The Zen Gene

by Mains, Laurie

  The bike wobbled and he maintained his balance though he was no longer fully in control. The energy of the light flooding his optic nerve produced a small voltage which was sufficient to uncouple much of his conscious awareness from his surroundings. His lower brain functioned as it should and it, along with his forward momentum, kept him upright.

  The strobe effect of the light through the pickets induced voltage spikes to his cerebral cortex which induced a seizure lifting him from the confines of his body, leaving land and flesh behind and below as he entered a state of flow.

  The unmediated light shook him violently as the electro-chemical effects infused his mind with intense sensation. His eyes were prisms which turned light into infinite seductive sensation.

  The peak came and lifted him away; soaring, vibrating, beyond pain, to that sweet inner source of pure elation. Sky, ground, fence, everything was gone, driven away as he surfed on waves of ethereal intensity.

  Below him he sensed the path coming to an end, he did not want the sensation to end but he knew it must and he searched his mind for the words Zen made him promise to say to resist the urge to go again.

  Only once Tyler, that’s the deal, only once, okay?

  It was hard to let go but he set his will and forced himself to keep pedaling past the end of the fence, past the gas station on Water Road, past the Hydro maintenance yard, peddling until the tears in his eyes had dried and the sensation ebbed; he wanted more but refused to give in to the need. He was three blocks away when he felt the need let go of his mind as the hollow ache inside him lessened its grip.

  Zen taught him to replace the emptiness which followed with pride and focus on the knowledge that he was strong enough to resist it and that too felt good. The further he got from the junkyard the better he felt and the stronger he became. The sweet memory of the sensation sustained him until he was far enough away the danger of getting stuck was gone.

  Three years ago Andrea had been frantic and asked Zen to help look for him when he did not come home after school. Zen found him on the ground next to his bike trembling and insensible. That was the day he discovered the weird light effect and got stuck making too many passes and only stopped when the sun moved out of position. He nearly blinded himself and needed to wear dark glasses for a month to combat the headaches.

  Zen was smart about things like that, she told him that she did not understand why he did it but she wouldn’t tell Andrea about it because she would freak.

  They told Andrea he fell off his bike which was mostly true. After his headaches stopped and he could ride again Zen spotted him heading in the direction of the junkyard and followed him. She watched him do it and realized it was probably not harmful if he only did it once.

  When he turned his bike around and tried to go again she forced him off the path. She was bigger than him and easily knocked him off his bike. She sat on top of him pinning him down mercilessly tickling him until he gave up. She called him the ‘nerve junkie’ for a long time after that.

  He did not like being touched but, if he did not exactly like it, he could at least tolerate some touching when Zen did it. Over the summer she caught him a few more times and came to understand this was something he was strongly drawn to. He could not understand why she wanted him to stop the fence thing; he did he believe it would hurt him. It was when she threatened to tell Andrea he agreed to a compromise. He could do it once a day. She made him promise he would stick to their deal.

  Only once Tyler, that’s the deal. Promise me.

  He turned onto Enterprise Crescent and made his way past blocks of empty and shuttered industrial buildings then turned left onto Dunstan Road for another block and a half to the factory property. He jumped off his bike and pushed it through the hole in the security fence stashing it in the weeds behind the factory’s long dead power transformer. His bike would not attract any attention; there was no need to lock it because it blended in with the rest of the junk strewn around the lot. The transformer had once supplied electricity to the factory, an Agro-Pharm Corporation, which had once been a large player on the local industrial scene back in the eighties.

  Now it was another abandoned piece of twentieth century technology standing sentinel to the massive structure decaying behind it. The pharmaceutical complex was two city blocks long and at least half a block wide with a dedicated spur line for rail cars. Three shifts of workers pumped out billions of doses of hormones for the dairy and meat industry during the late twentieth century.

  Until the unfortunate connection between artificial hormones and Alzheimer’s disease was discovered hundreds of employees efficiently turned out products which produced generations of out-sized livestock and over-sized humans. The physical plant was shut down in 2013, and as far as he could tell, no one had been inside the building since it had been boarded up and abandoned. He discovered it six years ago when he was ten and it became his playground.

  Cars seldom drove past and there were never any people around and, as a solitary child, the situation suited him well. He ran his fingers through the waist-high weeds growing along the rail spur which led to the factory’s concrete loading dock. He walked down the path worn through the Scots broom.

  Somehow the first year he begun hanging around the factory Andrea found out and forbade him to play there. She made up stories about how they experimented on children inside the factory but as a ten-year-old he was bright enough to realize she was making up stories to scare him, and if anything, her efforts made him more interested in the place. It was only a few blocks from their house and he came most days after school while she was at her job.

