NLI-10

by Lee Isserow

  “Reminds me of a nootropic I took for a while, Aniracetam or maybe it was Pramiracetam.”

  The others hadn't heard of either.

  “It's meant to be a smart drug.” he explained.

  “Smart drug, like the drug is intelligent, or smart drug like it makes you smart?” asked Pete, with a big goofy smile on his face.

  “The latter.” Micah confirmed. He said he had found it online from some guys in Silicon Valley and used it for six or so months to try and learn some new programming languages, but had tapered off after a while. It made him feel a little bit like an automaton, rather than a human being. The others discussed whether that was part of the drug regime. None of them knew the actual purpose of the clinical trial, and questioned whether it was some new intelligence-stimulating concoction.

  “You think it's tied in to the sounds in the walls?” asked Alex.

  The others had all been wondering the same thing, but none of them had spoken up. The tones, whatever they were, had been following them from room to room, whispering to them in the background of every conversation, an undercurrent of noise stalking their every step.

  Turning in for the night, they each listened intently to the sounds, mechanical womb noises, and drifted off only to wake the next day to the same tones.

  The rest of the week was, as promised, free from tests. They had two smoothies a day, at breakfast and dinner, and at lunch were presented with two clear gelatine capsules of white powder to accompany their meal.

  “This seems a little excessive, doesn't it?” Farah asked. “IV bags, pills, and drugs in smoothies? Do you think one of them is the real drug, and the rest are just placebos?”

  “Why would they do that?” asked Rob.

  “Secrecy.” said Micah. He had a semi-informed opinion based on spending far too much time trawling Reddit. “Pharmaceutical companies have to keep this kind of shit secret, even if we sign NDAs and they probably did background checks, they don't know that one of us isn't here under false pretences, working for a rival company or whatever. Giving us at least three drugs, not to mention the weird sounds in the walls, we won't know which the real test is, assuming any of them are real...”

  Conspiracy theories started to make their way back and forth across the table, but Sarah was in a world of her own. She hadn't thought about background checks. All the company would have had to do was look at the electoral roll or do a quick search online, let alone glimpse at their own database of employee births or next of kin. They'd probably have the names of her parents in seconds, and she'd be revealed. But, she reasoned, maybe a familial tie to the company wasn't enough to send up red flags. They wouldn't know she had the files her parents stole, let alone that she harboured secret desires to bring the company down. She had done her best to make it appear like she was just a lost little girl trying to make some money with a potentially dangerous experiment. There was no reason they wouldn't believe that. Sarah returned to the conversation, laughing at Pete's jokes, and nodding and querying further in to Micah's tidbits of information. She'd get through this if she just played along, blended in with all the others.

  The rest of the week flew by faster than Sarah could have imagined, given her Persistently Perceptive condition. She wondered whether the drugs were curbing her skewed experience of time, and hoped that it would continue. She almost felt normal again, even the shimmers and glimmers in her field of view seemed less frequent and intense.

  At the weekend, the whole group was taken to another test room deep in the depths of the bunker. They were each attached to electrodes and made to run on treadmills as their heart rates and brain patterns were monitored. Instructed to run faster and faster, harder and harder, past the point where they felt like they were going to collapse. Sarah felt like she was going to die, her heart punching hard in her chest, lungs begging her to stop so they could replenish themselves.

  After two hours, Pete, Leah and Micah had already had enough, and Sarah's legs finally gave in. One of the Balderlies caught her as she fell, helping her over to a seat behind the remaining runners. She watched as the others gave up one at a time, some of them of their own accord, some falling and being caught as she had been. She thought about how far people would go for money, mulled on whether that was also part of the experiment. There were so many questions she had, and obviously nobody who worked for the company was going to answer them. All of the information and explanation was no doubt hidden in a room somewhere on the never-ending ouroboros of corridors, but no matter how many questions stacked up, she knew she couldn't risk looking for it so early in the trial. She'd just have to add this room to her mental map, another doorway to cross off the list she was struggling to keep track of.

  As they all recovered in the rec room, Sarah was forcing her way through The Communist Manifesto, trying to balance her reading regime between fiction and something more intellectually substantial.

  “Learnin' to be a Communist?” asked Alex, with a wry tone.

  “Yeah, I'm also a Muslim and was born in Africa, despite what my birth certificate says...” she shot back, with a smile. Alex sat down next to her, and revealed genuine interest in the book.

  “I read it years back, totally blew my mind. Y'know, when people talk about socialism back home, they always demonise it as Communism, but I didn't think it seemed that bad. Just meant equality, rather than, y'know, how things are now.”

  “I bet England's just as bad though.” Sarah said.

  Alex wasn't convinced. “I don't think the rich here have as many vested interests, like the senators that are on committees for climate change or whatever whilst being paid as 'consultants' by oil companies.”

