Test Subject Twelve

We learn of the T.S.'s past and a lot about who and what they are. Shade is moments away before he is sent into the unknown past.

Chapter 4 test subject twelve

 

Shade’s head jerked to the side of the plane when they landed. He stayed in his seat unwilling to get up. He heard the plane door open in the room ahead and some murmur about him being late, and forcing them off schedule. He then heard more talk about him for a minute and his attitude towards this situation.

Two large men entered Shade’s cabin with guns at their sides. Their heads seemed to scrape the top of the cabin while they walked towards him. One of them frowned, “Let’s go, get up, you’re making us late.” He forced his hand on Shade’s shoulder and lifted him up. He guided him out of the plane and on to the sandy runway.

Shade couldn’t believe the heat he had entered into. He placed his hand over his eyes covering the blazing sun and looked at the vastness of the Sahara Desert. At the end of the run way was a small building, with several people entering into it.  He then looked passed it, as far as he could see, nothing but sand for miles. Shade then turned his head around, and looked beyond the plane. In the distance he could see the Great Pyramids and a little ways besides it, Cairo.

Shade noticed the plane started to drive towards the end of the runway and turned around. “Where’s the plane going?”

“To Cairo Airport, no sense in it staying here any longer, Mr. Howel and that other guy got business with some company called Sun.. Industries or whatever it’s called. Hey, Hey Dan what’s that place where Sam use to work at?”

The man named Dan perked up from staring at the ground, “Sam? Yeah, he worked at that Black Sun Industries place for a while, what about it?”

“Nothing, the kids just asking questions,” he murmured.

Dan turned to Shade, “No use in asking questions anymore, you know what happened to the last people these scientist tested on?”

Before Shade could answer, a man had come in between them. He said something in German to Dan, which Shade couldn’t make out, but he assumed he was telling Dan to be quiet. The man was tall, had dark black hair and was wearing a lab coat. He turned to Shade and spoke some more German. He grimaced when he saw that Shade couldn’t understand what he was saying. He took out a small rectangular object, which resembled a pocket tazer. The object had several different buttons on it, and a flashing yellow light at the bottom. The man flipped a switch on the object which made a slight buzzing sound. The light on the bottom then turned red then blue, and then Shade was hit in the head with the object.

“OW, why do people keep hitting me in the head?!” Shade yelled.

“My apologies, my name is Dr. Tomas Smith.” He stated in a perfect accent, “But I have just given you a great gift, you can speak and understand any language, and you won’t even realize it. It’s like you’re not speaking a separate language at all.”

“No way,” Shade said uncertain.

“Yes way, but that’s not why you’re here today. I'm sure you’ve been told who we are and what we are about.”

Shade laughed a little, “I’ve heard so pretty crazy things. You people aren’t actually serious with this whole time travel stuff, right?”

Dr. Smith took a step closer towards Shade, “Let me tell you this now Shade Redmond, We are absolutely serious on what we do, Time Travel is possible, we know because it has been done before. And who ever can have mastery over time…well, they pretty much have mastery over humanity don’t they.”

            Shade was led to the small structure at the end of the runway. Dr. Smith along with some other men in lab coats opened the metal door and guided him down a long passage of stairs going deep below the sand.

            “How does that language box thing work,” Shade asked as he pointed towards the doctor’s pocket as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

            “It was a gift, but it doesn’t matter, simple technology really. All that matters today is that we succeed in sending you back.” They then all entered a large circular shaped room.

            The room was very bright, large LED lights covered the ceiling. In the center of the ceiling was a sky light, but sand covered the window blocking any sun from the outside. The room was very tall with a balcony looking into the room. Several men wearing suits stood on the balcony looking down into the room waiting to witness the event.

The floor had three levels leading down. The upper two levels are where massive computers and screens were set up and being operated on by scientist. While the bottom layer was where the fabled time machine stood, it was presented in the center of the room waiting for its next victim. 

