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drownedinlight) wrote2011-03-07 10:07 pm
drownedinlight) wrote2011-03-07 10:07 pm
Entry tags:
Experiment part 3
So, yeah, here it is. I have noticed that this project is doing wonders for my actual sitting-down-and-writing ability because once I began I really couldn't stop until like, a thousand words later it was beautiful
Theo, like Ellen, knew why we were there, and was even waiting for us on his porch step when we got there. He simply walked down to the car and got into the seat behind mine after I got out.
“Empathy?” Stephen asked. Theo shook his head,
“When I touch things, I see what’s going to happen, or sometimes, what’s already happened.” Stephen muttered something about psychometry and went back to typing. “Is he always like that?” Theo asked.
“Only lately,” I said, putting the car back into drive.
“Where are we going then?”
“Toward the mountains—Ellen should start sending me directions once we get closer.” And so we drove, for a good hour, Theo occasionally giving directions about which exit we should take and where we should turn, while his fingers dug into my seats, almost ripping the stuffing out. Joe rested his head between the seat and the door, trying to block all of this out, like Mommy and Daddy fighting in the car. Stephen still typed away, and it made me wonder just what he was looking for and just how he was looking, because there was probably no way there was a stable internet connection.
“It’s here,” Theo said when we had been driving along a dirt trail for about ten minutes. I pulled to a stop just as the dirt road ended. I unbuckled my seat belt and looked around, trying to see anyone, but all that was in sight was the edge of thick forest all around us. “Come on, we have to go deeper.” Joe leveled a look at men, clearly still convinced all of this was nuts, but he opened the door and pulled his seat forward to let Stephen out, while I did the same for Theo.
“Lead on MacDuff,” Stephen chirped, trying to type one handed as he held his laptop in the air with the other. Theo frowned at the reference, but put his hand to the ground and closed his eyes. He appeared to be listening for a good while before he stood and led us into the foliage without a word. Joe followed first with me behind him and Stephen lagging as he still tried to type on his computer. We only walked for a minute before Theo stopped and said,
“This is as far as I saw; I think they’ll meet us here.” And so we waited again. I reached for Joe’s hand in the quiet of the woods, and he took it, lightly, not really looking at me. I squeezed his hand and he finally turned toward me, and I could see in his eyes a greater emotion than anger: fear.
A twig snapped, but none of us had moved.
“Who’s there?” Joe called into the forest, but nothing responded. “That was too close to be an animal,” he told us. “Someone is definitely within five feet of us.”
“It’s okay,” I said, reaching out with my mind. “We’re from the test group.” Like a curtain dropping two boys appeared in the spall space of woods with us, both of whom I recognized from the physical.
“Esmail, where’d you get a gun?” Theo exclaimed at one of the boys.
“From my older brother, does it matter?” Esmail asked. He was darker, and spoke with a little bit of an accent, from where I couldn’t tell. Next to him stood a tall boy with thick brown hair, whom I recognized as Galen Byers.
“Photokinesis,” Stephen said. “Interesting.”
“I made us invisible,” Galen retorted.
“Yes, and that’s how one becomes invisible, by reflecting the light particles off of oneself or another object: ergo photokinesis. I’ll bet if you really wanted to, you could change the color of something too.”
“Whatever,” Galen said. “Now come on the others are waiting up the trail.”
“So tell me, how do you guys know each other?” I asked.
“Esmail and I are part of a second generation immigration program,” Theo said. “So are Riya, Liliana and Tamara. Lili’s from Argentina, Riya is from India, Tamara’s from Russia, I’m from Korea and Esmail’s from Egypt—or at least our families are, for the most part all of us grew up in the states. It’s how all of us pretty much got involved in this. Liliana mentioned that she had heard from a friend that there was this experiment going on and they would pay us a lot to do it.”
“I think that’s how all of us got hooked,” I said. “The cash they were willing to dish out to us.”
“It would certainly help for university costs,” Esmail said.
“And in turn they messed us up,” Joe said.
“I do not think it is so messed up to be almost completely aware of my surroundings,” Esmail said.
“So then you don’t know that we could be dying because of this, right now?” Joe asked.
“Joe, don’t be mean about it,” I told him.
“I’m just saying, it’s happening,” he muttered. I squeezed his hand.
“I know, but we need to talk about this in a group and analyze our risks.” I looked back up at the other three boys.
“Dying?” Galen asked.
“Pretty much,” Stephen said, “everybody else has, so we’re good candidates for it. But like Myra said, we’ll talk about it when we unite the whole group.” The boys bit their tongues as we walked in a little further, until we found the others sitting around what looked to be an abandoned fire pit.
“Thank God,” Ellen said. “What took you guys so long?”
“Navigation,” Stephen replied. “Everyone huddle up, we’ve got a few problems. And not just the whole dying thing. Bigger problems.”
“Wait, what dying thing?” a dark skinned girl, who I assumed to by Riya asked.
“They said we could be dying,” Esmail told her. “Now hold on I want you to explain that.” There were general nods going around the circle of the group and Stephen looked at me as if I could change everyone’s mind.
“They need to know, Stephen, so just start from the beginning,” I said. He rolled his eyes and grumbled a little, but settled himself on a bench around the fire pit, everyone else doing the same.
“All right,” he said, and began talking more slowly than I had heard him do since before yesterday, “here are the cliff notes; we were all chosen for a top secret government experiment. The pill we’ve been taking opens up the space and capability for our minds to grow allowing us extra abilities with them, such as moving things with our mind, or molecules, or even the way we are all able to telepathically sync with one another. It also physically conditioned our bodies to be able to last significantly longer than even the most well trained regular human.
“In the past, this conditioning and opening of the mind has resulted in a physical collapse of the body—some way or another, the conditioning was not thorough enough and the organs began to give way and many of the subjects eventually died. However, in comparison with the dosage we received with that of the other test groups, and the time, in which their symptoms preceding death became apparent, I would say that there is a very good chance that we are not dying. Or if we are, we have a good time to ride our systems of the drug, and possibly be less supernormal, but still alive. Either way, we will never be regular people ever again.”
“You said most people died,” Joe interrupted. “Last time you told Myra and I that everyone before us had died from the experiment.” Stephen frowned, and typed away on his computer.
“That’s what I thought. All of the records the facility had on their previous test subjects revealed that they suffered death a short time after being released as death subjects—another indicator that we’re not dead yet, but the way—but after Myra mentioned that we had all been getting fevers of 103.2 degrees, I went back and reanalyzed the files. There were five cases before Myra, from the other test groups, who had fevers of the exact same temperature, but the files still list them as dead.
“But I did some checking. All of them had some traceable interaction with the world up to a week after the facility lists them as dead. And then they disappear. Car payments, school records, nothing continues on, but they all did something after the facility, and a state issued death certificate for that matter, lists them as dead, and then they just fall of the grid.” He paused for a minute and quit typing, shutting the laptop. “I think it means that if we aren’t dead, than we’re theirs.”
“What do you mean, ‘theirs’?” Ellen asked.
“I mean we no longer have a choice in this experiment; they will take us and further train us to be super soldiers and we will have no way out of it once they figure out that we have these abilities,” he said. “We’ll no longer be human, but weapons. I mean, there’s a pill that can give us mental superpowers, who’s to say there isn’t something that can control our minds and removes our free will? For all we know, they could know we’re here right now and have people monitoring us.”
“But that goes both ways,” Tamara pointed out. “I mean, they could not know we’re here.”
“But it does look a little suspicious, a bunch of test subjects meeting up in the woods,” Liliana pointed out. “And if they are watching us—”
“If,” Esmail pointed out. “We aren’t even sure if they are or not.”
“Well then, let me reassure you.” I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, and through the group psyche, we all pretty much projected the same thing at the same time: I know that voice. We jumped up from where we were seated and, except for Stephen, who fiddled with his lap top, we turned to where we heard the voice, and saw the head doctor stumbling through the foliage and over fallen branches. He snarled at them, as if it would help, before motioning to the air, as if that would help more. As it turned out, it did help him, because commandos dressed in camouflage and with what looked to be heavy duty guns stepped into the clearing and pointed them at us. We all stood rigid, except for Stephen who was digging into his pockets and still messing around with his computer.
“What do we do?” Ellen asked.
“Does it look like any of us can take them?” Joe hissed.
“Well, many of us do have offensive powers,” Esmail said. “We might have a chance.”
Stephen stopped digging through his pockets and held out a chip in front of him.
“Stop him!” the doctor cried. But before any of the commandos could move, Stephen pushed the chip into a drive on the computer.
“I just erased everything off of here,” he said, aloud, dropping it into the leaf bed. “You won’t find a thing.” The head doctor scowled, and made a motion to the commandos to ease off. I could feel the groups’ apprehension around me, almost suffocating me in my head—
Wait. In my head? Aloud?
“I would advise you surrender,” the head doctor said. “We would prefer to let you live out the rest of your days in a mildly comfortable existence.” I felt the rest of the group look between him and the commandos. “Or we could shoot you. I much prefer fresh samples, and do loathe on site work, but it can be done, and I will give the order.” My mind whirled with a hurricane of thought. He thought we were dying. He was giving us what seemed like a peaceful option out.
“Are you all right?” Joe hissed at me, wincing at the very force of my thoughts.
“I’m fine,” I said. “All right, I’m deciding for everyone, we surrender.” I held my hands up, and slowly, around me through hisses of, “traitor,” the others did the same.
“A wise decision,” said the head doctor.
But as the commandos came and tied our hands together, I projected a thought out to the group,
“He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything.”
Piece WC: 8422
3/7/11 WC: 2062
Project WC: 18201
Still Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum
PS: Decided I am changing the piece count to the overall count for the total piece, instead of just doing what I post in that specific entry. It makes more sense in my head this way.
PPS: TOMORROW IS MY ONE WEEK ANNIVERSARY!!! YAYAYAYAY!!!!
Theo, like Ellen, knew why we were there, and was even waiting for us on his porch step when we got there. He simply walked down to the car and got into the seat behind mine after I got out.
“Empathy?” Stephen asked. Theo shook his head,
“When I touch things, I see what’s going to happen, or sometimes, what’s already happened.” Stephen muttered something about psychometry and went back to typing. “Is he always like that?” Theo asked.
“Only lately,” I said, putting the car back into drive.
“Where are we going then?”
“Toward the mountains—Ellen should start sending me directions once we get closer.” And so we drove, for a good hour, Theo occasionally giving directions about which exit we should take and where we should turn, while his fingers dug into my seats, almost ripping the stuffing out. Joe rested his head between the seat and the door, trying to block all of this out, like Mommy and Daddy fighting in the car. Stephen still typed away, and it made me wonder just what he was looking for and just how he was looking, because there was probably no way there was a stable internet connection.
“It’s here,” Theo said when we had been driving along a dirt trail for about ten minutes. I pulled to a stop just as the dirt road ended. I unbuckled my seat belt and looked around, trying to see anyone, but all that was in sight was the edge of thick forest all around us. “Come on, we have to go deeper.” Joe leveled a look at men, clearly still convinced all of this was nuts, but he opened the door and pulled his seat forward to let Stephen out, while I did the same for Theo.
“Lead on MacDuff,” Stephen chirped, trying to type one handed as he held his laptop in the air with the other. Theo frowned at the reference, but put his hand to the ground and closed his eyes. He appeared to be listening for a good while before he stood and led us into the foliage without a word. Joe followed first with me behind him and Stephen lagging as he still tried to type on his computer. We only walked for a minute before Theo stopped and said,
“This is as far as I saw; I think they’ll meet us here.” And so we waited again. I reached for Joe’s hand in the quiet of the woods, and he took it, lightly, not really looking at me. I squeezed his hand and he finally turned toward me, and I could see in his eyes a greater emotion than anger: fear.
