| | The Devil's Candy
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The needle entered my skin. My fingers tensed at the prick, and I white-knuckled the chair as the liquid seared through my veins. Liquid fire rushed through my right arm, igniting every cell, every piece of DNA hidden in thousands of nuclei. I saw the damn doctor smile, a bluish white anomaly that contrasted his tanned face. He whipped the elastic band from my upper arm.
I screamed and lost consciousness.
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I woke up to a million whines from a million machines somewhere in my vicinity. When I drew breath, brilliant flashes of red ranged through my vision, hundreds of me started to grab at the oxygen nourishment. Cells. I am a multitude of cells awakening in a body once unified. The Devil's Candy, Pandora's Box was a manufactured disease that granted sentience to every cell in your body. It would be a quick, painful death, each cell death crushing the psyche until you were reduced to a bumbling fool, a million broken pieces on life support. And they would pull that too, the doctor with the whitened teeth didn't give a damn for a test subject like me.
Me.
The room came into vision then. It was like those pictures of flies, mirrored images bombarding me at once. But I tricked myself, like magic eye, looked at it all like I wasn't paying attention. Then I saw the whine of the flourescents above me. White tiles on the ceiling. I was on a dentist's chair. I tried to get up but I was strapped down. Though I wondered whether I could do it even without the straps. A door opened to my left.
The doctor. “Awake?”
I managed to groan. How to make a coherent sound from a team of one hundred cells with no individual voices?
He laughed. “You survived the first test. Most of you can't speak for at least another week. If you live that long. If.”
I had a strong urge to kill the man. But he was a giant and I was lilliput.
“But don't you worry, I have high hopes for you. This shot will help you, it gives your cells a little extra boost. You'll experience less cell deaths than us normal humans.” He chuckled at that, like it was some inside joke between him and the rest of humanity. I spat.
This time, I didn't watch the needle. Just felt for the invigorating fire enter through my veins. I was each of us, absorbing a piece or two of the stuff, letting it enter my nucleus, fiddle around with my insides. Soon I would produce the proper little pieces to shore up my cell wall.
The doctor shuffled around the room, grabbed a bag of clear liquid. An IV. As soon as he set it up, he was gone.
I slept again.
-----
A piece of me broke. My wall was letting in some kind of foreign particle. A knife slashing at my sides. Fix it! Fix it! I felt my precious insides spill out of my membrane. Proteins breaking. Other parts of me watched, indifferent. But this was death! Blackness invaded my vision. I felt myself scream without voice. Torture. Death.
And then it was gone and I was eating it. The pieces of my former self dissolved, nourishing the other parts of me. I was dead, and once again alive. It was dangerous to isolate, and yet I could no longer group myself up as one entity.
I felt the straps on my wrist. So I tried to shift my wrist selves a little bit. Harder. Thinner. Shed hairs. Produce sweat. Pull. The straps bit at my skin. Smoother. My palm caught at the strap. OK. Sharper, jagged edges. Cut through the strap. Back and forth, slowly, slowly.
My leg throbbed. Shit! I had concentrated too long on my arms, my leg cells were suffocating. Shift focus, realign, balance out the nutrients. Keep alive, damn it.
I tried again at my wrists, but slower this time. I kept some parts of awareness for the rest of me, letting the mundane continue. Produce energy. Respiration. I don't know how long it was, but the straps were cut. I lay there for some time, exhausted. I took in breath one cell at a time and took status. Each cell-self appeared intact, ready.
I moved my leg. Tried to coordinate each part of me. Stretch, pull. Push, breathe, tense, relax, beat, think, fire impulse, move. I stumbled, but I was up.
I looked about me. An empty room save the chair. One door to my left, a mirror on the far wall. I saw myself and shuddered. I was ugly! It was a smorgasbord, lacking the clean structure of cells, tissues, even organs. And yet, it was me, who once had a... name?
“Jenkins?” The doctor's startled voice.
I turned slowly. Commanding my cells. Is that my name?
“How did you?” He looked alternately towards the broken straps and my arms and legs.
“Iahhhhh,” I managed.
The doctor drew a needle and took a step towards me. I stumbled backwards, flailed my arms. “Noooooooooo.” I moaned.
“Oh, but this will help you sleep, you're still not ready for... movement.”
I detected malice. I shifted the route of my veins. I constructed a fake vein, reabsorbed cells, and vomited. I slumped into the chair.
“There there,” the doctor purred as he injected me.
I felt the fake vein take the liquid. I drew a wall around it, let a probe cell enter. Immediately I felt the poison of it attack me. That part of me was lost. I screamed. I closed my eyes, went limp. Faked unconsciousness. Ha! as if such a thing were now possible for me.
I felt a hand reach for my neck. I created sharpness. As his finger touched, it broke skin. I deposited myself in his finger. I opened my eyes and smiled.
The doctor drew back, his hand holding his finger. “What did you-?”
I saw myself dig through his membranes, enter his blood stream. Through the roar of liquid red, I could feel myself going.
“Kill.” I said.
“Wha-?”
I let myself lodge onto the wall of an artery. Commanded myself to divide, expand. Block the blood. Pressure, pressure, burst!
The doctor gagged. Fell to his knees.
“Hurt?” I smiled.
I was already going after one of the delicate parts. Already there were dozens of me attacking various parts of his body. Once I even tried to absorb and assimilate one of his cells. It tasted disgusting, and that cell had died.
“Jenkins, wait. I can stop this. I have an antidote.”
“Ga ga ga,” I laughed. Antidote for what? How can you make human what is no longer?
Parts of him were starting to fail now. He writhed on the ground, white foam appearing at the edges of his mouth. His eyes rolled back. I felt his cells shutting down, and then I knew those cells of mine were likewise doomed.
I braced myself for the multiple deaths. I thought I was ready for it, now that I had experienced cell death before. I wasn't. Multiple deaths are exponentially worse.
I felt myself falling forward.
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| | Posted 5/4/2008 2:50 PM - 36 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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