The Test 2: Finally Free

Have you ever heard your heartbeat? I mean really heard it? Heard it thumping so hard you can’t even breathe? I have.

Have you ever seen your bones? Have you ever seen the doctor scraping at them to ready them or a carbon fibre implant to make then stronger for a test? I have.

Has your doctor ever stick a bone marrow needle in you before the anaesthetic has taken place? Mine has.

I’m Tes, for those of you who don’t know, I am a human guinea pig for science. And I’m not alone; there are lots of us down here in angelic white hell hole as i have recently found out.

It doesn’t feel like 16 years. 16 long years of testing experiments and operations. It feels like a lifetime, whatever a lifetime is. You see down here, we all outdo our usefulness when we get to the age of 16. Our body loses its usefulness and we become disposable. I am looking forward to my time. It’s the only way I can be free. Truly free like I am in my dreams, like the time I escaped one year ago and got my first glimpse of the outside world. That golden sunlight field haunts my dreams every night, taunting me, screaming how I shall never be free while I am alive. Many times I have awoken in the night, dripping wet with tears on how my escape was just another measly test. A test to see if I could get out. Well soon I shall be free of my daily tests, because it is only 1 day away from the day I turn 16. The day I escape. The day I die.

7:00 am is when GLADIS wakes me up in a morning

“Test Evaluation Subject 20, Time To Wake Up” she said in her female robotic voice through the speaker on my glass wall. A year ago I would have swung my legs over and out of the bed and told GLADIS to call me Tes, because I don’t call her by her full name. But all that was when I had a plan to escape. That was when I had a purpose to live, a will to get out.

I can’t be bothered any more.

Instead of getting up I turned over in my bed, refusing to hurt my eyes with the blinding whiteness of my room. Everything had to be crisp white and sterile in case I got any germs on me, that’s also the reason why the scientists always wear gloves when they handle me. a short smile reaches my lips as I think that I have never actually touched the skin of another human being.

“Test Evaluation Subject 20, Time To Wake Up” GLADIS said again.

‘Generated Longanimity Device Intelligence System, Bite Me’ I felt like saying to her, you see I had just been given a book on the upper worlds slang and the way they talk, its bizarre to me how they talk to one another, why don’t they just use one common easy language like Latin? I asked this to Le Docture one day as he was getting me ready for a bone marrow extraction; Le Docture just smiled his evil malicious smile and stared at me in the eyes.

“Not everyone is as clever as you petite” he grinned, and forced the anaesthesia upon me.

“Test Evaluation Subject 20, Time To Wake Up” GLADIS said, yet another time.

I groaned and put my pillow over my head, she would continue this until I actually got up, or she would alert the scientists and it would be a very painful Blood test for today.

Somehow, the pillow blotted out the blinding whiteness and the whirrs of robots passing by my glass cell, similar to the ones the people on the top side of the world use to cage animals. All I heard is my blood pounding in my heart to keep me alive and my mind turns to Jae.

Jae.

Where was he? Was he all right? What did the scientists do to him? Apart from using him to his name of course. His name, like mine, was an acronym. He was Juvenile Actnometer Experiment, basically translating that he was a young human radiation tester experiment. I had met Jae when I tried to escape, he looked so lonely, he had ink black hair and the saddest grey eyes I had ever seen. I don’t know why but as we laid our lands against the glass wall that separated us I got a feeling down in the pit of my stomach, it felt like it was doing back flips. It felt like we had known each other forever and I hoped so much that I was in his mind as much as he was in mine.

I guessed he wasn’t dead, Le Docture would have surely told me if he was to spite me. Sometimes here if they really need you for an ongoing experiment, they keep you alive for as long as they need you. The oldest age a test experiment has gotten to is 25.

“Test Evaluation Subject 20, get up now. You have visitors.” A voice said, shocking me out of my thoughts. That voice did not belong to GLADIS. I sat up, rubbing my eyes from the sudden shock from black to white. I stared at a blurry creature, a creature I could recognize from a mile away, a creature I had grown up with.

Le Docture.