damned_institute | Disciplinary Therapy Room 5 [MU for Sangamon Taylor]

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Disciplinary Therapy Room 5 [MU for Sangamon Taylor]

His body was his temple and it was about to undergo some unexpected revisions. Somehow, the doctor didn't think this Mr. Sangamon Taylor was going to appreciate the renovations, even if they were for science. Actually, come to think of it, he'd probably have a worse time of it all precisely for those reasons.

Chuckling to himself, the doctor moved into position and rolled the medical tray over, carefully arranging the assortment of needles on it into neat little rows. Sangamon would be waking soon and he had to have everything ready and perfect for him. Tonight, the scientist became the lab rat, in a most delicious twist of irony and fate.

Humming to himself, the doctor waited for Sangamon to awaken, checking the straps that held him firmly in place.

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S.T. woke groggy, but with memory intact. He kept his eyes closed against a wave of dizziness, and tried to take stock. He couldn't move. Not paralyzed-by-drugs couldn't move, but tied, wrists and torso and ankles strapped into a chair. His heart skipped a beat, one and two and three and the rhythm caught, like the engine of a Zodiac catching and purring and ramping up to full throttle. He opened his eyes.

Light. High-wattage fluorescents illuminated gleaming metal and plastic. The lingering effects of the sedatives blurred edges and turned the entire room into a kaleidoscope in shades of white and silver, spinning slowly like a leaf on a river.

Some self-satisfied bastard was humming to himself. Puttering away at the straps like a bored graduate student who'd confused his lab with a bondage club. Or who didn't see a difference between the man in the chair and a shaved-naked albino rabbit.

"Who the fuck are you?" Was this the Head Bastard himself? Or just another faceless flunky?

Ah, he was awake. And there was that searing wit the doctor had heard sooo much about. A pity that S.T. wasn't more awake, perhaps he could have come up with something better.

"Does it really matter to you? You're just going to insult me anyway." A quick tug on the straps and the doctor disappeared into the dark. His hands were just barely visible as they went back to rearranging the needles at S.T.'s side, all in perfect little rows, ordered, neat, exactly as they were needed. "Besides, I'm not the important one here - you are, Mr. Sangamon Taylor. You're the most important one of all."

The doctor chuckled and began slipping bottles out of his pockets, lining them up with the needles. Bottle, needle, bottle, needle - like a pretty pattern. Patterns were everywhere in nature. Would S.T. pick up on the one that was about to hurt him? "You're my little lab rat tonight. Isn't that wonderful?"

That answered that question -- it wasn't the Head Bastard himself playing mad scientist. And a scientist the guy was, or at least he looked the part. Eyes focused, motions over-precise, darting in and out of the gloom quickly, but soft. He had the inherent weakness of a man who left the lab only when security kicked everyone out to shower.

Mr. Sangamon Taylor The name dropped like a turd in the sewer of condescending gibberish from a flunky needing to prop up his own importance. But it was his name. His real name. The bastards knew who he was and they had him bracketed. The bright side was that he wasn't crazy. The flip side was that he had a bad feeling it was the last bright spot of the night. Aside from the fucking interrogation lights.

"I need to know so when we blow this place wide open, I can splatter your face across the nightly news and sweet-talk the NEJM into turning your name into a synonym for malpractice. A two-bit Josef Mengele who missed his true calling as a tattoo artist." He was giving the fucker exactly what he'd asked for. They knew who he was and they knew how he'd react, and he was checking off the boxes in order. He shut up. Was it too much to ask for someone to take a swing at him without doing their fucking homework?

When he spoke again, his voice was clipped and a first-order approximation of calm. "And I'd gathered that," he said, each word punctuated by a tug at the restraints around his wrists. "No need to insult my intelligence."

As long as he kept bitching or bullshitting, he could ignore the endless procession of needles. Bottles and syringes clicked down like binary ones and zeros, encoding a biochemical equation in a language he knew well. His nameless torturer had just neglected to provide the key to the notation.

"What makes you think I'm well-suited as a catalyst?"

Edited 2009-03-13 23:20 (UTC)

There it was! That stinging anger and the lavish insults he'd heard so much about had finally awakened! Grinning wide, the doctor was aware that his smile was probably visible like a Cheshire grin in the dark. All the better, he hoped S.T. was watching. "Oh, but you do know how not to disappoint, don't you? I'm so glad that little motormouth of yours has started its engines. But you'll never get close to me, Mr. Taylor. Try and flail against the giant machine as you might, but then you're used to that sort of thing, aren't you?"

