Chapter 6

Roger pays a friendly visit to a research facility.

The scientist hurried through the hallways, gripping his clipboard tightly. He was short, balding, and wearing a labcoat that was a few sizes too big, with safety goggles perched on his nose. The monogram stitched onto his breast pocket read ‘Dr. Leopold Mercer’, and he gave the impression of a man who is perpetually overworked.

“Out of the way, out of the way,” he said as he pushed past a gaggle of other people with lab coats. The all had concerned looks on their faces as they discussed important scientific matters.

“What’s the rush, Mercer?” one of them asked.

“Mr. Pink is here,” said Mercer.

“Already? But he wasn’t supposed to get here until three.”

“Well he’s here, and no one has greeted him!” snapped Mercer. “Apparently he’s been waiting for half an hour already!” With that, he hurried on down the hallway.

No one could quite put their finger on it, but there was something about Mr. Pink that just wasn’t right. It upset the staff terribly, and Mercer, as head of Mr. Pink’s project, had drawn the metaphorical short straw to give him a tour through the facility while discussing results. As far as Mercer was concerned, that straw was so short as to be practically nonexistent, and he had had to take fifteen minutes to fight the urge to have a nervous breakdown in the bathroom after he had been notified of yet another of Mr. Pink’s impending visits.

Unfortunately for Mercer, Mr. Pink was paying Eagle Scientific LLC, the organization that Mercer worked for, a tremendous amount of money. This meant to the CEO that no amount of weird vibes or nervous breakdowns would stop them from continuing to be in his employ for as long as possible. This was also tremendously good news for Mercer’s psychiatrist.

Mercer threw open the door that lead to the walkway over the main development floor, and there, with his white hair and immaculate dress sense, stood Roger Pink. This time he wore a blue suit with broad gray stripes, a white shirt, and a bright orange tie with a silver tie clip.

“Hey! Uh,” Roger squinted to read the monogram on Mercer’s coat, even though they had met on several occasions. “Mercer! How’s it going? I hope you don’t mind if I eat in here. I had to skip breakfast today.” In his left hand he held a carryout box with a stack of syrup covered pancakes in it, which he held up as he talked. There was a fork in his right hand. “Most important meal of the day, you know.”

“Uh, of course not, that’s totally fine,” Mercer said. It was strictly against policy to have any kind of food in the lab areas, but there was absolutely no way Mercer was going to tell him that.

“I’m here just on a little informal visit to see how my product is doing,” said Roger. “So show me whatcha got.”

The walkway overlooked a large space that was connected to a number of doors which lead to the separate facilities and laboratories in the building. The floor space in the room was filled with countertops on which stood laptops, chemical reagents, bubbling beakers filled with interesting looking liquids, random assorted machinery, and sealed containers, a large portion of which were marked with ‘caution’, ‘danger’, and skulls with crossbones.

“Well sir,” Mercer said. “There’s still enormous potential for each and every one of the experimental products, and we’re discovering a wider variation every day. That being said, however, we have experienced a few, um, setbacks.”

“Setbacks,” echoed Roger, his mouth full.

“Yes sir,” said Mercer.

“What kind of setbacks are we talking here?”

Mercer swallowed involuntarily. “Not terribly good ones, I’m afraid. It seems that in the test subjects that we have had so far, the product has had...erm...difficulty taking.”

“Difficulty taking, huh?” said Roger.

Mercer dearly wished he would stop repeating the last thing he had heard. There was no menace in his voice, but Mr. Pink could recite a children’s poem and make it carry a threat of implied violence.

“That’s weird, because everyone that I used it on did just fine,” Roger continued.

“Well be that as it may,” Mercer replied, clutching his clipboard. “We have noticed that each one of our tests had ended with...uh...catastrophic results.”

“That sounds pretty neato,” said Roger. “But not really what I was looking for when I hired you guys.”

“Allow me to show you around to the different test rooms,” said Mercer, who wished he had stayed in bed this morning. “And we’ll discuss the experiments in question.”

Roger smiled slightly and said nothing, taking another bite of pancakes with the look of perpetual good natured innocence that he always wore. Looking at it was a bit like pulling yourself out of a beautiful tropical lagoon to find that a shark is attached to your foot.

“Um. Follow me,” said Mercer.

I don’t deserve this, Mercer thought to himself. Okay, so I fudge my taxes a bit and I could give to charity, um, ever, and I laughed at that old lady whom I saw trip at the crosswalk last Saturday, but I’m not a bad person, not really.

Silently, Mercer lead Roger through the hallways until they reached the section of the facility that housed the testing rooms. These were hundred square foot concrete pits with a viewing window made of glass that was bulletproof, shatterproof, fireproof, and damn near everything else-proof as well. The pits had been constructed specifically for the purpose of field testing the products that Eagle Scientific were hired to make. Mercer liked to think of it as being a mercenary, but without all that business with shooting people and getting oneself dirty. It was a job that Mercer had very much enjoyed until three months ago, when he had been put in charge of Roger’s project. Mercer didn’t know what Roger planned to do with the product, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.

Mercer pawed at the papers on his clipboard while he looked down into the pit that was testing room number one.

“This one was, uh,” he said. “For the product that was meant to impart the ability in the subject to raise the basal level of their homeostatic capabilities at will, pertaining to internal and external temperature, specifically, both personal and atmospheric in the case of the latter.”

He and Roger looked inside the chamber. It was bare except for a wire frame bed with a thin mattress, on which lay someone who was wrapped in bandages from head to toe. The walls were covered in what looked like burn marks, reaching twenty feet in height in some places.

“Subject volunteered for testing, stating that it was ‘gonna be wicked awesome’. He was given the pill and left alone for the allotted time, in this case forty five minutes, after which he was instructed to hit a target on the far wall. Subject managed to hit the target.”

“That’s good,” said Roger.

“Subject also managed to hit everything else in the room,” continued Mercer. “Including himself and the researcher who was in the chamber with him. Subject suffered burns ranging from first to fourth degree and is currently under heavy sedation.”

“I see,” said Roger.

Mercer moved to the adjacent testing chamber and Roger followed. Mercer turned the page on his clipboard.

“Test subject number two,” he said. “Pill designed to give the subject hydrokinesis pertaining specifically to H2O. Subject was selected from a pool, heh, of potential candidates as he was deemed to have the most chance of successful modification. You will notice that the test chamber is empty because seventeen minutes after ingestion of the product, the subject promptly melted into a puddle and was mopped up by the janitor.”

“Sanitation technician,” said Roger.

“Excuse me?” asked Mercer.

“Nothing,” said Roger. “Please continue.”

“Subject number three,” said Mercer, wiping his brow with a handkerchief and moving to the next viewing window. “Serum inside pill was engineered to allow the subject to open ionization pathways, both atmospheric and physiological, in order to command electron flow on a large scale.” Inside the chamber sat a man wearing blue scrubs. Every strand of hair that was visible on his body was standing straight outward. The lights inside the chamber flickered on and off constantly, and he was reading a book. Mercer continued to talk. “Subject is unchanged physiologically except he now causes electrical problems in anything within a twenty foot radius and he can no longer wear wool.”

Roger chewed his pancakes thoughtfully.

“Test subject number four,” Mercer started to flip through the pages in his clipboard. “showed exponential, catastrophic increase in muscle density and can no longer move, subject five immediately ran into a wall and fractured her spine in three places, subject six started screaming uncontrollably that ‘the rocks were yelling at her’ and had to be sedated...the list goes on and on, Mr. Pink. Nothing that we have engineered has worked as we had intended.”

“What about that guy?” Roger asked. He pointed at the room behind Mercer, in which a man in a jumpsuit sat and stared quietly at nothing in particular.

“Subject thirteen?” said Mercer. “He appears to be doing well, but there is no change in him. It’s like he never took the pill at all. We’re monitoring him for any signs of superhuman ability, but personally I don’t have much hope for any change in his status.”

Roger stepped forward, close to the glass.

“Uh, we generally discourage unauthorized interaction with-” Mercer started to say. Ignoring him, Roger knocked on the glass. Subject thirteen looked up, and Roger  waved at him.

“Hey buddy,” he said loudly. “Do you feel any different?”

Surprised, subject thirteen waved back. “No,” he yelled. “I don’t think it wor-”

Without warning, his eyes bulged and his words became shrill screaming. His hands clawed at the arms of the chair and his body flopped and jittered like a fish out of water. He jumped up out of his chair and began to run around the room, waving his hands and slapping the air as if something was flapping around his head.

“Help! Help!” came his muffled shrieks.

Gradually, shapes began to materialize around him. They started with grotesque, nightmarish outlines coming into existence, then filling in with vomit-inducing colors and horrifying detail. There was the distinct impression of gleaming fangs, curved talons, and other gruesome features. Mercer wasn’t quite sure what to make of them, but his mind rejected the images and he had trouble recalling exactly what they looked like. Later, in therapy, he would suffer a seizure and have to be taken to the hospital.

The apparitions continued to flap their ghastly appendages around subject thirteen as he rocketed around the chamber, flailing his arms. Suddenly, they converged on him in a writhing, crawling mass, which pulsated and undulated in a disgusting fashion, and then exploded into black flakes that floated slowly to the ground and dissipated. There was no sign of subject thirteen.

The sound of chewing broke Mercer out of his horrified reverie.

“Neat,” said Roger with his mouth full. “What did he get?”

“Muh...muh…” Mercer said. “M-manifestation of psychological constructs into t-tangible form...”

“Huh,” said Roger.

For a long time he said nothing, only eating his pancakes and looking over into the now unoccupied test chamber. “So you’re telling me,” he said finally, turning back to Mercer. “That some s**t that I made with smuggled reagents in a prison cell toilet worked perfectly, yet you guys are unable to replicate my results even though I told you exactly how to do it and am paying you a substantial amount of money?”

Mercer started to sweat noticeably. “It’s not exactly like that, Mr. Pink,” he said.

“Call me Roger,” said Roger.

No thank you, thought Mercer. “I assure you that we are working around the clock to rectify any errors that have been made. As the project’s supervisor, I myself haven’t even slept in two days.” Mercer’s eye started to twitch.

“Well, it’s only cutting edge postdevelopmental genetic engineering in combination with quantum theory and perversion of the laws of nature,” said Roger. “It’s not like it’s rocket science or anything.”

“Mr. Pink, we at Eagle Scientific take extreme pride in our ability to produce exactly up to the client’s standard, and in many cases well above and beyond it,” Mercer said, resorting to his sales training as a defense mechanism. “We will obtain the results that you are looking for, and we will be able to mass produce it effectively. We only require a little more time than we had originally thought.”

Roger chewed for a while, staring thoughtfully. There was the air of gentle menace that Mercer experienced every time he was in Roger’s presence. Roger swallowed and then a slow smile spread across his face, showing his perfect, porcelain white teeth. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? No need to go through all that ‘excuses, excuses’ crap. Consider your timeline extended.”

Mercer let out a sigh. “Thank you, Mr. Pink,” he said. “You won’t be dis-”

“And I’m going to up your budget as well,” Roger kept talking. “Nothing greases the wheels quite like a little green, eh?” He laughed and nudged Mercer playfully.

“Why, thank you, Mr, Pink,” said Mercer, mopping his brow again. “That’s quite generous of you.”

“Isn’t it?” said Mr. Pink. “Just make sure you get it right this time. I do have an eventual deadline, and I’d hate to see you end up in one of those test chambers, you know?” He laughed again, taking a bite of pancakes. “Ahaha, I’m just kidding with you, Merkel. Damn, these pancakes are good.” He slapped Mercer on the back and started to walk away. “I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other in the coming weeks, Mendel. Catch you later!”

Just like that, he was gone. A drop of sweat ran down Mercer’s forehead and hung, quivering, on the tip of his nose. For a long time he didn’t move, just swayed gently back and forth. Eventually, with a little sigh, he folded up and collapsed onto the floor.

Author's Note

It's hard to find good help these days.