Experiment part 4
Mar. 8th, 2011 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drownedinlightHere it is, the final part of this! Sequel may happen later. ONE WEEK ANNIVERSARY YAYAY!
Week Eight, Day Four:
They knocked us out and put us in a van. Well, I guess it would have had to be in the reverse, but it happened, none the less. They gassed us with something and when we began to wake I remember hearing the scientists talking.
“They’ve been out for an entire day already.”
“I knew the soldiers would gas them wrong.”
“You think Dr. Morison would have administered it.”
“Not really; he doesn’t care if these kids live or die, so long as they provide him with the formula for a better and longer lasting superhuman.”
“When do you think they’ll wake up?”
“Does it matter? If anything, maybe we shouldn’t let them wake up.”
“Frank!”
“I’m just saying, maybe it’s more merciful. They’ll experience full body failure in a week or two anyway. Morison probably won’t let them leave since they knew something was up, and might even have them shot just to be done with it. Don’t you think it would be nicer if we just let them go to sleep and not wake up?”
“Yeah, maybe, but I can’t stand the thought of euthanasia with animals much less people.” They continued talking, and I heard their feet shuffling toward a space I assumed to be a door, and then the conversation and footsteps slowly died away. I opened my eyes, and felt everyone else do the same.
We were all groggy, and tied to metal exam tables standing perpendicular to the floor, with shiny silver straps that were probably stronger than all of us combined.
“Esmail, can you tell where we are?” Riya asked.
“Not as in an actual location, but we are in a large complex and I can feel most of it mapped out in my head. The question is, how are we going to get out of these bonds to get out of here in the first place?”
“I might be able to slip my straps,” Ellen said. “I could try moving them and then when I’m free get everyone out.”
“Then what?” Tamara asked.
“Esmail, is there an armory in this place?” I asked. The group
fell silent, aside from what I now noticed as a collective buzzing, and Stephen’s strange murmurs.
“Why would you want weapons we don’t know how to use?” Joe asked me.
“Because we do know how to use them,” Stephen said. “Not consciously, but they were feeding it to us through the videos. Myra makes a good point that if we are going to escape from here, we’ll need to be armed.”
“Yeah, since it’s her fault we’re here anyway,” Esmail said.
“Esmail, don’t hold a grudge,” Theo said. “Myra surrendered when we all would have been shot and before we revealed that we already have our superpowers and are probably not going to die in two weeks.”
“What?” Galen asked. “How did you get all of that?”
“I tuned into her before they gassed us,” he said. “Tell them Myra.”
“When we were in the circle, we were talking with our minds,” I said. “The only time any of us spoke aloud was when Stephen told Dr. Morison that he had erased everything off of his laptop. That’s when I realized that he has no idea how we’ve developed so far. There is still a chance that we might make it out of here unharmed. For now, everyone play as dead as you can.” We, as one, closed our eyes playing as if we were asleep, or dead.
“It’s a good plan,” Riya admitted. “But what if they don’t let us go, do we fight our way out then?”
“Hard to say,” I replied. “We’re hard wired as special ops soldiers now, and we have superpowers to boot, but…”
“…But we might not make it out of here,” Joe finished for me. Ellen let out a little sob from where she lay.
“I can’t imagine what my family is going to go through,” she said, “when they probably won’t even find my body.”
“Oh, they’ll know,” Stephen said. “That chip I put into the computer didn’t really erase my everything. It transferred it on to the chip and then sent an email to a computer I have hidden in my wall. If I don’t check that computer within the next few days the message I sent gets forwarded to all of our parents, congress people, the president, and many national news stations. If they kill us they’re sunk.”
“Or they could just kill us and keep you alive to cancel the program,” Esmail said.
“Esmail!” Riya and Theo yelled at the same time.
“Don’t bother, he obviously knows nothing about blackmail and leverage,” Stephen said. “I wouldn’t tell them where the computer was or anything.”
“They could still track it and delete it before you did anything…Unless you did something else.”
“Maybe, I did,” Stephen said. “Let this be a lesson, children, have a contingency for everything—even your contingency.” Somehow, that startled a laugh of everyone.
“So then, do we wait?” Tamara asked.
