Chr. 2/46

I opened my eyes in a hospital bed again, but in addition to finding out my plan failed, medication was injected into my left arm, and that the room also looked like a complex laboratory, I saw that it is not the laboratory at Area 51. I was somewhere else. Then I noticed that there were people in the room as well, but was unable to speak or lift my head to see the room better. A voice fades away, as I closed my eyes again.

I hear a voice again and I wake up to find a woman in a long white coat staring at me with the look that told me she did not expect me to ever wake up. I asked her "Where am I?" and she told me that I will be okay. I asked the question again and told her that I knew this was not a hospital. She said that I should relax and get some more rest, smiled, and walked away. I sat up in the bed and looked up at the familiar black screen that showed my heart rate, showed that I was still breathing, and calmed me down with the soft, regular beeping noise. Almost my entire first life I woke up either to the beeping noise or to the sound of the cars near the Olive Park. I noticed that I was wearing the same stolen clothes from some store called Gap.

A short, bald man wearing a similar white coat entered the room and watched in shock as I ripped out the IV from my left arm. I knew that if I did not hold the spot on my arm where the IV was, blood would squirt out of my arm and leave more evidence that I was here, so I removed the IV carefully, and did not expect such a strong reaction from the man in the white coat. I said I will be okay without the medication, and stood up, despite the slight dizziness. The man called for someone called Marie, probably the woman I saw earlier, and told me that he had to ask me some questions. I knew what they were, but decided to stay, lie to most of them, and hopefully figure out what this place is. The man proceeded to ask me where I was from, where my parents are, what their names are, what my name is, and told me to call him Dr. Sylvester. I told him my name was Amanda, I live near Olive Park, *my dad is James Watson (a name I happened to overhear at Area 51), and my mom left when I was a little girl. Dr. Sylvester began to laugh, then became serious again. "Your father is James Watson? Now, you have to tell me the truth. Where are your parents, Amanda, and how can I contact them?" I refused to give him any more information, thinking I will be kept here, or at least with a roof over my head, until they can return me to my parents. I can escape to Olive Park anyway, if the situation called for this.

The nurse came in and reattached the IV to my left arm, tied my hands so I could not move them, and then left again. I looked around and found one more bed, empty, next to me. Maybe this was a hospital… but not like the pictures I saw on the Worldwide Web. Maybe it is a mental facility? Fifteen minutes later the door opened, as I was ripping the IV out of my arm again, having untied my hands, and someone walked into the room. "Hi. Sorry. I did not know anyone was here."

The guy, about 17 years old, looked at me more closely, and then quickly backed off towards the door, with a weird expression on his face. I asked, "What is wrong? Why are you scared?" and the guy said, "You are the person from my nightmares. You killed me." I replied, "I am not in a good enough condition to be a nightmare" I held up the IV. "Maybe if they stick twenty more wires into my arm, then I will look scary enough that someone dies. I don't know." The boy said "But you ripped out the IV…" He quickly dashed to a desk near the second bed and retrieved a textbook. Trigonometry.

"Why are you here?"

"I tried to commit suicide by poison" I said.

Silence.

"You know, they would not put you here for… What poisoning did you survive?" asked the boy. I described the plant I found. "I don't know what it's called." The 17 year old apparently knew, and ran to the door with a weird expression on his face. "What are you? Any normal person would die from this amount of poison!" After another short silence, the boy said, "I guess I know, then, why you're here".

I asked, "Why are you here then? Where are we?" He looked at the textbook and said that he is not supposed to tell me what this place is, but he helps his father with some of the research here. Then he left.