  “Yeah, I don't think that'd be tolerated here, although it's perfectly fine for the Prime Minister to be in bed with a media company... “ Sarah trailed off, realising that she could very easily have said –

  “Or a megacorp that creates phones and laptops and then spies on everyone who uses them...” Alex said, finishing the thought.

  Sarah said nothing. She knew that someone was probably listening to, or monitoring their conversations in the facility, and if she responded at all, perhaps it would give away that she knew A-Pharma was part of APEX, which might raise suspicion about her presence.

  “It's pretty fucked up.” she finally said.

  “Yeah.” said Alex, noticing Sarah's mood change. She didn't want to push further. “Enjoy the book.” she said, getting up. “It's a tough slog, but worth it, even if we'll likely never get a real revolution. There's no proletariat any more... everyone strives for, or considers themselves bourgeoisie, and in the digital age we don't exactly have a 'means of production', because we don't make anything anymore!” She sauntered over to the couch in front of the television to join Farah and Leah, who were in the midst of the third season of Bridezillas. Sarah watched them over the top of her book.

  “I can't believe how awful these people are.” she heard Leah say.

  “That's kind of the point.” said Alex “Everyone loves to watch a trainwreck, or rubberneck at an accident on the highway.”

  “You know, now I look at this...” said Farah. “The situation in Iran really doesn't seem that bad.”

  Alex was quick to agree. “Yeah, my country likes to talk big about bringing democracy and all that jazz to the rest of the world, but they really should do something about the shit we have going on at our own doorstep.”

  The women laughed, as the bride on the television threw a cake at a server because the frosting was Powder Blue instead of Sky Blue.

  The next day they were taken straight from breakfast to a new room, which Sarah tried and almost instantly failed to add to her map. Everyone was still aching from overworking their muscles the previous day, but they were assured that this would be an easy session. The room itself was painted completely black, with seven massage tables in a line. They were instructed to lie face-down on the tables and put their heads in the holes at the end. They did so, and discovered that the
head-holes went directly into a black box under the table.

  “Mines not working...” said Pete.

  The others looked up to see that the comedian was lying the wrong way on the table, his feet dangling into the hole where his head should be. The Balderlies were not entertained, and glared at him until he faced the correct way. They left the room as the mechanical womb sounds started churning away, increasing in volume with every ten minute loop. They all tried to speak, but found that they were paralysed by the noise, and even if they could say a word, the sounds soon became so loud that they wouldn't be able to hear one another.

  They stared into the darkness ahead, each of them wondering what the hell they were meant to be looking at, when BANG, a bright light flashed in their eyes, the outline of a grid hanging in their vision amongst stars in the blackness.

  Another cycle of the room noise and BANG, another flash, the grid returning for another ten to fifteen seconds.

  This continued for the next two hours. Every ten minutes the tones would come to a crescendo and the image would be burnt into their retinas, each time remaining longer than the last. At the final play-through of the sounds, the flash blinded them one last time, and the noises came to a stop. They heard the door open, the click-clack of heels walk across the threshold, and the door close again. From the pitch blackness, Whark's voice sounded out.

  “Would you all please be so kind as to sit up?”

  They did so, the outline of the grid still stuck in their vision, hovering over wherever they looked. Whark dialled up the lights slowly, and they could see one another again, under glimmers of the grid. She took the group through to an adjacent room and sat them down each at their own desk, instructing them to draw what they saw in the flash. It had been three minutes, and the remnants of the image were fading, but each of them did their best to try to recreate the outline of the grid that had been lightly seared into their subconscious. Whark collected them all and looked through the sketches. She seemed dissatisfied.

  “Let's try that again.” she said, opening the door for them to return to the black room.

  Another round of tones and flashes, the images staying with them longer and longer. After two hours Whark entered again, and brought them through to draw what they saw.

  Seemingly annoyed, she put them through the process in the black room a third time, then a fourth, until the image was not just seared, but completely burnt into their minds. After the fourth round of drawing, Whark finally seemed happy with their sketches and sent them with the orderlies to the mess hall for dinner. None of them were feeling particularly hungry, and sipped at smoothies with reluctance, under the watchful eyes of their grey and white clad minders.

  “What do you think that was?” asked Farah. “Why was it so important we remember that box?”

  “Did you see a box? I saw a grid.” said Rob.

  “It was like a grid, but I had circles in mine, like, I dunno, Iron Man's helmet or something.” said Pete.

  “It looks like a UI.” said Micah.

  “What's that?” asked Sarah.

  “A User Interface.” said Alex, to a nod from Micah. “Like on your computer or your phone.”

  “Why would they want us to be able to draw that?” asked Leah.

  “That's just the question at the top of the pile, isn't it...” said Micah.

  They continued to sip at their smoothies in silence. Each acutely aware of the bitter chemical twang, and that they had literally no idea what they signed themselves up for.

