drownedinlight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
drownedinlight) wrote2011-03-06 04:45 pm
drownedinlight) wrote2011-03-06 04:45 pm
Entry tags:
Experiment part 2
So I'm not sure how much I need to say, other than that this story is becoming a little ridiculous and just growing and growing some more.
Week Eight, Day Two:
Stephen Martin answered his door the first time we rang the bell. I could hear him thumping down the stairs, before the door swung open to reveal him leaning on it.
“Oh good, get in.” He backed away from the door and Joe and I looked at each other. He had come with me, despite every bone in his body telling him not to, so I took the first plunge and stepped inside.
There was a den just off the door with a giant HD TV, and a few couches. As we went further in, I noticed a kitchen, a dining room, and a down stairs filled with exercise equipment and a pool table. Stephen thumped back down the stairs. “Go back into the living room; I need to show you both something. I’m so glad you finally came; I didn’t know what to do. My parents have the car you see, they’re at some kind of conference down and Arizona, and it was so close they decided to drive instead of fly and save on the rental. That and they have the computers and the phones bugged, so even though I got one they couldn’t track, they could still track yours, and I was at a total loss for what to do. So I waited, and now you’re here.”
He said so much, but he only spent about thirty seconds talking, and as he talked, he ran a few cables from his laptop to the TV connecting them together.
“Why didn’t you just take a cab?” Joe suggested. Stephen stopped dead in his tracks, blinked rapidly as he hovered over the TV’s power button.
“Huh, I didn’t think of that. Oh well, you know what they say about geniuses: they don’t really see the obvious. Anyway, you’re here now.” He clicked the power button on the TV, and then flipped through a couple of settings before the screen finally matched what was shown on the computer. “I know why you’re here,” he said, plopping down on the floor in front of his computer, his fingers clicking as soon as they touched the key board at what must have been over one hundred words a minute. “You’ve been developing extra abilities. Like me.”
“And what exactly do you do?” Joe asked. He and I both took seats on the couch most directly in front of the screen, watching the information scroll by.
“Super smart—my IQ sky rocketed over the past few weeks. I’m guessing yours have too, congrats on your scores, by the way, though not to the extent that mine has. It’s the pill they’re having us take, all of us. They have in their files.” He began pulling up records documented by the doctors of the facility. “As it turns out, it is an enhancement drug, but they weren’t just interested in helping the lame walk and the blind to see, or helping the US win a few medals in the next Olympics. The drug helps open up neural paths so that we use more of our brains and can focus our ability better, hopefully resulting in such abilities that we can control a number of things just with our brains. It also reduces fat and increases muscle mass, helping to increase our stamina and strength. You look great by the way, Myra. And you know those videos they were showing us? Yeah, they were feeding us information on tactics, weaponry, government plans, the whole nine yards.”
The clicking of the key board was the only sound that filled the room over the next few minutes. So, they were making us soldiers—ones who could run long and fight hard, but also ones that had an extra edge, who could do things other special ops couldn’t.
“Wait, how are you hacking their systems if all of our computers are bugged?” I asked.
“I told you, I got one that they couldn’t trace,” he said.
“How?” Joe asked.
“I stole it,” he said. “There’s a computer warehouse here in town and I took one and made it my hacking computer. And before you start Joe, I know it was wrong, but it was this or become the government’s chew toy. Now listen: they’ve had five test groups so far. The last one only made it to nine weeks.”
“Meaning?” He grabbed my arm so he could look me straight in the eye.
“Meaning that by day two of week nine, all ten subjects were dead.” He let go and turned back to the computer, pulling up a different set of files. “They all developed powers too, supers smart, telepathic, telekinetic, pyrokinetic, pathfinding, and even in one case, precognition. All of them dropped dead, they weren’t able to function at that higher level.”
“So, what’s the difference between us and them?” Joe asked.
