Five minutes later, I enter the busy tech lab, inhabiting the body of Jenkins, 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. I had slapped the Fang Ring against the back of Jenkin’s hand 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, as I realize he’s talking to 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 the door and escaping by crawling under the stall door.
The chronometer is almost at zero. The string of characters stops scrolling down the monitors, concluding with the phrase ‘TERMINUS transmission. End. 20500524.’ Some technicians stand, arch their backs, twist their bodies left and right, and rub their fingers. 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 toward someone else.
“Here’s the log of today’s transmission, sir,” she says, with no indication as to 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 some type of signature. A tan oval pulses next to the name “Dr. Cal Jenkins.” I press my thumb on the oval and it turns green with a beep.
When I look at the woman, she has her hand extended. I hand her the pad.
“Thank you, sir. Have a good day.” She turns and walks out the door without waiting for a response from me/Jenkins. Others in the lab leisurely exit until the only other person in the room is a young technician with curly blond hair. 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 questioningly. “Is everything OK?”
“Oh. I’m just wondering what you’re going to do now,” I ask cautiously.
“Me? Oh, you know. Before I leave for today I have to feed, you know, the, um, Roy guy.”
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 OK, McNaughton. I’ll do it today.”
The young man’s eyes widen in surprise. “Really?”
Apparently, this is too much out of character for Jenkins, so I try to downplay the novelty of this offer. “Yes. Go enjoy the city celebration. I’ll take it from here.” I smile and extend my hands.
The surprised man hands me the tray. “Thanks! I will.” He’s out of the room in ten seconds.
The items on the tray capture my curiousity. There are two bottles of brown liquid, some gauze, and bandages. I set the tray on a counter, lock the exit, and head toward the fortified gray door. Just before I wave my new key card over the door’s scanner pad I notice the vid-camera aimed at the door.
Of course. Deciding 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 wave of the keycard at the scanner, I hold my breath for a second until it chimes and a green light illuminates on the lockpad. 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.
I round a corner of the dim room and 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 characters that had stopped on the large video wall as if this monitor was several minutes behind. One of the video screens shows the room I’m in, with me looking around like an uninformed tourist. Another displays the outside of the reinforced door I just passed through.
The stream of characters flowing down the screen stops. The final letters and numbers slide from the top of the screen, concluding with ‘TERMINUS transmission. End. 20500524.’ followed by blackness.
Now what?
A whirring and clicking sound explodes from the ceiling as a large monitor slides out and hangs suspended in front of a miniature sofa. Behind the sofa stands a curved wall of tangled cables and illuminated tubes.
Nothing happens for a few seconds. 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 short clips in online historical archives.
I scan the room. To my left is a wide blue carpet strewn with children’s toys: some plastic bowling pins, a ball, and several stuffed animals. Looking counter-clockwise around the room, I see a child-size treadmill, a small chair, and a table littered with coloring books, a sink, cupboards, and a closet.
Empty. I see no reason why this room should be so heavily fortified. The only equipment 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. The cables and tubes wrap around a large metallic-framed column, forming a round closet. It looks like an electronic tree, the branches of wires and cables grow into the ceiling, and the bark is formed by cables, wires, and tubes of dripping brown liquid. Then I notice a row of I-V bottles that trim the top of the circular closet.
Dizziness assaults me. I almost stumble and then catch myself as I rest a hand on a nearby chair. I frown and scan the room again. 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 walks out of the closet 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 child wearing pajamas is behaving normally in what would be an ordinary experience, except that he’s wearing what looks like an electronic football helmet with wires and cables growing out of it like hair. Tiny lights flow through the fiber optic cables, which sprout like branches from the helmet to the ceiling, where they join together in a braided bundle attached to a movable pulley system that follows him across the room. I’m uncertain if the bundle of wires moves to follow him or if he moves where the bundle leads him.
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 small room, which is barely five feet across, sits a small toilet with the lid down. The toilet has armrests with metal straps 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 child and inserts the IV needles.
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, the boy suddenly turns his eyes from the cartoon and looks in my direction. Fear flashes in his eyes for a second and then he directs his attention at the cartoon, ignoring me.
I force a smile onto my face 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 take another step closer. “Hi, little guy.”
Without taking his eyes off the cartoon, in the unsteady voice of a toddler with little experience in pronunciation, the young boy says, “Hewwo, Vawentino Harris.”