“Well, it’s not like we can do much else,” Joe said.
“Guys—” Theo cut Esmail off before he could say much more.
“If you aren’t going to say something positive, then don’t say it.”
“Is ‘there’s a giant group of soldiers coming to the lab,’ positive enough for you?” Esmail said. We could not feel what he was feeling, but soon we heard the boots pounding against the floor.
“Line up,” ordered one of them to the others. We heard them form the line, and draw their heavy guns up to their shoulders.
“They’re going to shoot us!” Joe cried out. “He’s just—”
“Confirmation received,” said the lead soldier. “Ready. Aim.”
“DON’T SHOOT!!!” I screamed. There was a long pause, but no sound of a firing bullet. On advice from one of the boys, I added, “Stand down.” There was almost a clattering sound as the guns feel to each soldier’s side. I opened my eyes, and saw each of them had a wide eyed, glassy stare.
“You’re controlling them,” Stephen hissed.
“Unstrap us from these tables,” I ordered.
“Myra, how are you doing this? You aren’t even trying,” Tamara said.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Riya replied, as the soldiers undid our straps and we stepped down off of the table. “What do we do now? If we leave, they will simply come after us.”
“Joe could help with that,” Stephen said. “I speculate that his power not only lies in reading a normal person’s mind, but in also manipulating it. He could make them forget, or change what they thought was real.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Joe said. I slipped my hand into his.
“I’ll help you.” I focused myself, and said, aloud, “Your orders have changed; you are to escort this group out of the building and off the premises, except for me and Joseph. You are to take us to Dr. Morison and the other scientists here.”
Joe gripped my hand tightly, but he could hear my thoughts, so he knew we had to go and repeat the process for the scientists or it would not be worth it. “After you take us to see the doctor, you will escort us out of the building as well. No one is to be harmed. Is that clear?”
“Sir Yes sir!” the soldiers cried, snapping to a sharp salute. Their leader, a colonel, I think, directed that one of his officers take half the troupe and take the rest of them outside, while he and the others would take Joe and I to Dr. Morison and the other scientists. We marched down the hall together, until the other group turned down a hall while we continued straight.
“I’m sorry this happened to us,” I told Joe.
“It’s not your fault, Myra,” he replied, quickly. “I…I want someone to blame for all of this, but that person, those people, are here in this building. And it’s me. They were wrong to try all of this in the first place, to try and change us and then sweep us out like yesterday’s garbage. But I was the one who took their bait and let myself be swept along with this. I’m mad at me—I want to go back in time and tell myself to earn money an honest way instead of taking the easy way out and leading me here.” He squeezed my hand a bit, and held tight so that we both stopped in the hall way.
Together, with him leaning down and me leaning up, we kissed, trying to feel some innocence left in us, that we did not know had been stripped away. I sniffed, and Joe, wiped at my wet face with his palms. “You’ve been crying ever since you stopped them. Didn’t you notice?” I hadn’t.
We continued walking down a maze of white corridors, until we entered the large laboratory where vials of blood were stacked on a far counter, labeled with nothing but a few letters and numbers. What they intended to be the last traces of us.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Morison asked the soldiers.
“We have brought the test subjects as ordered,” the colonel replied.
“I didn’t order that!” he exclaimed before he caught sight of us. “You—you’ve already developed them haven’t you. You tricked me.”
“Yes we did,” I said.
“Seize them!” Dr. Morison cried, “Do you have any idea how valuable they are now?”
“Don’t move,” I said, and the soldiers, who had only taken one step out of place, stopped dead in their tracks. The scientists still moved forward, though, reaching out for us.
“We’ve all had psychic training,” said one as he grabbed my arm. I didn’t think, I just did, as I spun my arm around, catching his and punching him away before he could do anything. Joe, who faced a scientist with a needle, stabbed the man with his own weapon before he barely blinked.
“You forgot what you made us,” Joe hissed.
“You may be able to fight off my scientist, but the others will break free soon enough, and in the meantime, you can’t convince us of much,” Morison said, keeping his distance from us.
“I wonder if we have more psychic ability than you’ve had training,” I said.