“Nothing,” Stephen said, still typing away. “Well, the dosage they gave us—they lowered it slightly to see if it would kill us more slowly but I’d say, at best, we get a month more than they did.” He shuddered suddenly, and I saw him wipe sweat away from his forehead.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Aside from the obvious problems? I’m fine, I just don’t feel good.” I reached out and pressed the back of my hand to his forehead and then to his cheek.
“You’re burning up,” I said. “Do you keep a thermometer in the house?”
“There’s one in my parent’s bathroom, my mom keeps it on the counter. It’s an ear thermometer.” Before I could stop him, he ran upstairs to get it. He came back down and placed it in his ear and pressed a button on the side. A moment later it chimed and announced,
“You have a body temperature of: 103.2.”
Then it clicked for me.
“Jesus you’re sick,” Joe said.
“I took some Tylenol earlier, I’ll be fine,” Stephen said, rushing back to the computer. “Didn’t know I had a fever, just felt really shitty.”
“Stephen, check the other test groups for signs of fever,” I told him.
“Are you crazy, Myra, we should force him into bed!” Joe exclaimed.
“I know, Joe, but listen; have you gotten a fever since the experiment started?” I asked.
“I got one right before the physical,” he said. “I had it for like two days before in broke.”
“And what did it peak at?” I asked.
“Why does it matter?” he said.
“Because I got a fever, and during that fever I started hearing voices in my head,” I said. “And it’s just something the doctor said to me: they had only five recorded cases of fever while people were taking the drug.”
“And?” Joe asked.
“My fever peaked at 103.2,” I said. “Maybe there’s a connection.”
“Maybe there is,” Stephen said. We turned back toward the screen where he had pulled up all the files for different test groups. “They’ve been experimenting with doses, like I said, so each group lasted for different amounts of times, but each had the same symptoms upon decline. If my calculations are correct, our group should have started declining over the past few days with the first few, minor symptoms, but as far as the files show, none of us has. And according to this, almost all of us have had a had a fever except for me and Angela Willis.” He paused completely quiet and still. “I think they finally found what works—our bodies adapted to the drug and found a way for it to be possible to have greater ability and still live.”
“Fevers happen because the body is trying to burn out a virus, or infection,” Joe said. “It doesn’t make sense that one would happen because we gained some superpowers.”
“Maybe it was trying to burn something out,” Stephen said. “Fevers also happen when the body doesn’t have enough strength and just keeps pushing and pushing. And when we recover, don’t we always feel better?”
“Speaking of feeling better, maybe you should go and lie down before you pass out and don’t wake up,” I said.
I can’t write much more, Joe needs me to go and look after Stephen.
Week Eight, Day Two:
Somehow, we managed to convince our parents that Stephen needed us. We both said over the phone that we had a friend who had a bad fever and whose parents were away, and that we needed to look after him just to make sure he didn’t get any worse. They bought it so well, that Mom even asked if I thought she should come look at him. I said that he seemed fine for now and that we would drive him to the hospital or call her if things got worse.
Stephen made it through the night, his fever breaking somewhere around one in the morning, and he was shaking us awake around seven.
“Jesus, we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night,” Joe said, rubbing his eyes.
“I’ll make you a protein energy shake,” Stephen said. “But we need to go and find the others in the group, so get up.” Reluctantly, we did. Admittedly, I felt better after I drank that shake, though I didn’t want to know what Stephen put in it.
We piled into my car as we navigated to the first address, which was thankfully in Stephen’s neighborhood. Joe also seemed to know his way around from driving deliveries, and found Ellen Dillard’s house. I was the one who elected to knock on Ellen’s door and ask for her, and thankfully, she was the one who answered it.
“Myra, right?” she asked. I nodded with a smile,
“Yeah, listen, I know we don’t know each other very well, but I think we both have AP Calc two next year, and I was wondering if you wanted to head over to a café or something and compare answers.” She nodded along with a smile.
“Sure, just let me get my notebook and my purse; do you want to come inside while you wait?” She shuffled off to the side to let me in without really waiting for my answer, leaving the door opened in her wake. “So, is this about the whole superpowers thing?” she asked. She had begun hunting around her living room to retrieve a black notebook, so it took me a moment to realize she hadn’t moved her lips. “Just say it in your head; we’ll be able to hear each other.”
