Chapter 289: Starting Life in a Truly Scary Lab

Saturday, February 4 to Monday, February 6, 2006

There was good and bad news. The bad news was that I woke up feeling like shit, was naked, strapped immovably to a hospital bed, and was connected to all sorts of instrumentation. That was especially true of my head: some sort of flexible cap was strapped to my now bald skull, with metal pieces pressing against my skin in many places. The good news was that I woke up.

I was in what appeared to be in a small, single-person hospital room, with several beeping and pinging machines on the wall beside and behind me. There were some strong hints that this wasn't a normal hospital room though:

• There was a large mirror running the length of one wall, EXACTLY like you see in ALL the cop shows.

• The door out of the room had no handle, only some sort of security sensor and keypad on the frame beside it.

• There were no: windows, TV, pictures, flowers, or anything else to cheer up a recovering patient.

• There was a camera mounted on the ceiling aimed down at me.

• I was SO strapped to the bed, it was ridiculous. I could barely wiggle a finger. This much strapping wasn't to stop a patient falling off the bed during his sleep, but to stop me attacking anyone with anything more than a viciously wiggled finger.

It was not a pleasant first impression.

#3: <With devices stuck on our head, we should hold fire on the sight blobs and other abilities. Seven of us should keep a low profile too. #1, you stay in charge?>

#1: <Agreed, but one of you should stay centered. It's meditative, so will probably show up on what I assume is the EEG that's attached to our head, but I want to have proximity working and to be able to NP as fast as possible if I need to.>

#7: <I wouldn't be at all surprised if we have to bust out of here. We're going to have to do a lot of sight blobbing even if they don't take these things off our head.>

#3: <We've got some time, and they have to take the sensors off sooner or later.>

#6: <Don't bet on it, our body is connected at both ends.>

We had an intravenous drip going in, and a tube stuck into the end of our cock.

#3: <So it is. I don't know how I missed that. I'll go on duty, good luck guys, #1 especially.>

The rest of us went quiet, just 'sitting and watching'.

When proximity came on, it confirmed that there was no one within six feet of me, something I hadn't been positive of before as a quiet person could've been sitting somewhere out of sight. Still could be, but it was less likely now, as there probably wasn't much of the room outside of my range, although I couldn't tell how far the room extended beyond the top of my head as I couldn't turn it to look behind me. It was strapped down and held immovable in what felt like a hard pillow with a hole in the middle.

My head was too restrained for me to look back at the machines behind me, but I could see them in the mirror. At first glance they appeared to be turned off, but they were making noises, so I was puzzled. On further inspection of the mirror, I realized that the machines were operating normally, except that their displays were turned off. With all the machines attached to me, the baddies must know that I'd woken up, but no one appeared. That gave me plenty of time to look at what parts of the room I could see.

The door looked like it needed a fingerprint. It probably wasn't an eyeball scanner since the device was at waist height. There was also a numeric keypad, which didn't worry me much because sight blobs would allow me to steal any number of passwords. The fingerprint was the tricky one. Maybe I could cut someone's finger off and use a heat blob to keep it warm (if the panel checked it was alive by detecting heat). I should've paid more attention during the Mission Impossible movies.

After fifteen minutes, there was a click from the ceiling, then a male voice said, "State your name."

I gasped, "Water." I didn't really need water, but in my experience it's a good idea to get as much water as possible when imprisoned. Also, I hated the idea of being questioned this way; I wanted to see someone. Obviously they wouldn't help me, but having the human contact still felt a whole lot better. I found out that "contact" was the last thing I needed, especially of the "hole" variety, because my cock was hit with an electric shock. Just for a second, and it wasn't a big shock, but it was a HELL of a surprise.

The Voice gave me a couple of seconds to recover, then said, "Just so you know, it's adjustable," then he hit me with a shock that hurt twice as much for twice as long.

"State your name."

"Mark Steven Anderson." I very rarely bother with my middle name, but I was feeling VERY cooperative.

"Address?"

"I have NO idea!"

#2: <Christ, that's risky. Our cock's on the line here.>

#1: <I'm trying to see if it's possible to establish some sort of emotional connection and/or freedom of action. Behaving like a good little boy all the time will make anything unusual we do stand out.>

#5: <Good thinking. Here's another idea, those shocks surely must screw-up the EEG. What went into our cock must've been several orders of magnitude greater than the small electrical signals an EEG detects. I hesitate to suggest deliberately getting shocked, but next time it happens, do a quick sight blob check behind the mirror and on the other side of the door.>

#1: <Good idea. Will do.>

#6: <What about turning off the pain from our cock? I presume the EEG would normally know if we weren't feeling pain, but because its signal is being scrambled, maybe we could get away with it?>

#1: <The pain's bearable, so let's not take the risk of showing them something special. Not unless it's REALLY bad.>

#6: <Let's hope the pain isn't so bad that it stops us thinking clearly enough to turn it off.>

#1: <If it's that bad, chances are our body's going to get some permanent damage. Pain that lasts a few seconds would probably be the least of our problems.>

"HOME address?"