A twig snapped, but none of us had moved.
“Who’s there?” Joe called into the forest, but nothing responded. “That was too close to be an animal,” he told us. “Someone is definitely within five feet of us.”
“It’s okay,” I said, reaching out with my mind. “We’re from the test group.” Like a curtain dropping two boys appeared in the spall space of woods with us, both of whom I recognized from the physical.
“Esmail, where’d you get a gun?” Theo exclaimed at one of the boys.
“From my older brother, does it matter?” Esmail asked. He was darker, and spoke with a little bit of an accent, from where I couldn’t tell. Next to him stood a tall boy with thick brown hair, whom I recognized as Galen Byers.
“Photokinesis,” Stephen said. “Interesting.”
“I made us invisible,” Galen retorted.
“Yes, and that’s how one becomes invisible, by reflecting the light particles off of oneself or another object: ergo photokinesis. I’ll bet if you really wanted to, you could change the color of something too.”
“Whatever,” Galen said. “Now come on the others are waiting up the trail.”
“So tell me, how do you guys know each other?” I asked.
“Esmail and I are part of a second generation immigration program,” Theo said. “So are Riya, Liliana and Tamara. Lili’s from Argentina, Riya is from India, Tamara’s from Russia, I’m from Korea and Esmail’s from Egypt—or at least our families are, for the most part all of us grew up in the states. It’s how all of us pretty much got involved in this. Liliana mentioned that she had heard from a friend that there was this experiment going on and they would pay us a lot to do it.”
“I think that’s how all of us got hooked,” I said. “The cash they were willing to dish out to us.”
“It would certainly help for university costs,” Esmail said.
“And in turn they messed us up,” Joe said.
“I do not think it is so messed up to be almost completely aware of my surroundings,” Esmail said.
“So then you don’t know that we could be dying because of this, right now?” Joe asked.
“Joe, don’t be mean about it,” I told him.
“I’m just saying, it’s happening,” he muttered. I squeezed his hand.
“I know, but we need to talk about this in a group and analyze our risks.” I looked back up at the other three boys.
“Dying?” Galen asked.
“Pretty much,” Stephen said, “everybody else has, so we’re good candidates for it. But like Myra said, we’ll talk about it when we unite the whole group.” The boys bit their tongues as we walked in a little further, until we found the others sitting around what looked to be an abandoned fire pit.
“Thank God,” Ellen said. “What took you guys so long?”
“Navigation,” Stephen replied. “Everyone huddle up, we’ve got a few problems. And not just the whole dying thing. Bigger problems.”
“Wait, what dying thing?” a dark skinned girl, who I assumed to by Riya asked.
“They said we could be dying,” Esmail told her. “Now hold on I want you to explain that.” There were general nods going around the circle of the group and Stephen looked at me as if I could change everyone’s mind.
“They need to know, Stephen, so just start from the beginning,” I said. He rolled his eyes and grumbled a little, but settled himself on a bench around the fire pit, everyone else doing the same.
“All right,” he said, and began talking more slowly than I had heard him do since before yesterday, “here are the cliff notes; we were all chosen for a top secret government experiment. The pill we’ve been taking opens up the space and capability for our minds to grow allowing us extra abilities with them, such as moving things with our mind, or molecules, or even the way we are all able to telepathically sync with one another. It also physically conditioned our bodies to be able to last significantly longer than even the most well trained regular human.
“In the past, this conditioning and opening of the mind has resulted in a physical collapse of the body—some way or another, the conditioning was not thorough enough and the organs began to give way and many of the subjects eventually died. However, in comparison with the dosage we received with that of the other test groups, and the time, in which their symptoms preceding death became apparent, I would say that there is a very good chance that we are not dying. Or if we are, we have a good time to ride our systems of the drug, and possibly be less supernormal, but still alive. Either way, we will never be regular people ever again.”
