Читать книгу The 8ight - Maxine Kia McClendon - Страница 4

“Warning! Warning! Self-destruct sequence initiated. Total facility annihilation in 10 minutes and counting. All personnel: please evacuate!” The mechanical voice calmly urged Dr. Rao to abandon his mission.

But he could not. The voice had come over the facility loudspeakers more than 10 minutes ago when he first entered the self-destruct sequence. He was hoping that in the ensuing chaos, his assistant, Dr. Yagamuchi and her research team would be able to get away with the specimens. Specimens? He still thought of them in that clinical, detached way, but be honest, he thought, the specim… the babies, he firmly told himself, were of the utmost importance. His job now was to make sure this distraction kept all eyes on him. If he failed and they were both captured, then it was all for nothing. His betrayal to the Company would not go unpunished. In fact, he was sure he would not be able to avoid the detonation that would destroy all 15 levels of the underground facility where he had spent the last 12 years of his life engaging in fantastic experiments in enhancing different life forms.

As a scientist in the employ of the Company, he enjoyed the latest state-of-the-art equipment, unlimited funding, a large staff who answered to his every whim, and every researcher’ dream: free reign to research and experiment on whatever he wanted without any fear of government sanctions or ethical morals getting in the way. The only caveat was that anything he discovered or created was the property of the Company, for them to do with or further develop as they saw fit.

For years, Dr. Rao did not mind that stipulation. His particular interest was in animal cell and then gravitated to gene manipulation. As a child, he always imagined common animals with physical attributes of other animals, and with the unlimited resources of the Company and the deep underground labs hidden away from prying eyes, Dr. Rao was indeed able to bring his childhood curiosities to life. He began by splicing the genes of animals together, to create new and interesting forms of life. He created butterflies with scorpion tails, wingless birds with frog legs, cats with wings, and rats with porcupine quills. He developed hamsters with forked tongues, squirrels with beaks, and turtles with octopus tentacles. He gave eagle eyes to blind mole rats, the kangaroos’ jumping ability to hippopotami and gills to lions and tigers. He enlarged hummingbirds to the size of elephants (of course they couldn’t fly) and he reduced elephants to the size of hummingbirds (and delighted in amazement as those could fly!). He gave a cheetah’s legs and speed to a tiger shark with a mammal’s lungs and watched as it hunted wildebeests with turtle shells on the Serengeti.

His research soon branched off into cell manipulation, and he attempted to increase the intelligence of the most intelligent animals on the planet: dogs, dolphins, and primates. This was where he had the biggest breakthrough in his career. For years he only had marginal success while manipulating the area of the brain believed to harbor intelligence. Compared to his earlier work, it was no big deal to develop chimpanzees that could read and write, or dolphins that could perform basic arithmetic. Dogs that could tell time and recognize letters were cool, but had no practical application for the Company and before long, Dr. Rao began to feel the pressure of coming up with the next big breakthrough. He began to work longer hours, and sleep less, and perform longer experiments on his subjects. His nerves began to fray from the lack of sleep, and one fateful day, while electrically stimulating the fully exposed brain of his favorite chimpanzee, Gilligan, his eyes closed briefly and his probe slipped a little too far to the left of the unused (or so believed!) portion of the brain.

Unexplainably, although heavily sedated, Gilligan sprang awake, screeching at the top of his lungs and jarring Dr. Rao from his daze. Jerking the probe out and pushing back from the operating table in a panic, Dr. Rao watched as all of Gilligan’s vitals momentarily flat-lined and then resumed on their own. The earsplitting shrieking stopped instantly. Shaken, Dr. Rao and his team closed up the cranial cavity and monitored Gilligan’s vitals for the next several days. Everything seemed fine, and although he viewed his error again and again on the recording automatically taken of all his experiments, he began to believe Gilligan suffered no ill effects.

“Warning! Warning! Self-destruct sequence initiated. Total facility annihilation in 5 minutes and counting. All personnel: please evacuate!” The mechanical voice briefly interrupted his musings of that fateful discovery all those years ago.

He ran to every computer workstation in the lab and uploaded the virus he specifically designed to erase all of his work. He could not let the Company further distort his work! He had to be sure the horror he discovered earlier that night would not be repeated!

“It’s all my fault!” he thought, as he pulled out every flash drive and encrypted disc and threw them in the metal trash can right before setting them afire.

He thought back again to that fateful day, sitting in his lab finalizing notes as Gilligan sat in his cage finishing a banana he had given him. He rattled his cage, indicating he wanted the one Dr. Rao was eating as well.

“Oh, no, Gilligan,” Dr. Rao said as he put the half-eaten banana down, reaching for another file. “That’s enough for you.” He turned his back to Gilligan and resumed his work, listening to the rattling of the cage.