  Sections of the metal security fence around the property had collapsed and it was easy to get onto the property and once inside there was lots of interesting stuff for a kid to play with. While he was looking for materials to build a fort he looked under the long concrete loading dock and noticed the wire grill covering an air vent. He thought the grill would make a good window for his fort and it was easy to pry it off using the pry bar he found on one of his earlier adventures. It was not until the grill was off that he realized the vent provided an entryway into the building. Going inside the first time had been terrifying; it almost killed him.

  He walked to the loading dock and squatted down amongst the tall weeds and waited a few moments watching the road and the surrounding buildings. He wanted to make sure there was anyone hanging around. Satisfied, he ducked underneath and duck walked over to the vent. He removed the metal grate covering the air duct leading to the building’s basement. He knew it was unlikely anyone was watching him but he was being more careful after the incident in lab four. The meatpacking plant across the road was shut down and boarded up long ago like most of the industrial buildings in this part of the city but he was careful about not being observed.

  The vent, eighteen feet long, led to a basement utility room. He discovered the vent has a deceptively gentle downwards slope which turns vertical at the twelve foot mark. The first time inside he crawled into the vent in complete darkness and was caught by the sudden drop off. He fell down the vent and came to a painful stop when his head slammed into solid steel grating covering a huge fan at the bottom. Plummeting face first down eight feet of ventilator into complete blackness almost killed him. His out-stretched arms slammed through the gaps in the fan cage and dangled in the blade space below and his face and head bashed hard into the steel fan cover.

  If the fan had been turning his arms would have been sliced off like two long sticks of salami at the deli. His head hit hard and he lost consciousness for a while. When he woke he was dazed and in a lot of pain and nearly passed out again. He forgot about the pain when he realized he was trapped upside down inside the vent. He came close to having an all-out screaming fit of hysteria but managed to regain control of himself. He struggled and pushed until his body moved back and little by little he worked his right arm free of the grate.

  He rested for a while because he was having trouble catching his bre
ath in the tight dusty confines. He was wondering what to do and thinking about the fact no one knew where he was.

  In desperation, though he was stuck head down inside the shaft and it was hard to move at all, he managed to free his other arm from the grate. He began to search along the sides of the vent as far as he could reach with his fingers until he came across something that felt like a crack.

  He realized it was a folded seam in the galvanized sheet metal of the vent. He tried to judge where the crack was relative to his foot and began to kick furiously with the heel of his sneaker. The noise was deafening and the dust he loosened made breathing difficult. He stopped frequently to catch his breath but fear soon had him back at it. It took long agonizing and painful minutes until he felt the metal seam begin to part and spread open. It took more long choking minutes to widen it enough to work it back and forth with his free hand.

  When the whole section of vent gave way and split open he kicked like a madman until he was able to squirm and wriggle his body backwards and out through the opening. Half in and half out of the vent he twisted around so he could sit upright in the open hole and this allowed the blood to drain from his head and let him catch his breath.

  He was relieved but then he realized he had another problem. When he stuck his leg out of the vent, no matter how hard he stretched it, he could not feel the floor below. He did not know how far down it was or what piece of machinery was waiting to impale him. He sat for a long time trying to decide what to do.

  It was not a decision between two courses of action because when he tried to climb back up the vent he discovered he could not. There was nothing to grab onto the vent had smooth metal sides. Being the only logical choice open to him, he got ready and held his breath and jumped into complete darkness. He remembered wondering how he would explain his injuries to Andrea.

  He got lucky, the floor was only a few feet below him and mercifully clear of debris but that was not the end of his problem. It took him a scary half hour of feeling around in the dark to find his way up to the main floor of the factory, and though he knew they were not true, during that half hour of blindness the stories Andrea told him about them experimenting on children came back to haunt him.

  That first time inside the building he had been badly spooked. When he found the stairs to the main level he ran around inside the factory like a caged rat until he found an emergency exit with a push bar that would open. He was glad to see the blue sky and his trusty bike that day but like most kids he was more curious than cautious and that first time going inside did not deter him from going back.

  He climbed the concrete stairs from the basement and stepped through the door stopping to marvel at the amazing light show of streaming sunlight angling down from the ruined roof onto the floor of the factory. For two city blocks random columns of brilliant golden sunlight poked through holes in the roof creating a fantasy realm of dust-speckled beams.

  It reminded him of St. Mark’s Cathedral downtown. Andrea took him there a few times and told him he was baptized there but he could not remember that. To him it was a building with pictures on the windows and a lot of soggy old people that tried to touch him. They stopped going and Andrea admitted that she only took him there to “keep up appearances,” whatever that meant.

  She did lots of stuff like that, he could not understand why she did those things but he found it easier to go along with her rather than have her repeatedly try to explain it to him and getting upset when he still did not understand.

  He walked into the section of the building that housed the rows of chemistry and biology labs.