“Yeah it’s about the superpowers,” I told her, mentally. “Thought I thought Joe was going to be the only one who could talk like this.”
“No, we can all talk like this; at least I can talk to Liliana and Galen like this.” Liliana Vaquez and Galen Byers were two of the people from our group. “I haven’t tried listening in on normal people though. Can Joe do that? What about you?”
“I…mind control. Joe listens in, and Stephen went a little nuts becoming a super-genius. You and the others?”
“I move things; Lili did this really strange thing with the computer the other day and Galen somehow made himself invisible. And his car. They’re hard to explain.”
“I’m sure Stephen could tell us what it all means, but right now we need to get everyone from the group together to talk about all of this.”
“Elle, who are you talking to?” said another voice in our heads.
“One of the girls from the test group; it’s happened to all of us, Galen. And we need to get the others,” Ellen replied.
“We need to talk to Joe, and Stephen,” I said, “and clue them in.”
“We can hear you,” Joe said. “I just couldn’t figure out how to talk.”
A few minutes later we had a plan. Liliana and Galen would help us track down the others, and get them to meet us. Ellen would go and get a few of the people that she knew vaguely from the group and from school, and everyone knew not to use the phones, just our connection.
“You know, it makes sense that we have an overlap of abilities,” Stephen said, typing away on his lap top in the back of my car. “I mean, we all technically have mental abilities, so being able to exercise our minds outside of even our supernormal capacity isn’t that strange. Probably how you heard the voices during your fever, Myra, instead of you know, mentally ordering people around.”
“Please, Stephen, don’t talk at like ninety miles a minute,” Joe said. “It’s bad enough that all of this is actually happening, but you don’t have to explain all of it and theorize about it.” Stephen shrugged and continued typing, and I wanted so badly to hug Joe and to tell him that everything would be all right, but I knew at this point it would be patronizing. So I drove on to find Theo Rhee.
Piece WC: 2158
3/6/11 WC: same
Project WC: 16139
Still Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum
Week Eight, Day Two:
Stephen Martin answered his door the first time we rang the bell. I could hear him thumping down the stairs, before the door swung open to reveal him leaning on it.
“Oh good, get in.” He backed away from the door and Joe and I looked at each other. He had come with me, despite every bone in his body telling him not to, so I took the first plunge and stepped inside.
There was a den just off the door with a giant HD TV, and a few couches. As we went further in, I noticed a kitchen, a dining room, and a down stairs filled with exercise equipment and a pool table. Stephen thumped back down the stairs. “Go back into the living room; I need to show you both something. I’m so glad you finally came; I didn’t know what to do. My parents have the car you see, they’re at some kind of conference down and Arizona, and it was so close they decided to drive instead of fly and save on the rental. That and they have the computers and the phones bugged, so even though I got one they couldn’t track, they could still track yours, and I was at a total loss for what to do. So I waited, and now you’re here.”
He said so much, but he only spent about thirty seconds talking, and as he talked, he ran a few cables from his laptop to the TV connecting them together.
“Why didn’t you just take a cab?” Joe suggested. Stephen stopped dead in his tracks, blinked rapidly as he hovered over the TV’s power button.
“Huh, I didn’t think of that. Oh well, you know what they say about geniuses: they don’t really see the obvious. Anyway, you’re here now.” He clicked the power button on the TV, and then flipped through a couple of settings before the screen finally matched what was shown on the computer. “I know why you’re here,” he said, plopping down on the floor in front of his computer, his fingers clicking as soon as they touched the key board at what must have been over one hundred words a minute. “You’ve been developing extra abilities. Like me.”
“And what exactly do you do?” Joe asked. He and I both took seats on the couch most directly in front of the screen, watching the information scroll by.
