by Eli Constant
The walls were lined with windowed cubicles. Those cubicles were dark now- nothing lighting the little rooms. They were so dark that I couldn’t see what was contained beyond the glass. A feeling of foreboding began to build in the pit of my stomach.
“Mrs. Swanson. Dr. Peters.” Doctor O’Toole hailed us from across the room and began walking in our direction. I followed Peters towards the other doctor and we met in the center of the room.
O’Toole’s fingers were wrapped around the handle of a large steel rolling cart. Syringes were lined up on the metal surface. The clinical fluorescents glistened against the shiny, liquid filled hypodermics. The fluid was a very pale pink.
O’Toole caught me staring at the cart. He pointed at the syringes.
“Behavioral modification drugs. An experimental combination of an LSD derivative, dexamphetamine, an antipsychotic and an unconventional relaxant.”
“That’s quite a cocktail.”
“We’re still studying the effects of human drugs on the undergrounders. We’ve found that physiologically they are very similar, but neurologically the cells sometimes respond opposite our expectations.” We walked, O’Toole pushing the cart. “We feel this is due to their higher level of brain activity. They use far more than the human norm of 20%.” O’Toole paused, bent over the tray, and compulsively straightened the line of syringes.
“I’m not surprised that the government is collecting test subjects. Have you made any progress discovering a weakness?” The doctors gave me a strange look. “Well, those drugs… aren’t we aiming for some sort of biochemical warfare? I would think we’d want to test drugs that affect the human body negatively if they are physiologically similar.”
The doctors were quiet. O’Toole began pushing the cart again; I walked along side of him. Peters moved away from us, his concentration focused elsewhere.
“Weakness? No… no. Mrs. Swanson you mistake our intentions.”
“Mistake? Undergrounders kill us; we aim to kill them. Seems pretty cut and dry.”
“That’s not very broad thinking for a scientist.”
“I’m not thinking like a scientist; I’m thinking like a mother. You obviously have no children, Dr. O’Toole.”
“Mrs. Swanson, we are trying to achieve something greater here than the genocide of a species we might strive to coexist with.”
“Coexist? You’ve got to be kidding. I consider myself to be a very reasonable person, but what you are suggesting is the absolute most unreasonable thing I’ve ever heard.”
Dr. Peters spoke then, his voice was close and I turned my body to see him standing right behind me. I hadn’t realized he’d rejoined us.
“When I first came onto the project, I felt the same way you do now. I watched my fiancé die… brutally.” Peter’s voice only cracked slightly. “I almost died myself.” My eyes moved to the scarring on Dr. Peters’ arm. “When I made it to this facility, my focus was on revenge and getting our world back. Working here these past months, my viewpoint has shifted. I’ve begun to see the primitive humanity in these creatures.”
“Humanity? I admit that I’ve seen undergrounders that appear markedly more evolved, but in no way are they human! They find us, they stalk us and they kill us.”
“I understand it’s difficult to be objective, but…” Peters’ voice trailed off.
As we’d been arguing, we’d continued walking as a group towards the first of twenty cubicles. Our approach must have tripped a motion sensor because suddenly the little room was bright with fluorescents.
The cubicle was designed like a typical prison cell; but instead of metal bunks, there was a proper bed; instead of an exposed toilet, there was a half-wall barrier.
It was an altogether proper room, not a prison cell at all, but the thing lying on the proper bed was… anything but proper.
Meeting Sheila
The elongated form was approximately five and a half feet long.
It was turned on its side, facing the white wall. The curvature of the spine was only slightly predatory and reminiscent of early stage scoliosis. The long bowed legs were sheathed in navy blue scrub pants, no top.
The form convulsed slightly in response to the bright light. After the initial convulsion, the body rolled to its side and rose from the bed. Very mechanically, it walked towards the glass wall, towards us, and it pushed its right arm up against the window. I was curious and I walked closer. Its flesh rested against a quarter-size, black dot. In the center of the mark, was a very small opening.
The undergrounder stood mindlessly, waiting.
Dr. Peters picked up a chart from the cart and made several notations.
Dr. O’Toole picked up the first syringe in line. He ejected a small amount of fluid and tapped for bubbles.
“We haven’t succeeded in humanizing the creatures, but we can train them… to a point.” He inserted the needle length through the hole in the glass. It pushed against the beastie’s pale flesh, causing a small indention and then entered the body.
I watched the face of the beastie. It remained emotionless, still- save for a tightening around the eyes.
When all of the fluid was out of the needle and coursing through the humanoid’s body, Dr. O’Toole removed the syringe and discarded it into a sharps container on the second shelf of the cart.
Dr. Peters tapped on the glass three times and the undergrounder walked back to the bed and sat down. Its glazed eyes bore into the adjacent wall. I wanted the undergrounders dead, but seeing one so lifeless was… disturbing and… a bit sad.
“Why does it seem like the walking dead?”
“That would be the unconventional relaxant I mentioned, a very concentrated dosage of Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate.” O’Toole’s voice was so clinical.