I told him.

I soon found out that we weren't playing "Twenty Questions". We easily passed twenty, and even passed two hundred. It was question after question after question. Because I'd read my DHS file, I recognized that he was working his way through it. It was as if someone had highlighted every fact in the file, and he was checking them all off.

His only care seemed to be that my verbal answers agreed with the file. For example, when he asked, "How much training did you do before the 10k race?" my deliberately testing answer of "A moderate amount" made him persist on the topic, until I'd confirmed that "moderate" meant "some, but not all that much," that being very close to what the file said.

I was careful not to use the same words all the time, but very close wording was fine most of the time because people tend to use the same expressions.

My file had a comment that I'd initially been reluctant to talk about my sex-life, so when we got to my having sex with Ava, instead of answering his question, I said, "Who are you? Where am I?..."

I had some more questions, but they were cut off by electricity blasting into my cock again. I was ready for it, so it wasn't too bad, but it was still VERY definitely NOT fun! (I doubt you needed me to make the last point, but just in case some weird people are reading this.)

While still being zapped, I created a sight blob and sent it straight through the mirror. The electricity must have been scrambling my brain, because I had a momentary thought that the blob might bounce off the mirror, which was so silly I almost laughed (blobs aren't themselves light, and even if they were, light must get through the glass or people in the OBSERVATION room wouldn't observe anything). The blob went straight through without any problem.

As expected, there was a viewing room on the other side, just like in the cop shows. Surprisingly there was no one in it. Its lights were off, but there was plenty of light coming in from my room.

I shot the sight blob straight through that room's door. I'd expected a hallway, as per the cop shows, but there was a large room. No people, but four desks, computers, and other stuff, including several medical pinging and beeping machines (I couldn't hear them, but I recognized the look of them and the information they displayed: "BP", "HR bpm", etc.) They were displaying live medical information, almost certainly mine, I assumed. I seemed healthy. There was a screen displaying what looked like an EEG, and the most recent couple of inches were a scrambled mess. It was nice to have that confirmed. It was settling down though. I noticed the time; it was 21:18.

I had a very good idea, but it looked like I needed to wait another couple of seconds before I could do it. I'd send the sight blob back later.

The room had three doors: to the viewing room that the blob had just come from, to my room, and one on the opposite wall. I sent the sight blob out the last one, finding a hallway this time. Through the door on the other side of the hallway was dark. I greatly increased the sight blob's size, enabling me to see a boring, unoccupied office.

It zoomed left, parallel to the hallway, into another unoccupied office. I hadn't seen a single person yet, which was starting to seem weird.

After a couple more empty offices, I crossed the hallway to be on the same side of it as my body, entering a room that was a clone of the big one outside my room. Its machinery was all turned off. It also had a viewing room and another 'hospital' room, cloning 'my' three rooms, except with one less person in them.

I returned the sight blob to the EEG display outside my room. It seemed to have 'settled down', although that was a hard call as EEG readouts bounce around. I watched it for a second to make sure, then canceled the blob.

I waited five seconds, then created a new sight blob and sent it to look at the EEG display. There was a very small spike at the time I'd created the sight blob. The spike was so small it almost failed to escape from the main line (call it a two or three pixel spike). There was no up or down spike at the place where the last sight blob had been canceled. And - MOST importantly - other than the tiny spike, the motion of the plotting line seemed the same whether or not I had a sight blob active. That was VERY good to know, because I wanted to do a great deal of sight blobbing.

While still looking at the EEG display, we deliberately started a conversation with all of my minds, except the one that was centered and the one that was answering my interrogator's questions. The EEG got more active; not much, but enough to be a little worrying. I got the other minds to think hard (do math puzzles) and the EEG got very busy. I quickly stopped them. That was bad news. Not so much because my doing a lot of heavy thinking showed up, but because even the level of non-puzzle thinking that I normally do was probably producing an EEG trace considerably higher than a normal person's.

Over the speaker I heard a new voice say, "Som..." {click}, as the microphone was turned off.

My guess was that someone else was monitoring my EEG, and they'd said, "Something just happened," or similar. That would've made me scared and cautious, except that I already was. I wanted to do one more test though, and it was probably better to do it now when erratic EEGs might be put down to the effects of the sedative, panic at my situation, or delayed reactions to the electric shocks.

