Tan says they intend to give us all some kind of painful disease. He claims he overheard them talking about it when they brought him here. I don't know whether to believe him or not.
"Will it be fatal, do you think?" one of the others asks--Ani, the female next to me. "Will we die?"
"Maybe not. They might be experimenting to find a cure." I say this despite my misgivings about Tan's claim, but of course there's no way to know what they're going to do. They certainly wouldn't tell us if we asked. And even if it's supposed to be a cure, there's no telling if it will actually work. They'd probably only give the cure to half of us, anyway. That's the usual arrangement in these experiments.
I rub my hands up and down my arms, imagining the first twinges of pain. The disease might be growing in me already. How bad will it be? Will the symptoms come soon or will they take months to develop? This is hard, knowing I'll have to wait, the uncertainty.
To distract myself, I press the hand-plate in the front of the cell, next to the door. It pricks my finger, and a moment later the food bowl fills with chow. I quickly sample a piece, but there are no unpleasant surprises here. Sometimes, I've heard, they make changes in the chow during a experiment. But this tastes the same as always. Soon my bowl is empty. I'd like more, but I doubt if I'll get it.
Across the corridor, Tan and the other female have followed my example. Only Ani, in the cell next to mine, is crouched on the floor with her arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth. "They're probably working on a cure," I try to reassure her. "It'll be all right. We don't even know for sure about this disease. It could be something else entirely, another kind of experiment."
Tan, overhearing, casts a hostile look in my direction. You'd think he actually wants to contract some painful disease, just to prove he's right.
Ani ignores both of us. She keeps rocking on the floor. "Don't you want to eat?" I ask her, but she makes no answer. I'd be glad to eat her chow if she didn't want it, but there's no way to get it from one cell to another. Too bad, I'm still hungry.
Just in case, I press my hand on the plate again, but nothing happens, no more chow appears in my bowl.
Across the corridor, Tan has got his prod in his hand now, working it back and forth, and in a moment it's jutting hard and erect. He glances over at me with a nasty grin, to see if I've noticed--a challenge. I decide to ignore him. Ani doesn't look up, but the other female, in the cell next to him, has certainly taken notice. I think I can make out her name on the door: Ida. She presses herself up against the clear partition separating her from Tan and moves her own hips in rhythm with him. Now Tan is ignoring me and everything else.
Of course now my own prod is reacting to the sight of what they're doing. I look over at Ani to see if she's interested, but she's still wallowing in her misery, oblivious to anything else. I think maybe Tan was the lucky one in the assignment of cells.
This experiment doesn't seem to be starting out very well at all.
)
The subjects of a lab experiment endure the physical effects of disease, but the true suffering is psychological ... and not knowing if they will be allowed to live or die.