Environmental terrorism was a tricky business. Even costing companies money and stopping up pipes weren't enough to make them stop completely. And then there was the tricky business of competition - who often made the job so much worse.

Picking up the first bottle in the line, he shook it a little, swishing the translucent contents inside like a cocktail. "I don't think you'll be a good catalyst, Mr. Taylor. That's why we call this an 'experiment.' It's so hard to find good lab rats, you know. Some of them don't even make it through the trial stages of the process." The doctor laughed and picked up a long syringe, inserting it through the rubber cap of the bottle. "Why, I killed a few of them last night in preparation for this. Weak creatures as they were." The plunger drew back and the doctor smiled. "It's all trial and error in gene modification, you see. We're on the cutting edge, so there's a lot of... mistakes, that happen. We learn from those and push forward. Ready?"

The smirking bastard had made his first mistake. Sangamon Taylor wasn't used to holding protest signs while drivers sped by, throwing slush from potholes over a bunch of long-haired duck-squeezers. He was used to winning.

Chemical corporations were notoriously short-sighted -- the long view wasn't something they could afford to consider, so they ignored it. Would-be whistleblowers were seduced by the promise of technological solutions from within. They ran studies wide and shallow, wore early success like a shield against concerns based in rational science. Ninety-nine percent of the byproducts are water and carbon dioxide; they always thought one percent could be swept under the rug. Coverups over coverups over coverups, and no-one paid attention to the man slipping in covered only by night. Slip-ups were everywhere. The janitor took out the lab trash and threw it in the dumpster rather than the incinerator, leaving a toxic trail better than any intercepted memo. Diffuser pipes just gave a bigger radius for detection. People talked, and he listened. And sometimes crazy Attorneys General handed him actual signed warrants to spy on their own taxpayers. Everywhere he went, he found evidence, and left lawsuits and satisfied journalists in his wake.

No, his problem wasn't a lack of success stories. His problem was that he was only one man, set against a host of idiots who thought science could outrun consequences. For every biochemist, manager, or PR flack who'd never work in the field again, a dozen stepped in to take their place. Public consciousness was the only answer. Make corporations so mediapathic that Joe Public distrusted them from the get-go. It wasn't good enough to question the factory down the road after statistically significant numbers of your neighbors came down with some rare cancer. Recycling newspapers wasn't enough; they needed to be read.

The doctor's continued cackling broke through the cadences of the old argument. Was he talking about rats, or fellow patients. The notices of disappearances on the bulletin flashed up like neon signs. Would there be one for him tomorrow, if he died here? Though with the (fully justified) paranoia running rampant, would anyone mistake a death for a disappearance? He had to hope not.

Gene 'therapy'. Shit. Whoever this bastard was, he knew how to pick his nightmares. It was the Holy Grail of any researcher who'd ever talked to someone with cancer or Lou Gehrig's disease or Alzheimer's. Though such altruism was probably beyond Igor here. There'd be profit in it, too -- tailored babies for the BMW set, more likely. But they couldn't have gotten that far in twenty years. Computers were making leaps and bounds -- it was possible that they had a rough map of the human genetic code by now. But it would be a rough map of trackless wilderness. The pathways and processes laid down by nature yielded their secrets slowly. Spider had mentioned a cure for cancer, but he'd also looked at headphones like S.T. looked at flint arrowheads -- charming souvenirs for tourists, but he wouldn't want to live there. Hell, the Indians he knew wouldn't want to live back then either. Which meant that anything that was in that bottle had to be the genetic equivalent of clearing underbrush with dynamite.

"No fucking way. If you're looking for informed consent, you've got the wrong man." As the doctor stepped near him with the needle, he clenched his jaw and forced himself not to look away.

"Informed consent?" The doctor had to laugh at that, setting the needle down on the tray so he didn't accidentally stab himself. Oh, that was rich! Informed consent? Doubling over as he laughed, the sound echoed dully off the walls in a way that shouldn't have been possible. Finally after a minute, he calmed down, wiping at the corners of his eyes as he shook his head. "Oh, Mr. Taylor, I didn't know you had such a sense of humor!"

Deftly picking up the syringe again, the doctor pulled a cotton swab bathed in rubbing alcohol out from beneath the tray and carefully cleaned S.T's arm. "We don't even know what these things do - so why should we ask you to? That's the fun of experimenting - seeing what happens when we throw the right cocktail together."

Jabbing the needle into his arm, the doctor smiled again and began to empty the contents into S.T. "Oh, and by the way? This will likely burn like the fires of hell in your veins. Enjoy."

