Hypersubjects

by Ainsley Komper

  “Are we playing poker?”

  “I am going to make you a pro.” Was her reply.

  She set up a camera pointing towards him but behind her, capturing a bit of her shoulder.

  “I know that in your eyes there is something in the way you see me… an impression of colours and shapes. I don’t want you to describe it. Keep it to yourself but make a mental note and call it “A”. Are you ready for it?”

  Lili’s halo was average, pretty much like everyone else. There was nothing particularly memorable about her emanating web of light treads and luminous notes, but this time, she was more colourful, perhaps due to the dose he just had. After switching on the camera, she held a card to be captured by the camera. He could only see the back of the card, unlike her.

  “There may be a change in my “A” state, please try to figure what that would be and make another mental note. Call that new state “B”.”

  Despite what she said, she was still the same, the only difference was that she was holding a card in front of his face without letting him see what it was. Lilly’s visual glow remain as normal. “This is a four of diamonds.”

  She repeated that slowly several times, focusing on that sentence in particular and then her shape changed, it expanded in a peculiar way. All her threads made small circles around and it looked more like a sponge.

  “Do you have the B image?”

  He nodded and she changed the card.

  “When I say every card, you are going to tell me if I look like A or B, you got it? Or even if there is a different vision, but hopefully, they will all be looking like either one of the two.”

  He nodded again and she started.

  “Seven of spades.”

  She repeated every card three times and he kept identifying states, but sometimes he said “C” because he was not sure.

  50 cards later, they stopped. She seemed particularly happy until she started jumping like a kid, laughing hysterically and throwing the cards in the air. Lark smiled sympathetically until she played the video footage back to him.

  “Did you notice anything?”

  It was more than obvious, scary that all of that came from Lark. Every time he said “B”, she was lying and when he said “A”, she was not. The three times he said “C” was considered by her a minor fail, perfectly normal. She was onto something that they did not care to consider much. She opened a bottle to celebrate, but after a glass of wine, she gently kicked him out of the place due to the whole load of work she needed to do before their next session. She started making a list, freaking out because she did not have any staff to help her or the proper equipment but she would figure something out.

  As the weeks passed, their weekly meeting became the highlight of his binaural sessions. After five days of training with soldiers, jumping, pumping, reacting, pushing and kicking, they mostly met at public places. First in her car, where she dosed him using an MP3 player and the helmet headphones. Then, they went to quite a series of very distinctive situations, to name them somehow. Funerals and cemeteries, to identify sadness; hospitals to recognise sickness; fun fairs to see common reactions to fear, surprise and adrenaline releases. The situations got more complex every time as they tried speed dating, debating clubs and, of course, poker games. They made a small fortune that night so they went for drinks to celebrate. It got late, so they watched the sun rising together by the river.

  “I know this is all going to blow out in our faces.” She said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “They must know we are hanging out together. They have you under surveillance.”

  “We could be dating.”

  “We could,” she smiled, “but they are quite thorough.”

  “So, what do you think they are going to do to you? They can’t fire you.”

  “I am not worried about me really. I am a scientist so I am used to play-scenarios.”

  “You mean that you have a Plan B?”

  “I am more worried about what they might want to do to you. Have you thought about it?”

  “I try not to. Be a spy? Rob some high-tech facility?”

  “That would be cool but naive. Maybe they will send you to the Middle East. I don’t know.”

  “It is nice that you worry about me.”

  “At some point, you should try to get out of this, before it’s too late.”

  “You think I am going to die.”