We were moving towards the next window. The fluorescents shut off behind us and glared to life in front of us. That drug sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. O’Toole continued talking.
“It took us a long time to gender-identify. The females have a moderately prominent protrusion on the lower left abdomen. We caught a pregnant female last month. The fetus is in cryostasis. This is the mother.”
I was listening to O’Toole drone on about the other significant gender differences in the humanoid species. I watched Peters assist in the injections and sporadically write study notes. Then it hit me.
Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate or ‘Donovan’s dreamers.’ When I was studying for my Master’s degree, I had a professor absolutely obsessed with Donovan and the ‘truth program.’
I had signed up for the Ethics in Science course expecting constant analysis of right and wrong. Instead, I and fifty other students received a semester long paranoia rant. Our final exam was an essay on administration of truth serum and its connotations concerning the Fifth Amendment.
Most of the students wrote the course off as a waste of time. Despite my incredulity, I began to read up on behavioral experiments throughout history.
I devoured conspiracy websites; I researched Californian involvement in unsanctioned experiments- the abuse of prisoners, veterans, mental patients. I was appalled at the exploitation of human beings. The raping of even an unlikeable person seemed an affront to God and civil rights.
Now, standing in a government laboratory staring at a ‘female’ beastie, I realized that even these creatures didn’t deserve such treatment. Or did they? If the situation was reversed and humans needed to move beneath the surface, would the undergrounders treat us so humanely?
“Donovan’s dreamers.” I said it quietly, but Peters looked at me in surprise.
“Yes Mrs. Swanson…” I interrupted him.
“Elise is fine.”
“We recreated many of the earlier OSS behavior experiments. Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate acts in two ways: it serves to relax a subject, but also makes that subject more receptive to manipulation.” Peters paused to clear his throat, coughing in the process. O’Toole took over, continuing the explanation.
“We’ve eliminated many drugs because the humanoids responded violently. We had to separate the population into individuals after they turned on each other. They were eating each other… apparently that behavior is normal for their species. It took us weeks to replace the dead and re-model our approach.”
I wanted to say something about my theory on flesh-memory, but I didn’t. Why give the crazy-ass doctors any more information than they already had?
Nineteen injections had been administered. We were at the very last room now.
“Sheila is our greatest success.” The pride in O’Toole’s voice could not be mistaken.
“Sheila? Seriously?”
But the doctors weren’t looking at me.
They were looking into the newly lit room with expressions that bordered on adoration. I followed their gaze- though it made my stomach churn unpleasantly, the earlier sense of foreboding resurging. What I saw confused me at first.
The hair wasn’t long, but it was human hair and so pale it had a silvery tone. I’d seen undergrounders with the first brush of hair growth, but nothing so advanced. Distinctly a ‘she,’ the beastie walked towards the glass. It looked at the doctors with recognition. Unlike the others, she seemed aware, alert.
And she was wearing a pale, yellow sun dress. Holy crap.
“Doc…ter.” Sheila had trouble moving her lips around the word and her speech had a garbled, guttural quality.
“Good evening, Sheila. How are you?” Despite looking human, Sheila craned her neck quickly left and right. That reptilian movement always freaked me out.
She didn’t vocally respond, but moved to press her right arm against the glass. Peters administered the dosage this time. I was curious why, but I doubted I could fathom the deep feelings these men seemed to feel towards the creature.
If it looks like a human, talks like a human, and smells like a human, it must be human… right?
The look on my face must have betrayed my disgust.
“Sheila is the very future of our world, Elise. We went through over a hundred candidates in four months. She’s the first that has responded so positively to drug and behavior therapy.”
I looked at Peters. He held the empty syringe at his side, watching Sheila. My mind was a tangled mass of thoughts and emotions. O’Toole’s voice was the soundtrack to the confusion in my head.
“With intact, but altered, genetic coding, Sheila is the first tangible evidence that humanoids may one day be an integral part of earth’s special fabric.”
The doctors looked at me in earnest. I wasn’t convinced.
Of course, I wasn’t in love with a freaking monster either.
Peter’s turned away, apparently finished staring at Sheila.
“We still need to find a way to control violent impulses though. Despite genetic altering and chemical behavioral modification, the humanoids remain essentially, predatorily focused. Dr. Peters attempted interacting with Sheila in a staged social setting. Sheila was at first unresponsive and then territorial. We lost two soldiers trying to extract Dr. Peters without damaging Sheila.”
“It would have been a shame to damage a beastie. They’re always so respectful and careful with humans.” I turned away from the men and studied Sheila.
Basically they were telling me that Sheila was pretty on the outside and a murderous bitch on the inside.
Actually, that did sound pretty typical of the human female.
“I still don’t understand why I’m here.”
Before switching to consultant work, my focus was fusing a manmade impulse remote system onto the control center of the rodent brain.
I knew basic chemistry, but nothing on the level of Peters and O’Toole. I was considered a bit of an expert on the anatomy of the brain: one of the reasons my biochemical company kept me on as a consultant.