At least someone was getting a laugh out of this. Smarmy fucking bastard. The Granola James Bond had his very own personal Dr. No. It was a touch he could have done without.

"That's not experimenting. A high school kid failing freshman physics knows that. If this is an experiment, where are the instruments? You haven't recorded a damn thing about this whole process. Repeatability nil, and I don't see any controls, either."

Of course, they could have them. He could be one Sangamon Taylor clone in one cage in a stuffy basement lab on a scale movies could only convey with matte paintings. Nah. Still too many variables. Landel's was chaos in a bottle. Too many worlds, too many personalities, too many different things at once. Unless humans looked so similar to whoever was running the show that it was like an ant farm; no-one thought individual workers capable of independent thought, though as a whole they were industrious on a scale that inspired revolutions.

"This is just you getting your rocks off over seeing me twitch."

He'd been running the lecture on cruise control, trying to let the scenery distract him from the fact that the bridge ahead was out. The area around the needle had started by feeling slightly warm, and then more nerves had joined the party. A crawling itch was spreading across the muscles of the arm surrounding the vein, though nothing was visible on the surface.

The press of the plunger sped up, and a surge of whatever the fuck it was went in. A trickle of warmth slid up his arm along the path of the veins. Veins don't have nerves like that. It was completely impossible for him to feel what he was feeling. Telling his arm that didn't stop the sensation, or the itch following in its wake, and then it hit his heart. He froze, holding his breath, but that didn't do a damn thing either. It didn't stop the blood from racing through his lungs and then back through the heart, destination everywhere. A second later, heat bloomed from his chest, radiating out across his entire body. Like the first gasp of air after a deep dive without tanks, when he'd been feeling lazy and stupid and needing to prove his bona fides by showing that he was just as much of an idiot as the next guy when oxygen-deprived. But that sort of warmth was a relief. This was anything but.

It was the itching and burning of an allergic reaction, histamines through the roof and he had to be running a fever already. Except it was his own blood supply that was toxic. He let go the breath he was holding, through a throat suddenly constricted and lungs suddenly heavy with fluid.

"As if I'd dirty the control subjects by bringing them into contact with the test subject." The doctor capped his syringe and set it down next to the bottle, picking up a clipboard attached to the other side of the tray. He waited for a moment and then started taking notes, watching with a smirk on his face as his little cocktail made the rounds through S.T.'s body. "And just because you can't see the instruments doesn't mean they don't exist. Remember that, Mr. Sangamon Taylor. We're always watching."

The pen scritched across the paper, checking here and there, taking notes, doing all the things he needed to square away before he started the next phase. "Most interesting...." he mumbled to himself before pressing two gloved fingers to S.T.'s wrist. The doctor nodded and then went back to writing. "Just as I thought..."

It wouldn't do to kill him right off the bat, so the doctor put down his clipboard and picked up the next in the series of needles. He filled it from the corresponding bottle and then injected it into S.T.'s arm. "Soon, the effects should wear off. Once it does, let me know and we'll move onto stage two."

He was being humored. They'd moved on to the taunt-and-threaten portion of the agenda, bypassing the ego-stroking information overload where the prick-of-the-week stops the nuclear missile countdown just to put on a multimedia blitz for Our Hero. And then the fucker was supposed to turn his back just long enough for a daring escape. Except he couldn't outrun his own circulatory system with a bit of fancy driving.

There might be control subjects, but it would be pretty fucking stupid. Anyone with the ability to duplicate not only his genetic code but a lifetime of environmental influences -- college-era experiments (course-related or recreational) and a career of midnight dump-raids, acid rain and late-night snacks -- didn't need to be farting around with the biological equivalent of installing an aftermarket stereo from Radio Shack in a brand-new BMW.

Not that he'd normally compare his scruffy and mildly toxic physique with anything that smelled like yuppie. The atmosphere of condescension and arrogance must be affecting his brain. He refused to contemplate the possibility it was the fever or the injection dulling his thoughts.

"Har de har har," was all he had to say in response to the claim of omniscience. Either that was a bald-faced lie, or Dr. No enjoyed pissing away most of his life watching patients eat, shit, and make small talk.

As the silence stretched on, broken only by the chickenscratch of pen on clipboard, S.T. tried to ignore the steady, monotonic advance of fever and weakness. His breathing was shallow except when he deliberately gasped for more air, and his pulse seemed to be running on at least four more cylinders than necessary. Full-throttle, damn-the-torpedoes speed, quickly gaining on who-needs-fuel-economy-this-is-America-damnit. Deep breathing and nature-retreat calming exercises were getting him nowhere. His body was a battleground and convening peace talks with this lunatic was even less useful than the normal United Nations gestures of futility. This was no Cold War detente -- strictly an old-fashioned guns-blazing firefight.