This was normal behavior for Gilligan lately, becoming more demanding, and eventually Dr. Rao would give in, if nothing else to just quiet him down so he could finish his work. But on this day, the rattling stopped before Rao could give him the half-eaten banana, and when he absently reached for it to give to Gilligan, he discovered it wasn’t beside him where he left it. He looked under the desk and moved his files around but couldn’t locate it. When he turned around, he saw Gilligan calmly eating the banana! He looked to his lunch, and then back to Gilligan in amazement, still locked in his cage on the other side of the lab, over 30 feet away from where the half-eaten banana had once lay! Dr. Rao took another banana out of his drawer and placed it beside him. He watched Gilligan intently. At first nothing happened. He watched Gilligan and Gilligan watched him. Gilligan’s eyes slowly travelled to the banana and turned red. He stretched his arm out of the cage toward the banana. He looked at the banana, never blinking for long minutes. Dr. Rao watched, and a small gasp escaped him when the banana slowly lifted up off the table and drifted over to Gilligan’s outstretched palm! It was unbelievable! Dr. Rao was amazed, and knew right away that his mistake, his unintentional electrical stimulating of the unused portion of Gilligan’s brain had awaken some sort of… hidden potential, some sort of telekinesis!

The research moved at a blinding pace after that. He developed a serum that would mimic the effects of the electrical brain manipulation, and from that point on, it was discovery after discovery. By replicating his mistake, this time with purposeful intent, he was able to awaken a specific amazing ability in his animal lab specimens. He was unable to explain why each species seemed to have their own unique ability, but discovering what they were and developing uses for it catapulted him quickly back into favor with the Company. That lasted only as long as it took him to discover that as great as this discovery was, it was minimized by the discovery of an insurmountable weakness along with the ability.

His chimpanzees developed limited telekinesis, although it only seemed to work on retrieving something they wanted desperately. They could only do this several times a day before intense headaches set in. Using the power also greatly diminished the chimp’s life span; Gilligan expired three months after first demonstrating his ability and dozens of other chimps didn’t last one week as Dr. Rao did experiment after experiment to determine the depth of their abilities. His dolphin specimens gained the ability to levitate, but they were only able to do this when they initiated a jump out of the water. This made them able to jump much higher out of the water than before and perform an insane number of somersaults before hitting the water again. They too suffered a greatly reduced life span; the more they used their new-found ability the sooner they lost their ability to swim, slowly sinking to the bottom of the pool, and unable to get the oxygen they desperately needed, they drowned.

He had the most success with dogs. They developed varying levels of teleportation. Depending on the size, breed, and disposition of the dog, these dogs (dubbed blink! dogs because of their ability to blink in and out of existence) could teleport varying distances. Dr. Rao ran an innumerable number of tests on almost every breed of dog imaginable, with varying results. Miniature designer dogs, like teacup Yorkies and miniature schnauzers could teleport from one end of a couch to another, while small breeds, such as terriers, could teleport from one room to the next. Both miniature and small breed dogs could only perform line-of-sight teleportation; they could only teleport to a space they could visually see.

The side effect of using this ability was that they would slowly lose their sight until finally they would make one last teleportation effort and simply fail to reappear. Larger breed dogs, especially retrievers and shepherds, could teleport up to five miles with the added benefit of teleporting a full grown adult with them. They did not depend on line-of sight; in fact with their heightened intelligence they could teleport almost anywhere within a one mile radius provided they had been to the destination before or the destination could be clearly described to them.

These dogs, being larger, could perform many more teleportations, and could teleport people with them, before they too succumbed to the effects of their ability. Nearing the end of their usefulness, they would begin to lose their hair in large clumps and bleed profusely from their gums until they too would attempt one last jump and simply fail to appear at their destination.

Unexplainably, this weakness was absent in the last group of dogs Dr. Rao experimented on. The more aggressive dogs such as Rottweiler’s, Dobermans, Pitt bulls, and bull mastiffs became even more aggressive. The Company was especially interested in them and immediately removed them from Dr. Rao’s care. Over the years he overheard his techs whisper about secret experiments with these dogs where they were trained to hunt down prey and rip them to pieces by teleporting sections away. He paid those rumors no mind, but in hindsight he wished he had. Maybe then he would’ve discovered the two secret levels earlier where his work was being used to experiment on humans.

He shuddered again and took one more quick look around the lab. There was nothing left. He had succeeded in erasing all of his research and knew that his assistant had followed his instructions to the letter.

“What a damn fool I have been!” he again cursed himself.

He foolishly believed that the Company was funding his research purely for the benefit of research. That delusion came crashing down earlier in the evening when his assistant quietly but urgently informed him that she had discovered some abnormalities with the facility schematics. A quick but thorough check by him revealed two hidden levels below his and a quick jump with Marley, his favorite blink! dog uncovered the existence of a virtual chamber of horrors.

