Experiment X

1 | Experiment X

1 | Experiment X    

     First. There’s darkness. Like always.   Suddenly, without warning a strange greenish-yellow light flickers on from above. The darkness flees, and a face appears. Shadowed. Studied intently, curiously. For any reaction, any sign of pain.   We’ve seen this face before, not hers, but the face. Unconscious. Eyes closed. It’s almost as if she could be lost in a wonderful, calm sleep. Perhaps even dreaming, worlds away from this one. But now there is no such sleep. No such dreams. Only the mere of illusions of their being.  

     It is the face of a girl. The first girl. Number 1. She is the special one. The first to be experimented on. Her motionless face is pale, and looks much older than her seventeen years of age. This life now, this struggle of living hardens you, makes you this way without choice. For there are hardly any more choices left anymore. The choice to continue getting up every day and somehow keep hope alive, the hope that things will get better to keep yourself alive. Or. The choice to give up , give into the lies, and let it all crush you instantly, and die.  

     But there is more to this one than her extraordinary will to survive. That tragically beautiful face had once been mired with dirt, blood, and grime. There had been scars: gnarled, scabbed-over scars upon her cheeks, neck, along her body, and legs; and, it was these scars that told her story, her past of constant running. Of escape. And now she is here. Captured.  

     There is no escape. For no one. Not even her.   Her long, crimson waves of her hair that burn fiery in the eerie light had once been matted, tangled, and splattered with mud. It told of the hiding place that had betrayed her, and maybe even the ones she loved, that had been on the move with her. The once malnourished, muscled leanness to her body told of the rarity of food, and the effort to find it, to protract living for as long as possible. It told more than that alone, so much more. Of the state of this New America.

     The horrifying reality.

     All with nothing but this girl’s once bodily condition.   Now she is perfect, by means of health and appearance. All of the scars, wounds, and bruises have been removed, her glowing skin seemingly unscathed. The rose-colored hair now flowingly rich, blankets smoothly against her soft neck, bare shoulders, and the cold metal of the table she was laid upon by white-gloved hands.

     Covering her mouth is a plastic, strapped oxygen mask hooked to a clear tube twisting into the dark. The air stings of clinical chemicals and the occasional beep of the breathing monitor. Three pairs of eyes intensely watch her, belonging to medical masked men draped in white, concealing coats. Stitched on the chest of these coats is a dark shadowed emblem of the Phoenix. The Phoenix. Below the Bird with its blazing wings sprayed wide are the initials:   N. A. M. D.   The Whitecoats all loom over her naked body, preparing for the final Phase of the Procedure. The Incision. The prior Phases, the Purification and the Injection had been completed successfully. But there is just something about her that seems…different, that unsettles these Whitecoats in manners unprecedented; it is this unforeseen dissonance that is the source of the apprehension within the Alteration Center.  

     Her refusal of capture had also been unanticipated. Her mere, unrelenting will of not being taken.   She had killed the first Shadow who attempted to confine her; the bite-marks of the recovered corpse were profoundly disturbing.   But she had been chosen. There was no hope escape for her. There still is no escape for her.   These specialist Whitecoats are fully aware of these unfortunate circumstances. The one opposite of the two claims a transparent papered clipboard and a writing instrument in hand.   “It is time.”   The Whitecoat nearest to her chest raises a hand, and something sickeningly sharp, silvery shimmers in the ghostly light.   “The Navi, Savus,” he says, the voice void of any humanity.   The third, Savus, lifts up a metallic, mystically lustrous chip and gives it away silently to the Changer. The holographic navigational chip is taken, and the sterilized, dissecting knife is lowered.   And in that quiet moment, the slice into the anodyne-glazed flesh of her chest is made.