I uncentered, waited five seconds, recentered, waited another five seconds, then created a sight blob and went to have a look. There was a noticeable difference between the centered and uncentered areas of the display. I can't easily describe the difference because the waveforms were too complex, but it only required an instant's look to see that they were different. That wasn't good. That meant my EEG was looking noticeably different from normal people's just from my being centered. Whether or not operating a sight blob had an effect didn't matter now, because I had to be centered to have a sight blob in the first place.

I had to make a choice about being permanently centered, permanently uncentered, or mixing it up. Remaining permanently centered was the obvious best choice, because I was very definitely in major danger, much more so than at my last ad hoc prison. I told the rest of my minds to stop trying to be internally quiet. I needed all the help I could get, and my EEG results were doubtless already so weird that a little more weirdness wouldn't matter.

The game of "Twenty - going on Two Thousand - Questions" resumed, but that just required one of my minds. One stayed on centering duty, and the rest of us worried a lot.

Further thought, over the next several minutes, led me to a number of conclusions. First, that from the EEG and recent history with the DHS, this was probably a ramped-up study of my alleged mind control powers. Second, that although my having mind control was bizarre nonsense, my situation certainly wasn't nonsense. This was a SERIOUS operation, and whoever the bosses were, they weren't playing around like the last bunch had been. I could only imagine three ways I was going to get out of here:

1. Whoever was holding me decided to release me. What was being done to me had to be illegal as hell (kidnapping, experimenting on an unwilling minor, electric shocks to my cock, drugging me), so even if they decided I had no mind control powers, I feared they'd not release me voluntarily. Given the other interesting things about my body, such as the unusual EEG outputs it produced, the chance of their releasing me had to be very low indeed. From Portland, to Washington D.C., to wherever I was now, the previous bosses had been utterly amoral, and my cock and the rest of me had a feeling that whoever the boss was now, he was probably the worst of all.

2. The family lawyer exerted enough pressure to get me out. EVERYTHING I'd heard about the War On Terror (which was the excuse my file was full of) made me believe that once you were 'captured' by the Government, you were fucked. If you were guilty they kept you locked up because you were evil, or if you were innocent they kept you locked up because releasing you would make them look bad. It was obvious that many of the people sent to Gitmo were either innocent, or were guilty of only small things, but they'd lost - and some were still losing - YEARS of their lives without being convicted of anything. Compared to me, they were lucky! My plight wasn't going to get a thousandth of the attention of the Gitmo prisoners', despite my families' best efforts. Not that it really mattered, as I'd never noticed that media attention had ever got any alleged terrorist released, so that avenue was probably closed too. [[Actually, the Dean's involvement added great credibility to my importance, resulting in a surprising and still growing amount of media attention to my disappearance. The amount certainly surprised Moran, as he'd expected little, and had even thought that the people I'd mentally controlled would get angry with me after I was removed for a few days, as my influence wore off.]]

3. I escape.

I wanted to think that keeping my special nature secret as much as possible increased my chance of getting out under the first two possibilities, either through my captors deciding I wasn't worth keeping, or it'd give my family more time in which to force my release. As highly doubtful as those possibilities were looking now, they were still worth hoping for. The longer nothing happened - especially not my making a dramatic escape - the better for those two chances.

However, "Get Out Of Here" Option #3 seemed the only one that had a decent chance of success. One major problem - that had existed from the moment the DHS had picked me up - was that escaping would destroy my chance of having a life with my loved ones. I'd have to be on the lam for the rest of my life, especially if my escape left evidence or witnesses to my having special abilities.

I didn't need to try to make a run for it immediately, but doing so eventually seemed the most likely outcome, because the longer I took to escape, the more they would learn about me, which would reduce their willingness to let me go. That was good in one respect, as their apparently wanting to research me meant I had some time to work with.

Escaping would ruin my life so badly that it was an option of last resort, even at the cost of staying here longer and letting them run experiments on me. I had wanted to keep my differences secret so I wouldn't be captured like this, but now that I was, it didn't really matter if they got fascinating results from dozens of different tests. I would choose to stay here for years if doing so still gave me a chance of resuming my life with my loved ones.

But there was the issue that if they found out enough about me, they might tighten their security in ways that made it even harder for me to escape, but I didn't think it likely that they'd find out that sort of information for a long time, as it was very hard to imagine how they could test for my NP and sight blob abilities. Nor was I too worried about being experimented on, or even tortured, because I could turn the pain way down and I'd "been there, done that", so it had less fear for me now. Just so long as the torture didn't damage my body so much that it became impossible for me to escape. Surely that level of damage was unlikely.

