NLI-10

by Lee Isserow

  “Ow fucking Ow, Ow, OW!” he finally gasped, as the others emerged from their beds to pull the door open.

  “Everyone awake?” asked Alex, looking around. There were only three of them. Rob, Leah and Farah were fast asleep in their bunks.

  “We better hurry.” said Micah. “If they get through the next door, we'll have no chance of following them.”

  He left a cloth at the foot of the door to stop it from locking behind them, and they started making their way down the hall. Sarah was hesitant about joining them. This was exactly the type of attention-drawing she was trying to avoid, but figured that they'd already have seen her being awake with the others on the cameras. If there was a group led by another subject, it hardly implicated her as any kind of ringleader, which she certainly wasn't. They sneaked down the hallway following the sounds of the Balderlies, staying behind corners and hiding, rushing forwards as soon as their quarry turned a corner. As they came to the door to the testing area, Micah used the run-and-slide technique he deployed previously. Once again he volunteered to have his fingers jammed in a door, but it got them deeper into the labyrinth, and he seemed to think it was worth the short-term pain. The Balderlies took a direct route with the gurney. In hushed tones, Alex reasoned that without a conscious subject they didn't have to twist and turn to get to wherever they were going. Sarah was comforted that she wasn't alone in thinking that they had been taken on over-long routes around the testing facility, that it wasn't her imagination playing tricks on her.

  Pete was pushed in to a room and the group hung back to see if anyone further was coming or going, in case someone spotted them. Minutes later, the Balderlies left the room and walked away. This time Alex took the hit, and slid across the floor to keep the door open. The others tip-toed down the hall to join her, and peered through the crack in the door. Inside was a surgical suite, Pete lying unconscious at the centre of the room, his legs up in stirrups as the nurse and a doctor started a procedure, ordering a surgical robot to make a small incision. Monitors above them displayed the path of a minute camera that crawled through a slit in his testicles made by the scalpel. Ahead of it was a tiny snake-like robotic arm which glided through Pete's blood vessels.

  “What the hell are they doing?” asked Alex.

  The doctor ordered the robot to clamp and sever the vas deferens.

  “Isn't the vas deferens something to do with sperm production?” Micah whispered.

  “They're sterilising him?” Sarah said, the thought digging a pit in her gut.

  They continued to watch as the doctor commanded the robot to cauterise the tubes, watching the live fluoroscopic feed as they sealed completely.

  After a few more minutes of abhorrence in silence, watching the doctor and nurse pass medical jargon back and forth, the three subjects decided there was nothing further to learn from watching the rest of the surgery. They returned along the hallway they had come down, made their way back into the living quarters, where the door was waiting for them, ajar. Getting back in to bed, they had more questions than answers. Tomorrow they would fill the others in, but as each lay their heads down on the facility-issued memory foam pillows, and the lights slowly dimmed back down to leave the room in darkness, they each wondered; am I next?

  APEX PROJECT AP_NLI-10

  Marion Whark Daily Report #13

  Phase One is drawing to completion, and the subjects are progressing as expected.

  Three of the seven have been through surgery, and as with the NLI-09 and NLI-08 trial, all are responding positively, with no adverse side effects observed thusfar.

  Last night's A-Eye feeds reported an incursion into the testing section by three of our subjects, which was unexpected, but not unprepared for. Tonight we shall be installing RFID tags in them all, and guards shall be on 24-hour call, should our guests be tracked going outside of permitted zones in future.

  As you will no doubt be familiar with from the previous trials, this is not uncommon as we enter Phase Two and our subjects become more unpredictable in their actions and reasoning. I am however delighted to observe that none of our NLI-10 subjects are displaying the behavioural quirks that previous rounds of testing, and logs from other facilities have noted.

  Based on the progress of Phase One, I am confident that this trial will be our shining light amidst the dark days of those previous.

  Sitting at her hand-carved mahogany desk in a room deep in the depths of the Cultybraggan facility, Marion Whark signed off and sent in her report to her superiors. She looked around her office, the furnishings from the Shadwell pop-up relocated and arranged with identical feng shui, as they had been at all the recruitment centres. The LED wall behind her was displaying London's skyline as the sun began to rise in the distance. She took a deep breath, trying to contain her rage, and reached to the intercom on her desk, pressing a button.

  “Come the fuck in.” she said, sternly.

  Her anger was not easily restrained when she didn't have to represent herself as the matriarch of the project.

  The two orderlies entered, towering over her in stature, but their faces were carved with expressions of terror at the slight woman sat before them.

  “What the legitimate, actual fuck happened last night?”

  The two gigantic men looked at one another, neither wanting to be the first to speak, yet both wishing to implicate the other.

  “This is un-a-fucking-cceptable. Do you understand that? Do you know how it makes me look that my fucking Neanderthals can't look over their fucking shoulders to see a collective of little shits following them into the bowels of a top secret fucking experiment?”

  “But...” the first started, and then trailed off, warned to silence by Whark's glare.

  “No fucking 'buts', you moron. Dinner tonight their food is drugged, gas in the living quarters, knock them the fuck out and inject RFIDs in all of them. Do. You. Under. Stand?”

  They nodded, looking at the floor with shame.

  “Good. Now get the fuck out of my sight.” she revolved her chair around, looking out over the LED window at London's skyline, her seething anger washed away slowly by the serene tide of the Thames.

  She waited to hear their plodding footsteps leave the room and the door lock behind them before turning back to her desk, taking another deep breath that was expelled with a growl. She pulled out a pile of files and leafed through the subjects until she found Sarah's. Opening it, she scanned the pages until she found the heading she was looking for.

  Daughter of APEX employees Scott and Jennifer Kirkland, retired from service in 2015 after A-Eye 1.2 discovered intentions contrary to The Company's best interests. Termination of employment enacted under order of NLI Project director, Marion Whark.

  She smiled to herself at a job well done. Having invested so much into the company to raise it to the global stature it had occupied for the last twenty years, she had been rewarded greatly for uncovering the Kirkland's plot to whistle-blow. She grinned as she flicked back to the beginning of the file, a photo of Sarah paper-clipped to the front page, and relished the notion of experimenting on the progeny of the couple who tried to take her company down. Having Sarah as a subject in the trial was a suitable denouement to the whole tale, she thought, given that it was her parent's research that had got the NLI project this far.

  6

  The next morning the seven subjects awoke feeling groggy, each of them complaining of pain at the base of their spines. Checking one-another, they discovered that they all had a small circular bruise three to four millimetres in diameter.

  “It's between the fourth and fifth lumbar.” noted Farah as she looked at the bruise on Alex's spine.

  “What does that mean?” asked Rob.

  “It means they knocked us out again... it would have been fucking painful if they did a spinal tap when we were awake...” said Micah.

  “What would they do to our spines?” asked Leah.

  “Could be anything,” said Farah “Depends what they were testing
for... Cerebrospinal fluid can show signs of infections, or a huge range of disorders. MS, Guillain-Barré, cancers --”

  “You think they were testing for cancer?” Leah stammered, breath fast, a quiver on her lip. “Could the trial have given us cancer? Is that what they were doing surgery for?”

  Rob put an arm round her and tried to calm her down.

  “What if they weren't taking anything.” Sarah said. The others turned to her and a silence fell on to the room.

  “So, rather than remove fluid... they put something else in? On top of the surgery?” asked Alex.

  Sarah didn't have an answer, and the room was quiet once again but for the tones echoing through the walls, until interrupted by a chime resounding through the speakers. It was time for another round of tests.

  Once again, they were placed in darkness in yet another room beyond another new door on the maze of corridors. Sat adjacent to one-another in deep leather chairs, they were instructed to keep their eyes open and concentrate on trying to recall the grid in their mind's eye. The room tones roared loudly from the shadows surrounding them, punctuated with asynchronous beeps, taps, sharp squeals of digital noise that sounded like a computer being stabbed in its electric heart. The cacophony and the darkness seemed to last for hours, but as it went on, each of them realised the grid was laid out before their eyes without having to think about it, as if the sonics were calling it out of the ether of memory, summoning it without their control.

  More hours passed, and the grid was not only hanging in their vision wherever they turned in the black, but felt like it was steadily populating with some kind non-visual data. Accompanying it was a hormonal release, serotonin relaxing their bodies and minds, letting the information flow. None of it was decipherable, but there was now some kind of depth beneath the shapes they could see in their mind's eye, as if there were something being installed in the grid that they couldn't access.

  The tones came to a crescendo, then stopped in an instant. The lights came on, grid fading from view as the room became illuminated. They could all still picture it, but not as evocatively as in darkness. The orderlies took them back to the mess hall for dinner, where they shared their vivid visions.

  “It felt kinda like an acid trip, y'know?” said Alex “Like, you're aware what your seeing isn't real, but it feels like it's always there, beneath the surface, the patterns connecting the universe, connecting us all.”

  “What do you think it was?” Sarah asked Micah.

  “Do you want me to be honest, or say it was just another average day in the bunker?” he asked. She wanted the former. “You know that feeling we all had, that pressure of... data or information of some kind?” she nodded, as did the others. “I think they're installing something in our subconscious, through the tones and the drugs.”

  “Like NLP?” asked Alex, who then had to reluctantly explain Neuro Linguistic Programming to Leah, who was visibly disturbed by a medical-sounding acronym. “It's nothing to be afraid of. Once you're aware of NLP it's less effective, because you're looking for it.”

  “But this isn't normal NLP, is it?” said Farah. “NLP doesn't have a side salad of surgery, noise and drugs.”

  A chime through the walls told them it was time to go to the living quarters for sleep, but none of them were tired. Adrenaline and fear of surgery as they slept was keeping their bodies ticking through to the early hours of the morning. In the darkness, they couldn't shake the image of the grid, as if haunting them in a waking dream. The lights came on to signal morning and none of them had slept a wink, yet didn't feel tired.