  She kissed him goodbye and left him by the river. That was the last time he saw her before everything changed. That Monday, he met Dr Velia Morant who briefed him on the plan for the coming weeks. He was about to be tested against another subject. She neither confirmed nor denied that his opponent was enhanced in the same way as him. Dr Meckler had been temporarily assigned to other projects, so Ms Morant was the one supervising the new tests. After their lovely chat, he was immersed in a completely new type of training because, for the first time, he would be competing with someone else. Braith was taller, bigger, rougher, and needless to say, more intimidating than Lark. They were briefly introduced and then taken to a field in two separate vans. There was an empty building in the middle of a derelict area and the task was very simple. He was required to retrieve a red backpack located in the flat at the top of the building and bring it back. The only problem was that Braith had the same objective and he would be in the way. Lark was dosed as usual with the latest version of binaural tracks, which included all the enhancements integrated in one go. He arrived at the front of the building and sensed the whole place was empty, except for a vibration above him. Braith was already there and going faster on the upper floors. A huge sound of rumbling was heard several times and by the time Lark reached the fourth floor, he found out that the stairs were blocked with broken pieces of walls and bricks. He was removing them as fast as he could but then he heard the rumbling sounds again. It was Braith, blocking the stairs on every floor. Lark decided not to play his opponent’s game, so he took the lift. With his gained strength, it was not difficult to force the doors open of the rusty and abandoned lift. The shaft did not seem so menacing and it was pretty easy to climb, faster than he thought it would be. When he was on the sixth floor, he could see through the walls that glowed and it was bigger and brighter than any other he had seen. Braith was blocking those stairs by destroying entire walls. After a few seconds, he realized that Braith’s glow was moving fast towards the elevator shaft. It was likely that he could see people through walls like Lark did. By the time he was reaching the ninth floor, the elevator doors of the sixth were demolished brutally, so Lark decided to open the ones in front of him. Before leaving the shaft to run for the stairs, this time on the ninth floor, he could not resist peeking down to see Braith angrily climbing up. So, he was right, perhaps they had exactly the same abilities, so why pair them against each other? Would it be for fun? Perhaps they were exposed to different types of doses. He felt the glow pass right beside him but upwards. It turned out that climbing by the shaft was faster than the stairs and he had just given that advantage. When he reached the top floor, he expected to see Braith leaving with the backpack but the place was empty. He checked through his earpiece to see if the test was over but it was still running. He used the few seconds he had as an advantage to search the place which was already a wreckage. Maybe Braith was running with this package. He looked outside but saw no signs of him. Lark continued to look for the package with no success until he concluded it was not there, despite being on the top floor. He had searched every possible corner except the rooftop. From the window, he climbed to it and there it was. A red backpack tied to a small smoke vent. He retrieved it and communicated with the guys in the van via the microphone on his watch. Lark decided not to leave the building by retracing his steps but climbing down fast using the pipes attached to the side of the structure. More than halfway through his descend, Braith emerged by breaking the actual walls and the pipes. They both fell down to the grass in the middle of a cloud of bricks until everything went
black. Lark woke up at the institution, surprisingly not as bruised as he expected. It had been 24 hours and Braith was the first face he saw.

  “Hey, man, sorry about the ambush.”

  “At least I won the test.”

  “Not really, I took the backpack from you”

  “Bastard.”

  “So, what is your thing? What do they do to you?”

  “They play some weird soundtracks through special headphones and I get a rush of adrenaline.”

  “I bet it’s more than that.”

  “Tell me about yours.”

  “They don’t want us to talk much.”

  “Are you a synesthete?”

  Braith smiled. “Not exactly your type.”

  Several doctors interrupted their talk, insisting that Lark needed to recover. His binaural dose included an enhancement on healing. The hit taken from Braith was considerably strong but there was more to it. The way he dealt with the situation was different, as if he was used to this. At least more than Lark. After a week, the nonsense stopped and they were comparing gun calibres through one-on-one combat. Boxing, free-style combat, running, obstacle races, swimming, weight lifting, paintball missions, etc. It was all fun and games but the time they were allowed to share was very reduced. Besides, learning that Braith was a loner, former mechanic and with a synesthesia related to smell, Lark could not get that much information. What was notorious for him was more of a negative attitude towards the institution. He clearly did not trust them, so why did he take up the training with them? Perhaps he got paid more than what he did for repairing cars, but he had the impression there was something more to it, something deeper.

  Things started to go downhill when his training was individual again. He was asked to do a mission in the outside world with no back-up from the institution, but he refused until he spoke in private with Dr Velia and someone of a higher rank. The meeting took place in an office he had never been before with a great view of the facilities in general, but somehow with the appearance of a cage. Lark wanted to know the ultimate goal of this whole operation and after a few evasive turns in the conversation, he bluntly got to the point. This was not a treatment they could replicate massively as only a very reduced part of the population had the same condition as his. Nobody can be made into a synesthete, not even that institution has the technology to do it. So, that meant all of those tests and experiments will be applicable to the few subjects they had been testing. What is more, the types of synesthesia differs in each person. Even Dr Meckler said that it is difficult to find suitable subjects for this project, which again leads to the same question: What is the ultimate goal of this research? “Besides being ground-breaking research on neurological science and opening the doors to cure or placate a group of brain diseases, of course, there is the idea of military applications, but at this point, it is too early to tell. Maybe you will stop responding to the stimulation after a few years because it has happened before. Perhaps you won’t be suitable for that kind of operation as they require steel nerves which we are frankly not sure you have. There are many variables to be considered and we are still too far from asking ourselves those questions.” they said. It was uncharted territory for both sides and they agreed to do quarterly reviews to discuss the matter and keep things clear. It felt too good to be true, too clean and cooperative, especially when they directly refused to disclose any information about Braith. His first mission was to assist police forces with tracking illegal trafficking at the border. He was a useful tool because he could feel the presence of people hidden in the weirdest places, like ships and containers, but after the satisfaction of his first day in what looked like a promising week, the news hit him. Braith’s face was all over media outlets as a man who managed to escape from security forces after stealing important information from a government facility. The news did not mention the institute at all and he wondered if that was the real reason why he was placed into an easy special mission, just to keep him out of the picture. A day later, he refused to go on the field and went directly into the institute but he was kept waiting for a long time until Lili reached him a bit agitated.

