Undercurrents

by Roberta Trahan

  But Deidre could no longer see the way out. She could not feel her feet beneath her. The driving, pulsing, unbearable pounding in her head was overtaking her senses and drawing her in on herself, consuming her, until all that was left was the pain.

  *

  CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED in flashes of disjointed blurs and muffled voices that shifted and melded with each surge and fade of her sensory perceptions. At first, she resisted wakefulness, slipping back into the total serenity that was oblivion. But each time she surfaced it was more difficult to drift away, and eventually, Deidre found herself fighting against the dark in order to reach the light.

  Her initial instinctive response was to try to draw the attention of one of the medical attendants scurrying in and out of the room, but while Deidre’s mind was fully alert, it had no command over her body. Holy shit, was she paralyzed?

  No, wait, that didn’t make sense. She could feel everything. Literally, everything. Deidre was aware of every minute function taking place in her body, even the feathery fuzz on her cheeks and the individual hair follicles on her arms and legs. She could actually feel the nails emerging from the cuticle of every finger and toe.

  What the hell? Deidre understood that her perceptions were freakishly amped and that something unnatural was happening to her, but she wasn’t afraid. If anything, she was awestruck. Her senses were so highly tuned that she could distinctly identify the metallic tinkle of individual dust particles carried on the air stream as they tumbled through the louvers in the overhead vents. How sick was that? It was like she suddenly had super-powers.

  Except that she could not will her any part of her body to move, not even her eyes, and the futility was panic-spurring. Deidre realized that if she allowed her nervous system to respond, her heart rate and blood pressure would spike and draw the full attention of everyone in the room. But that was no longer what she wanted.

  A parallel line of thought had already evaluated her physical condition, calculated her current limitations, and begun assessing potential risk factors. It was like a new autonomic hierarchy had overridden her inbred instincts. The behavior protocols driving her now were self-preserving but acutely disciplined, and distinctly predatory. Her primary concern was her own safety.

  Deidre was fully aware of them, the medics who poked and prodded and noted their findings, though they were completely unaware of her cognizance. This was an advantage, despite her paralysis. She had determined she was not in imminent danger, but everything and everyone was a potential threat.

  It literally took nothing more than a thought for her to maintain her vital signs in a static pattern and keep her eyes fixed and focused when the attendant examined her responses. Everything about her physiology would indicate to anyone who examined her that the chemical cocktail flushing through her veins was still inducing a comatose state, unless she wanted them to think otherwise. For now, Deidre would observe them as they observed her, until she was ready to act.

  So, who were these people? Deidre did not recognize any of the faces staring into her eyes. She knew where she was. Her memory was intact. At least up to the moment she passed out in the clinic waiting room at Extragen Biolabs.

  She remembered the massive migraine that had completely incapacitated her, by far the worst she’d ever experienced. The reasonable assumption was that she was still at Extragen. Obviously, she was on a gurney in an examination room, attached to monitors by electrodes and intravenous tubing, undergoing treatment for whatever trauma had precipitated the headache. Maybe she’d had a stroke. That could explain the paralysis. But, for the first time in years, Deidre was completely headache free.

  And what could possibly explain how her thought processes had suddenly advanced so far beyond what she had always known to be the limits of her own intellect: On one psychic sublevel, Deidre was horrified by her own mind. Contemplating her psychic sublevels was a totally foreign concept and far outside any frame of reference she possessed. Not to mention fucking bizarre. And yet, on a deeper, far more pervasive plane, she already had acknowledged and reconciled with this altered and obviously evolved version of herself.

  Footsteps, clipped but heavy, approached from an exterior corridor. A thickly reinforced and hermetically sealed door, behind her head and out of her field of view, opened inward and someone stepped into the room. Testosterone, shallow rattling breaths and sweet-smelling perspiration – a middle-aged male with some sort of pulmonary disease and an endocrine disorder. Simultaneously another distinct scent registered, unknown to her and yet not foreign. Deidre was awestruck. How the hell was she doing this?

  “Has the last infusion been administered?” A subtle accent of indiscernible eastern European origin colored the man’s word pronunciation, but the urgency in his tone was unmistakable. “If she wakes before she receives the full load, we could lose her.”

  Deidre had not been able to track time. Was it day, or night? How long had she been here?

  “No, not yet.” Cotton fibers scraping against each other indicated movement as another authoritative person who was already in the room, a taller same-aged male of less exotic origin, turned to face the newcomer. His voice was muffled by the mechanical buzz and whir of the monitors and medical equipment, but almost familiar. “This is a completely new mutation. Frankly, I’m surprised we’ve been able to keep her under this long.”

  The newcomer sighed, frustration tinged with anxiety. “Let me know immediately if anything changes, anything at all.”

  “Dr. Herzog,” asked one of the medics attending to the equipment, a slight tremble underscoring her words. “What do we do if she wakes up?”

  “When she wakes up,” Dr. Herzog’s voice was tinged with hues of awe and pride and terror. “There will be nothing you can do. But if you notice even the most minute variation in her vital signs before the treatment is complete, I suggest you double the vecuronium ratio.”

