EXPERIMENT
Author's Note: I do not own any of the characters in this story, or the plot, or the premise, or the world in which it's set. Okay, I own nothing.
Derek Sanders looked out over the UC Sunnydale campus. Within a month it would be filled with students, teachers, and nubile coeds. However, it was still summer, which meant the university was virtually barren, except for those, like Derek, who were working to prepare it for the start of classes in September. As he tread over the grass, Derek was uncomfortably aware of how empty the campus was. Usually, it's almost impossible to hear sneakers walking over grass, but there was so much empty space around him that Derek's every step resulted in a slight, crunchy echo.
Derek shook off the momentary jitters the echoes gave him. After all, he told himself, it was absolutely no good for his image. He was a tall, well-muscled guy, with a calm and stony face. He wore a black muscle shirt and some raggedy jeans. Mixed with his detached, observant eyes, Derek very much seemed like the sort who should give other people goosebumps, not receive them from perfectly ordinary echoes.
With suddenly furious speed, Derek landed a well-aimed kick against an empty beer can lying on the ground. The can went hurling through the air and hit a tree, causing it to fall to the ground, crushed. Derek gave a small, half-grin. Showing off a little, even when no one was around to see it, always cheered him up.
"Hey, Derek!"
Derek spun around quickly, once again a little startled by the way sound carried on the empty campus. He quickly went from startled to annoyed, though, when he saw it was Riley Finn who had called out to him. Derek wasn't exactly fond of Finn. He was three years Derek's junior, but carried himself like he was the absolute cream of the crop. Also, Derek had to admit to himself, his dislike of Finn partly came from the fact that he looked much more like a college student, more like he belonged at UC Sunnydale.
"What is it, Finn? I was having a Zen moment," Derek called back as Finn jogged towards him.
"Just got word from Walsh," said Finn as he neared Derek, "She wants to see you downstairs."
"Gotcha," Derek said as he nodded.
He calmly turned away from Finn and started walking towards the fraternity where all the guys were staying. He made sure to walk fast enough so that it didn't look like he was wasting time, but went slow enough so that it wasn't like he was at Walsh's beck and call. Whenever he was around Finn, Derek always took special care in how he composed himself, never wanting to feed that sense of superiority Finn always carried around.
The air suddenly dropped twenty degrees as he entered the air- conditioned frat house. Derek quickly wiped the sweat off his forehead that he hadn't noticed when outside in the summer heat. He walked over to the mirror and pressed the secret button that activated the elevator. From out of the glass, a beam of green light shot out and scanned down his face. Derek hated this part; the light always left his eyesight blurred for about a minute after. He didn't understand why they couldn't just use fingerprints. Those were just as accurate, and you didn't have to look straight into a bright light to do it.
"Retinal scan complete," said an automated voice.
Through the green spots now in front of his eyes, Derek saw the mirror slide into the wall, revealing an immaculately white elevator. He stepped in and the mirror slid back into place behind him. As Derek's eyes cleared, the elevator began to slide downward. Leaning over to a small speaker in the wall, Derek said, "It's me."
"Initiative vocal code confirmed," said the recorded voice again.
Derek tapped his foot on the ground as the elevator descended something like sixty feet. By the time it stopped and the doors slid open, his eyes had just about recovered from the retinal scan. The doors opened and Derek walked out into the underground compound. They had spent the entire summer building this for their base of operations, and had done incredibly well. The walls and ceiling were still just messes of wire, but those could be fixed up quickly enough. The containment area was up to full form, though, and already three Hostiles were stored behind the electrically charged glass walls. As Derek walked past the cells, he kept his eyes away from the captured lizard creature and the two human looking creatures that could best be described as vampires. He had never really understood the point in keeping them locked up when the ultimate goal was just to eliminate them. But, Walsh said that's what they were going to do, so that's what they did.
As he left the containment area and came into the mess of computer consoles that made up "Command Central", Derek spotted Walters. Unlike Finn, Walters was someone Derek got along with. Over the past two months working to prepare the Initiative project, Derek and Walters had gotten along almost as though they were the college buddies they were going to assume the roles of come September.
"Hey, man, ya seen Walsh?" Derek said.
Walters turned away from looking over a tech guy's shoulder as he fixed a computer up. "Sure. What's the prob, failing covert ops again?" Walters responded.