“Super smart—my IQ sky rocketed over the past few weeks. I’m guessing yours have too, congrats on your scores, by the way, though not to the extent that mine has. It’s the pill they’re having us take, all of us. They have in their files.” He began pulling up records documented by the doctors of the facility. “As it turns out, it is an enhancement drug, but they weren’t just interested in helping the lame walk and the blind to see, or helping the US win a few medals in the next Olympics. The drug helps open up neural paths so that we use more of our brains and can focus our ability better, hopefully resulting in such abilities that we can control a number of things just with our brains. It also reduces fat and increases muscle mass, helping to increase our stamina and strength. You look great by the way, Myra. And you know those videos they were showing us? Yeah, they were feeding us information on tactics, weaponry, government plans, the whole nine yards.”
The clicking of the key board was the only sound that filled the room over the next few minutes. So, they were making us soldiers—ones who could run long and fight hard, but also ones that had an extra edge, who could do things other special ops couldn’t.
“Wait, how are you hacking their systems if all of our computers are bugged?” I asked.
“I told you, I got one that they couldn’t trace,” he said.
“How?” Joe asked.
“I stole it,” he said. “There’s a computer warehouse here in town and I took one and made it my hacking computer. And before you start Joe, I know it was wrong, but it was this or become the government’s chew toy. Now listen: they’ve had five test groups so far. The last one only made it to nine weeks.”
“Meaning?” He grabbed my arm so he could look me straight in the eye.
“Meaning that by day two of week nine, all ten subjects were dead.” He let go and turned back to the computer, pulling up a different set of files. “They all developed powers too, supers smart, telepathic, telekinetic, pyrokinetic, pathfinding, and even in one case, precognition. All of them dropped dead, they weren’t able to function at that higher level.”
“So, what’s the difference between us and them?” Joe asked.
“Nothing,” Stephen said, still typing away. “Well, the dosage they gave us—they lowered it slightly to see if it would kill us more slowly but I’d say, at best, we get a month more than they did.” He shuddered suddenly, and I saw him wipe sweat away from his forehead.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Aside from the obvious problems? I’m fine, I just don’t feel good.” I reached out and pressed the back of my hand to his forehead and then to his cheek.
“You’re burning up,” I said. “Do you keep a thermometer in the house?”
“There’s one in my parent’s bathroom, my mom keeps it on the counter. It’s an ear thermometer.” Before I could stop him, he ran upstairs to get it. He came back down and placed it in his ear and pressed a button on the side. A moment later it chimed and announced,
“You have a body temperature of: 103.2.”
Then it clicked for me.
“Jesus you’re sick,” Joe said.
“I took some Tylenol earlier, I’ll be fine,” Stephen said, rushing back to the computer. “Didn’t know I had a fever, just felt really shitty.”
“Stephen, check the other test groups for signs of fever,” I told him.
“Are you crazy, Myra, we should force him into bed!” Joe exclaimed.
“I know, Joe, but listen; have you gotten a fever since the experiment started?” I asked.
“I got one right before the physical,” he said. “I had it for like two days before in broke.”
“And what did it peak at?” I asked.
“Why does it matter?” he said.
“Because I got a fever, and during that fever I started hearing voices in my head,” I said. “And it’s just something the doctor said to me: they had only five recorded cases of fever while people were taking the drug.”
“And?” Joe asked.
“My fever peaked at 103.2,” I said. “Maybe there’s a connection.”
“Maybe there is,” Stephen said. We turned back toward the screen where he had pulled up all the files for different test groups. “They’ve been experimenting with doses, like I said, so each group lasted for different amounts of times, but each had the same symptoms upon decline. If my calculations are correct, our group should have started declining over the past few days with the first few, minor symptoms, but as far as the files show, none of us has. And according to this, almost all of us have had a had a fever except for me and Angela Willis.” He paused completely quiet and still. “I think they finally found what works—our bodies adapted to the drug and found a way for it to be possible to have greater ability and still live.”
“Fevers happen because the body is trying to burn out a virus, or infection,” Joe said. “It doesn’t make sense that one would happen because we gained some superpowers.”