When fingers touched his wrist, he jumped (as far as the straps would allow, which admittedly wasn't much) and opened eyes he hadn't realized he had closed. The prick was taking his pulse. Which made no sense if there were hidden instruments. S.T. was sticking with his original theory of purposeless dick-twisting. There hadn't been anything to contradict it.

He tried to cultivate a look of detachment as the needle jabbed again, but he had a feeling he just looked dyspeptic. He refused to look the doctor in the eyes, letting his head fall back against the chair. The lights above were burning tracks in his retinas; each minuscule movement of his head as his neck muscles slowly relaxed dug trails of blood-red light and toxic-waste green afterimages across his field of view.

It only dawned on him that the doctor could be telling the truth about the effects wearing off when he felt the fever break. Sweat he hadn't noticed forming was damp and cold, and the room felt warmer even as the clamminess of his own skin made him shiver. He wasn't sure which would be preferable: tell the sadistic asswipe to get on with it, or stall for as long as possible. He didn't realize his bodies' unconscious reactions had already answered for him.

No answer, but the way Sangamon relaxed and the color of his skin told the doctor all he needed to know. A few more marks on his clipboard and he flipped one of the papers over, checking the next sheet. Hmming and mumbling to himself as he checked boxes and crossed out lines, the doctor barely paid any attention to his little lab rat. The man wasn't talking and he wasn't in any danger of dying (unless the next shot had an unpleasant reaction with the first), so he had little to do but check the results.

"Har de har har is hardly on the same level as your usual insults, Mr. Sangamon Taylor. Isn't there anything better floating around in that head of yours?" Setting the clipboard down, the doctor picked up the next syringe and filled it with a rather noxious looking blue liquid. Tapping out the air bubbles, he grabbed S.T.'s head and smiled. "Perhaps this will do something to help you remember? I'm not sure what exactly this does, but the higher-ups wanted it tested, so here we go. They said something about increasing brain functions or whatever - let's see what it does to you, hm?"

Pushing the needle into S.T.'s neck, the doctor depressed the plunger and drained the contents into him. Depositing the needle into its proper waste bin, he then stood back and waited to see what this one did, taking notes all the while. "Oh, and if it looks like it's going to kill you? Please let me know."

Hell if he was going to be their trained monkey, flinging insults like feces on command.

This time, the sensation started where the first injection had left off -- heat poured up and down his neck from the injection site and his metabolism had already lit off the afterburners before he'd even had a chance to process that last taunt. At least jet engines would explain the roaring in his ears.

"Is that what you want? That what gets you off? You want me to beg you for my life?" Pride and terror both rated a perfect 10 on the motivation scale, but stubbornness slammed his mouth shut for a few long moments.

When he blinked, trying to clear his head, his vision shuddered and blurred. Which meant the fever was back. He was going to roast to death in his own skin like his first (and last) attempt at making a Thanksgiving turkey. A two-hundred pound lump of toxic char, permanently baked onto the chair.

"How," he coughed, biting back nausea and the shakiness of his own voice. And already, he wasn't quite sure what he'd been about to ask. "Fever-induced brain damage?" Right, that was it. "How do you expect to get a reading after that?"

He closed his eyes again. Where were the fever dreams, or was this one? That was it. He'd done something stupid in the Harbor again and was curled up at home, but this time without a roommate to whine until he dragged himself to the hospital. There were antibiotics in the medicine cabinet. Leftovers, but they'd get him conscious enough to take stock. Unless this was viral -- no, it could only be viral if he was really in some nightmare of a laboratory. Had to just be an infection. He tried to stand, but the dream wouldn't let go. Then he tried to thrash, but he didn't have the energy to do more than twitch.

"Fuck. What's," he gasped, and the thread of the conversation lurched ten feet up on a wave of disorientation and full-body tremors. "What's so fucking interesting about shock and organ failure. Not -- not a fucking thing." Any shaking from fear was lost in the fog of other involuntary twitches. "Stop it. Please."

"Beg for your life? Hardly, Mr. Taylor. I'm looking to advance genetic manipulation and therapy. It's interesting how tweaking one little bit of code can either mutate the entire being into something good, or kill them in an instant." The pen scratched across the paper and the doctor smiled. "Don't you think?"

Leaning over, the doctor adjusted something on the chair, turning a dial that clicked ominously through the room and then straightened again. He glanced over his shoulder and then looked back to S.T. "You're lucky to be on the forefront of all this. You're breaking new ground. Most of the other subjects died after the first round, the strong ones usually kicked it right about....now. You should be proud of yourself. You're a survivor."

Leaning in, the doctor took a sample of S.T.'s blood and tucked the little vial away into his pocket. He patted the fabric and grinned wide, his white teeth the only thing showing of his face. "And why stop when we're getting so far? The fever will wear off by daytime and it isn't high enough to kill you." Picking up the neutralizing substance, the doctor injected it into S.T.'s neck and waited a few moments, tapping his watch. Then, without waiting for the results, he grabbed the last syringe and a bottle of a light pink substance. He swirled it once in his hand to stir it before he stabbed the needle in and filled it until there was almost nothing left in the bottle. "Now, for this one, we'll need a prolonged period of observation. The effects of this beauty aren't well documented yet, but I'm sure it won't kill you. More that it'll... Well, we'll see won't we?"

Leaning over, the doctor grabbed S.T.'s head, pushing it to the side. "Don't move now or I might just miss." He waited a moment for his words to sink in and then he slid the needle in behind S.T.'s ear. The plunger fell and the doctor watched in pride as the mixture disappeared into his new lab rat. Withdrawing it, he pulled back and dropped the empty syringe into the waste basket, pushing the tray away. "And now? The maze begins. We'll be monitoring your progress, Mr. Sangamon Taylor. Please, don't disappoint."

The doctor's footsteps faded into the darkness and just as they disappeared, the straps and the door unlocked with a faint click.

Tortured, humored, and now patronized. By a smarmy scrawny fucker whose wet dreams involved syringes because they were bigger than his dick. S.T. didn't grace him with an answer. He just stared back, trying to force the fear from his face by grinding his teeth together.

The click from the chair could have been a million miles away, for all he heard it. The argument between the voice going shit oh shit oh shit and the one that sounded eerily like Jim Grandfather when he'd pulled him out of the woods telling him to sit down -- but wasn't he already sitting -- was too loud. The prick on his neck Prick, hah! Shit. That shouldn't be that funny. I really am dying. Aren't I? felt like a beesting but for some reason he couldn't bat it away. Honeybees died after one sting -- people were so afraid of being stung but they don't want to hurt anyone. Nature's perfect riot cops, less-lethal than tear gas, hesitant rather than sadistic. And sweet, to boot. Or maybe the buzzing was just static, and they'd turned his head into a radio receiver. Going down into a tunnel, signal fading out, hundreds of feet of mud and water and boats over his head fuck you callahan wait why is that familiar was there something I've forgotten shit what was I supposed to be doing am I'm not supposed to be here?.

Rational thought had hit fever shoals and broken up with all hands. But pieces were washing ashore, on wave after wave of icy Atlantic spray. Or sweat. Salinity about the same. He'd only just processed the surprising concept that he was still alive when the bastard started talking again. Which meant this wasn't over. He squinted, trying to bring the doctor into focus. It brought, instead, the final bottle and needle into view, filling inexorably. He whimpered, but didn't even have the strength to pull away as the final injection went in.

The warmth bloomed out again, a toxic plume on the right side of his head, slowly disseminating across cheek and lips and eyes and fingertips. The familiarity was almost comforting. Third time's the charm. He lay, shivering and half-conscious, waiting for it to kill him. Or at least knock him all the way out.

It did neither. An eternity, or maybe fifteen minutes, passed. The fever failed to reach the heights its predecessor had attained. A shiver grew to a shudder, and the loose strap around his left wrist fell away. The motion grabbed his attention, and he lifted the arm. For a few minutes, the sight of it moving freely was a curiosity, but not one he could connect to any useful thoughts. Then the driftwood built a pier and thought had a place to dock. He leapt out of the chair.

Or tried. His knees buckled under him and he pitched headlong onto the ground. Shit. Everything ached, and his muscles were shivering with fever, exhaustion, and only the absent mad scientist knew what else. But he could stand, and he did. He staggered one step towards the door, and then a second. Fuck, what had they done to him. He looked around, but the clipboard had left with the doctor. The room was clean, sterile.

Clean. Sterile. Disposal. The wastebasket. That was still there. He picked it up and hugged it to his chest. He could take it, find a lab, find out what they'd done to him. He walked in the straightest line he could manage to the door and pulled it open.

[to here]

Edited 2009-03-27 01:02 (UTC)

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Disciplinary Therapy Room 5 [MU for Sangamon Taylor]

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