Joe and I took each other’s hands, and it seemed like a fog rolled out from our minds, blanketing the whole room and making everyone else dizzy. I spoke aloud, because that was the only way I could imagine controlling my ability, and Joe echoed every word inside their heads.
“This is how you will remember: test group six was unsuccessful. Each test subject lived, but there was sign of any supernormal development in any of them. Every time you look at any of your results, you will see results of a normal human being. You will destroy the DNA samples you took, after you find that your results were unsuccessful. You will recommend to your supervisors that the project be canceled, because after this test group, do don’t think the drug with do anything at all at a smaller dose. As far as you know and will ever know, this was just another unsuccessful experiment.”
“Myra! Joe!” Esmail stood in the door way of the laboratory, wearing a heavy, black vest, and holding a gun. Joe held still, finishing off his thrall, but then we went forward following him out of the doorway and running down the white halls.
“Where’d you get the gun?” Joe asked.
“When we get outside,” Esmail said. “I can’t think and run at the same time.”
Esmail weaved through the white corridors, his ability leading us out of the prison and into the sun light. There, in a plain dirt yard surrounded by a fence, two black SUV’s waited and Stephen stood in front of them with five other people. They all looked like they were at least a year or two older than us, and felt almost the same as our group.
“It took you three long enough,” said one of the women. “Now, get in the trucks, we’ve got to make tracks. As talented as you two are, that thrall won’t hold long.” It took me a minute to realize she had not been moving her lips.
“Precognition,” Stephen sang into our heads.
Five of them.
Five patients who had had fever before us.
Who mysteriously disappeared.
That thought filled me with a greater hope now than it had with despair before. Maybe there was a chance for us to escape all of this, to go back to semi-normal lives.
“You’ll never really be normal again,” said one of the men, only to be punched in the arm by one of his companions. “But we’ll help you try.”
We were supernormal now, exceeding any part of man’s brain. But we were rolling out of the place that did it to us, with people just like us, who could hear the humming of each other in their heads.
“Oh, if you like this,” said one of the other five, “just wait until you meet the groups from the other facilities.”
Joe looked at me, a small smile tugging at his lips.
3/8/11 WC: 2215
Piece WC: 10637
Project WC: 20416
Still Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum
Week Eight, Day Four:
They knocked us out and put us in a van. Well, I guess it would have had to be in the reverse, but it happened, none the less. They gassed us with something and when we began to wake I remember hearing the scientists talking.
“They’ve been out for an entire day already.”
“I knew the soldiers would gas them wrong.”
“You think Dr. Morison would have administered it.”
“Not really; he doesn’t care if these kids live or die, so long as they provide him with the formula for a better and longer lasting superhuman.”
“When do you think they’ll wake up?”
“Does it matter? If anything, maybe we shouldn’t let them wake up.”
“Frank!”
“I’m just saying, maybe it’s more merciful. They’ll experience full body failure in a week or two anyway. Morison probably won’t let them leave since they knew something was up, and might even have them shot just to be done with it. Don’t you think it would be nicer if we just let them go to sleep and not wake up?”
“Yeah, maybe, but I can’t stand the thought of euthanasia with animals much less people.” They continued talking, and I heard their feet shuffling toward a space I assumed to be a door, and then the conversation and footsteps slowly died away. I opened my eyes, and felt everyone else do the same.
We were all groggy, and tied to metal exam tables standing perpendicular to the floor, with shiny silver straps that were probably stronger than all of us combined.
“Esmail, can you tell where we are?” Riya asked.
“Not as in an actual location, but we are in a large complex and I can feel most of it mapped out in my head. The question is, how are we going to get out of these bonds to get out of here in the first place?”
“I might be able to slip my straps,” Ellen said. “I could try moving them and then when I’m free get everyone out.”
“Then what?” Tamara asked.
“Esmail, is there an armory in this place?” I asked. The group
fell silent, aside from what I now noticed as a collective buzzing, and Stephen’s strange murmurs.
“Why would you want weapons we don’t know how to use?” Joe asked me.
“Because we do know how to use them,” Stephen said. “Not consciously, but they were feeding it to us through the videos. Myra makes a good point that if we are going to escape from here, we’ll need to be armed.”
