The Machine

Part 2, a Year Passes

A new day. Lyla looked at the calendar the room had her using to keep track of the number of days she had been in her prison. The sheer number of months astonished her. She quickly counted them. 10, 11, 12... wait! Had she been here for a whole year? Wow. And... that makes her six years old! But there was no one to celebrate with.

"Happy Birthday Lyla!" said Lyla, in a high-pitched voice.

"Ooh, ooh, what did you get me!" she said to herself, but in her normal voice.

"I got you this!" Lyla said in the high pitch voice and held out her arms as if she was holding a very large present. Suddenly, a tile rose up right below her arms, bearing an enormous gift. Lyla squealed, and dropped down on her knees to open it. Inside, was a doll house and five dolls.

"It's just what I always wanted!" she said.

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Rita pressed return, and it was done. Her paper about the isolation experiment was finally done. She read over it for the thousandth time, to make sure there weren't any errors. 'By keeping a human in complete isolation for all of their life, scientists can determine the mental stability of the average person. Lyla-'

She deleted 'Lyla,' and wrote 'the subject.' Dr. Williams would like that much better.

'The subject was diagnosed with virus X at birth, and is therefore an almost perfect replication of the Debratos case.'

Next, she opened the newspaper clip she had found in the archives. 'Mentally unstable man escapes from quarantine.' The headlines said. 'Nico Debratos roaming the streets. Be on your guard, he is potentially dangerous and is carrying a lethal disease.' Rita sighed. The isolation experiment did kind of make sense, and that's why she was here. Because she was a scientist, with 'a very inquisitive spirit,' as her college engineering teacher had always said.

Hearing someone walking towards her room, she quickly deleted the words, 'THIS IS INHUMANE.' At the bottom of the page. As the person passed (it was someone working in another section of the building she supposed), Rita heard her talking on the phone, "Yes, and I'll be in time for dinner to see Jinny. Tell her I love her and not to miss me, I'll be home in around an hour."

Rita put her head on the desk and began crying hot tears into her keyboard.

Alerted by the noise, the woman stuck her head into the door frame, a sympathetic expression on her face.

"What's wrong?" She asked, "Work bothering you?" She gestured at the computer.

"You don't even know," Rita replied. 

************

Lyla was asleep. In the distance, a voice was singing softly. She felt a warm hand touch her face, and gently stroke her hair. She tried to look up at the face but saw only darkness. All around her were wood boards, not the tiles she was used to. Lyla sat up in bed and opened her eyes. There was no one there. She was back in her prison.

"Mama?" Lyla whispered.

************

Rita collapsed onto the bed in her room at the laboratory. An entire day of searching through the archives had really exhausted her. All she wanted now, was to go home. But that was impossible. Her house was hundreds of miles away, and she was needed here, especially right now, when one wrong move could start another epidemic, just like the Debratos case. 'The world is not sterile, Rita' She had been told once, and it was important that the lab be sterile. No disease would ever get in there.

Rita opened up the video messaging program on her computer. No new messages. Of course. Who was there to message Rita anyway? She hadn't gotten one in years.

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