“You said most people died,” Joe interrupted. “Last time you told Myra and I that everyone before us had died from the experiment.” Stephen frowned, and typed away on his computer.
“That’s what I thought. All of the records the facility had on their previous test subjects revealed that they suffered death a short time after being released as death subjects—another indicator that we’re not dead yet, but the way—but after Myra mentioned that we had all been getting fevers of 103.2 degrees, I went back and reanalyzed the files. There were five cases before Myra, from the other test groups, who had fevers of the exact same temperature, but the files still list them as dead.
“But I did some checking. All of them had some traceable interaction with the world up to a week after the facility lists them as dead. And then they disappear. Car payments, school records, nothing continues on, but they all did something after the facility, and a state issued death certificate for that matter, lists them as dead, and then they just fall of the grid.” He paused for a minute and quit typing, shutting the laptop. “I think it means that if we aren’t dead, than we’re theirs.”
“What do you mean, ‘theirs’?” Ellen asked.
“I mean we no longer have a choice in this experiment; they will take us and further train us to be super soldiers and we will have no way out of it once they figure out that we have these abilities,” he said. “We’ll no longer be human, but weapons. I mean, there’s a pill that can give us mental superpowers, who’s to say there isn’t something that can control our minds and removes our free will? For all we know, they could know we’re here right now and have people monitoring us.”
“But that goes both ways,” Tamara pointed out. “I mean, they could not know we’re here.”
“But it does look a little suspicious, a bunch of test subjects meeting up in the woods,” Liliana pointed out. “And if they are watching us—”
“If,” Esmail pointed out. “We aren’t even sure if they are or not.”
“Well then, let me reassure you.” I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, and through the group psyche, we all pretty much projected the same thing at the same time: I know that voice. We jumped up from where we were seated and, except for Stephen, who fiddled with his lap top, we turned to where we heard the voice, and saw the head doctor stumbling through the foliage and over fallen branches. He snarled at them, as if it would help, before motioning to the air, as if that would help more. As it turned out, it did help him, because commandos dressed in camouflage and with what looked to be heavy duty guns stepped into the clearing and pointed them at us. We all stood rigid, except for Stephen who was digging into his pockets and still messing around with his computer.
“What do we do?” Ellen asked.
“Does it look like any of us can take them?” Joe hissed.
“Well, many of us do have offensive powers,” Esmail said. “We might have a chance.”
Stephen stopped digging through his pockets and held out a chip in front of him.
“Stop him!” the doctor cried. But before any of the commandos could move, Stephen pushed the chip into a drive on the computer.
“I just erased everything off of here,” he said, aloud, dropping it into the leaf bed. “You won’t find a thing.” The head doctor scowled, and made a motion to the commandos to ease off. I could feel the groups’ apprehension around me, almost suffocating me in my head—
Wait. In my head? Aloud?
“I would advise you surrender,” the head doctor said. “We would prefer to let you live out the rest of your days in a mildly comfortable existence.” I felt the rest of the group look between him and the commandos. “Or we could shoot you. I much prefer fresh samples, and do loathe on site work, but it can be done, and I will give the order.” My mind whirled with a hurricane of thought. He thought we were dying. He was giving us what seemed like a peaceful option out.
“Are you all right?” Joe hissed at me, wincing at the very force of my thoughts.
“I’m fine,” I said. “All right, I’m deciding for everyone, we surrender.” I held my hands up, and slowly, around me through hisses of, “traitor,” the others did the same.
“A wise decision,” said the head doctor.
But as the commandos came and tied our hands together, I projected a thought out to the group,
“He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything.”
Piece WC: 8422
3/7/11 WC: 2062
Project WC: 18201
Still Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum
PS: Decided I am changing the piece count to the overall count for the total piece, instead of just doing what I post in that specific entry. It makes more sense in my head this way.
PPS: TOMORROW IS MY ONE WEEK ANNIVERSARY!!! YAYAYAYAY!!!!