“Yeah, since it’s her fault we’re here anyway,” Esmail said.
“Esmail, don’t hold a grudge,” Theo said. “Myra surrendered when we all would have been shot and before we revealed that we already have our superpowers and are probably not going to die in two weeks.”
“What?” Galen asked. “How did you get all of that?”
“I tuned into her before they gassed us,” he said. “Tell them Myra.”
“When we were in the circle, we were talking with our minds,” I said. “The only time any of us spoke aloud was when Stephen told Dr. Morison that he had erased everything off of his laptop. That’s when I realized that he has no idea how we’ve developed so far. There is still a chance that we might make it out of here unharmed. For now, everyone play as dead as you can.” We, as one, closed our eyes playing as if we were asleep, or dead.
“It’s a good plan,” Riya admitted. “But what if they don’t let us go, do we fight our way out then?”
“Hard to say,” I replied. “We’re hard wired as special ops soldiers now, and we have superpowers to boot, but…”
“…But we might not make it out of here,” Joe finished for me. Ellen let out a little sob from where she lay.
“I can’t imagine what my family is going to go through,” she said, “when they probably won’t even find my body.”
“Oh, they’ll know,” Stephen said. “That chip I put into the computer didn’t really erase my everything. It transferred it on to the chip and then sent an email to a computer I have hidden in my wall. If I don’t check that computer within the next few days the message I sent gets forwarded to all of our parents, congress people, the president, and many national news stations. If they kill us they’re sunk.”
“Or they could just kill us and keep you alive to cancel the program,” Esmail said.
“Esmail!” Riya and Theo yelled at the same time.
“Don’t bother, he obviously knows nothing about blackmail and leverage,” Stephen said. “I wouldn’t tell them where the computer was or anything.”
“They could still track it and delete it before you did anything…Unless you did something else.”
“Maybe, I did,” Stephen said. “Let this be a lesson, children, have a contingency for everything—even your contingency.” Somehow, that startled a laugh of everyone.
“So then, do we wait?” Tamara asked.
“Well, it’s not like we can do much else,” Joe said.
“Guys—” Theo cut Esmail off before he could say much more.
“If you aren’t going to say something positive, then don’t say it.”
“Is ‘there’s a giant group of soldiers coming to the lab,’ positive enough for you?” Esmail said. We could not feel what he was feeling, but soon we heard the boots pounding against the floor.
“Line up,” ordered one of them to the others. We heard them form the line, and draw their heavy guns up to their shoulders.
“They’re going to shoot us!” Joe cried out. “He’s just—”
“Confirmation received,” said the lead soldier. “Ready. Aim.”
“DON’T SHOOT!!!” I screamed. There was a long pause, but no sound of a firing bullet. On advice from one of the boys, I added, “Stand down.” There was almost a clattering sound as the guns feel to each soldier’s side. I opened my eyes, and saw each of them had a wide eyed, glassy stare.
“You’re controlling them,” Stephen hissed.
“Unstrap us from these tables,” I ordered.
“Myra, how are you doing this? You aren’t even trying,” Tamara said.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Riya replied, as the soldiers undid our straps and we stepped down off of the table. “What do we do now? If we leave, they will simply come after us.”
“Joe could help with that,” Stephen said. “I speculate that his power not only lies in reading a normal person’s mind, but in also manipulating it. He could make them forget, or change what they thought was real.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Joe said. I slipped my hand into his.
“I’ll help you.” I focused myself, and said, aloud, “Your orders have changed; you are to escort this group out of the building and off the premises, except for me and Joseph. You are to take us to Dr. Morison and the other scientists here.”
Joe gripped my hand tightly, but he could hear my thoughts, so he knew we had to go and repeat the process for the scientists or it would not be worth it. “After you take us to see the doctor, you will escort us out of the building as well. No one is to be harmed. Is that clear?”
“Sir Yes sir!” the soldiers cried, snapping to a sharp salute. Their leader, a colonel, I think, directed that one of his officers take half the troupe and take the rest of them outside, while he and the others would take Joe and I to Dr. Morison and the other scientists. We marched down the hall together, until the other group turned down a hall while we continued straight.
“I’m sorry this happened to us,” I told Joe.
