2012-12-12

Vera knew she didn’t have much time. As she sat in the tower of the old refurbished castle, the noise outside was steadily growing louder.

            Just two more minutes, she thought to herself.

            Regardless of what happened to her, people outside of the commune needed to know about what had transpired here. They needed to know about the genetics experiments. They needed to know about the kidnappings. They needed to know about the . . . failures.

            Vera shivered at the thought. The small, whirling rainbow wheel mocked her urgency.

            Right now, overcome with primal urges, those ‘failures’ were seeking her out. They were seeking to make her one of them.

            When she had signed up for the project, she had only been told the very basics. She supposed that, in a way, they at least hadn’t lied to her. The fact that they were ‘using bacteria to reproduce human enzymes which were deficient in people with certain medical conditions’ was indeed true. What they didn’t tell her until much, much later was their procurement methods of test subjects. She had even been forced to pose as a nurse herself once during one of their ‘clinic raids’.

            Vera was also left in the dark about the eventual goals of the project. The ones involving customizing the enzymes and producing them in large enough quantities. That with enough treatments, that which would make a sick person healthy would in turn grant a healthy person super-human abilities.

            Unfortunately, they had been successful. The celebrations had been short lived. The festivities had lasted only until the serum they had produced ‘completely’ took effect. Nobody had bothered to hypothesize or verify the possible effects on neural physiology. If the body took two steps forward, the mind was made to take a dozen steps backwards.

            Primal, savage, bestial—that was the only words she could used to describe the ‘failures’. They reminded Vera of angry apes she had seen in the primate house of the zoo.

            There were sounds in the hallway now. She looked at the screen again and smiled. The makeshift barrier had done enough. The rainbow wheel was gone, the files were uploaded, and the links to the documents were published.

            As the door to her room started splintering under relentless pounding, a smile filled her face as a tear ran down her cheek. At least the world would know what had happened here.