  At breakfast they tried to make sense of getting through a whole day and night without exhaustion.

  “Y'ever try Modafinil?” Alex asked Micah, who had. “Kinda feels like that, huh?”

  She proceeded to tell the rest of the group about the drug that the US Army had given to the troops to keep them awake for two to three days straight without loss of mental clarity, none of the jittery feelings and swift tolerance from caffeine or the high and crash of speed or coke.

  “So, you think that's what we're here to test? Something to keep people awake?” asked Leah.

  “It's probably a side-effect.” said Rob. “The rest of these tests haven't exactly lined up with what that drug is for... can't imagine soldiers spending weeks surrounded by flashing lights just to stay awake a little longer.”

  Their discussion was cut short by a call for them to move through to the testing area. Another day spent in darkness with the noises, another night sleepless with the grid hanging in their vision, clearer than ever.

  The week went on, and they went through the same thing every day for six days until they were told it was the weekend.

  “How many days have we been here now?” asked Leah during breakfast, her eyes puffy and exhausted.

  “I don't even know any more. Don't really fucking care...” said Rob, shrugging her off.

  He was irritable. They all were.

  “What does it matter?” asked Pete. “They'll let us know when our three months are up.”

  “But we should have kept track!” said Leah. “How will we know when it's our one month anniversary? We should have a party or something!”

  Her words were met with blank stares, the others in disbelief and bemusement.

  “Not so much, no.” said Alex.

  “Why would we want a party?” asked Sarah.

  “Everyone likes a party...” said Leah with a huff, slumping in her chair.

  Their confounded looks at the young blonde were distracted by the click-clack of overpriced heels, as Whark entered.

  “How are we all doing this morning?” she asked the group, who turned to her with bag-laden eyes and an inability to feign sincere smiles. “Oh you'll feel right as rain once you get a good night's sleep.”

  “About that...” said Pete. “Have you been keeping us awake all week to prove some kind of point, or is it a side effect?”

  The others stared at him, each thinking the same thing, but afraid to say so.

  “I mean, I understand the need for secrecy with the surgery, the injections into our spines, the weird tones and flashing lights into our faces.”

  Sarah considered telling him to shut up, but there was no stopping him, he was on a roll. Plus, he was only saying what they wouldn't

  “But you're taking away our sleep! I don't care about the other crap, but sleep is, y'know, sleep!”

  Whark was, as far as the group could tell, expressing bemusement at her subject's honesty. He turned to the others, his eyes full of shock and confusion.

  “I honestly have no idea why I just said that!” he said.

  “That would be your limbic cortex firing on all cylinders.” said Whark, to an eyebrow raise and dumb expression from Pete.

  “The lizard brain.” said Micah, which brought a nod and a surprised smile from Whark. “Oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily speaking. Has a habit of taking away the filter between thought and speech when you're sleep deprived.

  “It's also where the 'fight or flight' impulse comes from.” added Alex.

  “Not to mention feeding, fear and fucking.” said Farah, who became visually embarrassed when she heard herself.

  “Well, I assure you you'll be getting a good night's sleep after today's session.” said Whark.

  “But seriously, are we going to address the surgery?” asked Leah.

  “Dear girl, you agreed to it!” said Whark, producing a seven inch tablet from her pocket and flipping through a digital scan of their paperwork, presenting the blonde with her initials on a page.

  I am aware that this trial will involve pharmaceutical, psychological, NLP, hypnogogic, and surgical elements, and hereby grant A-Pharma the rights to act as healthcare proxy for the duration of my time in the Cultybraggan Facility.

  Leah handed the tablet back, feeling stupid. The table had no further questions for Whark, each finally feeling the exhaustion of the best part of a week without sleep.


  “When you're done with your breakfast, do please be so kind as to join the orderlies at the door, we've got a busy morning ahead of us before you can lay your heads down to rest.” She forced a non-smile to them all and strutted out of the room, orderlies opening and closing the door for her without making eye contact.

  The group was too tired to be paranoid. They slovenly rose to their feet and followed her out.

  Sat once again in the deep leather seats in the dark room, Whark stood in front of them, her voice emanating out of the black.

  “Are you all comfortable?” she asked, insincerely.

  They grumbled in the affirmative.

  “Very good. Now I want you to picture the grid.” she said, waiting for them to do so. “Are you all seeing it?”

  They were.

  “Now in the top right there is a small box, do you see it?”

  They concentrated on the grid, trying to make out its lines and sections in the darkness, one by one seeing the box they were being directed to.

  “It is currently...” a light glowed out in the darkness as she brought her wrist up to view her watch, illuminating the angles on her face like she was about to tell them a ghost story. “Ten thirteen a.m.” the light dissipated as she dropped her arm back into the darkness.

  The group felt a tingling in the back of their heads, as if some background thought process was running and set off a physical sensation. Metaphysical gears wrestling themselves to life, wheels starting to turn.

  “I want you to place that time in the box.” said Whark.

  “What do you mean, 'place it in the box'?” asked Leah, but she didn't have to wait for an answer.