VERY unfortunately, there was one consideration that outweighed EVERY other issue: among all the weird shit they could learn about me, there was the BIG, civilization-destroying secret. Everything else they could learn from studying me would never lead them to that. They could analyze my body down to the atomic level, and "The Big Secret" would still never occur to them. But sooner or later it would come out, probably by their using a truth drug or something else that removed my inhibitions and judgment. The Big Secret could NEVER be divulged, and it ESPECIALLY couldn't be divulged to the criminal, power-mad, asshole members of the Government's secret services (presuming those are the hands I'm in now, or that the results were being reported to them in the event they'd sent me overseas to be worked on, as there's been several reports of the Government doing). If they learned about merging, they would abuse that knowledge horrendously. Imagine patriotic DHS-type assholes after they'd merged enough times to be super-assassins, able to fly anywhere in the world under their own power, able to kill anybody (even inside buildings and surrounded by bodyguards) without leaving any evidence behind, able to be super-spies using sight blobs to dig up dirt on all their opponents to use it to publicly destroy them, etc. They were power-mad already, but with the powers of a few merges, it wasn't hard to imagine a group of them taking over the world.

The key determinant of how fast I had to act, was how long it'd be before they used a drug on me that removed my don't-tell inhibition over the Big Secret. One minor hope I had was that those drugs can't be very good, or they'd be commonly used. Criminal trials would work FAR faster and more accurately if such drugs were reliable and safe. Or after a conviction, a prisoner could voluntarily ask for such a drug as a way of clearing his name. Not to mention using it in job interviews, marriage counseling sessions, and with used-car salesmen. There had to be serious problems with those drugs, so I guessed the current baddies wouldn't be quick to use them on me, especially because it was my mind they were presumably interested in, so hopefully they'd be slow to risk having drugs screw it up.

I probably had some breathing room, but "probably" is not a very reassuring word when the consequences of getting it wrong include trillions(?) of deaths and the collapses or power-mad abuses of God knows how many Earths' civilizations.

If I wasn't ready to try to escape by the time they came at me with a syringe and a tape recorder, then I'd have to choose "Get Out Of Here" Option #4, order my body to self-destruct in the most thorough way(s) possible (I was in a hospital type set up, so just stopping my heart probably wouldn't be enough). All things considered, I'd better quickly find a way to escape. I didn't have to use it right away, not while I could hold out hope of being rescued or released, but I had to be ready to escape if they came at me with a marijuana cigarette or something else that threatened to destroy human civilization.

Researching an escape meant I'd be using my special abilities and thinking more, which theoretically reduced the chance of their letting me go, but I was pretty sure the chance of that was "fuck all" already. Planning my escape had to take priority over staying low key, as the boat had almost certainly already sailed on that strategy.

[Amusingly, it took several hours for one of my minds to think of "Get Out Of Here" Option #5: coming clean by telling my 'owners' what I could do and offering to work for them. It took me considerably less than several hours to reject the idea.]

I thought of another experiment I wanted to perform: I sent the sight blob to look at the EEG display, then I created an NP-fingertip. It created a tiny spike, just like creating the sight blob did. Then I created two NP-fingertips at the same time, which produced a spike slightly larger than before. I made two mental notes: keep my creations active rather than canceling and recreating them later, and create them individually. The EEG display moved fast, so I wouldn't have to wait long between creations so they didn't accumulate; about a quarter of a second would be fine.

I tried creating an NP in front of the sight blob, in case the creation distance, especially when outside my proximity range, changed the spike size, but it seemed not to.

It was time to do a great deal more sight blob searching. I nearly canceled the NP-fingertips out of the habit of thousands of repetitions, but remembered my mental note just in time.

As I had a sight blob and NP-point already in my "Anteroom" [I learned that name soon], I might as well search it. I was particularly interested in finding three things: people, video cameras, logged on computers. A careful search of my anteroom found no cameras, so it was safe to try the computers. They were turned on, but the screens were blank. I pressed the shift key on the first. The screen lit up, but the last user had logged out. That was the case on the other computer too. Placed beside each keyboard was a small box, not much larger than a pack of cigarettes. It was cabled to the computer, and had a slot in front suitable for taking a credit card, or - I feared - a security card.

I checked out the desk drawers and the cupboards in the room. They contained lots of medical stuff, including syringes and several vials of different drugs, which was very worrying. I looked at the labels, recognizing some of the names, such as "Adrenaline" and a couple of painkillers. There were some names I didn't know, which I'd google as soon as I got computer access. That would be essential knowledge if I saw someone fill a syringe then come at me with it. There were boxes of rubber gloves, requisition forms, and all sorts of other general crap, none of it specific to me. Nothing had an address on it. I did find several labels and forms that indicated that this was "Isolation Suite 9-1". ["Isolation Anteroom 9-1" was the name for the specific room the sight blob was in.]

