An Intangible Pattern

They're mine!

Noah slumped into his chair and pressed his palms against his eyes, as though to snuff out the flickering phantasms that drew his attention inward. Far from suffocating the errant visions, it only served to sharpen his imagination and his stomach churned uneasily. He tried, once again, to finish reading the journal open on his laptop but his attention wandered back to Alex before he could reach the end of the sentence. He gave up and stared out of the window of his office on the first floor of the research facility. It was snowing again.

He ruminated, in forensic detail, all of the ways his plan could fail: What if Alex was seen? Was he sure there were no more hidden microphones in his home? What if something happened to her on her way over? Was he sure the chains would hold? What if he somehow broke free? 

In a way he hoped she wouldn't show up, that she would finally see sense and tell her sister everything, that there would be some kind of closure to this whole sorry situation - even if he lost everything. He felt as though he stood on a narrow ledge over a pit, unable to move forward or back, with only two possibilities open to him: remain with his back to the wall or leap to certain destruction, and the longer he lived with the threat of complete character annihilation, the more tempting it became to submit to it. 

He sighed, shut down his Laptop and shoved his lab book into his bag. He was too distracted to write and at any rate, the research center would close on Christmas eve. He would wrap up the last of the experiments for the day and come back to it with a clear mind once he had dealt with Alex. 

He walked down the hall, lost in thought, when one of the research assistants caught up to him. 

“Dr Courentin!” He gasped, wheezing from running up the stairs. 

“Yes, what is it Peter?” Asked Noah, confused by the man's anxious appearance.

“Can you…come down… to the lab? One of our participants is throwing a fit.”

“What's wrong?”

“They're insisting we tell them who donated the shirt. They're making all kinds of threats”

Noah looked startled, then dismayed,

I should have expected it. Why should this drug be any more effective than the others?

Noah marched into the lab with his colleague and looked through the observation window at a tall woman with long dark hair. Her otherwise handsome features were twisted with rage as she paced impatiently around the testing room. 

“Thank god, you're here, she’s insisting on speaking to a senior member of staff,” whispered a bespectacled, blonde researcher sitting at the control panel.

He took the microphone from her and spoke into it. 

“This is Dr Courentin, I'm in charge here. Is everything alright?”

“No!” She snapped, “Everything is not fucking alright. Your idiot staff won't answer the simplest questions!”

Noah ground his teeth, biting back the urge to snap at the woman in defense of his colleagues. Mastering himself, he said in as neutral a tone as possible,

“Perhaps I can help?”

She brandished a white t-shirt. 

“Tell me who this belongs to?” She commanded.

“I'm afraid I can't. All samples are anonymised and even if they weren't I would be breaking the law if I were to give out the personal information of volunteers.”

Before he could finish his sentence, the woman picked up the chair and hurled it at the observation window. It bounced uselessly off the reinforced glass and clattered to the floor.