            No one stood by the machine or even on the bottom level, they were not permitted to. The time machine was like no other. Four bulky computers surrounding a circular metal pad set out on the floor. Thousands of wires of different sizes led from the large computer towers to the smaller computers and monitors on the second and third level. The circular metal pad had several tubes filled with gases and liquids leading into chambers underneath the floor. On top of the metal pad was a glass bed meant for its subject to rest upon. The glass bed had multiple circuit boards on the inside and the circuit boards connected to purple wires leading into the computer towers and to the only control panel on the bottom level. This panel was different from the others like on the second and third level. The others had key boards and other small flashing buttons and lights. This lone panel had seven levers lined in a row on top of it. The very large intimidating levers led Shade to guess that those levers were literal keys to sending him back in time.

            “This is pretty impressive, how long have you had this place up and running.” Shade questioned.

            Dr. Smith smiled, “Not very long at all, we just bought this place several months ago, originally it was a Nazi lab set up during world war two, and the Egyptian government sold it to us after they discovered it two years ago.”

            “I heard there were others like me, If you just got this place how have you tested your machine on them, and… what happened to them.” Shade shifted nervously.

            “This isn’t our first lab. We’ve had several over the past few years. You’d be surprised how much a government would pay you for research like this. The only problem is when you fail they stop funding you and they kick you out of their country.”

            “And your experiments?” pushed Shade.

            Dr. Smith hesitated, reluctant to share his past results, “Let’s get you set up first and then I’ll explain everything.”

Dr. Smith motioned his hand to three female doctors, while he walked up the flight of stairs leading to the balcony. The three doctors walked up him and one of them introduced herself, while the other two stood shyly behind her. “I’m Mrs. Martha Cunningham, Nice to finally meet another fellow American, haven’t had one sense subject three, nice to meet you Shade Redmond. That’s what you prefer right ‘Shade’ not Sherman.” She asked in an eager southern accent.

“Yeah, Shade is good, not to fond of Sherman really. So this time travel thing, you believe in it too?”

“I sure do, seen it work nine times. Eh, just not the way we all expected, but twelfth times the charm right? Listen here, you fret none about what these other docs tell you, every things gunna work out, you just wait and see.” Martha with the other two scientist led Shade to a side room, where more doctors were waiting. “Now we’re gunna give you a checkup, make sure you’re physically fit and ready to be sent back in time.”

Martha then asked Shade to take off his shirt, while another doctor grabbed a stethoscope and listened to his heartbeat. “His heart beat is normal Martha, but he’s still a little nervous, his heart is beating fast.”

Shade shook awkwardly, “Yeah I'm nervous, I’ve been kidnapped and about to be experimented on.” 

Martha frowned, “You make it sound like we have it out for you, once we’ve completed our task and they send you back, we’ll send you home.”

“Well when you put it that way, and you’re sure the machine works?” Shade asked.  The room went silent and there was an extremely uneasy pause “Does it?”

“Course it works,” Martha then whispered to him, “But you better hope to God that it works correctly.”

When the Doctors had finished their examination on Shade, they handed him over to the scientist who led him to the center of the room. They laid him up on the glass bed and tied him down.

“Wait here, well not like you can go anywhere else. Dr. Smith will be with you shortly.” One of the scientist explained to Shade.

Shade struggled trying to loosen the straps that held him to the glass bed, the glass was cold and they hadn’t given him his shirt back. While he was fiercely struggling, he realized the entire room’s focus was on him. “Stop staring at me,” he yelled, “You’d all be doing the same thing if you were in my shoes.”

“Indeed they would,” Dr. Smith announced as he entered the room and walked next to Shade. “In fact every single subject before you, all eleven of them had experienced fear before going into the process.”   

“No shocker there,” Shade whispered to himself.

Dr. Smith got close to the metal bed and announced to the crowd, “I'm gunna brief Shade on our procedures, we will begin momentarily.”

Shade watched as the room’s focus went into quiet conversation with each other. He noticed Dr. Smith came closer to him and he was about to speak, but not before Shade could ask, “What happened to the people you tested this on?”

“So you wanna begin there?” The doctor asked.     

“Yes I really would, I think my life depends on it.”

“If you want me to explain, I’ll have to start from the beginning. Two brilliant men created the first functioning time machine, but at great costs. They had to try their machine early, and they had no one to test it on, so one of the two volunteered and was sent back in time before the second was arrested and sentenced to life in prison afterward.”

“Who are these people?” Shade uttered.

“No one really knows, they won’t release that information, my only source was an officer who was there when they made the arrest. Everything was taken and scraped the next day and they swore secrecy. What I do know is that it worked. No one knew where the man ended up, weather future or past, but it was certain he had traveled.”

“So, you heard about it, and are attempting it yourself?”

“Not just me, everyone here. Like I told you earlier time travel can be used for the good of humanity, once we master going into the past, we’ll guide the human race from the very beginning, all in the right direction.”

“Haven’t you seen those movies and shows with all the consequences and paradoxes and such? What will you do if you go too far with changing events?”

            “Yes this is a very common concern among our sponsors, but rest assured, we have everything planned out. No need to worry. Anyways, back to my story. We worked tireless hours trying to figure out how the two men did it, then there was a breakthrough, we found a way to isolate and reverse particle motion in a single area. Now add that with some quantum physics and a generator that produces microscopic black hole, you got a way to send yourself back in time.”  

            “That sounds absolute insane.” Shade said plainly.

            “Indeed it does, but it’s true. You may have noticed but we haven’t discussed going into the future, this is because with the technology we have now it is virtually impossible, massive amounts of energy would be required to even send a cubic micrometer into the future.”

            “So on with your experiments?” suggested Shade.

“We started out with animals, but we ran into problems, glitches if you will. We were able to send them back in time no problem… but they weren’t exactly the same.”

“What does that mean?” asked Shade impatiently.

“We sent a two inch caterpillar back in time, only when it arrived two weeks prior it was ten feet long! Can you believe it, Ten feet? We tested multiple animals all with different results, including arachnids, rodents, and a giant albino squid. And that was just the beginning! So we changed some things, added a few zero’s, and the sized problem fixed itself with smaller beings… but still on larger subjects… not so much.  Our machine tried to fix the size problem with larger animals, but the machine malfunctioned and just spit them out in to random places in time, like that squid I just mentioned.”

“Wow you people seem to take a lot of precautions when doing these experiments.”  Shade joked.

“… after realizing that wasn’t working, we put in some new codes in hoping to fix the size problem, and it did, only now things we sent back in time multiplied itself by seven thousand. There were a lot of copies of the same fly we needed to kill in our lab in Mali, but luckily something in the machine cause the flies to disappear shortly after they arrived. So again we came up with more codes and plugged them in, it almost worked on a scorpion, but again the machine malfunctioned and spit seven thousand copies of that scorpion somewhere else in time.”

            “How’d you fix these problems, you must have changed something at some point to get it working properly.”

“We did, we stopped wasting our time with animals and went straight to humans, we weren’t successful the first two times, and both subjects…expired. After that we seriously needed to find a solution, which we mostly solved by correcting some simple mathematical errors. And boom! Subject three was our first success, only not where we wanted.”

“He didn’t arrive where you planned him to?”

“No that problem became much more difficult after we plugged in our new inputs, and it’s been a problem ever since and we can’t seem to figure out why our subjects can’t reach our set destinations. A few other errors have carried over from our original experiments too, such as immortality.”

“What do you mean immortality? You telling me those people and animals are invincible?”

“Kind of, what we’ve gathered is that the ageing process does not take place to subjects that were sent back. What we found next, surprised every scientist in this room, in fact you probably won’t believe it.”  

“Well I’ve come this far, try me.” Shade answered.

“We did some ‘controversial’ testing on a rat. But what we found was beyond our belief. We went in for a live dissection but it didn’t work! Every time we drove the knife into the rat, the cut wound would heal almost instantly.”

“How?” Shade gasped in disbelief.

“We still don’t even know. Some of us think it has to do with coding. Others think a subject never travels back in time at all, only a ‘hologram’ if you will. But seriously none of us really know. We continued different tests on different rats, we used poison, deadly gas, diseases, we crushed them, spliced them in half, and nothing. They could not die, no matter what we did. We even separated the bottom half and the top half of a rat, but once we put the halves back together the skin fused and the rat was perfectly fine.”

“That’s insane, and they feel no pain at all?”

“That’s one of the only major issue we could really find. Some rats retained consciousness while suffering severe pain, while other just blacked out.”

