|
|
|
It has been twenty three months so far, twenty three months since they created me. I felt like I had no form, just a viscous liquid in a silvery basin. I tried to talk; to make noise like they could, but all I made were bubbles. The white coats looked down at me in disgust. I wasn’t one of them. I was just a thing, the two hundred and twenty first thing to be exact. To them, I had no feelings, no emotion, and no will – or did I?
I had no eyes, but I could sense the room around me. There was a sickening scent of cleaning products, like chlorine and ammonia. There were panes of glass all around, so that other humans could gawk at me. Bright lights shone down, lighting up my form.
The white coats poked and prodded me with sharp, metal instruments. After some time, they gave up. It wasn’t affecting me. I couldn’t feel it. Maybe it was that gas they made me breathe in through my pores. What I could feel was my consciousness slipping away; that is, if I had one in the first place.
They threw me into a room and locked me up. Whatever room they put me in, it wasn’t a room. It was more like a cell. The door looked invisible when it was closed. Tall, bright white walls loomed over me as if they were mocking me and saying, “You can’t escape. You’ll never get out.”
I overheard a few humans talking about me roughly an hour later as they passed by. “That shifter thing is bizarre,” one of them told the other, “why did you guys have to make it again?”
“Because the military told us to,” another voice, almost pessimistic, replied.
“Couldn’t you at least make it look better?”
“That’s stupid. It can change its form if it wants to. Why should we even bother making it look better if it’s going to change in a moment?”
Change my form? What did they mean by that? I listened through the door even more intently now.
“Well, it’s your project. The least you could do is teach it how to be something else,” the first one said again.
“Whatever. I should get back to my other experiments. If this one ends up like the last two hundred and twenty… well, let’s not talk about that.”
On the fourth month, they placed a screen in my cell. They showed me things from the outside world. I felt an urge to be like the things I saw. Bright light radiated from my body as it warped and twisted. I transformed into things I saw on the monitor: a cat, a snowball, a tree... They brought me movies, so that I could see more of the world. I started to change my form again and again, the thrill of being something else encouraging me. So this is what they were talking about, I thought.
After three days of this, the white coats brought in a mirror so that I could see what I looked like. I turned into that, too.
~*-*~*-*~
I started to become restless and stir crazy. I morphed into a spider and loomed over the nearly-invisible doorway, but the white coats came in a different way. I became a cheetah, but they entered from farther away from me while wearing protective suits. Once I even became a monkey, clinging to their legs as they walked out. I wailed and held on tight as they tore me off. It was like I was nothing more than a paper doll to them.
My body ached as I lay there on the floor, gasping for the air my muscles so desperately needed. If only I was faster. If I only I was stronger. If only I was smart enough. Then I remembered. I was smart enough; I just had to become something more intelligent.
By the fifteenth month I started figuring out how to change different parts of my body into things. My hand could be a dog paw. I could have spikes jutting out of my back like a dinosaur. I could even have the wings of an eagle. With this, I could escape.
It was finally the twenty third month. I crawled up the wall, just out of the camera’s sight. I had been monitoring their patterns, and I had figured out each one’s blind spots. Recently I found that I had a great intelligence from all the creatures I turned into. With this brainpower, I made a mental map of the places the cameras could and couldn’t see.
I smashed each camera to bits, so that they couldn’t be re-connected. I did it swiftly because I formed an arm into a hammer. Of course, hummingbird wings helped, too.
The second last camera posed a problem. When I smashed it, the electricity running through it gave me a jolt. I had never experienced this before. The electric current spread through my blood stream, turning every molecule into that viscous liquid I once was. I was paralysed, trapped in an ever-shrinking box. I could smell flesh burning. It was probably me.
Next Chapter
 Kagenagaru · Sat Feb 27, 2010 @ 05:16am · 0 Comments |
|
|
|
|
|
