ZERO

“How are his vitals?” he asked, his fingers rapidly typing commands on a tablet, adjusting conditions and reviewing settings. After a moment of silence, he turned to look to his assistant, intently staring at a large monitor. Her soft, young face glowed faintly in the blue-white light of the screen in the dark room, illuminating threads of her hair tied back into a ponytail. her expression was focused and polite, with unbridled curiosity and fascination leaking from behind her professional mask. In stark contrast, his weathered, hardened face, bushy eyebrows and stubbled chin relayed an expression of mild irritation and fatigue, through the permanent filter of bitterness acquired from years of life. He raked his hand through his loosely combed black hair and opened up the boy’s profile on his tablet.

On the screen in front of them, curled in a fetal position and floating in murky liquid, was a naked, tranquilized adolescent male.

There was a small metal device embedded in his wrist with wires and thin acrylic tubes and cables snaking up his arm and into the ceiling of his glass prison, with the number 0023 tattooed on his right calf.

Asleep in his test tube, his heartbeat, breathing, brain activity and eye-movement constantly being tracked and monitored.

He was an experiment in a test tube, not a human. A science experiment.

“Uhm, yes, his vitals are…”

“I already checked.” He interrupted quietly.

The ambience of the room filled the space between their words.

“How’s the other?” an official questioned from behind them, taking notes on his tablet.

“She’s stable. Jared’s team is watching her.” Coal muttered, distracted with his transparent glass tablet, glowing faintly.

After another minute he set down the tablet and folded his hands behind his back, standing still in the dark ambience of the room as the lab systems worked silently in the background.

They stood in silence, watching the timer tick down. Around two minutes to go.

“Dr. Coal, which one do you think will survive?” she said, barely above a whisper, in the broken way your voice sounds when you’ve not spoken for a while.

The scientist sighed and leaned back against a chair. He gestured towards a secretary and ordered a cup of coffee from the silent room of well-dressed observers sitting in steel chairs behind them in the dark. Their faces were blank and white and shadowed.

Coal studied the boy’s face.

“You know I don’t know the answer to that, Lauren.” He’d been with the program for fourteen brutal years and still hadn’t grown used to the feeling of uncertainty that always preceded deployment.

“One minute until deployment,” A subhuman voice crackled through an intercom. The ambience of the room was pierced by whispers in the shade, machines and systems running in the background. The dark metal of the room matched its inhabitants; dark, metal observers. Scientists began arguing in the room behind them in muffled shouts, running final preparation procedures. The bustle of scientists swarming around the glass cylinder on the screen evacuated the room that the pod sat in, suspended by hydraulics and wires. With a deafening boom, a blinding beam of light split the shadowy air of the room in half in the flickering image on the monitor, illuminating the watcher’s faces as the door slowly opened above the pod.

“Coal?” Lauren said.

“Yes?” His tired eyes glanced over at her young ones- pupils wide and suddenly filled with fear

The mentor and his apprentice suddenly were human again. They were afraid.

“Thirty seconds, twenty-nine,…” the voice on the intercom so marred by static it was barely human.

The two silhouettes’ fingers touched in the shadows.

The countdown crackled in the intercom, echoing in the darkness as the scientists quieted, watching in tense anticipation. They had begun their final experiment.

Everything hung in the balance this time.

Dr. Coal and Lauren’s fingertips found eachother in the dark.

They clasped hands tightly as they watched the monitor in silence.