  “We don’t have much time. I need you to find the answers for yourself. Do not believe anything they tell you and, if possible, run away from here.”

  A couple of guys dressed in suits found her. One of them took her by the arm. They were with 4 security guards, all heavily armed. When Lark tried to intervene, he was blocked by one of the men and told that Dr Meckler was required for an emergency.

  “Wait, wait, just one last thing. Lark, I gave my bike away. I know you like the helmet. It was a bit retro. You can keep it. It’s on the trunk of my car.”

  She tried to hand the key to him but one of the men took it and examined it. He told two of the guards to go with Lark to retrieve the helmet and nothing more from the car. On the way to the car park, he knew she was not talking about a helmet, but the big round headphones he jokingly referred to as such. The guards had fallen for it because Lili had actually disguised the device as an ugly helmet by adding a transparent visor and sticking a number 5 to it.

  The guards did not even allow him near the car and looked inside the trunk like waiting for something to happen. They went back with the keys while Lark told them he would be back in a second after putting the helmet in his own car. Once inside his vehicle, he put the device on and when he slipped the transparent visor down, a massive swirl of sounds invaded his ears. He reclined the chair down to get immersed in the cacophony of piercing noises that were spreading through all of his body like a vibrant current of electric bugs. By the time he was back at the building, Lark could feel everyone’s glows behind walls as he was passing floor by floor, sweeping every corridor, until he saw him. It was Braith’s green halo, bigger and bolder than your average human being. However, too many people were in the way, so he decided to take another approach and went one floor higher and located himself as close as possible above Braith’s room. It seemed like a laboratory that was less guarded but when he felt security personnel coming, he went to the nearest bathroom, opened a window and hung from the outside rail. It was the perfect move because the guards did not find him when they raided the bathroom. They were not looking for Spiderman, so they did not even bother to open the relatively small window where he was hanging outside like a trapezist. From there, he could see Braith’s window. It was good that the Binaural track came with a shot of adrenaline. He could feel the intensity of his force along with a high perception of beings like him. With a jump, he managed to reach Braith’s window frame and hung there until he saw that there were no glows around Braith’s. Slowly, he climbed up to reach the window handle and broke it open. In a matter of moments, he was inside, in front of him, looking at his huge glowing aura. He felt a strange connection, perhaps because he might be the only person in the world able to share his feelings about the situation he was going through.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. I feel so lost.”

  Braith’s glow changed turning in to a swirl.

  “You can hear me.”

  The shape started to produce yellow spikes.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He laughed until he remembered his game with Lili at her place. Maybe that’s why she gave the helmet to him. All that training with the deck of cards at her place, the poker games at the casinos, and reading people’s emotions at parties led him to this point.

  “I am going to ask you some questions and by your reaction to them, I will be able to determine when you are saying yes or no. We don’t have much time, so here we go… Is your name Braith?”

  His aura changed immediately and was covered by a small cloud of green dots.

  “Are you 3000 years old?”

  The dots disappeared and turned into a more solid cloud, closer to his core.

  “Did the guys here do this to you?”

  As Lark suspected, the dots came back.

  “Were you robbing confidential da
ta as they said?”

  The dots remained

  “Why? Were you trying to sell it?”

  The shape shifted into a no.

  “What were you going to do with it?”

  Braith’s aura kept changing into different forms, all of them unknown to Lark’s definition of yes and no. He should have come back to the binary option but there was no time to play twenty questions because Braith heard people talking outside. After locking the door to gain some time in the likely event of being interrupted, he came back to his unconscious friend.

  “I want to help you but I don’t how. I want to understand what happened. I am sure you have a good reason to do what you did, but…”

  Braith’s green glowing aura had been growing towards Lark while he was talking to him and now was evident it was all around him like a slow-motion tornado trying to pull him back. Lark had never seen this, it was as if Braith was making an effort to catch Lark with his own aura.

  “What do you want?”

  The people outside were trying to get in but they were held by the lock.