  Deidre’s mind simultaneously catalogued, combined and calculated every piece of information she acquired, and projected the potential conclusions. The man with the accent was Dr. Herzog, she was undergoing some sort of involuntary transformation, vecuronium was the neuromuscular blocker they were using to restrain her. This was helpful knowledge, but not enough.

  “And then what?” The other authoritative male asked. He was agitated, a little worried.

  “Come now, Edam.” Dr. Herzog was delighted. “This is the breakthrough we’ve been working toward.”

  What? Before Deidre could fully process what she was hearing, a sudden, irresistible itching on her palms distracted her. In the past, the burning tingle signaled the acute onset of unbearable agony. The sensation rapidly flushed along her arms and across her chest. Milliseconds later, the itch erupted on the soles of her feet and spread to her calves. It was harder this time to quell her fight or flight reflex. Deidre braced for pain, desperate to keep from cuing a doubled dosage of vecuronium.

  “You’re right, of course.” Dr. Edam moved closer. “These EKG readings are truly elegant.”

  Dr. Herzog examined the half full bag of IV fluid hanging above head. “Just a few more hours, and the CGRP regimen will be complete. We will bring her out of stasis then, under sedation, and assess the transformation. It’s too soon to be certain she is our patient zero, but the early indications are quite promising.”

  Deidre was struggling to maintain control over her physical reactions. The burning tingle had reached every nerve ending in her body, like an open flame searing her flesh. How could she have been so stupid? She had blindly trusted Dr. Edam, and whatever it was that was happening to her, he had led her to it.

  “It was a brilliant move, using naked DNA as the targeting vector.” Dr. Edam’s admiration for Dr. Herzog was disturbingly evident. “A broad spectrum delivery system carrying a unique, patient-specific protein developed from his or her own genetic matrix that will seek out and activate a single dormant chromosome. Simply brilliant.”

  “Yes, well,” Dr. Herzog said, feigning hu
mility. “We may well have developed a reliable triggering mechanism, but we still have a long road ahead. There are more than 14 million migraine sufferers in this country alone, and as many as half of them emergents struggling to awaken.”

  Deidre’s vision was blurring, fading. Her grip on consciousness was slipping. What the fuck was an emergent?

  “We can’t hope to help them all in our lifetime, Emil,” Dr. Edam said. “But you have initiated the next stage in human evolution. That, my friend, is the achievement of the millennium.”

  A new technician arrived to relieve the other, and began to double-check the equipment and verify readings. Dr. Herzog stepped aside.

  “While we’re waiting, why don’t you come and review my paper. The article is just a rough draft at this point, but I’d like to have your perspective.”

  “And I’d like to take half the credit,” Dr. Edam joked. Both men laughed. “But seriously, I’d be delighted.”

  Deidre activated her adrenal medulla. That she was able to access her own internal functions was only slightly weirder than the fact that she knew how to do it in the first place. The controlled hormone surge was just enough dampen the pain and keep her alert, as Dr. Edam followed Dr. Herzog out into the hall.

  But it was also just enough to register on the monitoring equipment. The resulting blip drew the technician’s attention toward a computer screen at the back of the room. He was distracted just long enough for Deidre to identify the chemical structure of the paralytic agent in intravenous solution being fed through her veins, isolate the vecuronium in her bloodstream, and neutralize its effects.

  She had to get out of there.

  By the time technician turned back toward her, Deidre was sitting on the edge of the gurney, stripping electrodes and intravenous tubes from her body. She wished she could strip her skin from her body as well, anything to stop the burning sensation. A metabolic transformation was taking place and her endocrine system was in hyper-drive. She could actually see her muscular structure morphing beneath her skin, shifting and crawling, redefining itself.

  Holy shit!

  Her vision, she realized, was not really blurred. It was magnified. No, not magnified, it was multi-dimensional. Her eyes were functioning like a high-definition imaging system with 3D optics.

  Deidre realized that the changes that were happening to her body were involuntary mutations that she was powerless to override or revert, but she could select and manipulate and implement them at will. And best of all, she could move.

  “Oh-OH my god,” the technician stuttered. He started toward her and then reversed direction mid-step, backing up against the counter. “Shit!”

  The tech reached behind his back, feeling along the countertop. Deidre could deduce his thoughts, almost like hearing him think in her head. He was looking for a syringe that had been pre-loaded with vecuronium, in case of emergency. It was just beyond his grasp. Not that it mattered.

  “Your heart is about to explode,” Deidre said. She could see it expanding inside his rib cage. Terror was pumping massive amounts of adrenaline and oxygen through an unhealthy organ. “If you don’t calm down, the stress is literally going to kill you.”

  Deidre was on her feet now. Her backpack and street clothes were in the cabinet just to her left. There wasn’t time to dress. She snagged her pack, stuffed her hoodie and shoes inside, and put on a pair of blue scrubs pants from the neatly folded stack on the cabinet shelf.

  The technician stretched in a clumsy backward arc, still trying to retrieve the syringe without taking his eyes off of Deidre. His terror, which was literally palpable to her, was confusing. She was no threat to him, unless he got in her way. All she wanted to do was go home, and unfortunately, that was what he intended to prevent her from doing. It was more important to him to keep her there than it was to preserve his own life. This she could not understand, but before the technician could get his hand on the syringe, his aorta burst.

  He fell to the floor, clawing at his chest and gasping for breath. Blood was already flooding his abdominal cavity and burbling up and out through his throat. The poor man would be dead in seconds. Such a waste. He couldn’t have stopped her, no matter how hard he tried.

  *

  AS SOON AS she reached the hallway, Deidre discovered that her brain wasn’t properly interpreting the sensory stimuli it was receiving. The information overload was skewing her depth perception and throwing her equilibrium off kilter, which made navigating the deserted corridor ahead of her a lot more difficult than it should have been.

  She planted her shoulder against the wall to stabilize herself while she put on her shoes and assessed her escape route. Ahead of her, at the end of about sixty feet of hallway, were a set of double doors that she was reasonably certain led back to the reception room where this whole ordeal had begun. There were obstacles - four office doors that opened to the hallway, two on either side, and two large plate glass windows side by side on the right. The corridor originated about twenty feet behind her in an elevator bay. There was no way to determine how many people were on the floors above or when any of them might emerge, but clearly the path of least resistance was straight ahead, down the hall and through those double doors.

  Deidre would soon be free of this place. The facility personnel would not have time to react and confront her in the next twenty seconds. Even if someone were to see her and attempt to intercede, it was unlikely one or even two strong men could so much as slow her down.

  But to her surprise, the rest of the wing was vacant. Deidre couldn’t exactly see through walls, but she could sense heat signatures and pheromones and other signs of life. The rooms adjacent to the corridor were all empty, except for one.

  Curiosity and a creepy-crawly quiver at the nape of her neck compelled Deidre to glance through the observation windows as she scurried past. She expected to see lab tables and research equipment or some kind of experimental chamber of horrors, but she was not at all prepared to greet her own reflection in the glass.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?” Dr. Edam’s receding hairline and narrow-shouldered torso appeared in the reflection just beside hers, like some kind of macabre apparition that had simply materialized in thin air. He was on the inside of the room looking out, speaking to her through a tiny speaker mounted on the wall. “The transformation is completely indiscernible to the naked eye. If I didn’t know what I was looking at, I wouldn’t be able to see it myself.”

  “What the FUCK are you talking about?” Deidre shrieked. The reinforced window pane rippled with the force of her voice and she noticed Dr. Edam wince. She wanted to break through the glass and crush his head with her bare hands, but she could not tear herself away from the image in the window. Deidre did not recognize the person, the thing in the reflection, and yet, from the outside, she looked exactly the same. “What have you done to me?”

  Dr. Edam opened the door next to the window and stood there, as if he were waiting for her to come in. “Exactly what I promised I would do. I found the cause of your misery and corrected the problem. With Dr. Herzog’s help, of course, but your headaches are gone now, are they not?”

  Deidre was too stunned to speak, too freaked out to move. “I don’t understand.”

  Dr. Edam stepped into the hallway and stood facing the window alongside her. “Neither do we, not fully anyway. But what we do know is that a small but growing fraction of the human race is undergoing a radical evolutionary shift. As far as we know, you are the first to fully emerge.”

  Deidre stared at his face in the reflection. She remembered Dr. Herzog’s reference earlier to emergents struggling to awaken. “What am I?”

  Rather than answer her, Dr. Edam continued to explain. “During a research study years ago, Dr. Herzog discovered a genomic anomaly in a handful of chronic migraine sufferers, just like yourself, that he believed was a key to understanding the cause and developing a cure. Eventually, Emil realized that the migraines were actually a symptomatic response to an internal co
nflict caused by a rapidly progressing mutation. He developed a gene therapy to assist the body’s own systems in resolving the conflict.”

  “What am I,” Deidre demanded. “What am I?!!”

  Dr. Edam paused a moment, regarding her with the smug satisfaction of someone admiring their own accomplishment. “You are a breed apart, Deidre. Quite literally, you are the first of your kind. A true homo novus. Naturally, further study is required, to fully identify and understand your mutations. Eventually, we’ll take our findings public, but in the meantime every precaution has been taken to protect your privacy. And of course, we’ll make your time here as comfortable as possible.”

  “This is insane.” Deidre almost laughed out loud. “You don’t really think you can keep me here. I’m a human being with a life, you asshole.”

  “But that’s the problem now, isn’t it,” he said, so calm and disconnected from the anguish she was experiencing. “You aren’t human. Not anymore.”

  The logic centers in her left hemisphere were working to override the emotional cascade taking place in her limbic system. Deidre could not help but be a little awestruck by her heightened self-awareness, even as she was horrified by what she saw. Skin deep, she was still the Deidre she had always been. Her physical form and basic anatomy were essentially the same. But underneath it all, her cellular matrix had been restructured. Her neural network had expanded. Her DNA had literally rewritten itself. And Dr. Edam was right. She was a freak. A truly incredible freak, but a freak all the same.

  Deidre detected movement in the reflection. Dr. Edam was pulling something out of the right hip pocket of his lab coat. In her momentary state of shock, Deidre had failed to detect the chemical odor of the vecuronium in the syringe he was carrying.