Miles of hallways lined with cells occupied with what could only be the unsuccessful results of his work done on human patients. Humans! Grotesque failed experiments whimpering pitifully for help, grasping at bars that kept them contained. He wandered for what felt like an eternity, gazing into each and every cell before he began to recognize a pattern. The occupants in each cell were vaguely human; some had missing body parts, some had extra body parts, some seemed to be turned inside out, and some seemed to be half human and half animal. He began to notice that the further down the hallway he went, the younger the occupants in each cell became. His horror grew as it became evident his research was used on patients as young as 15, 14…he walked on and saw hideously deformed human children as young as 5 and 6 crying piteously out of mouths filled with sharks’ teeth, or as in one cell, of a child crying out of the seven different mouths that appeared all over his head.

Marley whined loudly beside him, anxious to get away from there, but Dr. Rao continued. He came to the end of the hallway, to a door marked Nursery and swallowed. He couldn’t come to bring himself to believe what he had seen, yet knew behind this door would be a much larger tragedy. Would the Company go as far as experimenting on babies? He slowly opened the door, and anger now beginning to replace his horror, he stormed into the room to confront…..no one?

He entered a brightly lit hospital nursery ward with no technicians in sight. Before him were two neat rows of four incubators each, covered with colorful sheets. He quickly looked around and inched up to the first incubator, leery about looking inside, but knowing he had too. The horrors in the hallway got worse the younger the occupants inside each cell became, and he believed that once he saw what hideous experiments lay below those sheets, his descent into insanity would be complete. He grabbed the end of the sheet and hesitated. Steeling his resolve, his heart beating furiously, he yanked off the first sheet, a cry of revulsion ready to spring forth from his lips as he looked down onto a …beautiful baby boy? He gasped, and scurried around the room flinging off the coverings from each incubator. Inside each one lay a perfectly formed human child. No grotesque appendages, no deformities, absolutely perfect.

“My god,” muttered Dr. Rao. “They must not have been experimented on yet.” He looked to Marley. “What are we going to do?”

“Woof!” replied Marley.

“You’re right!” exclaimed Dr. Rao. “We have no time to waste!” He crouched down beside Marley and grabbed his big head and gazed deeply into his eyes. “Listen boy, you have to help me get these babies away from here!”

“Woof! Woof!” replied Marley, shaking his head up and down, understanding exactly what Dr. Rao was asking of him.

They quickly set to work. One at a time, Dr. Rao laid one of the babies on the ground and watched as Marley gently placed a paw on its chest. With a loud blink!, Marley teleported away back to Dr. Rao’s personal lab, taking the child with him. Before long, they had retrieved all 8 children, and when Marley teleported back with Dr. Rao, he quickly assembled the rest of his research team and informed them of what he had discovered. Among shouts of protests and cries of outrage, Dr. Rao quickly set to work. He tasked his lab techs with ensuring all projects currently being worked on would be discontinued and all of the research destroyed. As they set out on their task, he pulled his personal assistant, Dr. Yagamuchi, to the side.

“Karen,” he said looking at his assistant, “you must get the babies out of here.”

“I can be more help to you here!” she disagreed. “You know that when the Company finds out-“

“Hush,” he said fondly placing a finger on her lips and looking deeply into her eyes. “It has to be you. I must make sure all of our research here is destroyed so that this can never happen again.”

“Send someone else. I know all of the same protocols you do and together we can erase the security tapes and…”

“No, Karen, we can’t. We were only able to loop the security footage for several minutes. Right now they are back online and they have begun to notice the purging in the computers. They will be here soon to investigate. You have to get the children out of here before then. We helped cause this; we must bring it to an end. I must bring it to an end and make sure this never happens again.” He walked over the main computer and began to enter a long string of code.

“Is that what I think it is?” Karen asked looking over his shoulder.

“It’s the only way to be sure,” he replied as he entered in the last few numbers. Immediately red lights began flashing and a loud mechanical voice came over the loudspeakers.

“Warning! Warning! Self-destruct sequence initiated. Total facility annihilation in 20 minutes and counting. All personnel: please evacuate!”

Karen looked at Dr. Rao then hugged him tight. They remained that way for a full minute, and then slowly pulled apart. She nodded her head.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Marley is my strongest blink! dog. Being a golden retriever, he has the farthest teleportation distance and endurance of any of the other dogs. Use him to get the babies out of the facility. Find somewhere safe for them. I don’t know where…”

“I know of an orphanage 2 counties over. Can he make it?” Karen asked.

“No, that’s too far. He would have to make too many trips. He’s never done something like that before.” Dr. Rao ran his hands through his hair trying to think of a way. Marley trotted over to him and whined and licked his hand. Dr. Rao looked at him. “No Marley, I can’t ask you to do that. It’s too much teleporting.”

“Woof! Woof!” Marley jumped up and placed his paws on Dr. Rao’s shoulders. He gazed intently into his eyes and licked his face. He trotted over to Dr. Yagamuchi and placed himself below her hand.