“Maybe it was trying to burn something out,” Stephen said. “Fevers also happen when the body doesn’t have enough strength and just keeps pushing and pushing. And when we recover, don’t we always feel better?”
“Speaking of feeling better, maybe you should go and lie down before you pass out and don’t wake up,” I said.
I can’t write much more, Joe needs me to go and look after Stephen.
Week Eight, Day Two:
Somehow, we managed to convince our parents that Stephen needed us. We both said over the phone that we had a friend who had a bad fever and whose parents were away, and that we needed to look after him just to make sure he didn’t get any worse. They bought it so well, that Mom even asked if I thought she should come look at him. I said that he seemed fine for now and that we would drive him to the hospital or call her if things got worse.
Stephen made it through the night, his fever breaking somewhere around one in the morning, and he was shaking us awake around seven.
“Jesus, we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night,” Joe said, rubbing his eyes.
“I’ll make you a protein energy shake,” Stephen said. “But we need to go and find the others in the group, so get up.” Reluctantly, we did. Admittedly, I felt better after I drank that shake, though I didn’t want to know what Stephen put in it.
We piled into my car as we navigated to the first address, which was thankfully in Stephen’s neighborhood. Joe also seemed to know his way around from driving deliveries, and found Ellen Dillard’s house. I was the one who elected to knock on Ellen’s door and ask for her, and thankfully, she was the one who answered it.
“Myra, right?” she asked. I nodded with a smile,
“Yeah, listen, I know we don’t know each other very well, but I think we both have AP Calc two next year, and I was wondering if you wanted to head over to a café or something and compare answers.” She nodded along with a smile.
“Sure, just let me get my notebook and my purse; do you want to come inside while you wait?” She shuffled off to the side to let me in without really waiting for my answer, leaving the door opened in her wake. “So, is this about the whole superpowers thing?” she asked. She had begun hunting around her living room to retrieve a black notebook, so it took me a moment to realize she hadn’t moved her lips. “Just say it in your head; we’ll be able to hear each other.”
“Yeah it’s about the superpowers,” I told her, mentally. “Thought I thought Joe was going to be the only one who could talk like this.”
“No, we can all talk like this; at least I can talk to Liliana and Galen like this.” Liliana Vaquez and Galen Byers were two of the people from our group. “I haven’t tried listening in on normal people though. Can Joe do that? What about you?”
“I…mind control. Joe listens in, and Stephen went a little nuts becoming a super-genius. You and the others?”
“I move things; Lili did this really strange thing with the computer the other day and Galen somehow made himself invisible. And his car. They’re hard to explain.”
“I’m sure Stephen could tell us what it all means, but right now we need to get everyone from the group together to talk about all of this.”
“Elle, who are you talking to?” said another voice in our heads.
“One of the girls from the test group; it’s happened to all of us, Galen. And we need to get the others,” Ellen replied.
“We need to talk to Joe, and Stephen,” I said, “and clue them in.”
“We can hear you,” Joe said. “I just couldn’t figure out how to talk.”
A few minutes later we had a plan. Liliana and Galen would help us track down the others, and get them to meet us. Ellen would go and get a few of the people that she knew vaguely from the group and from school, and everyone knew not to use the phones, just our connection.
“You know, it makes sense that we have an overlap of abilities,” Stephen said, typing away on his lap top in the back of my car. “I mean, we all technically have mental abilities, so being able to exercise our minds outside of even our supernormal capacity isn’t that strange. Probably how you heard the voices during your fever, Myra, instead of you know, mentally ordering people around.”
“Please, Stephen, don’t talk at like ninety miles a minute,” Joe said. “It’s bad enough that all of this is actually happening, but you don’t have to explain all of it and theorize about it.” Stephen shrugged and continued typing, and I wanted so badly to hug Joe and to tell him that everything would be all right, but I knew at this point it would be patronizing. So I drove on to find Theo Rhee.
Piece WC: 2158
3/6/11 WC: same
Project WC: 16139
Still Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum