Roberts ignored the man.
He grabbed a third slide and slipped it into place.
He fought to keep his hand steady, and it only trembled a little.
He made the adjustments to his controls, and flipped the toggle.
The settings remained intact.
There was no flip back to an earlier position, and there was no spot on his hand.
He felt the weight of the security patrolman's gaze on his shoulders, but he didn't turn.
If they wanted him out, they were going to have to reach him.
He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of admitting he'd screwed up.
If they didn't catch it, what harm could one slightly irregular slide in half a million make?
Finally, unable to endure the strain, he slowly turned his gaze to the window.
The patrolman was gone.
The day finished in a blur.
He worked through his slides, secured his equipment, began the cleansing sequences right on time and sweated bullets through each, expecting bells and whistles and flashing lights, and getting nothing more than the hiss of the inner pod door sliding open, followed by the clinging security of his bio-suit, and, finally, his room.
He knew it was a risk, but after eating, he didn't log on to the main system.
He didn't want to risk the temptation of asking questions.
Had anyone else noticed the anomaly?
Did they know about it?
Were they readying themselves to remove him, even now, or worse yet, to study him?
The calm, glowing walls took on a sinister aspect, and the strictly structured life and world surrounding him felt like some strange kind of prison.
The wait was interminable, but eventually it was time for him to sleep. He lay back on the cot, pulled the blanket up to his chin as always.
His heart raced.
His skin was clammy.
He knew the sensors would pick it up.
Was it fever? Had he managed the impossible, becoming ill, or infected, in a place devoid of illness or infection?
No alarms sounded.
The lights shifted through their color spectrum and the misting sedative tugged his eyelids closed, despite his best effort to keep them open.
Roberts slept.
EXOTECH INTERNAL MEMO 1009-53-1
Subject appears to be near the key.
Mental stability questionable, but motor skills normal.
Sensor readings indicate partial solution.
Initial scan incomplete.
Risk of damage to subject in second scan acceptable.
Sonic pulses, even at reduced control rates, caused reactions in multiple workstation pods, despite shielding.
Subjects cleansed. Recommend commencement of pulse ray construction.
Next scheduled flight to Earth in less than 60 hours.
The pain was immediate and excruciating.
Roberts felt the cold metal table against his naked flesh.
His limbs were secured as before, eyes clipped open, and the two long, slender needles were already in place just forward of his ears.
He felt the numbing, icy touch of whatever they dispensed, but it wasn't enough.
The pain shot through him and despite the danger, and the additional pain, he fought to force a scream through immobile lips.
The walls glowed white.
He heard whispered voices, but, again, could make out no words.
The ringing in his ears, accompanied by a sizzling, chemical hiss each time he strained to move, gave the voices a rhythmic, hypnotic quality.
Like a chant in some foreign tongue.
He wanted to call out to them.
He wanted to beg them for mercy.
The metal bar slid into place just beyond his toes and the balls of his feet.
Roberts' eyes rolled up into his head in panic as the turbine sound returned and the scanner kicked to life.
It wasn't a steady beam this time, but a pulse.
It flashed so brilliantly he felt as if his eyes would boil from the heat of it.
The flashes recurred at a steady rate, like a hideous strobe light.
The bar began its excruciatingly slow ascent of Roberts' body and he shied away.
He couldn't move, but his skin drew back, and up, and every muscle in his body was clenched.
Though he fought against it, perversely, his penis stiffened, stretching up obscenely as the scan made its way slowly upward.
Something was different.
He grasped this thought and clung to it.
Maybe it was important, maybe not, but it was something.
If he sat and watched and waited for that pain to leave his toes and ankles and work its way up to…
What was it?
The pulse?
He tried to blank his mind.
He couldn't close his eyes.
He couldn't look away from the inexorable ascent of the bar, and each time the light pulsed his nerves screamed with pain, blanking thought.
Between those pulses, he fought to think.
There was something he should be seeing, something just out of reach.
The pulse came again, radiating his upper thighs and teasing at the edges of his groin with fiery tendrils of agony.
He held that thought.
Hairs, sticking out at angles, brought the image of the anomaly to his mind.
The pain flashed again, and thought vanished.
When it returned, colored dots swam before his eyes.
He knew he was nearing unconsciousness, but as he slid away, the dots formed patterns, like motes swimming in his eyes.
They whirled into small circles, each with strands of something – tentacles? – trailing from their perimeter.
His skin crawled, though the next pulse had yet to fall.
Something deep inside detached moved slowly from a point directly above his navel.
FLASH and the scan reached that same point.
His thoughts extinguished like the quick flash of a camera, and all was darkness.
EXOTECH INTERNAL MEMO 1009-53-1.b
Subject stabilized, scan complete.
Sonic pulse settings verified as key.
Construction of pulse ray reported in stage four with expected completion in thirty-two hours.
Freighter conversion complete and ready for installation of Pulse Generator.
Test subjects transformation terminated at various points, not to exceed safety parameters.
Final solution imminent.
The walls shifted color, and the stimulant misted the air.
Roberts blinked.
He stared and blinked again to convince himself he had control of his eyelids.
His body was on fire with a burning ache that permeated muscle and nerve endings.
He moved his toes slowly, and then bent one leg.
It hurt, but the pain was bearable.
He slid his legs off the couch and stood.
Everything was as it had been every single day of his time at The Compound.
Roberts forced his aching body through the motions of his daily routine.
Something was horribly wrong, but the central control team didn't appear to be aware of it, and lacking any other form of defense against his world crumbling, he decided to delay their awareness as long as possible.
If he were sick, they would have come for him.
If his synapses fired erratically, they would note this too, eventually.
Everything was monitored.
Everything was clean.
He managed to make it into his bio-suit and into the hall without incident.
Normally he didn't pay much attention to the other pods he passed.
When he'd first arrived, he'd been fascinated, staring into each and trying to imagine what kind of person the other technician was, where they'd come from and where they were going when all of this was just a memory.
Then the novelty faded, and he paid them no more attention than he did the walls, or the floor.
Now he glanced from side to side surreptitiously.
Everything looked much as it had the last time he'd bothered to check until he got within two pods of his own.
He knew they had technicians assigned.
He also knew both should be at their stations.
The work was scheduled on a cycle so that none of them hit the passage at the same time, and the two pods directly before he reached his were on an earlier start schedule.
They were empty.
No lights flashed.
There was no indication that anything was amiss, except for the missing technicians.
Sweat slicked his skin.
The bio-suit was suddenly very tight, warm, and restrictive.
Roberts forced his steps to remain steady, and when he reached his pod, though the desire to be free of the suit was overwhelming, he fought it back.
He stood quietly through the layers of decontamination and moments later stepped free into the workspace.
Inside, he stared.
The electron microscope seemed alien to him, the chair something from a bad dream.
The row upon row of blank slides awaiting his attention gleamed, and he thought of their sharp edges.
He wondered how his blood would look under the microscope, and how long it would take the system to sedate and remove him if he tried to find out.
He wondered where the missing technicians had gone.
Mechanically, Roberts grabbed a slide and began to prep it.
The work took little of his concentration, but there was nothing else to focus it on, so he stared blankly at his hands as he worked and ran through the past few days in his mind.
The screen flashed on and he cringed, nearly dropping the slide in his hand.
The flash of light had triggered memories of the scan.
His skin itched and his bones ached.
He managed to get the slide into place and focused.
He glanced at the chart beside his workspace.
He stared.
Each day when he came in the chart had changed.
He wasn't allowed control over keeping track of his tests because this allowed for error.
The system itself made the shifts, always slight, in the control settings.
Except the settings were the same.
He forced himself to visualize each knob position, as he'd set them the day before.
It was hard to concentrate.
His fingers, while not broken, were stiff and did not want to bend to his will.
The date on the chart was new.
All of the information was as it should be except the first setting.
It was identical to the previous day's setting.
Exactly the same.
Roberts' hand shook, but he didn't hesitate.
If this was a test to see if he would deviate, or become a problem, he was up to the test.
If they were using him in some way for a separate study, he had no doubt he'd be compensated for it.
He flipped the knobs into position and hit the toggle.
The pulse bombarded the slide with its subtle pressures and "tones."
The shift was more immediate than before.
He saw the thing tug itself to the surface of the slide.
It was larger, still, than before.
If it got any larger, it would not be contained on the slide, and all he'd see was a black splotch.
Roberts felt a stabbing pain in his hand.
He glanced down and screamed.
The black mark he'd noticed the day before had grown.
It was a splotch, pressing outward from inside the skin of his hand.
He could clearly make out the outlines of tentacles, reaching down the length of his fingers and groping toward his wrist.
It throbbed, and each throb ground the thing into his bone.
It was too much.
Roberts lurched forward and smacked his hand down hard on the alert button.
If they were going to cleanse him and deport him, fine.
He hoped they would hurry.
He reached out with his free hand to flip the toggle down and stop the pulse.
At that moment the thing burst through his skin.
He whirled and stared in horror as it oozed out of his vein and gripped his arm, tugging itself along, and growing.
In its trail his hand shriveled and sank in upon itself.
The screen had gone dark.
Whatever pulled itself free of the slide had completely blocked the lens.
Gas hissed through nozzles set deep in the walls.
Roberts clawed his way upright and used his one good hand to drag himself toward whatever it was they'd piped in.
He hoped it was a sedative, or a pain killer – some sort of antidote.
He never reached the nozzle.
Whatever sprayed from its tip solidified, like a bubble.
Within that pale surface he saw a familiar swirl, and he screamed again.
His arm no longer existed below the elbow.