“So what you’re telling me is that if you send me back in time, I’ll be immortal forever?” Shade started to laugh.

“Now we’ve reached the second major issue… after the rats reached the point where they were sent back in time in the first place, they die instantly, turned to dust. But we think now with our latest updates the immortality problem and instant death issue could be fixed, but since the past nine subjects haven’t arrived where we want them to, it’s impossible to tell.”

“So all of the past nine subjects could have been sent back hundreds of years and they would have to live through it all?” Shade asked fearing this new information.

“Sadly yes, and we owe those people our respects. If the updates did not fix these issues, they have already reached the point where they were sent back, and they would now be dead.”       

Shade remained silent, not wanting to hear any more. He glanced away from Dr. Smith, and the doctor understood that he had said enough about his experience with time travel. “Well, no point in waiting any longer let’s begin.”  

Seven doctors none of which he recognized added wires and other rubber pipes into his body. Scientist shined bright lights in his eyes and felt his pulse. They continued to run test on him for what seemed like hours. Eventually after everyone in the room seemed to be in position, Dr. Smith approached the lone control panel on the bottom level and spoke out to the rest of the room.

“I just want to thank you all for coming here today to witness history. You all made this possible and I would like to thank you on the behalf of all these Doctors and Scientist you see here. I would also like to thank Shade Redmond for giving us this opportunity to use his being to test the art of time travel, not like he had much of a choice anyway.”

The people at the balcony went into laughter. Shade tightened his fist, again he felt defenseless and exposed. He then realized the scientist weren’t laughing, Shade then thought that the doctors knew of their past failures while the people in balcony had no idea what could entail for Shade in the upcoming minutes.

“And so,” Dr. Smith continued, “Without further ado. I will pull the first lever and the subject will begin the process of being sent back in time. Wire one is now flowing!”

Shade’s whole body started tingling, his arm hair stood on end and goose bumps drove through his body. 

“Alright wire two is a go!” Dr. Smith shouted again.

The tingling in his body turned in to sharp pains that felt like thousands of needles were being shot through his entire body. Shade cringed uncontrollably.

“Ok, now wire three up slowly. We don’t want to melt the kid’s brain.” Dr. Smith trying to crack another joke for the audience to draw attention away from the pain Shade was experiencing.    

            Suddenly, Shade had a severe migraine. He felt light headed, and at the same time like someone was squeezing his skull.

“Now wire four!” the doctor pulled down on the fourth lever with extreme speed.  

Shade’s heart was pounding slower and slower. He could hear his heartbeat, and it continued to beat slower and slower, so much it began to almost feel like it was pounding backwards.

“Great! Now Wire Five!” he shouted, but as he pulled down of the fifth lever red lights started flashing throughout the room and sirens went off.

“Oh not again!” some of the scientist screamed as they started to rush around the room trying to get a hold of what ever had gone wrong.

Shade started to panic, “What’s wrong, am I gunna die!”

Doctor Smith’s eyes filled with rage, “For God’s sake, which one of you pinheads didn’t plug in the dark matter stabilizer?!”

No one answered and no one was going to, the sirens blared throughout the room, and the flashing red lights seemed to become more intense as the seconds flew by. The heat from the machine became unbearable and most of the people in the room evacuated. But a person ran to Shade’s side, a younger looking women about his age that he hadn’t seen in the room up until now. She smiled a sad smile, and didn’t say a word. Shade looked at her intensely, his eyes half shut and couldn’t make out her face.  The heat in the room started burning his eyes.

“Please, if you can, get me out of here!” Shade shouted horrified.

“I can’t.” she said softly among the loud blaring sirens and the intense heat, “You’re apart of the machine now, if I unhook you, you’ll get lost in the time stream, or even worse, die.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Shade screamed while he felt intense pain on every inch of his body.” 

“Yes, I'm activating wires six and seven and sending you to the beginning of it all, good bye Shade, and good luck!” She said as she watched as a bright light surrounded Shade, smoke appeared from the machine, and she and everyone else who was still in the room watched as Shade disappeared in time. The sirens stopped, the lights stopped flashing, and all that was left was a quiet buzzing coming from the time machine.    

Author's Note

Feel free to leave a comment, I want to know what my readers think of the story thus far.