Dead Connections

Chapter 20 - Child 005

I could practically hear the horror music pounding in my head as Ember continued her search. My heart was pounding so loudly that I could feel it in my ears and finger tips. Eventually, Ember found another folder with at least one hundred video’s inside.

“Shall we watch a couple?” she asked, seeking no consent. She was going to do whatever she wanted to do, no matter what me or Drew would say.

She clicked on the first video and it came up full screen.

A middle aged woman with short black hair stood directly in front of the camera, one arm outstretched as if she was holding it whilst filming.

“The date is the 3rd of February, 1997. This is day 1 of the project ‘life24’.” She then swivelled the camera to face in front of her, revealing about half a dozen men sat on large stools. Standing up, one man introduced himself as Ron Schools, a local scientist.

“For years now we have been attempting to create the ultimate being,” he explained directly to the camera. He was an old man, with dark grey hair and stumble above his mouth and around his chin. Despite his nimble figure, the way he spoke made him sound very wealthy and powerful, like he was not a man you would want to mess with. “24 projects have failed and we thought we had tried everything. We mixed animals genes with human genes. We rewired the human brain, replacing some of the main framework and replacing it with different organ functions but they failed to survive a day. In this project we’ll be trying something never done before in any recorded history. We were focusing on cloning life, but now we’ll reconstruct it from scratch.”

The video stopped. We’d just watched the first of 224.

“What was that about?” I asked in confusion. Drew shrugged, looking intrigued.

“Shall I play another one?” Ember asked me.

“Yeah,” I replied. “But skip a few videos. We can’t watch every single one of them.”

Ember nodded, then scrolled half way down the page, clicking on a video named ‘video 43’.

The same man stood in front of the camera, with his hair gelled back the same as last time and his round large glasses sat comfortably on the top of his head.

“Its day 14 and we’ve made significant progress,” he said to the camera, loud and clear so everyone heard him alright. He clapped his hands together and held them there as he ventured across the room to a scientist who was stood behind a table with a plastic box and a flask of translucent liquid in. “The largest organ is the skin, and that’s why we created this.”

He quickly and subtly nodded to the young man who was wearing a lab coat. The young man nodded in response and held the flask a few inches above the plastic box. The camera zoomed in so that the audience could see what was inside the box. It was a strange gloopy peach pink substance with tiny bit of what looked like grit embedded within. The young scientist paused for a moment, then carefully began to the whole lot of translucent liquid into the plastic box. The two substances reacted fiercely, spitting and fizzing and hissing as well as bubbling and churning. The camera workman, Ron and the young scientist took a precautionary step back and Ron put down his glasses in front of his eyes, his face intense and hopeful.

About a minute passed before the chemicals stopped making noise and then the young scientist carefully trudged up to it and, using some small plastic gloves, took out the newly made substance. What was now made was a large coat of rubbery, pale something. I couldn’t help comparing what I saw on the video to Cassandra from Dr Who. I watched a lot of Dr Who before my life got turned upside down because it was one of my favourite shows, besides the Simpsons, Revolution and Game of Thrones, but it surprised me to realised that I hadn’t watched TV since I was kidnapped months ago (apart from when I watched the news with Unseen.)