  5

  The second week in the facility sped by. Every day involved rounds of flashes in the black room, each time emerging and drawing the grid with greater clarity. By the weekend they could all redraw it perfectly, and Micah recreated the layout on his laptop to confirm his suspicions, that it could function as a rudimentary user interface. The others crowded round whilst he populated it with basic applications, then threw it across to his tablet to look at it in a touchscreen view. Clicking through the menus he had populated with blank headings, he demonstrated that it felt like they should naturally go through to sub-menus, leading to what he called 'peripheral apps'. None of them wanted to approach the staff with queries. So the purpose of the UI, if that was what it was, still eluded them, and they were left to shoot speculation back and forth amongst themselves.

  “Maybe they're turning us into human computers?” scoffed Pete.

  “Humans are technically computers, biological ones at least.” said Micah.

  “Oh please.” said Alex. “Don't give him some generic line about humans being computers, neurons being circuit boards... it's a hell of a difference calling people 'biological machines', and installing a user interface by which we can... what? Control the operating system? What the hell is the human OS?”

  “Do you feel like asking them?” Micah asked, indicating to the red LED in the corner, hanging under the glass eye staring at them.

  Alex was hesitant. “No... we'll find out when they're ready to tell us.”

  At lunch, they discovered their drug regime had changed, and rather than two capsules to accompany their meal, they were given another smoothie, this one containing a different chemical twang to the ones that arrived with breakfast and dinner.

  “Do you recognise the taste?” Sarah asked Micah.

  He didn't. It wasn't anything like the nootropics he had experimented with in the past. Sweeter, with an almost synthetic citrus flavour.

  “It's kinda like drinking a Glade plug-in!” Pete scoffed.

  “Maybe this is something new,” said Micah “Or something different. Perhaps the Nootropic smoothies are just a primer, and this is the actual thing we're here to test.”

  “Why would we need a primer?” Alex asked, but Micah had no answer.

  As the second weekend continued, they all noted that the tones in the room had changed, less harmonious and more like pulses of digital noise grouped together in ten to fifteen second bursts. Each had found themselves lulled to sleep faster than the previous nights, and complained about waking up with a metallic taste in their mouths.

  At breakfast, Rob waited for the Balderlies to leave before speaking to the group in hushed tones.

  “I think they're drugging us at night.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Leah, a tremble in her voice.

  “That metal taste, I reckon it's from some kind of aerosol anaesthetic or something, knocking us out.” he said.

  “Why would they do that? They've already got our consent to take drugs...” said Farah.

  “Maybe this is for something different. Maybe they're doing something to us in our sleep.” said Micah.

  “If I find some doctor's diddling me in my sleep, I will not be best pleased.” said Pete, trying to crack a joke, but failing to raise even a smile from the others.

  “So, how do we find out what they're doing to us?” asked Alex.

  That night, they went to bed prepared for the gas. In the shower room as they brushed their teeth, they each soaked a hand towel in water and surreptitiously brought it back with them to the living quarters. Micah reasoned that breathing through it might filter out some of the gas, like they used to advise people to do when caught in a burning building. It wasn't quite the same as a tank of oxygen, but it was the only suggestion that had been offered from the group. Hiding the cloths under their duvets, they breathed through them, the metallic taste pervading, but less so than without. They waited hours after the lights dimmed, fighting the notion of sleep, biting lips and tongues, digging nails into palms, trying to keep their brains ticking whilst the vapour sneaking through the moist fibres did its best to knock them out. They had no way of telling how much time had passed, let alone what time it was when the door to the living quarters finally unlocked. The familiar thumping footsteps of the Balderlies entering, accompanied by the tak-a-tak-a of small metallic wheels rolling on the tiled floor. None of them wanted to peek out from their covers and give themselves away, relying on the sounds to track the jou
rney of the two men around the room. The footsteps and tak-a-taks of wheels stopped. Silence reigned over the dark bedroom.

  “This the right one?” asked the first Balderly.

  “Is it the Chinaman?” asked the second.

  The first pulled back the covers, revealing Pete sleeping soundly, his cloth falling to the floor, having failed at its task.

  “What is that, a blankee?” asked the second.

  “Must be a China thing, always see those fuckers breathing through masks, don'cha?”

  They lifted him up, placing him on the gurney they had wheeled in, pulling it back through the room to the door, where the second orderly placed his hand on the APEXecurity pad, unlocking it. A surge of adrenaline pulsed through the remaining subjects, knowing they'd have to get to the door before it locked again, without the orderlies seeing them. The two gigantic men pushed Pete through the door and it started to swing shut behind them. Micah dashed out of bed and burst across the room, his bare feet pitter-pattering on the floor as he ran. The bulbs in the ceilings and walls started to slowly crawl to life. As he was within metres of the door, he dropped to his knees and slid across the remaining distance, reaching out and jamming his fingers in to the gap of the closing door. Knelt down, he was hidden below the line of sight of the orderlies were they to turn, and tried to keep his agony inaudible. The enormous men didn't look back to check the room or investigate why the lights were coming on. The sound of the wheels and their thumping feet slowly disappeared down the corridor.