The 3rd Experiment

Chapter 18

|New York City, New York|
|Tuesday, September 6, 2011|

I wake to a bright white room littered with fluorescent lighting. Halfway through the room, I can see a glass divider, beyond that is a wide doorway. My side of the glass is just an empty room. The walls are white except for one beam in the middle of the wall which has been painted a bright red.

I look down at my body to see a straightjacket and I start to recall the last moments I can remember.

I was taken here, inside of a metal suit.

A man with black hair and a goatee comes into the room, and he takes off his sunglasses to look at me. To admire me. I start to feel as though I'm an animal inside a zoo.

"Who are you?" he asks. He sounds somehow both confused and confident

His confidence starts to make me second guess myself.

"Rebecca... Rebecca Barnes." I say, not sounding too sure of myself.

"Okay, Rebecca Barnes, I'm gonna need to ask you a few questions," he says, pulling up a chair to his side of the glass. I don't move from the wall.

Just as he opens his mouth to speak, I interrupt his thought.

"Why did you bring me here?"

"Because you killed people." He says without missing a beat and I flinch in response.

"But why did you bring me here and not to the police?"

"Because you're not normal."

All I can do is stare at him. I should've been offended by that comment but he's right. I ran for miles without a hint of exhaustion. I sliced my palm and didn't notice until I saw the scar. I killed four people without a second thought. What is wrong with me?

"And I want to figure out how 'not normal' you are."

Something in the way he said that immediately made me feel more comfortable. I didn't feel as tense as when the conversation started and I could feel myself starting to slouch.

"So, Rebecca Barnes, what happened?"

"I don't really know," I say trying to recount the last few days. "I woke up in a broken capsule and I ran. I don't know how far or in what direction. I just ran. I remember getting to a road and I sat down to rest my legs but I fell asleep there. I remember the sun being so warm and the feeling of the morning dew on my clothes was refreshing."

I looked up at him and realized that I had trailed off. He didn't seem upset, he seemed genuinely interested. But not in what I had to say, more in how I was saying it.

"Then what?" He asked. And I just knew that he had opened a notepad in his head and he was taking notes.

"Then, I followed the road to a small town. There, I saw cars smaller than I remembered and the TVs larger. That's when I saw the newspaper." I stopped talking and noticed how much harder to breathe it was all of a sudden.

"Rebecca?" He asks, trying not to get too worried.

"What year is it?" I call out over my staggered breaths.

"I'm sorry?" He asks, no doubt confused by my question.

"What year is it? Today, now."

"It's 2011. September 6th, 2011."

"Oh, my god," I say quietly. It's true. It's really true. I feel tears start to pool in my eyes and I cringe, trying to catch my breath. That's when he gets up and opens a door in the glass wall. He kneels down next to me and begins to unbuckle the tethers around my arms and torso. Finally, I can breathe.

He sits down across from me and watches as I move my arms from the position they were stuck in. But I notice that my left wrist has been put in some sort of brace. I look over at him and he knows what I'm thinking.

"You fractured it on my suit." He explains.

After a few minutes of silence, he speaks up again.

"What year should it be?"

"The last time I read a newspaper was in 1942." He jerks his head back in confusion.

I rest my head in my hands, as much as I can with one of them locked in a brace. I can't even begin to process what I've just told him, let alone the fact that I lived it.

He stood me up and walked me to a room at the end of a long hallway. That's when he introduced himself, Tony Stark. Inside the room was a large bed dressed with the softest blankets I had ever felt. Two side tables with large lamps. In the corner was a cozy chair decorated with one small pillow. He told me to stay there and get as much rest as I needed and that he would check on me in the morning.

|Wednesday, September 7, 2011|

The morning came much faster than I had anticipated as I was awoken by another stint of panic. Tony came into the room with good intent, only hoping to see if I was still asleep but the slightest noise woke me. I sat right up and my arm launched forward and hit Tony before I even realized he was in front of me.

"Oh, my god. I am so sorry, Mr. Stark."

He reaches up to rub his eye that I've probably bruised.

"Don't worry about it, and please, call me Tony. So, how'd you sleep?"

"I was out hard until you came in. I never used to wake up that easily. I slept in a room with my younger sisters for most of my life."

"Well, things have changed. What do you say, we go out to the kitchen and get you something to eat?"

I guess he could tell by the look on my face that that was the best thing he had said to me since I met him. He helped me out of bed, not that I needed it, and he led me back through the hallway, past the holding cell, and to the kitchen. There, he pulled out a griddle and some pancake mix.

After a few minutes, he set a plate of three pancakes on the table in front of me. Before he could return with the bottle of syrup, I had already scarfed down one and a half of the pancakes.

"Jesus, kid. You act like you haven't eaten in years."

"I haven't."