Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
30) Tick Tock
So I am beginning to think maybe they forgot about me. I have spent the last three days alone. It has not been a total waste, as it’s helped me turn up the dirt and find a couple of potentially valuable skills. I seem to have acquired an acutely powerful sense of time. I noticed it after the third or fourth time I thought to myself it, must be 2:30, or, I bet its 6:26, and it was. I tried testing it, over long periods and short. My internal clock is spot on. The testing led me to a highly interesting discovery. I was planning to go twenty hours with the clock covered. I slept for 8 hours, then exercised for 26 minutes. Then I spent an hour eating breakfast and reading through the news they suddenly made available to me. It happened after I ate.
I knew I had just over ten hours before I could look at the clock again. I sat down on the bed and folded my legs, planning to do some meditation. I fell into my groove, but it wasn’t the same as it used to be. My sense of time was still with me. I sighed internally thinking, this might turn out to be a serious problem. Thinking let’s speed this up a bit. I felt a rush, a feeling of acceleration, and I knew that an hour had gone by. I checked the clock, and sure enough, it had worked. I tried again, this time I thought, I need to kill twenty minutes, a tiny bit of focus, and the feeling of acceleration again. It worked. Over the course of the next few hours I found I could slow my relative time as well. I know it is simply my perception of time that has altered, that I am not controlling time per se, but goddamn, I can control how I move through it! After several attempts, I realized that I could even for a just a moment seem to stop time altogether. Try me out in the ballistics chamber now, assholes.
The other trick is a bit more pedestrian, but seems a bit useful in re my current situation. When I shut off the lights in my room (cell, let’s not get too domestic), I can see. Not only is my night vision like a cat’s, but I am picking up spectra that lay outside the normal range of human sight. For example, I can see the electric behind the walls. The faint glowing lines I first noticed in the test chamber were energy cables in the fucking walls. I didn’t pick up on what was going on, for obvious reasons. With time and a little effort, I find I can push over to Infra red, turning the world into a blue smudge highlighted by radiant blobs surrounding sources of heat. I try for a while to force some sort of x-ray action, but it doesn’t happen. Apparently I cannot emit radiation, just pick up on it. Sort of a bummer, but sort of reassuring at the same time. The idea of having enough decayed isotopes inside me to actually emit x-rays would’ve been a bit disconcerting.
The question is, is this something they expected from me? Or is this a secret side effect of the process they put me through? Does it give me an edge as far as escape is concerned? I have so many questions for my friend the Head Usher. Taking stock of my new body and mind leaves me with few answers as to what exactly I have been developed for. I can survive vacuum, I can bend my sense of time, I heal from wounds in an hour. I am apparently more or less unbreakable. I have the eyes of a cat, and the electric sensitivity of a great white shark. I am a tool for something, but what? Attacking spaceships from the outside? Inspecting black holes? Farming the fucking moon? My questions lead me to more questions, which lead me back to my original questions. I am confused, alone and at the mercy of the most mysterious cabal I have ever had the misfortune to cross paths with.
I wonder what Chuck is doing right now.
Next >
