Antarctica [discontinued

Chapter 8

It didn’t matter if Professor Professor was still going to behave the same way he did today tomorrow by the time I got back to my apartment—not with an ‘urgent’ marked message on my screen computer that was nowhere near state-of-the-art. I pulled up the message from my notification center, and...

stopped.

No, not stopped in the sense where I was trying to collect my thoughts, nor were there people behind me restraining me.

There was a line. That read two words.

“Lab 342”

No sender, no return address, no IP.

Just those two words.

So, any normal person would run it through commercially available security checks and if they were slightly more technical, try routing it back to the sender using whatever method they could find with a quick search.

No, not me. I dealt in secrets, or at least some of them.

But what really stopped me for a minute was the significance of it.

Lab 342 had a vault where they kept pills.

There are pills for everything.

I’ll never figure out how I hadn’t ever thought of it before.

~~~

Getting to the lab was the easy part, I just had to act interested in the research. Student citizens were allowed entry into labs 100-350.

Getting any pills would be easier, pills in the seven colors of the rainbow, each with different effects could be sold at any pharmacy kiosk, and slightly more expensive yet dangerous ones could be easily bought at a kiosk in lab 342.

I didn’t want a regular consumer pill, and I didn’t want any of the acceleration pills, either.

I needed the red pills.

Unlike many other countries, where black was the color of the death pills, black was the pill that they wanted no one to have.

The red pills were for brain stimulation.

A mostly unknown side effect is that they remove many, many control effects.

~~~

The first thing I noticed walking into lab 342 was that there weren’t security guards near the vault in the back of the building or any of the hallways leading toward it. There was a scan when I walked in, but they never scanned you walking out.

Someone had cleared the entire area for me.

I knew the maze of pathways well—architecture had been a passing interest as a student—so I hurried down and turned the way I knew that I needed to get to the vault. The security camera before the doors of the vault wasn’t swinging around the way it was supposed to, and although the concealed cameras didn’t make much noise, the telltale static was absent.

The person had done a really thorough job of clearing this place out.

When I passed through the security-less door, there was a note taped to a nearby rack.

It read, “not the red ones. get the cerulean ones.”

Cerulean was unknown to me, so maybe it was a new formula. I walked through the aisles, alphabetized by color name, until I reached cerulean.

Yet another note, this of which read, “caeruleus > caelulum > caelum”

Caelum, of course, was Latin for heaven.