Chapter 4 – TERMINUS
~ Valentino ~
Ten minutes later, I enter the busy tech lab, using my new dark gray trimmed security badge attached with a retracting cable to my new white lab coat. I pause at the door for a moment and remove my new eyeglasses. The room suddenly goes blurry. Yup. Required to see. After putting the glasses back on my new big nose, I scan the TERMINUS lab and note with amusement that everyone is now wearing their white lab coats.
My wounded left hand is no longer bleeding where I had slapped the Fang Ring to start the transmission. After I had gained control of this body, I washed the hand in the sink and dabbed at the wound with a paper towel.
One of the white-smocked technicians walks past me and asks, “How’d it go, Jenkins?”
I look up and force myself not to glance behind me. “No problem. I got rid of that annoying security guard.” It was true; I stashed his body in the last stall of the bathroom, locking it and crawling under the door.
The chronometer is almost at zero. The string of characters stops scrolling down the monitors concluding with the phrase ‘TERMINUS transmission. End. 2050-05-24.’ Some technicians stand, arch their backs, twist their bodies left and right, and rub their fingers. The chatter increases. A female transcriptionist collects the digital pads from the other two and walks directly toward me.
Involuntarily, I step back and glance behind me, hoping she’s headed for someone else.
“Here’s the log of today’s transmission, sir,” she says, with no indication whether she’s expecting a reply.
So I just grunt and nod.
Apparently, that isn’t the expected response because a frown flashes across her face.
Forcing a fake smile, I extend my palm.
She places it in my hand.
I study it. There’s a list of bulleted items. Pressing each item with a finger opens a more detailed display. I try to glean as much as I can from the pad without appearing too interested.
The woman sighs, shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and glances at her watch.
She must be expecting a signature. A tan oval pulses next to the name “Dr. Cal Jenkins.” I position my thumb there; it turns green with a beep.
She extends her hand, and I give her the pad.
“Thank you, sir. Have a good celebration day.” She turns and walks out the door without waiting for a response from me/Jenkins.
The lab workers leisurely exit until the only other person in the room is a thin junior employee with curly blond hair, with a candy sucker in his mouth. He removes a tray from a cabinet and walks toward the heavily secured door.
As he is about to pass by, I narrow my eyes disapprovingly and stare at him until he stops and looks at me. He grabs the tray with one hand and pulls the sucker from his mouth with the other. “Is everything okay?”
“I’m wondering what you’re going to do now,” I ask cautiously.
“Me? Oh, you know. Before I leave and lock up, I have to feed, you know, the, um, Roy guy.” He waves the sucker toward the reinforced door.
I nod knowingly as I look down my big nose at the name badge of the young man, who is at least four inches shorter. “That’s okay, McNaughton. I’ll do it today.”
McNaughton’s eyes widen in surprise. “Really?”
Apparently, this is too out of character for Jenkins, so I try to downplay the novelty of this offer. “Yes. Just because it’s a special day. I’ll take it from here.” I smile and extend my hands.
He pops the sucker back into his mouth, rubs his neck as he slowly shakes his head. “I don’t know. That security guard may be back…” he mumbles over the sucker.
I frown like an administrator. “Don’t worry. I’ve dealt with the guard. And I have the required security credentials, correct?”
He nods.
I grasp the tray on one side. “Go enjoy the city celebration.”
McNaughton releases the tray and jerks the sucker from his mouth. “Thanks! I will.” He exits the room in ten seconds.
The items on the tray capture my curiosity. There are two bottles of brown liquid, some gauze, and bandages. I set it on a counter, lock the exit, and head toward the fortified gray door. A second before I wave my new key card over the door’s scanner pad, I notice the vid-camera aimed at the door.
Of course. To make this look as normal as expected, I retrieve the tray and step to the door, now clearly in the camera’s view. After a scan of the keycard, I hold my breath for a second until it chimes and a green light illuminates on the lock pad. The door automatically swings open.
Carrying the tray inside, I glance nervously at the massive door easing shut. A lock clicks into place. Hopefully, exiting will be as simple.
After two steps, I set the tray on a chair.
Several video monitors frame the room, which glows from the illumination of a dozen electronic cabinets with digital displays, flickering LEDs, and small monitors with green crawling characters matching the text from the large video wall, running several minutes behind. One of the video screens shows the room I’m in, with me looking around like a gawking ignorant tourist. Another displays the outside of the reinforced door I just passed through.
The stream of characters flowing upward stops. The final letters and numbers slide from the bottom of the screen, concluding with ‘TERMINUS transmission. End. 2050-05-24.’ followed by blackness.
Now what?
A whirring and clicking explodes from the ceiling as a large monitor slides out and hangs suspended in front of a miniature sofa. Behind that stands a curved wall of tangled cables and illuminated tubes.
Nothing happens for a few seconds, and the only sound is the low hum of computer equipment and cooling fans. The new giant monitor flickers to life. A moving image comes into view. It’s a black-and-white cartoon of Mickey Mouse. A cartoon? Mickey is in the strange laboratory of the mad Doctor XXX, being chased by skeletons. It must be at least a hundred years old! I’ve seen rare, brief clips in online historical archives.
To my left is a wide blue carpet strewn with children’s toys: some plastic bowling pins, a ball, and several stuffed animals. Scanning counter-clockwise, I see a child-sized treadmill, a small chair, and a table littered with coloring books, a sink, cupboards, and a closet.
Empty. Why is this room so heavily fortified? The only technology of real importance seems to be the tower of cables and tubes that travel down from holes in the ceiling to a mountain of electronic equipment wrapped around a large metallic-framed column, forming a round closet. It resembles an electric tree; the branches of wires and cables grow into the ceiling, and the bark is formed by power cables, thin colored wires, and clear flexible tubes of dripping brown liquid. I notice a row of I-V bottles trimming the top of the circular closet.
Dizziness assaults me. I almost stumble and catch myself as I rest a hand on a nearby chair. I frown and look around. Is it all the blinking lights in the dim room?
What I thought was a curved front wall slides open like a door. From my angle, I can’t see the interior.
Mickey Mouse is strapped to a gurney and about to be severed by a buzz saw when a child’s chuckle erupts from the round closet. A young boy who appears to be twelve years old exits the enclosure with his eyes trained on the cartoon. He doesn’t see me. He rounds the small sofa and sits while chuckling at the monitor.
The brown-skinned boy in pajamas is behaving like a six-year old, except that he’s wearing an electronic helmet with wires and cables growing from it like hair. Tiny lights flow through the fiber optic threads, from the helmet to the ceiling, where they join in a braided bundle attached to a movable pulley system that follows him around the room.
Completely fixated on the cartoon, he doesn’t notice me as I walk to the opening of the closet to examine it. In the center of the round enclosure, which is barely five feet across, sits a small toilet with metal straps on the armrests for holding the child in place. Intravenous needles attached to each armrest lay dripping in a tray. The mechanism appears to be a robotic system that automatically grasps and restrains the boy and inserts the feeding tubes into his arms.
The empty bottles trimming the top of the closet match the two full bottles of brown liquid I carried on the tray.
Moving behind the boy, I study his bare arms. They are red with fresh punctures surrounded by old scabbed wounds. I move around the sofa into his line of sight. When I step closer, he focuses his gaze in my direction. Fear flashes in his eyes for a second, and then he directs his attention at the large screen, ignoring me.
I force a smile and try to figure out what I can say without sounding like an imbecile. I want to ask, “Why do you have all those wires going into your head?” or “Where’s your mommy?” But I also don’t want to scare the boy. I step closer. “Hi, little guy.”
Without taking his eyes off the animation, in the unsteady voice of a toddler with little experience in pronunciation, the young boy says, “Hewwo, Vawentino Harris.”