I stared out into the gloom of the hallway, the shaking of the wheels making my teeth chatter. The whitecoat pushing the cart was instructing other whitecoats and two Erasers, who hung around the back. Even whitecoats got nervous when they came too near.
My cage rattled as the cart went over a crack in the pavement, and I bit my tongue. I didn't bother to acknowledge the pain. More was sure to come, I knew.
As I looked around, the same undercurrent of information raced through my head. I could pluck facts from this flow about my surroundings; much of it was useless, but maybe something could help.
...the doorknobs are gilded steel, much like those used in many of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs... the windows showed a small storm brewing in the distance, probably caused by a cold front, which is when two air masses... the Erasers behind us are 98% human, 2% wolf, and have been bred with no pain receptors...
The Erasers had been bred for brawn; I, on the other hand, was more brain. When I was an adorable little clump of deoxyribonucleic acid in a test tube, they had injected a sort of serum into my mind. It made my brain mature faster than the rest of my body, so I would have extraordinary logistics at a young age, but it also greatly increased my memory. Almost everything I had ever seen, heard, or read I could remember; and that was a good deal, because they gave me numerous books each day. Therefore, I had so much information, my whole brain had sort of adapted; now, my thought process was completely altered, my normal thoughts on the surface, and a subliminal current of information coursing through my head at the same time.
I had been the sort of pet experiment. They gave me hoops to jump through, constantly. At lunch hour, whitecoats would wander over to my room to ask me the most difficult math question they could think up. Seconds later, I'd have an answer. Because of this, I was sort of their cheat sheet; if they couldn't figure it out, Subject 3b could.
But then they started to panic. If I was so smart, who's to say I couldn't find a way out? Escape, reveal the School to the world? Ruin everything they'd worked for?
It started small. No more books, less knowledge for me to gain. It was hard, with no entertainment, but it was mildly amusing to sift through my mindflow, as the whitecoats had called it. But in this, I became more observant. So they locked my door. No biggie. I just had to go without my normal lunchtime questionnaire. Not so bad. But I became more self-sustaining, less reliant on whitecoats. So they shoved me in maximum security. In short, it had sucked; Erasers patrolling the door, mikes and cameras planted all over the small, basic room; white walls, white bed, white dresser. Only the essentials.
Then, the big blow. One perfectly normal day, they shove me in a crate, stack me with the others. The failures, as i saw them. No one with anywhere near my intelligence to talk to; most of them were unable even of forming coherent thoughts.
I fell into a normal schedule. Sleep, wake, fed, experiment, fed, slept. The experiments were horrible; would sustaining injuries affect her thought process? Let's find out by hitting her with large, pointy sticks!
The worst was when they wanted to know if lack of nutrients affected my mindflow. A week without food, constantly hooked up to the machine that recorded any changes to my brain. Big shocker that when you're half dead, you're unable to perform complicated algebra, right? These whitecoats just keep getting dumber and dumber.
I was snapped back to reality when the cart stopped. An Eraser flung open the polished white double doors, letting in the patchy sunlight. I instantly recognized the hide-and-go-seek grounds, where they trained Erasers. My thoughts raced, but I could come to only one definite conclusion.
They were going to kill me.
I had known for a while that they were worried. In the back of mind, I had suspected this, from the very beginning; nothing gets past genetically enhanced me. But it was still a big shock.
Death. I knew everything that didn't matter about it. Endless formulas, scientific laws, and complicated diagrams raced through my head at the word. One dictionary-definition stuck out at me: The permanent ending of vital processes in a cell or tissue.
I almost burst into bitter laughter. I knew nothing about death, nobody did. They could pretend, but they didn't really. I wasn't religious at all; science was the only thing that made complete and total sense to me. Math, I just sort of followed the rules. But science I got. And in science, there was no afterlife.
The burliest Eraser grabbed the top of my crate and swing it roughly to the ground. He stuck his face up to the bars.
"Whatcha gonna do now, Brain? Finding the value of x ain't gonna help you now, girlie. Just us an' you, the ultimate battle of fight smarts. An' we been doin' it for longer."
I fought the urge to correct him. I have this thing about proper language. Hey, you would too if you'd spent your life raised on novels as thick as your palm is wide!
One of the whitecoats, a Korean-looking woman all business in her lab coat, leaned over to unlatch the cage. My thoughts raced. There must be a way out, there's always a way out, it's only logical...
There was a small, almost imperceptible click, and the door to the cage swung open. I burst out, planless, thoughtless, adrenalin coursing through my veins, supercharging me with energy.
The Erasers were on me within a second. They tore at me, so full of battle lust they didn't care if they missed, as long as they saw blood. Something clicked.
I darted from Eraser to Eraser, many more following me. They were heavier, almost imperceptibly slower than I, slim and light. That meant that as they ran, enraged, claws out, toward me, they often injured some of their own themselves.
It wasn't much to go on, but it was something. I continued this, discouraged by the little response due to teir lack of pain receptors. I thought, hard. If there was ever a time when some kind of epiphany would have come in handy, it would have been then.
But come it did not. The brawniest of the remaining erasers, some big brute the rest called Xero, turned to me.
"You think IQ scores are gonna help you now?" He growled menacingly, stepping closer. I backed away, having never been trained in fighting. Like I said, brains was their main goal when I was created. Because God forbid I have a normal existence.
"Well, they aren't," he said, wrapping his thick, strong fingers around her slim, fragile neck. "This is about brute force."
My life flashed before my eyes. Little me, gnawing a cookie as a whitecoat checked my answer to an algebra problem. 7-year-old me, wanting to play with the other kids but not being allowed to. Who needs social skills, anyway? I had told myself. Not me. Big me, hours earlier, sleeping in my crate.
Xero's eyes flashed with an insane joy as he tightened his grip, his arm muscles flexing visibly. The little air she could get wheezed feebly on it's way to her lungs. He grinned, the grin of a maniac.
As though from very far away, she heard the snap. She felt the huge wave of pain roar through her.
And blackness. Deep, endless blackness.