“It will be cutting it close Karen,” Dr. Rao said while gazing lovingly at Marley, “but he is willing to try. You will have to go with him first so he will know where to return to and then send him back for the babies individually. Now go, quickly!”

With a loud blink!, Marley teleported Karen away. Dr. Rao quickly got to work. Every few seconds Marley would teleport back into the lab to retrieve another baby. Dr. Rao tried not to notice, but each time Marley returned, more and more bald patches began to appear around his body as the effects of the massive teleportation effort began to take its toll. By the time he returned for the last baby, he was practically hairless, tongue lolling out, and limping badly. He gazed sadly at Dr. Rao as he shakily placed his paw on the chest of the last baby. Dr. Rao crouched down and patted Marley on his head.

“Good boy, Marley. Good boy,” he said as tears ran down his face over the condition of his favorite dog. Marley woofed slightly and teleported away.

That was several minutes ago. Looking around his lab, watching the fire in the trashcan devour the last of his notes, gazing at his computer screens as the uploaded virus deleted years of research, he felt a pang of sadness. He could not believe how deceived he was. He knew that he could not erase the years of turning a blind eye to the applications the Company made of his work with animals, but he began to hope that his current actions to deny the Company the benefits of his research to apply to humans, and the removal of the babies before the ghastly experiments could harm them would begin to make up for his error in judgment by working for the Company.

“Warning! Warning! Self-destruct sequence initiated. Total facility annihilation in 2 minutes and counting. All personnel: please evacuate!”

Dr. Rao wiped his face and took a deep breath. He heard a blink! behind him and began to turn around in amazement saying, “Marley? How did you make it back? Is everythi-“

“Hello, Dr. Rao,” Claire cut him off.

She stood behind him, hands on her hips, a sinister smile on her lips. On either side of her were the largest Rottweiler’s Rao had ever seen. Sitting on their haunches, their heads easily came up to the height of her chest. They had blinked! her right into his lab. Their sudden appearance caused him to scramble back in fright, and the sudden movement caused the two dogs to issue growls so deep that the glass in the lab doors began to vibrate. Dr. Rao froze in fright.

“Dr. Rao, what have you done? Why the sudden sabotage?”

“You stand there and ask my why? I’ve been to the lower levels! I’ve seen how the Company has abused my research! I’ve seen the people, the hideously deformed people! And the children-“

“Spare me your drama, Dr. Because of you, I haven’t the time nor the patience to extract the information from you the fun way. I will ask you only once – where are they?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Claire beckoned slightly with her head. The dog to her left blinked! away and instantly appeared beside Dr. Rao. It gripped his left hand in his massive jaws and blinked! back to the side of Claire. It happened so fast it took Dr. Rao a moment to realize he had moved at all. He looked down and realized his hand was…just gone, blood pumping out onto the lab floor. Then the pain hit him. He crumpled to the floor, gripping his wrist in a vain attempt to stem the flow of blood. He looked to the Rottweiler that blinked! his hand away and he swore it smiled at him as it made a big show of tossing his severed hand in the air and swallowing it in one gulp.

“One last time, doctor,” Claire snarled. “Where are they?”

“You and the Company will no longer benefit from my research,” said Dr. Rao through gritted teeth. “I destroyed it all.”

Claire began to laugh as she walked toward him. Her dogs paced her. “You stupid ass. What exactly do you think you destroyed?” She gestured around the ruined lab. “You think because you wiped your computers and burned your files that your research is gone? Every bit of data you complied, every experiment you videotaped, every note you wrote, we have copies of it all.”

“What? How?”

“You really think the Company would give you unlimited funding and not keep tabs on every little thing you did? Damn, how can you be one of the most ingenious men I’ve ever met and also one of the dumbest at the same time?” Claire squatted before Dr. Rao and looked him square in the eye. She motioned to the other Rottweiler and he circled behind Dr. Rao. Gently for a dog of his massive size, he seized the back of Dr. Rao’s throat between its jaws. “Where are the specimens?”

“Specimens? You mean the babies? I’ll never tell you. You will never conduct my experiments on those babies.”

Claire slowly stood up and placed her hands on the broad back of both Rottweiler’s. She chuckled. “A fool to the end. Those specimens you think you saved? We performed your procedure on them two weeks ago. You saved nothing!”

The dogs blinked! and teleported Claire away. Dr. Rao’s throat went with them. His decapitated head tumbled to the floor as his body jerked and twitched, blood pumping from his throat. His head rolled to a stop against the desk, the look of horrified realization frozen forever on his face. The loudspeakers crackled over the sound of the alarms.

“Warning! Warning! Self-destruct sequence initiated. Total facility annihilation in 5 seconds and counting. 4 seconds…3seconds…2 seconds…”