“I’m not a chemist, I’m not a geneticist. I can’t help you. Like I told you before, I’m essentially a Neural Engineer… I know the brain; it’s kind of my thing.”
“Exactly.” The doctors said it in unison, making me feel even more confused.
“If we can’t control the undergrounders through chemical influence and gene therapy, then we figure the next best thing is to control them through mechanical engineering.”
We’d followed O’Toole back to the computer station on the opposite side of the room. He parked the steel cart and sat down in front of a hibernating screen.
I watched them both- O’Toole seated with Peters standing behind him looking over his shoulder at the newly awakened screen. I wondered:
Do they realize how crazy they sound?
I began to speak. I knew my voice dripped acid.
“So let me recap and see if I understand what you want. Your attempts at channeling the CIA and Pavlov’s ding-dong dogs have failed. Now you want me to step in and throw together a teeny-tiny transmitter to insert into a humanoid’s incredibly capable brain so you can mind screw a beastie? And you actually think that’s a good idea?”
My hands rested on my hips and my mind rested on the absolute stupidity of the two men standing before me. “I think fellas, you need to drop O’Toole and Peters and go with Mad Scientists 1 and 2.”
“You have no vision, Elise. This is how we make the world work again.” O’Toole was zealot. He’d found a cause and was doggedly sticking to his guns.
“Maybe the world isn’t supposed to work again, O’Toole.”
“Or maybe this is our opportunity to…”
“To what! Try and play God ourselves? You two are flipping delusional! Do you realize how this story ends? In every story, movie, or hypothetical scenario where a person attempts to play God, the world is worse off than it was before! Jesus H. Christ! Look at Einstein and the atom! One sentient being is not meant to control another; one sentient being is not meant to tamper with anything else that is thinking and feeling and living!”
I didn’t usually climb up on a soap box and stand firmly on a position, but if I was going to make an exception, now was the time. With rock-hard resolve, I calmed my voice. “Tell me truthfully, do you both completely support this idea?”
“The direction of our research is not decided by us, but, yes; we support this idea fully and without reservations.”
“Then you both should be ashamed. You’re a pair of lemmings and I’m not following your hairy asses off a damn cliff.”
I left the men contemplating my words. I hoped they enjoyed watching my backside exit the double doors. It was a dramatic exit. As soon as I was fully in the hallway though, I realized I had no idea how to get back to the barracks. I was too stubborn to turn around and ask for directions. Oh well. I’d muddle my way along.
I walked away from the lab, pretty sure I was heading in the right direction. Before the double doors clicked shut behind me, I heard O’Toole’s voice call out loudly:
“Remember, Elise. We are allowed in this facility for a purpose. If you shirk your responsibilities…”
That’s all I heard, but the threat was crystal-freaking-clear.
Un- and the Ethical
Before the girls woke up the following morning, I hit the showers. I stood in the hot, cascading water and thought.
What I’d seen in the NORAD laboratory stuck with me. My dreams had been riddled with disturbing images: humanoid females rocking human babies, beastie babies suckling at the teat of human mothers.
If I put aside my hate for the undergrounders, could I consider them objectively? Were they really animals intended for domestication and exploitation?
They’d supposedly lived on this planet as long as humans. They were sentient with their own way of life. They embraced the pursuit of technology, had families. The undergrounders sustained a distinctly animal quality, but we, ourselves, humans… we’re animals too aren’t we?
It was true that the undergrounders invaded our territory and not the other way around, but did they know better? Hadn’t the human race decimated forests and oceans in favor of tech
nology and expansion? Could we blame the beasties for following our lead?
If the humanoids were categorized at the animal level, what kind of humanity could we claim in our treatment of them?
Should we treat them like our new chimpanzees? Keep them locked in rooms, experiment on them, and provide them with only the most basic of comforts? We were adolescents burning ants with our looking glass- no thought for the lives we tampered with.
I was having a real crisis of ethics. It had been easy dealing with undergrounders when that only meant killing them.
Yesterday, I’d ripped the doctors a new one for supporting another creature’s right to exist, for wanting to make those monsters a part of our social fabric.
Today, I was confused and could not discern what was ethical and what was unethical. How could I have an issue with experimentation on undergrounders when I wanted all of them dead?
Maybe because a clean bullet hole was easier to accept and more humane than watching a beastie melt away, injection after injection.
In 1933, the Nazis passed legislation for the protection of animals against experimentation and brutality. It was a hard pill to swallow that Hitler’s code of ethics would find Peter’s and O’Toole’s work unethical. References to Hitler were never kind and often misdirected, but in this case… well.
My husband used to tease me about my rambling. Thankfully, no one could hear my mental moral debate.
My shower wasn’t so soothing now.
It had eased the aches and pains of my physical body. It couldn’t ease the aching in my mind.
I had no idea what I would tell the doctors. What response would I give them to ensure that I would be taken care of, that my girls would be safe? Would I sacrifice my code of ethics in the name of survival?
I had to be honest with myself. Betraying my confused ethical beliefs was a small price to pay. I would eat; my children would eat. I’d happily pay the price for abusing a natural creation.