I looked around again, and noticed a backpack near the desk. I got up and looked through the large blue backpack. There were three other textbooks – AP Biology, Honors Physics for College Prep, and a kindergartenish – looking History book. I guessed this was for a CP2 Class. Why does such a bright kid take CP2 History? There was also a crumpled report card, belonging to an Erwin Sylvester. Biology – A, Study Hall – Pass, Physics – A-, Trigonometry B+, English – A, Keyboarding – A, Art Studio 2 – C, History – F. Below the chart with the grades, there was a line which I did not quite understand – "Career GPA – 3.2", and below that was a signature "Niv Sylvester" with a short handwritten note: "My child needs to have extra help with History. He may not be an average student, due to his obsession with math and genetics, and I thank you for being patient with him. I don't see how it could happen, that he cannot get an "A" in a CP2 History class, when he is able to get a perfect grade in AP Bio.

"Not an average student with his obsession with math and genetics"? I thought that this was interesting. I re – crumpled the report card and turned my attention to the red binder, which was in the other section of the backpack. There were a bunch of "handouts" relevant to the subjects listed on the report card, and none of them looked that interesting, aside from many of them saying "Important handout. Don't lose". However, the piece of paper with the schedule ( I guessed it was for the classes) drew my attention. On the other side of the bright pink sheet of paper was a diagram in the shape of multiple concentric circles, hastily sketched in blue ink. There were many lines drawn outward from the center of the circles, with a letter written in each space between these lines. I tried to read them. "A, U, G, C, C, U, U, A, G, G, C…" the letters continued all the way around the circle, as well as the larger circles. I tried to make sense of this data, and then realized that this was a table of the genetic code. From what the World Wide Web taught me, this was studied in such detail only in college classes. But the report card and the textbooks obviously belonged to a high school – Chicago High School.

After rummaging further through the backpack, I found one red pen, three pencils without erasers, one without lead on its tip and half of a green eraser on its other end, five pieces of lead from the tips of these gray pencils, one blue piece of lead from a pencil that wasn't there, one graphing calculator, two late passes to History, and a broken Geiger counter. What was the Geiger counter doing in a high school student's backpack? Footsteps resounded from the hallway, and I quickly put all the stuff back into the backpack the way it was. As the door started opening, I hid under the bed. I heard Dr. Sylvester's voice. "What do you mean, she isn't here? How did she manage to escape under the influence of sedatives, with her hands tied, and a guard posted outside the door?" The other voice was Marie's. "Amanda shouldn't even be alive right now, with the poison she ingested. The plant she ate should have killed a 30 – year old male, never mind a 12 – year old girl." Both people walked around the room for a while, then left. Now I was facing a choice. I was still in Chicago; otherwise the boy I saw earlier couldn't be going to Chicago High School. Dr. Sylvester and the nurse believed that my name was Amanda, and that I ran away from my parents. I could stay and try to figure out what this place is, or I could escape, and terminate myself, to make sure the experiment at Area 51 couldn't go on.

I decided to wait for the person outside the door to leave, and listened until I heard another set of footsteps approaching the room I was in, then footsteps walking away, as two people were talking in rapidly fading, hushed voices. When I could no longer hear the footsteps, I crawled out from under the bed and stepped cautiously outside the room. There was a long, narrow hallway, extending in both directions from the doorway I was standing in. The lights were off; save for the one that flickered on when I opened the door. I could not see an entrance nor an exit, as the ends of the hallway faded into darkness. I decided to walk to my left, away from where the footsteps went, and found that while I walked, the lights behind me shut off, one by one, and the lights ahead came on, one by one. While I was staring at the lights, I noticed a camera near the ceiling, on my left. I kept walking for at least five minutes, and then decided to enter one of the rooms, the doors of which lined both sides of the hallway. Behind the door was a smaller hallway, leading to one other door.

The bright white light blinded me as I opened the second door. A harsh, cold wind whistling by let me know that this was the exit from the building. I stood there for a while, contemplating what to do next, and then heard someone's voice. I closed the door, rushing back into the building and dashed behind another door. I couldn't leave yet, as I felt I had to unravel the mystery of the building, from the over-the-top security to the feeling this building was shrouded in uttermost secrecy. The room behind this door contained rows and rows of lab benches, containing genome sequencers, lots of beakers, reagents, and other lab equipment. No one was there, and only one genome sequencer was working, the bright screen of the computer attached to it showing rows of multicolored lines. I remembered how to read these lines, but before I sat down on a chair beside the computer, I decided to put on a lab coat, just in case the person with the loud, booming voice chooses to enter the lab.