"Probably. But you copied off all my tests, so I wouldn't get too cocky," Derek said back, "So, know where she is?"
"Yeah," Walters said, getting serious, "She's over by that 315 room."
"Thanks man," Derek said as he left Command Central and headed towards Professor Walsh's private area of the compound. None of them had been inside room 315; it was reserved strictly for Walsh, Angleman, and their experiments with the Hostiles. Sometimes, Derek wondered what was being done in that room, and why almost the first thing they did when building it was soundproofing.
Such thoughts were interrupted, though, by the presence of Professor Maggie Walsh standing outside the door to room 315. A short, middle-aged woman, Walsh still managed to carry an aura of power about her. It could be the white lab coat, Derek thought, people in white lab coats always seem smart and in control.
"Agent Sanders," said Walsh as Derek neared.
"Professor Walsh," Derek replied.
"Have there been any incidents lately?" Walsh asked.
"Incidents" were situations when one of them ran into a Hostile. The Initiative was being built so that, come the beginning of the school term in semester, they'd be able to handle the influx of Hostiles that would come to feed off the young, student population. However, at the moment, they were still in the construction process and were not really equipped to handle a Hostile attack. It didn't happen much, given that there wasn't much to find on the empty campus, but, when it occurred, it was usually a very messy affair for the soldiers still adjusting to this new type of enemy. The lizard creature back in the containment cell had taken Derek and four others about twenty minutes to bring down, which is a lot of time to spend fighting.
"No. The place appears peaceful," Derek replied.
"Good," said Walsh. She paused to examine his face before she continued. "Agent Sanders, the construction of the compound is ahead of schedule. We estimate it should only be another two weeks before it is fully operational. As such, Professor Angleman and I have decided it is time to begin some of our more long term objectives, which could not be reasonably completed while construction was going on."
"Such as?" Derek asked.
Walsh took another one of those pauses where she looked at his face, and then replied, "Derek, there is something I want to show you." Without waiting for a response, Walsh turned to the room 315 door and punched a code into the small keyboard just to the side of it. The door slid open and Walsh walked in, clearly expecting Derek to follow. He did, and made it through just before the doors closed and locked themselves again. Derek followed Walsh further through a couple more doors, getting a little anxious at being in the secret room that, so far, had been off limits.
They passed through one last pair of doors and entered the heart of room 315. It was pretty bare, consisting of a large, white table and some medical supplies along the walls. Walsh stepped behind the table and looked at Derek.
"Agent Sanders, I'd like you to lie down on this table."
Derek glanced around the room a couple times before lying down on the cold, white slab. The metal was piercingly cold to Derek in his thin muscle shirt. He uncomfortably flashed back to when he was a kid and the doctor would have him lie on a table like this right before giving the shot.
"Now, I'd like you to close your eyes and breathe deeply," said Walsh, not looking right at him.
"Um, why?" Derek asked, beginning to feel a little stupid doing this.
Walsh looked at him, apparently a little surprised that he'd bother to ask why. "I'm a psychology professor, Derek," she said, "I have a scientific interest in such exercises, and find they can usefully demonstrate a point."
"Okay," Derek consented, still not really understanding the point. He closed his eyes and shut out the white room. He took in a long, deep breath, and slowly let it out. He did it again, and, just as he was about to let the air out, a sharp pain hit his neck. Suddenly, his eyes flared open and his arms shot out like rockets. Professor Walsh went skidding across the floor as his fist hit her. She was knocked into the wall, causing various medical instruments to come spilling onto her. Derek turned over to get a closer look at her and what exactly had hit his neck. But, a sudden drowsiness was overcoming him. He couldn't even support himself by leaning on his elbow. His eyelids became impossibly heavy. Just before he drifted into unconsciousness, Derek caught a glimpse of the syringe, slightly blood stained, that Walsh had plunged into his neck.
* * *
Derek slept for a long, long time. Sometimes that sleep was empty, filled with nothing but a vague recollection of drowsiness. Other times, there were dreams. He dreamed of his past, flashing back to various chapters of his life. Derek dreamed of his recruitment into the military, the first time he scored with a woman, saying the boy scouts' pledge as a kid, drinking a Coke in his car one day. He probably revisited every event he'd ever experienced at least three or four times. But, at some point in this great sleep, new thoughts and memories came in, and they brought their own dreams. He dreamt of destruction and death. He dreamt of foul creatures running across the earth. He dreamt of unleashing untold anger upon the world. And, he began to think in a totally new way altogether. He thought in digits; he thought in numbers. A complex series of ones and zeroes became a dream of kicking that beer can into a tree. It's safe to say that, by the time his dreams were nearing their end, he was no longer Derek.
And then the sleep ended. Not with a bang, as though he had been doused with cold water, but gradually. He began to have a sense of his own body, sensing the presence of his limbs. Also, while he still dreamed, it became more of a backdrop to his view of his own closed eyelids. And, eventually, he started to hear things. Sometimes he heard to people speaking to each other. Other times, he heard one person speaking to him. When this happened, it was usually the more familiar voice, the voice his sleep-saturated brain almost had a name for.
It was while this familiar voice was speaking to him that everything speeded up. His senses became sharper; his body began to feel more solid, more in his control. And his dreams turned into thoughts. His mind whirred, processing ideas quicker than he had ever thought before. And yet, he had very few ideas to process. Derek may have had more to wonder about, but only parts of him were still present. A great deal of his mind had been replaced with animalistic fury and cold, strangely mathematical analysis. But, there was still enough of the young soldier left to be familiar with the voice. Yes, he recognized the voice, and it conjured up thoughts of a powerful figure, carefully guiding his life. A mother. Yet, there was anger in there, too. There was a sense that this voice was a traitor, and that it was responsible for the long sleep. His mind fed on this like Derek's mind never would have, for there were parts of it that were made of almost pure hate.
And, with that anger at betrayal, he woke up. He processed his surroundings quickly, far quicker than any human could do. In a stream of data, he comprehended everything around him, including the small, human body that represented the voice. Understanding without quite understanding, he did what he had to do. His body was like his mind: parts of it were Derek, yet parts were of something else entirely. Yet he used them with expert care to shoot a long spine out of his arm and stab the source of the voice.
The voice, the one familiar to what remained of Derek Sanders, spoke one last word: "Adam?"
Adam. This would be his name. He was no longer Derek, yet he had no other name to use. He would be Adam from now on. And, in thanks for this naming, he also told the voice its name, as its body sagged to the floor.
"Mother."
Author's Note: I do not own any of the characters in this story, or the plot, or the premise, or the world in which it's set. Okay, I own nothing.
Derek Sanders looked out over the UC Sunnydale campus. Within a month it would be filled with students, teachers, and nubile coeds. However, it was still summer, which meant the university was virtually barren, except for those, like Derek, who were working to prepare it for the start of classes in September. As he tread over the grass, Derek was uncomfortably aware of how empty the campus was. Usually, it's almost impossible to hear sneakers walking over grass, but there was so much empty space around him that Derek's every step resulted in a slight, crunchy echo.
Derek shook off the momentary jitters the echoes gave him. After all, he told himself, it was absolutely no good for his image. He was a tall, well-muscled guy, with a calm and stony face. He wore a black muscle shirt and some raggedy jeans. Mixed with his detached, observant eyes, Derek very much seemed like the sort who should give other people goosebumps, not receive them from perfectly ordinary echoes.
With suddenly furious speed, Derek landed a well-aimed kick against an empty beer can lying on the ground. The can went hurling through the air and hit a tree, causing it to fall to the ground, crushed. Derek gave a small, half-grin. Showing off a little, even when no one was around to see it, always cheered him up.
"Hey, Derek!"
Derek spun around quickly, once again a little startled by the way sound carried on the empty campus. He quickly went from startled to annoyed, though, when he saw it was Riley Finn who had called out to him. Derek wasn't exactly fond of Finn. He was three years Derek's junior, but carried himself like he was the absolute cream of the crop. Also, Derek had to admit to himself, his dislike of Finn partly came from the fact that he looked much more like a college student, more like he belonged at UC Sunnydale.
"What is it, Finn? I was having a Zen moment," Derek called back as Finn jogged towards him.
"Just got word from Walsh," said Finn as he neared Derek, "She wants to see you downstairs."
"Gotcha," Derek said as he nodded.
He calmly turned away from Finn and started walking towards the fraternity where all the guys were staying. He made sure to walk fast enough so that it didn't look like he was wasting time, but went slow enough so that it wasn't like he was at Walsh's beck and call. Whenever he was around Finn, Derek always took special care in how he composed himself, never wanting to feed that sense of superiority Finn always carried around.
The air suddenly dropped twenty degrees as he entered the air- conditioned frat house. Derek quickly wiped the sweat off his forehead that he hadn't noticed when outside in the summer heat. He walked over to the mirror and pressed the secret button that activated the elevator. From out of the glass, a beam of green light shot out and scanned down his face. Derek hated this part; the light always left his eyesight blurred for about a minute after. He didn't understand why they couldn't just use fingerprints. Those were just as accurate, and you didn't have to look straight into a bright light to do it.
"Retinal scan complete," said an automated voice.
Through the green spots now in front of his eyes, Derek saw the mirror slide into the wall, revealing an immaculately white elevator. He stepped in and the mirror slid back into place behind him. As Derek's eyes cleared, the elevator began to slide downward. Leaning over to a small speaker in the wall, Derek said, "It's me."
"Initiative vocal code confirmed," said the recorded voice again.
Derek tapped his foot on the ground as the elevator descended something like sixty feet. By the time it stopped and the doors slid open, his eyes had just about recovered from the retinal scan. The doors opened and Derek walked out into the underground compound. They had spent the entire summer building this for their base of operations, and had done incredibly well. The walls and ceiling were still just messes of wire, but those could be fixed up quickly enough. The containment area was up to full form, though, and already three Hostiles were stored behind the electrically charged glass walls. As Derek walked past the cells, he kept his eyes away from the captured lizard creature and the two human looking creatures that could best be described as vampires. He had never really understood the point in keeping them locked up when the ultimate goal was just to eliminate them. But, Walsh said that's what they were going to do, so that's what they did.
As he left the containment area and came into the mess of computer consoles that made up "Command Central", Derek spotted Walters. Unlike Finn, Walters was someone Derek got along with. Over the past two months working to prepare the Initiative project, Derek and Walters had gotten along almost as though they were the college buddies they were going to assume the roles of come September.
"Hey, man, ya seen Walsh?" Derek said.
Walters turned away from looking over a tech guy's shoulder as he fixed a computer up. "Sure. What's the prob, failing covert ops again?" Walters responded.
"Probably. But you copied off all my tests, so I wouldn't get too cocky," Derek said back, "So, know where she is?"
"Yeah," Walters said, getting serious, "She's over by that 315 room."
"Thanks man," Derek said as he left Command Central and headed towards Professor Walsh's private area of the compound. None of them had been inside room 315; it was reserved strictly for Walsh, Angleman, and their experiments with the Hostiles. Sometimes, Derek wondered what was being done in that room, and why almost the first thing they did when building it was soundproofing.
Such thoughts were interrupted, though, by the presence of Professor Maggie Walsh standing outside the door to room 315. A short, middle-aged woman, Walsh still managed to carry an aura of power about her. It could be the white lab coat, Derek thought, people in white lab coats always seem smart and in control.
"Agent Sanders," said Walsh as Derek neared.
"Professor Walsh," Derek replied.
"Have there been any incidents lately?" Walsh asked.
"Incidents" were situations when one of them ran into a Hostile. The Initiative was being built so that, come the beginning of the school term in semester, they'd be able to handle the influx of Hostiles that would come to feed off the young, student population. However, at the moment, they were still in the construction process and were not really equipped to handle a Hostile attack. It didn't happen much, given that there wasn't much to find on the empty campus, but, when it occurred, it was usually a very messy affair for the soldiers still adjusting to this new type of enemy. The lizard creature back in the containment cell had taken Derek and four others about twenty minutes to bring down, which is a lot of time to spend fighting.
"No. The place appears peaceful," Derek replied.
"Good," said Walsh. She paused to examine his face before she continued. "Agent Sanders, the construction of the compound is ahead of schedule. We estimate it should only be another two weeks before it is fully operational. As such, Professor Angleman and I have decided it is time to begin some of our more long term objectives, which could not be reasonably completed while construction was going on."
"Such as?" Derek asked.
Walsh took another one of those pauses where she looked at his face, and then replied, "Derek, there is something I want to show you." Without waiting for a response, Walsh turned to the room 315 door and punched a code into the small keyboard just to the side of it. The door slid open and Walsh walked in, clearly expecting Derek to follow. He did, and made it through just before the doors closed and locked themselves again. Derek followed Walsh further through a couple more doors, getting a little anxious at being in the secret room that, so far, had been off limits.
They passed through one last pair of doors and entered the heart of room 315. It was pretty bare, consisting of a large, white table and some medical supplies along the walls. Walsh stepped behind the table and looked at Derek.
"Agent Sanders, I'd like you to lie down on this table."
Derek glanced around the room a couple times before lying down on the cold, white slab. The metal was piercingly cold to Derek in his thin muscle shirt. He uncomfortably flashed back to when he was a kid and the doctor would have him lie on a table like this right before giving the shot.
"Now, I'd like you to close your eyes and breathe deeply," said Walsh, not looking right at him.
"Um, why?" Derek asked, beginning to feel a little stupid doing this.
Walsh looked at him, apparently a little surprised that he'd bother to ask why. "I'm a psychology professor, Derek," she said, "I have a scientific interest in such exercises, and find they can usefully demonstrate a point."
"Okay," Derek consented, still not really understanding the point. He closed his eyes and shut out the white room. He took in a long, deep breath, and slowly let it out. He did it again, and, just as he was about to let the air out, a sharp pain hit his neck. Suddenly, his eyes flared open and his arms shot out like rockets. Professor Walsh went skidding across the floor as his fist hit her. She was knocked into the wall, causing various medical instruments to come spilling onto her. Derek turned over to get a closer look at her and what exactly had hit his neck. But, a sudden drowsiness was overcoming him. He couldn't even support himself by leaning on his elbow. His eyelids became impossibly heavy. Just before he drifted into unconsciousness, Derek caught a glimpse of the syringe, slightly blood stained, that Walsh had plunged into his neck.
* * *
Derek slept for a long, long time. Sometimes that sleep was empty, filled with nothing but a vague recollection of drowsiness. Other times, there were dreams. He dreamed of his past, flashing back to various chapters of his life. Derek dreamed of his recruitment into the military, the first time he scored with a woman, saying the boy scouts' pledge as a kid, drinking a Coke in his car one day. He probably revisited every event he'd ever experienced at least three or four times. But, at some point in this great sleep, new thoughts and memories came in, and they brought their own dreams. He dreamt of destruction and death. He dreamt of foul creatures running across the earth. He dreamt of unleashing untold anger upon the world. And, he began to think in a totally new way altogether. He thought in digits; he thought in numbers. A complex series of ones and zeroes became a dream of kicking that beer can into a tree. It's safe to say that, by the time his dreams were nearing their end, he was no longer Derek.
And then the sleep ended. Not with a bang, as though he had been doused with cold water, but gradually. He began to have a sense of his own body, sensing the presence of his limbs. Also, while he still dreamed, it became more of a backdrop to his view of his own closed eyelids. And, eventually, he started to hear things. Sometimes he heard to people speaking to each other. Other times, he heard one person speaking to him. When this happened, it was usually the more familiar voice, the voice his sleep-saturated brain almost had a name for.
It was while this familiar voice was speaking to him that everything speeded up. His senses became sharper; his body began to feel more solid, more in his control. And his dreams turned into thoughts. His mind whirred, processing ideas quicker than he had ever thought before. And yet, he had very few ideas to process. Derek may have had more to wonder about, but only parts of him were still present. A great deal of his mind had been replaced with animalistic fury and cold, strangely mathematical analysis. But, there was still enough of the young soldier left to be familiar with the voice. Yes, he recognized the voice, and it conjured up thoughts of a powerful figure, carefully guiding his life. A mother. Yet, there was anger in there, too. There was a sense that this voice was a traitor, and that it was responsible for the long sleep. His mind fed on this like Derek's mind never would have, for there were parts of it that were made of almost pure hate.
And, with that anger at betrayal, he woke up. He processed his surroundings quickly, far quicker than any human could do. In a stream of data, he comprehended everything around him, including the small, human body that represented the voice. Understanding without quite understanding, he did what he had to do. His body was like his mind: parts of it were Derek, yet parts were of something else entirely. Yet he used them with expert care to shoot a long spine out of his arm and stab the source of the voice.
The voice, the one familiar to what remained of Derek Sanders, spoke one last word: "Adam?"
Adam. This would be his name. He was no longer Derek, yet he had no other name to use. He would be Adam from now on. And, in thanks for this naming, he also told the voice its name, as its body sagged to the floor.
"Mother."