My anteroom search finished, I looked farther afield. The office across the hallway was the next target. The computer was powered off. Checking the drawers showed me the office was unoccupied, but there was a small internal phone list in the top drawer. It only had a couple of dozen entries, giving job title, room number and extension. They were mostly medically oriented, from "Orderlies" and "Nurses" up to "Medical COO". The extension number written on the phone in this room was not included in the list. There'd been two phones in my anteroom, and they were both listed, with their 'job titles' being "IAR 9-1: A" and "IAR 9-1: B". I hoped that "IAR" stood for "Imminent Automatic Release".

I continued searching. The whole floor was medical and vacant. There were three suites like mine, with "Isolation Suite 9-1", "... 9-2" or "... 9-3" on their hallway doors. There was also a much more traditional hospital ward with a dozen beds in it. There was no other person to be seen, but there was ample evidence that other people had been in the area recently, such as a half-empty coffee cup, a jacket hung behind a door, etc. There was all the usual stuff you expect if this had been a working facility, from trash in the trash bins through to potted plants growing in people's offices. I didn't try reading any of the paper trash, as I didn't want to move any stuff around until I'd searched for cameras. I'd seen one in a hallway already, but I wasn't taking the time for a proper search for them yet. I was just getting a quick overview now.

I found an elevator bay at the other end of the floor, with a sign labeling this as "Level 9". I searched for but did not find any emergency stairs (I considered my situation an emergency, and I'd been looking forward to taking the stairs out of here). I thought it was illegal to have high-rise buildings without emergency stairs, in case of fire. I searched carefully around both elevator areas (I found two in total), and didn't find any stairways, or see any notices about them. I'd keep my eye open for them, but I was starting to suspect they didn't exist. [I confirmed later that they didn't, and that the elevators were rated for use in a fire, with sealed, pressurized shafts, were heat insulated and had their own air supplies. As you'll learn soon, the last thing this place wanted was stairwells openly connecting every level of the building.]

I found the Medical COO's office, judging by its size, plushness and extension number. There was a box of business cards in the top drawer, giving me his name, confirming his job title, and the address only as "Level 9, Eclipse Building." He worked for the, "Eclipse Project." The phone number had an area code that wasn't one that I recognized, and I was pretty sure I knew them all because I'd made an effort a while ago to study a map which showed the locations of every area code. They weren't being helpful.

Seeing "Level 9" made me think of outside the box, especially because I'd not seen any windows, so I sent the sight blob in a straight line through some walls until it found the outside. The absence of windows was soon explained, as the total blackness beyond the last wall was a strong indication that this was underground. I created a new sight blob and sent it rapidly straight up. As I feared, I was getting nothing but quick glimpses of floor after floor of this building, until the sight blob self-canceled. I was too deep to see the surface - fuck! My sight blobs wouldn't have the range to find the surface. That was a MAJOR pain, as I wouldn't be able to plan my escape fully. I couldn't search outside the box, so I got back to searching inside it.

This place seemed to take security very seriously. The door into my bedroom (so to speak) required security access to get both in and out, which seemed excessive. In each of the two longest hallways, there was a solid door halfway down its length which also had a fingerprint(?) and numeric keypad control. It was a good thing sight blobs could pass through walls. There were security panels next to the two elevators' calling buttons. I wasn't sure why. It seemed silly to use a password to call for an elevator, because it only took one person to call for it, then twenty people could get in.

After finishing my quick scan of his floor, I went up one level and started checking that out. I learned it was called "Level 8", consistent with my being underground. It had some offices, but was mostly labs. Not nice, fun labs like in the Physics Building at OSU; these were chemical and biological labs, and there were some scary looking safety measures around the place: two-layers thick totally sealed off glass rooms with airlock accesses within an otherwise open-plan area, rubber suits, little boxes with gloves to handle dangerous things, and many, many warning labels stuck all over the place. If these guys wanted to inject me with something, they'd have many state of the art choices. I wanted to go back to the Sciences & Tech building; their strange pluralization was less worrying than this place.

I finally found some people: half a dozen scientist types were working on something in one of their labs. One of them was putting a vial in a fridge, letting me see that the fridge contained many vials. I resisted knocking them all onto the floor. Maybe after I'd confirmed that their air conditioning didn't also feed into my bedroom. Their security tags were all "Eclipse Project," which was both unhelpful, and after seeing the type of work they were doing, a little ominous sounding.