he had drawn. But before he could speak, a strange sensation distracted them both. Penny looked around. The sensation was like the change in pressure in the cabin of a plane that was taking off. Suddenly, Sheldon gasped and pointed toward the center of the room, where something was rising through the solid floor. Although he dashed toward the spot, the physicist wasn't able to observe the mysterious effect at close range. Now, sitting insouciantly in the middle of the room, was a tray which contained a tall, metal container shaped like a vase and some bland colored lumps. Penny knelt beside him, looking at the tray with a dubious expression on her face.

"Is that what I think it is?" she asked, horrified.

Sheldon sniffed at the liquid in the pitcher, and then dipped a cautious fingertip into it. He examined the beige lumps in the same way. "It appears to be water, and some kind of protein substrate," he announced glumly. "In other words, breakfast."

"No way in hell I'm eating or drinking anything that just appears out of the floor," Penny snarled, her temper flaring up once more. "For all we know, it's poisoned."

"May I point out that whoever possesses the technology to imprison us in a room without windows or doors and can make food materialize through the floor, hardly need bother to poison us? If they wanted to kill us, we would already be dead," Sheldon replied.

She looked at him wide-eyed, grasping at straws. "Sheldon, you're always up on the latest technology. Could we have been captured by some secret government agency?"

Reluctantly, he shook his head. "To use a popular phrase, this technology is light-years ahead of anything any government on earth has produced."

All the color in her face drained away at his use of the word earth. She sank to the floor, her legs suddenly too weak to hold her up. "Oh holy crap, you mean aliens, don't you?" she gasped.

"Empirical evidence does seem to indicate…" Suddenly, the physicist broke off mid-sentence. He had a stunned expression on his face.

"Sheldon, what's wrong?" Penny asked, getting to her feet, alarmed.

Sheldon waved a hand, motioning her for silence. "Who are you?" he asked, looking around wildly. "Why have we been detained?"

Penny's eyes widened. Who was he talking to? Had the stress finally sent him over the edge of sanity? It didn't seem too much of a stretch for someone that his roommate had once called "one lab accident away from a super villain". Sheldon continued talking to himself. It was like listening to one side of a phone conversation, although clearly Sheldon did not have a phone anywhere on his person.

Then suddenly he yelled, "We are sentient, intelligent beings! You have no right to treat us this way! Answer me! Answer me!" Then he slumped to the floor, cradling his head in his hands in a posture of defeat.

"Sheldon, what's going on? Who were you talking to?" Penny asked, more than a little unnerved by this display.

She crossed the room and sat down next to him. His whole body was shaking, trembling violently, and Penny heard him gulping for air as he tried to get his emotions back under control. She hesitantly placed a hand on his shoulder, and he didn't even seem to notice for a long moment. Finally he straightened up, and Penny let her hand drop.

"I believe that the purpose of this procedure..." He touched the scar on the side of his head gingerly. "...was to implant some sort of communication device in my head. It seems that their technology somehow allows them to communicate directly with my primary auditory cortex, bypassing the peripheral auditory system."

Penny gaped at him. She didn't understand all of the big words he used, but she thought she understood the first part of his speech. "You're hearing voices in your head? I mean, actually hearing voices in your head?" He nodded slowly, his eyes wide and unfocused. "So I guess it's not good news, huh?" she asked, trying hard to keep the note of panic out of her voice.

"They don't think we're sentient," he said with a tone of utter confusion. "How can that be? I have an IQ of 187."

"But who are they? What do they want?" she pleaded.

"Penny, please, I am attempting to explain," he snapped, seeming a little more like his former self. "Whoever was speaking to me did not deign to identify himself. It appears that we were randomly collected as a representative sample of Homo sapiens. He said they are conducting a survey of proto-sentient races."

"I don't understand what that means."

"It means that they don't consider human beings to be intelligent enough to be treated as people," Sheldon explained angrily. "He said that I only possessed two of the eight benchmarks of intelligence. In his eyes, apparently, we are rather smart animals."

"Well, If he thinks you're not smart enough, then I must really seem like a blonde monkey," Penny groused.

He shook his head and held up his index finger in the posture she recognized as his lecture mode. "Sentience is not merely just intelligence. It is a measure of whether a species is self-aware and conscious. In most popular science fiction tropes, sentience implies that an individual or species has rights."

"But… I don't understand," Penny protested. "How can you be talking with someone who doesn't think you're self-aware or intelligent, even though you're having a conversation?"

"I honestly don't know," he said. "But given that our unknown captors have performed invasive medical procedures on us without our consent, and have confined us in quarters with a minimum of amenities, I surmise that from their perspective, we are little more than lab rats or animals in a zoo."