As I adjusted the screen to show the nucleotide sequence instead of the lines, the door to the lab opened.

"Hi! You're still working? Usually only Marie works here that late." The person who entered was a woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a lab coat with colorful drawings and designs drawn on the fabric. As I looked closer, I realized that the designs were carefully embroidered on the lab coat. "Where did you get such a pretty lab coat?" I asked. The genome sequencer finished working. Uh – oh. If the Marie who was working at this station was the woman looking for the missing patient, I am in trouble, and I have nowhere to go. Meanwhile, the woman in the fancy lab coat replied to my careless question; "You are new here, I see. This is interesting. You must have quite an outstanding resume, because this is supposed to be a private research company, almost bordering on secret. I embroidered the lab coat myself. It's my favorite hobby, outside of this lab." So I was right. There is more to this story. I then asked: "So everyone else here knows you like embroidering?" The woman looked at me, like she had trouble understanding me. "Everyone here knows that I wear this lab coat all the time. What's your name?" I decided not to lie again. "My name is Diane." The woman in the lab coat smiled, and said: "I'm Sanaa Farai. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to meet someone new once in a while." The door to the lab opened again. This time my worst fears were confirmed. Marie walked in, but did not notice me right away, as I pretended to be analyzing the output from the genome sequencer. "Hi, Sanaa, have you seen a little girl wandering nearby? She says her name is Amanda, and she is about twelve years old." Sanaa laughed and replied, obviously thinking this was a joke: No, I haven't seen a little girl. However, it seems you have a competitor for leaving work the latest." To my uttermost horror she pointed in my direction.

At first, Marie didn't recognize me. She simply said: "Why are you using this genome sequencer? It was sequencing something for my research." Then: "Amanda, get away from it immediately! This is a piece of sensitive and very expensive lab equipment!" Her face went white, when she saw that I knew what I was doing. "Alu repeats in C. Elegans? You are trying to figure out what these particular ones do, so you used a viral vector to insert human Alusequences into C. Elegans! How clever!" As I said this, I stepped back. As Sanaa saw how young I was, her face also showed a considerable amount of confusion and surprise. "So, is she working in this lab or not? How did she get in here? She told me that her name was Diane."

"Diane, huh?"

As the two scientists were talking, I turned my head to face whoever was speaking.

"So, how does she know that I was studying Alu sequences? She could only have known if she ran a search using the sequence. There is no way a twelve year old knows how to do that." Sanaa seemed to still be in a state of confusion.

I simply read what the genome sequencer had spit out. She was right; I didn't search for homologous sequences on the Internet. I should have, to seem more like a normal human.

"I don't know. She was taken to a local hospital, having survived two suicide attempts. The first one was electrocution. The device used as the source of electricity was never found. The second attempt was suicide by poison. Both should have killed her in an instant, however, here she is, analyzing the output from a genome sequencer, like nothing ever happened."

So they knew.

"She was transferred so you could study how she survived? Have you tried locating her parents yet?"

"There were no missing children reported anywhere near Chicago, who match her description. We don't even know her real name"

Sanaa decided to calmly ask me a question, as I turned to look at her once more, in a state of extreme panic. "How did you get here? What's your real name? How do you know so much about the sequencers?"

"It's useless. She won't tell you the truth."

I should have stuck to my old story.

I replied, "My real name is Diane. I got here by walking down the hallway, after your "guard" abandoned his post. It didn't take much to figure out what I was looking at on the genome sequencer. I simply switched the display to show the nucleotide sequence instead of the colorful lines, and it spelled out an Alu sequence for me, and then a gene that could only have belonged to a nematode. I didn't know that it was from C. Elegans, but since the run was labeled "C. Elegans" I thought that this was the name of the worm you were studying." Both Marie and Sanaa seemed to be listening to what I had to say, so I also asked them why the sequencer displayed lines instead of the sequence at first. They didn't say anything for a while.

Fifteen minutes later, I found myself in the room I was in earlier, while Dr. Sylvester, Sanaa, and the others were talking outside the door, probably debating what to do next. As the long conversation outside went on, I noted that the backpack was gone. From the conversation, I realized that it was 6 A.M. on a Tuesday morning, and the boy must have left for school. I really enjoyed hearing the confused voices outside the door; however, I definitely needed to find a way out of here. If the people outside knew about my suicide attempts, then it couldn't be long before I would be returned to Area 51.

After what seemed like an hour an hour of heated debate outside the door, Sanaa entered the room. She pulled up a chair to the bed I was sitting on the edge of and pulled out the little table they use to put food or medicine for the sick people to be able to reach it. They probably thought that I would trust her more if she would talk to me. She was no longer wearing her fancy lab coat. She was wearing a pink – terribly bright pink – blouse, with an open long sleeved purple semi – transparent shirt on top of the blouse, and black jeans. I thought that she should be freezing to death right now, because the air conditioner was running full strength. I had zipped up my gray sweatshirt and wished that they hadn't confiscated my coat. They were probably trying to locate something that would identify me. They will probably fail, but for all I knew they could even have connections to Area 51. Sanaa produced a lined piece of paper with neat, but still hastily (judging by the spaces between the words) scrawled notes. I uncrossed my arms, slouched, and looked Sanaa in the face, attempting to assume the pose of a nonviolent, cooperative teenager, but then I had to look back down at the little table with the paper. It was light blue. Never in my life have I seen a blue lined piece of paper that hasn't been ripped out from a notepad by a nerdy scientist.

I looked back at Sanaa, as she asked me, "Where do you live?" "Nowhere for now. I am homeless". Sanaa wrote something on the piece of paper. I could tell she wasn't experienced at this, as she crossed her writing out and wrote something of the same length a few lines below. "Why are you homeless?" Some questions could remain unanswered. "I ran away from my parents". I found myself looking sideways, with my arms folded on my knees, and quickly resumed my previous position. Sanaa didn't notice and continued with the interrogation, writing down key points on the piece of paper. "Have you ever been in a lab before?" "Once, on a school field trip." "What school do you go to?" "I used to go to Hailston High, but as I said, I ran away"

I lied. She asked me a bunch of similar questions, including why I can read the output from genome sequencers, to which I answered, "I guessed."

When she finished, Sanaa picked up the extensively written on piece of paper and left the room. The guard locked the room and I stayed in the room for an indefinite, but seemingly long, period of time. Finally I heard the room being unlocked and Erwin walked in, dropped his backpack next to the desk, and sat down on the other bed. "You're still here? I thought they have gotten your genome sequence or whatever, and handed you off to somewhere else."

"No, not yet."

"We haven't officially met yet, and since you're still here, I at least deserve to know the name of the person in my nightmare. My own name is Erwin Sylvester. What is yours?"

"My name is Amanda." I had suspicions about him, so I decided to continue the mystery around what my name was, going. My suspicions were confirmed by what he said next.

"You are looking away and both your legs and arms are crossed. This is a sign that you are hiding something. What is your real name?"

I knew he wasn't a normal kid himself.

"Amanda."

"I won't tell anyone," Erwin said in a hushed tone. "You can trust me."

For some reason I had a feeling I could, even though Erwin seemed even more mysterious than the lab we were in.

"Diane."

Pause.

"Diane Okazaki."

Erwin laughed. "And I thought my name was weird."

I probably looked annoyed at what he said, because Erwin commented, "What are you going to do, stab me with a replication fork?"

"A replication fork?"

"Don't play dumb." Marie walked into the room. "You even know how to operate a genome sequencer. Don't tell me you don't know what a replication fork is!"

Erwin smiled. "A genome sequencer, huh? It would be even funnier if you could sequence genomes, Amanda." I felt a chill running down my spine. I felt I couldn't completely be sure the guy didn't know where I was from, and what I was accidentally reprogrammed to be able to do. At least he called me Amanda.

Marie turned to Erwin. "Is that your way of flirting with girls? No wonder you didn't have a date to the senior prom!"

I hoped that was all it was.

Erwin continued talking.

"I heard that you read what the genome sequencer spit out and you already knew what they were studying in Lab A103. Is that true?"

"Erwin, this is not your business. Come on, Amanda D. Watson. We're going somewhere else.

"Amanda D. Watson? You're –" Erwin stopped himself from saying anything else.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Somewhere where we can talk to you … more efficiently."

I didn't like that. I heard somewhere that to "talk efficiently" meant to interrogate someone violently, and Marie had a stern look on her face. I didn't want to be interrogated violently. I grabbed Erwin by the sleeve of his shirt and I started yelling, "I don't want to talk more efficiently! I don't want to talk more efficiently! I speak efficiently enough as it is!" Marie tried to pull me away from Erwin and Erwin tried to pull the sleeve of his shirt away from me, but I refused to ease my grip on what might have been my only chance to avoid the interrogation.

"Amanda, you need to come with me to the other room. Let go of his shirt and follow me to the other room." Marie sounded pissed off.

"I don't want to talk efficiently!" My hand twitched as I angrily said this and Erwin ran to the back of the room, as Marie dragged me out of the room and down the hallway.

I was sat down behind a desk, and Marie sat at the other end. She took a thick gray folder out of the briefcase that was already sitting on top of the desk, opened it up somewhere to the middle, and then looked up from the papers in the folder, at my face, with a cold stare that made me flinch. I was never in my life violently interrogated, I couldn't defend myself as the people in this building would throw me out or even kill me (if they would resort to such measures as violent interrogation), and I was horror-stricken by what I remembered about violent interrogation from what I was taught by Area 51.

I decided to do what I was taught. Marie began her speech, in a strict and somewhat mean tone.

"As you probably already figured out, you are here because of an unusual set of circumstances relating to your prior suicide attempts, as reported by the hospitals in which you were a patient, and extensive scientific knowledge, as reported by two of the people working at this building. How did you survive these suicide attempts, and under which circumstances did you acquire such a deep understanding of the scientific concepts you have demonstrated the knowledge of?"

I decided to play dumb. "Huh?"

"I know you understand what I'm saying as well as the implications of what I'm saying. Answer the question."

"Look, I am not taking any drugs or anything, I just felt a little depressed since I ran away and I probably won't see my family again. My parents would beat me."

An angry vein pulsed on Marie's forehead. She calmly said, "If you don't answer the questions, the liquid from this syringe will be injected into your arm, and you will feel the worst pain ever, starting at your arm. Once it hits your brain, you will feel disoriented, extremely nauseous, and five minutes later, you will wish you were dead all over again."

Fear got the best of me. I couldn't help but burst out crying. "Why are you doing this to me? *Sob* Why can't I just be left alone? *Sob* Alone? Alone, alone, alone…."

Marie seemed somewhat discombobulated by my response, but then she picked up the syringe again, and emptied its contents into my arm. I felt a sharp pain traveling slowly up my arm, with a sting worse than that of a thousand fire ants, and a strong, dull ache left after the initial wave. I stopped crying and focused all the relevant proteins in my body to try to identify the bothersome chemical, which caused the pain. An antibody seemed to be able to bind and disable the molecule, so I told the cells further upstream my arm to make more of the antibody. Soon thereafter the wave of pain came to a halt and then stopped, leaving the affected portion of my arm with light, dull pain.

I sat in the chair, rocking back and forth, and pretending I was still in pain. This couldn't be all that Marie had planned for me, I thought, as Marie told me quietly, "You seem to be able to tolerate pain well, but you only have five minutes until the stuff in the syringe reaches your brain, so you better start talking. By the way, how old are you, really?"

* James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA.