The Experiment (Book 3): Infectious Thinking

by Micah B. Edwards

  A metaphorical lightning bolt of realization hits me. My phone glitching out when Regina arrived, the stressed hum of the refrigerator, her lightning affinity – it's all tied to the massive boost I gave to her magnetism. She'd be completely unable to approach anything that's affected by strong magnets. I'd sort of assumed that that would wear off in time, but clearly it has not.

  "I can fix that!" I exclaim. Regina's eyes flash with hope, and I hurry to qualify my statement. "The phone. And the going outside. I can't give you your powers back. But I can demagnetize you."

  "You can? Oh God, thank you!" Regina whispers, and I can't tell if that's directed at me or meant as a legitimate prayer. She clutches her water glass with both hands as if it's keeping her from falling over.

  "It's gonna take a while," I say. "I lost my powers when you lost yours. I've only got a smidgen left. It took me almost a week just to demagnetize some pots. But I can do it."

  Regina's crying again, but this time it appears to be from happiness. "Thank you, Dan! Thank you. You don't know what it's been like. I haven't been able to use a phone or computer in months. I couldn't get another job; no one had any way to contact me. I knew I was going to get kicked out of my apartment so I left while I still had money for food and I've been living in my car and even that stalls out half the time!"

  I have no idea what to do at this point. Is this the sort of situation where I'm supposed to comfort her again? Or is this all just relief, and she needs to get it out? I'm physically exhausted from my day at work, mentally exhausted from this entire thing and I just don't know how to react.

  "So, um," I say. "I've got a couch you can crash on if you need someplace to stay for a little bit."

  "No, I can't," says Regina, still crying.

  "Okay, but seriously, it's better than your car. Stay here, and tomorrow I'll get started on demagnetizing you. Just try not to fry out anything expensive until then."

  Regina lets out a half-hiccough, half-sob. Was that a laugh through tears? Did my stupid joke just make things worse? I am in way over my head on this one. I stand around awkwardly for a minute, but she doesn't say anything else.

  "Hey, so, I've got to get up early for the construction job I'm on. So I'm going to bed. You staying?"

  She nods, and I beat a hasty retreat out of the kitchen. This is not how I expected my day to end.

  - Chapter Two -

  Construction jobs start early in the day. When my alarm goes off, it's still fully dark outside. I grunt and turn it off resentfully, then slowly drag myself out of bed to face the morning.

  It generally takes me a while to fully wake up. I tend to wander into the kitchen to get coffee going before I get dressed, so that the smell can slowly coax my brain out of hiding and I have time to make sure that I've actually done things like put my shirt on right-side out before I leave the house. This is usually a fine plan, but today my routine is brought to a screeching halt when I enter the kitchen to find Regina sitting at the table, hands wrapped around a mug. She's wearing the same clothes from the night before, and aside from being in a different chair, is pretty much in the same position as I left her last night.

  "Hi," she says timidly. "I couldn't sleep. I made coffee."

  I stare at her for several seconds while my brain grinds its gears. Ordinarily at this point, I would make coffee, but clearly that has already been done. So, what next?

  "Sorry, I should put pants on," I say eventually.

  "It's your house! You can walk around in boxers if you want to."

  "Yeah, but – I'm gonna put pants on. Back in a minute."

  I shuffle back to the bedroom in search of clothes. When I re-emerge, there's a second cup of coffee sitting next to Regina in the kitchen. She gestures at it.

  "Maybe I don't drink coffee," I say, just to be contrary.

  "Well, on your first try at the morning, you didn't remember pants, so I figured it was a safe bet," she says, trying a smile. I grin and take the mug.

  A bowl of cereal later, I check my phone and stand up. "Make yourself comfortable today. TV's downstairs, food's in here – and that's pretty much it for what you need to know around the house. I've gotta get to the bus stop."

  "The bus stop? Don't you have a car?"

  "No, it – it's a long story. But I don't have one right now, is the short version."

  "I can give you a lift to work."

  "Yeah, you don't mind?"

  She shrugs. "I don't really have a busy day planned out."

  Her car is an older model, but well maintained. It's a bit dirty, but free of scrapes, rust or major dings. Inside, the back seat is absolutely packed with stuff – clothes, suitcases and assorted boxes are crammed in, pressing hungrily against the front seats as if eager to invade.

  "Sorry about the mess," Regina says. "Like I said, I've been living out of my car for a little bit. I didn't really have anywhere else for all of my stuff."

  "No, it's fine," I say, moving aside a box in the footwell. "I appreciate the ride."

  The car starts up smoothly, but half of the warning lights on the dash stay lit. I look at Regina quizzically, and she shrugs again.

  "I have no idea if the car's actually malfunctioning, or if it's just the warning lights," she says. "It runs all right."

  "This is way better than waiting for the bus," I say, which is true.

  At the construction site, I clamber out of the car.

  "What time do you get off of work?" Regina asks me.

  "I can take the bus home; don't worry about it."

  Regina gives me a dirty look. "What time do you get off of work?"

  "Four o'clock."

  "Okay, I'll see you then."

  She drives off as Christopher approaches. We walk off to punch in together.

  "What, you don't kiss her goodbye?" he asks me jokingly.

  "She's a friend staying with me, man. She was just doing me a favor."

  "Yeah, and she's not going to be more than a friend if you don't start giving her a kiss goodbye."

  "Dude, no. It's complicated."

  "Kissing's not that complicated."

  "Don't you have heavy things to lift or something?"

  - - -

  Things I never thought I'd say: I really enjoy grunt-level construction work. It's almost completely mindless, but because I've got to stay alert to avoid getting injured, it never gets boring. And there's a real, tangible satisfaction to it. I get to see results of my efforts: the ground flattened, holes dug, concrete poured, materials set up. As a security guard, all I ever saw were the same empty halls in an endless loop. It feels good to effect change on the world around me. And we haven't even gotten to putting the new building up yet. I'm really looking forward to that.

  At lunchtime, I text Brian: "Do you like surprises?"

  He writes back almost immediately. "No."

  "Sucks to be you, then. Come over tonight. Bring a couple of pizzas."

  "A couple? Is your new superpower eating?"

  "No powers yet. Just come hang out."

  "Na na na na na na na na, Fatman!"

  "What's that make you then, Red Robin?"

  "Boy Wonderbread."

  I laugh into my sandwich, which is about as dignified as it sounds.

  - - -

  Regina shows up to get me shortly after I clock out. She's wearing different clothes now, and seems to have taken advantage of the shower at the house. She looks a lot more relaxed and put together than the night before, or even this morning.

  Christopher is walking back to his car, too, and waggles his eyebrows at me. I ignore him as I squeeze into Regina's car. Different warning lights are on this time, but it stills seems to be running fine.

  "I'm sorry, I'm sure I smell," I say, but Regina waves the comment away. I continue, "Hey, so do you remember my friend Brian?"

  She looks blank. "Not really?"

  "He was with me the night we, um, met you outside your store. You –" tried to kill him with a lightning bolt "– might n
ot remember him. Anyway, he's coming over tonight."

  "What for?"

  "Because I like him? He's a good dude. I don't know, I thought maybe it would make things less weird."

  She casts a sidelong glance at me. "Dan, are you messing with me?" Her tone is steady, but there's something in it that hints of a quaver.

  "What? No. How?"

  "You said you could fix me, make me normal again. Now you're inviting people over. Is this just a delaying tactic?"

  "No! No, I can start on that as soon as we get home. Shoot, I can do it while Brian's there, he doesn't care. Seriously, he's just a good guy to have around. I'm gonna be sitting there playing 'I'm not touching you' for who knows how long, and he'll help keep a conversation going."

  Regina relaxes. "I'm sorry. I haven't really had a great year, and then you got my hopes up, and suddenly I didn't know if you were just screwing with me or something."

  "Why would I do that?"

  She looks at me like I'm stupid. "Because I tried to kill you?"

  "Well, okay, when you put it like that. But no, I'm not messing with you. I can fix this."