“It’s not your fault, Myra,” he replied, quickly. “I…I want someone to blame for all of this, but that person, those people, are here in this building. And it’s me. They were wrong to try all of this in the first place, to try and change us and then sweep us out like yesterday’s garbage. But I was the one who took their bait and let myself be swept along with this. I’m mad at me—I want to go back in time and tell myself to earn money an honest way instead of taking the easy way out and leading me here.” He squeezed my hand a bit, and held tight so that we both stopped in the hall way.
Together, with him leaning down and me leaning up, we kissed, trying to feel some innocence left in us, that we did not know had been stripped away. I sniffed, and Joe, wiped at my wet face with his palms. “You’ve been crying ever since you stopped them. Didn’t you notice?” I hadn’t.
We continued walking down a maze of white corridors, until we entered the large laboratory where vials of blood were stacked on a far counter, labeled with nothing but a few letters and numbers. What they intended to be the last traces of us.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Morison asked the soldiers.
“We have brought the test subjects as ordered,” the colonel replied.
“I didn’t order that!” he exclaimed before he caught sight of us. “You—you’ve already developed them haven’t you. You tricked me.”
“Yes we did,” I said.
“Seize them!” Dr. Morison cried, “Do you have any idea how valuable they are now?”
“Don’t move,” I said, and the soldiers, who had only taken one step out of place, stopped dead in their tracks. The scientists still moved forward, though, reaching out for us.
“We’ve all had psychic training,” said one as he grabbed my arm. I didn’t think, I just did, as I spun my arm around, catching his and punching him away before he could do anything. Joe, who faced a scientist with a needle, stabbed the man with his own weapon before he barely blinked.
“You forgot what you made us,” Joe hissed.
“You may be able to fight off my scientist, but the others will break free soon enough, and in the meantime, you can’t convince us of much,” Morison said, keeping his distance from us.
“I wonder if we have more psychic ability than you’ve had training,” I said.
Joe and I took each other’s hands, and it seemed like a fog rolled out from our minds, blanketing the whole room and making everyone else dizzy. I spoke aloud, because that was the only way I could imagine controlling my ability, and Joe echoed every word inside their heads.
“This is how you will remember: test group six was unsuccessful. Each test subject lived, but there was sign of any supernormal development in any of them. Every time you look at any of your results, you will see results of a normal human being. You will destroy the DNA samples you took, after you find that your results were unsuccessful. You will recommend to your supervisors that the project be canceled, because after this test group, do don’t think the drug with do anything at all at a smaller dose. As far as you know and will ever know, this was just another unsuccessful experiment.”
“Myra! Joe!” Esmail stood in the door way of the laboratory, wearing a heavy, black vest, and holding a gun. Joe held still, finishing off his thrall, but then we went forward following him out of the doorway and running down the white halls.
“Where’d you get the gun?” Joe asked.
“When we get outside,” Esmail said. “I can’t think and run at the same time.”
Esmail weaved through the white corridors, his ability leading us out of the prison and into the sun light. There, in a plain dirt yard surrounded by a fence, two black SUV’s waited and Stephen stood in front of them with five other people. They all looked like they were at least a year or two older than us, and felt almost the same as our group.
“It took you three long enough,” said one of the women. “Now, get in the trucks, we’ve got to make tracks. As talented as you two are, that thrall won’t hold long.” It took me a minute to realize she had not been moving her lips.
“Precognition,” Stephen sang into our heads.
Five of them.
Five patients who had had fever before us.
Who mysteriously disappeared.
That thought filled me with a greater hope now than it had with despair before. Maybe there was a chance for us to escape all of this, to go back to semi-normal lives.
“You’ll never really be normal again,” said one of the men, only to be punched in the arm by one of his companions. “But we’ll help you try.”
We were supernormal now, exceeding any part of man’s brain. But we were rolling out of the place that did it to us, with people just like us, who could hear the humming of each other in their heads.
“Oh, if you like this,” said one of the other five, “just wait until you meet the groups from the other facilities.”
Joe looked at me, a small smile tugging at his lips.
3/8/11 WC: 2215
Piece WC: 10637
Project WC: 20416
Still Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum
