A baby's fervent cries rang through all the ears in the operating room. The mother exhaled in sweet relief. The pain was over for now; her baby had been born. The doctors finished tending to the mother as the nurses took the baby to clean it off.
"Where... Where is she?" the mother asked deliriously. "I want to see her..."
"Here you go, ma'am," one of the nurses replied, handing the child to the mother.
Swaddled in a soft bunny blanket, the child continued to cry and cry as she was placed into her mother's arms. The nurse offered to take a Polaroid for the mother, but she declined.
"Charlotte..." the mother cooed. "Shh, shh... Mommy's here. Mommy's got you."
By then, the baby girl had stopped crying at looked into the mother's eyes. A strange feeling entered the mother's heart. She felt almost afraid, and a tiny bit sad. She couldn't figure out why. It wasn't her emotion, but somehow she still felt it.
The nurses had to take back the baby in order to finish their jobs. The mother was wheeled back to her room where her small family and close friends waited. There were pink balloons floating everywhere and stuffed animals lining all the flat surfaces.
"When can we see her?" the mother's brother asked.
"I don't know..." replied the mother, still a bit groggy from the medicine.
A low murmur filled the room as the visitors began congratulating the mother quietly. Almost a minute later, a doctor came sprinting in the doorway.
"If you're not family, please leave," he said rather curtly, looking nervous and slightly upset.
After a few blinks of stunned silence, a couple of the visitors began shuffling out as they breathed rude whispers about being kicked out.
"Is everything alright?" asked the father of the mother.
The mother's heart rate began beeping quicker on the monitor.
"We were doing the routine hearing screenings," the doctor began. The mother looked to her father as her mother put a hand on her shoulder. "And she wasn't responding well as most infants normally do..."
"What does that mean?" the grandmother asked.
"She has significant hearing loss from the point where we brought her in, almost to the point of total deafness," he explained.
Everyone in the room gasped.
"My baby... My baby is deaf?" the mother asked, almost on the verge of tears. The hand on her shoulder tightened its grip.
"What... What are our options?" asked the mother's father. "Hearing aids-"
"Hearing aids might work to an extent, but each case is different. I can't give you a guaranteed option," he replied. "I'll have a nurse give you some business cards for specialists." He stood up and said, "I'm very sorry, but congratulations, ma'am." He walked out.
No one in the room knew what to say.
"No one in our family is deaf..." the mother said, holding back tears. "How did this even happen? I mean... What am I going to do?"
"We'll figure it out," her mother comforted. "We can handle this. God will provide us an answer."
"I'll go get the number of those specialists..." her father said, walking out of the room.
As mother began silently crying, her brother took her hand and tried to reassure her.
The mother's mind was racing with so many questions and emotions, it was almost impossible to sleep. But as visiting hours quickly ended, she wallowed in silence alone and full of doubt.
From the first day this child was born, she had gone from a hearing child to a hard of hearing child to totally deaf within the span of the first hour of her life. The specialists recommended by the doctors couldn't do anything to help and the hearing aids didn't work.
But even with this news, the little girl was the most beautiful gift the mother could have ever asked for. Her large and darling green eyes felt mysterious and ethereal, and her platinum blonde hair shone vibrantly. Despite knowing challenges we're sure to rear their heads in the future, the mother was completely happy and content with her child, even her little ears. Her deafness didn't have to be a disability.
But her ethereal cuteness wasn't the main intrigue of the child. The mother knew from the first instance of holding her new daughter that she was special. She could feel strange emotions occasionally in the pit of her stomach. The mother thought it was just her hormones at first, but in time, she knew it was her baby causing it. The little one had a gift, a special power. She shared her feelings with those around her without having to say anything. If the little one felt scared or angry, sometimes the mother could feel those things as well. When family came to visit, they always picked up that something was a little peculiar about this baby, but what, they couldn't figure it out.
Many harmless incidents happened within the first months, but the when the child was a couple months old, something strange began to happen. The mother had set her in the high chair and began cutting up some bananas into thin slices when a feeling of anger boiled into her stomach. The child began crying.
"What's wrong?" asked the mother.
Suddenly, the mother stopped cutting the banana and dropped the knife onto the counter. Her face turned almost white as a sheet as she turned around and walked robotically back to the refrigerator. As she opened the door, she pulled out a small tub of puréed carrots.
To an outsider, this seemed like a completely normal thing to do, but inside the mother wasn't in control of any of her actions during this small incident.
When the child had forfeited influence over her mother, the mother screamed and dropped the carrots on the floor, spilling them. All she could do was stare at her child in awe and fear. A small drop of blood was pooling out of the child's left nostril.
Her gift was growing in strength. It started with sharing her emotions and now she could influence other minds to do things.
Despite the unsettling incident, the mother ran to her child and hugged her, trying to calm her down more for the child's sake than her own. She took a dry washcloth from the sink and dabbed the blood from her baby's nose.
She stared at her child for a while, wondering what to do about her possibly dangerous gift.
About a month later, when the little one was about 10 months old, tragedy struck her tiny life.
In the dead of the night, the mother was fast asleep. A small, muffled cry came over the baby monitor, but it didn't wake the mother up. Another cry, this time a little louder. Something was wrong. The mother's eyes slowly opened, hearing the second cry. She yawned, waking up hearing more muffled cries from her daughter. Suddenly, the cries turned angry and desperate. The mother sat up, becoming a little concerned. She must have really needed her diaper changed, the mother thought. An uneasy wave of deep anxiety came over the mother.
Over the desperate screams and cries of the baby, another muffled voice rang through the speaker of the baby monitor.
The mother stopped in her tracks, freezing in panic. Someone was in her house. With a furiously beating heart, she took a hesitant step towards her door. More cries echoed through the baby monitor. She finally worked up the courage to go outside of her room. She scampered out into the hall and hesitated once more before deciding to confront the presence in the child's room.
She didn't get half way down the hall before seeing three men dressed in all black carrying her child out of the room. Her child was screaming and crying angrily, not liking this unexpected capture at such a late hour. The mother stopped dead in her tracks. The three men noticed her frozen down the hall and began scurrying out of the house with her baby in hand.
"Stop!" the mother shrieked desperately. She ran for the kidnappers wildly, flailing her arms in fear and fury. "Don't take her! Don't take my baby!"
Two of the men stayed back as the one carrying the child hurried out of the house. The two men held the crazed mother back so as to let their comrade escape with the stolen child. One of them whipped out a small syringe and jammed it into her neck as the mother shrieked, screamed, and cried, "Don't take my baby! Don't take my baby!" over and over again.
The mother slowly started to lose consciousness and sank to the floor. "You can't... take her..." she slurred. "She's... d..." But she couldn't finish her last word: deaf.
The mother woke up the next day with a cold shiver and sweat-soaked clothes. She sat up at once, eyes opened wide and terror-filled. She noticed she was back in her bed. Running to the nursery immediately after, she gasped and fell to her knees in complete and utter despair at the sight of the empty crib. The mother wept uncontrollably. Unbeknownst to her, it was the last time she would ever see her daughter again.
The first thought in her mind was that of the declined Polaroid offered by that nurse. Ludicrous, it seemed to deny such a special memory. It would continue to weigh on her mind until the day she died.
The cross shaped building in the unassuming town of Hawkins, Indiana seemed to mock the trinity with the immoral and unholy evils lurking within. The seemingly innocuous van drove up to the guard shack as they passed the aloof fence that warned all who thought of entering. After being allowed to enter, the cold building loomed ahead as the van drove under the grayish sky. From the distance, it looked like a prison, but on the inside it was worse.
The child was carried into the laboratory very much against her will, which she so plainly shared with the guards through sharing her emotions and wildly angry cries. Passing the child over to the doctors, the soldiers felt relief now that their job was over. The doctors took the child to a small examination room to do a simple check up to make sure the child was healthy and had gifts.
Dr. Brenner watched outside from the window and gazed with a slight smile across his face as the doctors conducted their tests.
It took a while before the child became calm enough to examine. One of the nurses had to rock the child in her arms for about ten minutes.
While examining, one of the doctors noticed something a little off with the baby. When she moved on to the hearing portion of the exam and snapped in the baby's left ear, the baby just stared at her, not reacting at all to the noise. Thinking this odd, the doctor clapped loudly, hoping to draw the attention of the child with the sound.
"What's wrong?" asked the other doctor.
"Bring me its previous charts…" the first asked.
A nurse handed the doctor the files on the child. She began shuffling through them, searching for something.
"What?" asked the other doctor again.
"Ah," she said. "That explains it." She plopped the files on the table next to the child and pointed at a particular line.
Dr. Brenner outside noticed both of the scientists gazing at the files. He pressed a button on the wall and said, "What's the matter? What are you looking at?"
"Um, sir," the second doctor said, "the child is deaf."
Dr. Brenner didn't respond immediately. "Well, continue with the preliminary examination."
"But, sir, what are we going to do?" asked the first doctor.
"That doesn't matter right now," he brushed off. "Continue."
The two doctors exchanged nervous glances at each other before returning to their work. They concluded that the child was perfectly healthy other than her ears and reported such to Dr. Brenner.
"Excellent," he said, forming a fresh smile. "Move onto the next phase."
"Of course, sir," said the doctors.
The medical doctors and staff moved out of the way while the PHDs entered the room for the next phase. Despite their high ranking doctorates, this examination was far less formal and truly scientific than the medical doctors' exams. Mostly, they just poked and prodded the child in hopes of inciting whatever gifts the child possessed. As the poking became annoying to the little one, she began to shift angrily and more than willingly let all in the room feel it. One of the scientists began recording the behavior of the child and the sensations felt. Eventually, the little one was so upset that she tried to make everyone walk out of the room, but couldn't actually control so many people at once. Little drops of blood began pooling at the end of her nose. A nurse noticed and quickly wiped it away.
The scribe in the room smiled gleefully after the experience and wrote down mental manipulation under her special skills.
"Dr. Brenner!" he said. "I think this one will be good."
"Fantastic," Brenner replied. "What can it do?"
"Influence emotions and even manipulation of other persons, sir," he answered. "With time, I hypothesize its powers will only grow."
Brenner smiled once again. "Alright, we'll put it into the program. What experiment are we on by now?"
"Twelve, sir," one of the PHDs replied.
"Great," he said. "Alright, then. Experiment 012. Let's put it in the rainbow room, as well. It does have a mental ability as well as the other two."
"Sir, if I may," the first doctor asked. "What are we going to do about her deafness?"
"Just teach it to read and write like the others," he said. "We don't need to go through the trouble of teaching it speech."
"Yes, sir," the doctor replied.
The next couple of hours sealed the child's fate there in the prison, wherein she should have remained until the day of her death.
A nurse carried the child of the room, holding it loosely to her breast, trying not to get attached to it. That's what happened to the last nurse; she was quickly fired.
That was the goal of the whole child-monitoring staff. The repeating mantra in everyone's head: Don't get attached. These children they held weren't actually children, they were seen as rats or gerbils or monkeys only for the scientific purpose of experimenting. None of the experiments were granted gender-specific pronouns for fear of humanizing a child.
Don't get attached.
So the nurse carried her off to a room down the hall where the mark was to be made on her left arm. The nurse cleaned off the spot on her arm with cold alcohol to sterilize the area. She routinely cleaned the needle off of the tattoo apparatus. She nearly hesitated as she held the inking machine over the child's arm. As she turned on the device and held the arm steady, she drew a small 012 on her forearm. The child began wailing and shrieking, even sharing her emotions with the nurse in protest. The inking was soon finished; it wasn't a very big mark. But, the child continued to cry. With the horrible sadness and pain the nurse felt in her gut, her eyes began welling up in sympathy for the poor thing. She tried to mask it and wished it to be over quickly, but the child held on. Eventually, a single tear fell from her eyes. She had to walk out of the room to regain a stoic air again.
This child was going to be hard not to get attached to, especially with her tele-empathetic prowess. To feel her emotions leads to sympathy and sympathy leads to bonding which is absolutely out of the question.
The nurse covered her new mark with a bandage so that it would heal properly and so that the child couldn't scratch or itch at it. She carried the little one to another nurse that placed her inside her new cell.
About 8 feet by 8 feet, the square room became her new home. Furnished with a crib, later replaced with a small bed, a desk, and a small chest of drawers, this square was one of the only things the child would remember about her time in Hawkins Lab.
Dr. Brenner sat down at the head of a table filled with the scientists and doctors who examined the child.
"Give me the full story," he said.
The doctors jumped at the opportunity first.
"012 is deaf, but other than that, she's perfectly healthy. So far the only side-effect of her powers is a nosebleed," said the second doctor.
"Yes, and, sir, you have instructed us to only teach her how to read and write," inserted the first doctor. Brenner nodded. "Alright." The doctor wrote something down on a piece of paper.
"So, what 012 do?" asked Brenner. "Someone said influence emotions, I believe... Please, do explain."
The people in the room began glancing at each other as if to say they all shared a similar experience.
"We believe it's some sort of empathic ability, but as far as we know, it's only one way- a sort of… cross between telepathic and empathic ability," one scientist explained. "012 shares its emotions with other people, but we did encounter another ability as well, and I think you'll find this one more compelling."
"Mind control!" another shouted out excitedly.
"We prefer to call it manipulative hypnosis or mental manipulation," the scribe interrupted haughtily.
Dr. Brenner held back a smile. "So, where do we think these abilities will go in the future? What are we looking at?"
"If 012 only has these abilities and they grow with age and practice, we believe a total mental manipulation is possible, meaning that 012 could completely control another human," the first scientist described eruditely. "Also, with the tele-empathetic abilities, 012 might eventually be able to influence and change the emotions of others instead of just broadcasting its emotions."
"This is all speculation, I would like to clarify that, Dr. Brenner," the scribe added quickly.
"Speculation is good," he said. "Speculation creates an end goal. Well, good work everyone, and keep me updated on the case."
"Yes, sir," the room responded.
Dr. Brenner was especially interested in the potential applications of 012's so-called manipulative hypnotic abilities.
Yes, he thought. This one will certainly be of use to me.
(I do not own Stranger Things or any of the characters, contents, settings, or ideas. This was created for entertainment purposes only and no copyright is intended.)