  The lab he used was closest to the basement stairs. He picked it because of that and it contained the best stainless steel work counters. The room was fifteen by twenty with one boarded up window. When he began the project he cleared and then maintained the pathway on the concrete floor from the basement stairs to the door of his lab. He wet mopped it with bleach and water every few days.

  He was careful not to track contaminates into the lab because you never knew what spores might be on the dust and thus traveling in the folds of your clothes. It would be ironic if, after having searched everywhere for the Hantavirus it showed up accidently in his lab media and made him sick. There were plenty of rodent droppings in the building but as far as he could determine not the virus.

  In every direction the factory floor was mounded with loose and drifting piles of debris that came from the ruined roof and deteriorating walls. No matter how hard he tried to avoid it each time he walked in the building he would raise dust storms in his wake.

  There had been several laboratories to choose from and he picked Bio Lab Eight because of its counters and proximity to the basement door. He spent weeks cleaning the lab and scrubbing the stainless steel countertops with bleach.

  He decided to paint the floor with white garage-floor enamel because he could not get the old concrete clean enough for his purposes. The lab once had lots of equipment but it had all been removed when they closed down operations; he saw the outlines of equipment that once sat on the floor and countertops.

  When the lab was clean and ready for use he began to search the rooms in the building for useful equipment. There were pieces here and there and though he didn’t always know what they were used for he dragged them to his lab.

  A month after he began his project he came across a locked storeroom with a jackpot of instrumentation. It took him a noisy exhausting hour of bashing the lock on the door to get in but once inside he found all kinds of cool stuff. He dragged the bigger pieces using an improvised dolly made from a skate board.

  As he learned more about genetics online he tried different experiments and steadily found or improvised the equipment he needed to do them and soon he had a well equipped biology lab. It was well equipped except for a few key items which he could not find. He could not obtain an optical microscope or a computer that wasn’t ancient but while he was searching he found something amazing in the basement beneath lab three.

  It was only accessible by a locked stairway inside the lab and when he first saw it he did not understand what it was until months later when he saw a photo of the same machine online and discovered that it was a scanning electron microscope.

  It was after midnight on a school night when he found the photo but he could not wait until school ended the next day to go back and see it and he snuck out. The first thing he did was search the device for a manufacturers tag, it was an Electroscan, scanning electron microscope, the date of manufacture read Mar 1997, but any hopes he had of using it were dashed when he read the power requirements. A diesel large generator could not supply enough power to operate it.

  He retrieved the key to his lab from its hiding place behind an old polished brass fire extinguisher which hung on the wall next to the door. He unlocked the door but before he opened it he plugged in the ends of an extension cord poking out from under the door and waited until he heard the fan inside. It was a household fan he found on Recycle Sunday. It was missing one side of its safety grill but it worked.

  It was big and efficient and strong enough to supply two psi of positive air flow inside the lab without drawing much current. The positive air pressure helped to discourage dust infiltration when he opened the door. The factory behind him was a million cubic feet of disintegrating building and there was dust and debris constantly circulating in the air.

  While he was putting the lab together he also searched for a live wall receptacle to run equipment. In five years he never found a single hot receptacle, though he actively searched whenever he went exploring in the building. Like everything else, when they decommissioned the building they shut down the power supply. The only place he found live power was in the security shack at the front gate of the factory and it was a long way from lab eight. He bought five one-hundred-foot extension cords from Canadian Tire and laid them on the ground from the guard shack to the lab. It cost seventy-five dollars to buy them. He had the money but he forgot there was
sales tax on top of that and he had to think up a good reason to ask Andrea for five dollars. There were times he almost gave up on the whole idea because things like floor paint and extension cords were costing a lot of money. When he laid the cords on the ground he worried its bright orange colour would attract attention and he painstakingly covered every inch of cord with dirt or other junk to obscure it.

  He replaced the key behind the fire extinguisher; it was a bit of luck when the last workers left the factory they inserted the keys into the lab door locks. The individual laboratories were all built as standalone sealed structures within the factory and time and exposure to the elements had not wrecked their roofs like it had the main factory roof.

  He slipped a pair of elastic shoe covers over his sneakers before he entered. He stole a few from the swimming pool change room last July. They were for use at the pool to keep people from tracking dirt onto the pool deck with street shoes, they also worked well at stopping him from tracking dirt into the lab.

  He opened the door and was pleased when he felt the gentle puff of positive air flow. Walking into the dark room he went to the main work bench and clicked the switch on the power bar. Three low volt LED lights came on and pulled the lab and equipment out of the murk into sharp focus. He waited a few moments for the computer monitor to flicker to life before he booted the computer. He found lots of monitors on sight but they were all ancient CRT types and they sucked power like crazy.

  The one he picked was the newest of the bunch but even so the resolution was fuzzy and indistinct no matter the refresh rate. On his travels through the ruins of the factory he never found a usable computer so he built his own based on an old IBM desktop.