  Back at the house, I grab a beer, lead Regina downstairs to the couch, and turn on Netflix.

  "Make yourself comfortable. If this is anything like demagnetizing the pots, it's going to be a slow and boring process."

  "Is it going to hurt?"

  "No? I don't think so. The pots didn't really say."

  I take a deep breath and concentrate. Sitting this close to her, I can feel her magnetic field. It's like a subtle wind pushing at me, but constant and unvarying. I hold my hands up and focus on calm thoughts. The eternal ocean, the quiet rustling of a cornfield, the unwinking gaze of a starry night. It sounds like a super-cheesy self-help manual on stress reduction from the 70s, but it's how manipulating the fields works for me.

  I open my eyes when I hear the door slam upstairs. Brian calls out, "I'm in your house!"

  "Down here!"

  He descends the stairs, pizzas in hand, and stops dead at the bottom.

  "Okay, dude. Why is the woman who tried to kill you in your house? Is this a hostage situation? Keep in mind that I will throw a hot pizza at you if it's necessary for me to get away. I'm not proud."

  I glance over at Regina, who's got the kind of poker face on that means she's determined not to cry. "Scale it way back, man. She's all right."

  Brian looks dubious, but enters the room. "All right, lay it on me."

  "Once the nanomachines shut down, they stopped making her hate me. Same thing happened with Vince. She's fine now. I'm demagnetizing her so she can function in modern society again."

  "Nanomachines?" asks Regina.

  "Oh! Yeah, the powers you had – they came from nanomachinery. Same with mine."

  "Let's pretend that any of that makes sense. How did I get nanomachinery?"

  "That – I actually have no idea about that part."

  "Is it dangerous? Should I see a doctor?"

  Brian chimes in. "Couldn't hurt to take her to see Doc Simmons."

  I nod slowly. "Yeah, okay. Gimme a few days to get her safe enough to go into a hospital, and we can bring her by."

  "What kind of doctor is he?" Regina asks suspiciously.

  "Medical. She's been trying to figure out how the nanomachines work. If you don't want to go, you don't have to, as long as Brian here keeps his mouth shut. Once he tells the doc about you, she will get you into her lab to test you if she has to hunt you down like it's some sort of urban safari."

  "Dude, she is not that bad," protests Brian.

  "Name one time she hasn't gotten things the way she wants them."

  Brian eats a piece of pizza, and says nothing.

  "That's what I thought. Anyway – she's great, and she would really love to meet you, and I promise she'd only think of you like fifty percent as a guinea pig. Maybe sixty percent."

  "Seventy-five," mumbles Brian around a mouthful of cheese.

  "That's still a quarter human, which is better than you probably got treated working at the convenience store, right?"

  Regina sighs. "I hope you're kidding about the urban safari thing."

  "Yeah, obviously."

  "Mostly," mumbles Brian.

  - Chapter Three -

  The next week goes about like you'd expect. We make steady progress at the construction site, filling several dump trucks with the last of the debris from the burned building. I see some pieces that look like finger bones in the rubble when we knock down the old walls, and say nothing. All of that stuff was supposed to be cleared away before we ever started here, but when you've got a guy who can grow functioning organic hands out of walls, I guess it's hard to find every last pinkie bone.

  Demagnetizing Regina also goes well. Every morning in the car, there are still random warning lights on the dashboard, but the refrigerator no longer starts to stress when she walks by it, and she's able to pass by fluorescent lights without making them pulse and flicker.

  Eight days into the process, when Regina picks me up from work, she's practically giddy. "Look!" she laughs, pushing a button on the side of the driver's seat. The seat hums and slides forward.

  "You've...got power seats?"

  "I have working power seats! I haven't been able to move them in months. And it's been stuck in the wrong position, so I always had to sit weirdly to drive. Now I don't have to anymore!"

  "I could have moved it for you, you know."

  Regina wrinkles her nose at me. "Then it would have just been in a different wrong position. At least I was used to this one."

  I know when to tap out of an argument. She's happy right now, and all I can achieve here would be to take that away from her. I'm not that committed to being right over something this trivial.

  It does remind me of something important, though. "Hey, if you're this close to normal magnetic function, we can probably take you to the hospital without risking any of the machines there. You up for meeting Doc Simmons?"

  "Yeah – do we have to do it tonight?"

  "Definitely not! She's going to want more time from you than we've got tonight, anyway. I'm off tomorrow; we can go in then, if she's free."

  Regina looks alarmed. "How intrusive is this testing?"

  "It's mainly talking. I mean, blood draws and all, but that's pretty minor. The doc's trying to build a picture of this thing, though, and you'll be only the second person she's met who's been directly affected by it, so she's probably going to have a few questions."

  So, let's talk about understatements. When we go in to see the doc the next morning, she all but pounces on Regina. She's waiting in the lobby when we get there and has to visibly retrain herself from physically seizing Regina as soon as we walk in.

  When the doc has her eye on something, it's like a lioness on the hunt. And just as with a lioness, it's disconcerting to be the focus of that attention. Regina's nervousness is practically tangible. To the doc's credit, she does her best to be social, but the predatory anticipation shines through.

  "Hi! I'm Dr. Simmons. You're Regina? Dan said he'd be bringing you by today."

  She grasps Regina's hand in a firm handshake, barely letting go before turning to head for the elevators.

  "Yes, Dan said you –" Regina looks around nervously before continuing, "– study this?"

  "Absolutely. I'm very interested in how these machines work. So far, Dan has been my only point of reference. I've seen them while they were active in his blood, and I've been examining them since they went dormant after the, ah..." She waves her hands vaguely. "...unfortunate incident at the police station."

  Regina stares at me. "The fire? That was you?"

  I shrug uncomfortably. "Well – yeah. I mean, I had, um. There was a, uh. Um. It was the best choice at the time."

  "And that was – the same way I could control the rain?"

  "I guess so, yeah. From the same mechanism, certainly. I mean, probably. Technically, we've just been assuming. You could have something to
tally different going on, I suppose."

  "Dan?" says Doc Simmons.

  "Yeah?"

  "You're rambling."

  "Sorry."

  - - -

  The bloodwork confirms what I was expecting. Regina's got the same matrix of nanomachines suspended in her blood that I do.

  "They're dormant like yours, but still functional!" the doc exclaims enthusiastically. I am less excited about this.

  "So they could just be reactivated at any time?" I ask.

  "I could feel the rain again?" Regina asks hopefully.

  "Yeah, and turn back into a ravening hate ghoul," I say dourly, and Regina's face falls. The doc scowls at me. "What? I think it's worth mentioning that when her machines were active, she made a pretty solid attempt at killing me. You'll pardon me if I'm not one hundred percent excited to hear that we can go back to that mode."

  "I'm sorry," says Regina, looking upset.

  "I don't blame you. Vince had something similar going on, and it was definitely linked to the nanos. I just don't want to see it come back."

  "Dan," says Doc Simmons, "if I accidentally re-enable Regina's nanomachines and she comes after you, I will personally protect you from the woman who's six inches shorter than you and half your weight."

  "Who can summon down lightning!" I protest.

  "We're inside, Dan! Put on some rubber boots if you're so worried about it."

  I feel that the doc is unfairly dismissing a legitimate concern I have, but before I can respond further, she physically turns away from me to address Regina.

  "As long as Dan's pouting about this anyway, let's discuss it. What did it feel like when you were near him?"

  Regina frowns. "It was like this hole in the world, a cut that wouldn't heal. It hurt just to know he was there."

  Not a particularly flattering description, and coupled with the patronizing dismissal of my worries, it gets under my skin. Despite the doc's accusation, I am not pouting, and so I do the mature thing and take a walk to cool off.

  Seriously, how am I getting made fun of for not wanting to die? It's not like I'm blowing this out of proportion. Regina tagged me with a couple of lightning bolts outside this very hospital. Doc Simmons was the one who tried to resuscitate me with the defibrillator. I'm in the right here. Brian would back me up.