Subject 23

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Noise crashed around me, and my eyes fluttered open, snapped open wide in shock. The light hit me, brilliant and glaring, blinding me so that I shut my eyes right away. My head hurt. It was throbbing so hard I felt sick to my stomach. The crashing noise stopped, and someone spoke, the noise too garbled to make out the words. A crack and pop followed this sound, and then scratchy sounding classic music filled my ears.

            I tried to open my eyes again, more slowly this time. The room swam around me, and I squinted against the light, struggling to sit up. Something pulled tight against my arms, holding me where I was. After a few seconds of panic my vision cleared.

            The room was white, blazing white. Sterile looking. There were cupboards along one wall, glossy metal cabinets above a wide green counter. Test tubes and glass vials decorated the countertop. Panic spiked in my chest, and my pulse picked up even more as I blinked, then shifted my gaze down to my torso. Why can’t I move?

            There were thick leather straps across my chest, metal buckles glimmering under the florescent lights. I tilted my head forward, chest tight, and saw an identical set of straps over my knees and ankles. I was in restraints, tied to a metal trolley like I was a mental patient at a hospital.

            But the room wasn’t a hospital, it was far worse.

            Opposite the table I was lying on was a second table, but this one was empty. The buckles were open, and the straps hung down, but I could see a pool of dried liquid on the trolley, the burnt crimson colour of dried blood.

            Something was squeezing my heart in my chest, sending it up into my throat. I felt like I was choking on my own panic. Beside me, something began beeping at a steadily increasing rate, and when I jerked my head the other way I could see I’d been hooked up to some kind of machine. They were monitoring me. There were tubes taped to my skin at both wrists, which meant there were needles sticking into my skin. A rush of nausea made me feel lightheaded.

            “Ms. Worth, please sedate the subject, I don’t want her heart rate rising above one hundred, if we can help it.” The man that spoken had his back turned to me, he was at the far end of the room, beyond the other table. He was tall, with frizzy black hair, and he wore a white lab coat that hung off his scarecrow frame. When he moved, the sound of glass vials clinking reached me. What was he doing?

            Movement attracted my attention to the other side of my table. A young woman, her dark hair pulled up in a careful knot at the back of her head, approached me. She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and drew something out. The lights overhead made the needle in her hand glitter.

            “No!” my voice was hoarse, gravely and barely audible. “No, stop. You can’t—”

            She didn’t even look at me. The needle felt like a beesting going in, a sliver of pain that ran up my arm. The woman stepped back and picked up a fist-sized black box from the countertop. She hit one of the buttons on the side and spoke into it. “Subject 23 has been sedated. We will begin by testing formula twelve point five.” The tape recorder clicked off and she set it down.

            “You can’t…you can’t do this…” It felt like my lips were numb, like I had to force the words out. It was the same feeling I’d had when the gas had begun hissing into my plastic prison, and I knew I only had a few minutes of consciousness left. I had to figure out what this place was, where I was being kept, what they were doing. Frantically I tried to look around, taking in the room as completely as I could. The vials were filled with different colours of liquid, some were boiling above tiny yellow flames. There were computers lining one wall, and flickering lights on the monitors. In one corner, looking out of place among the burnished steel surfaces was an old brass gramophone. It was the source of the crackling sounding classical music. Somehow the music made everything worse.

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