As Humanely as Possible

The first stages of the trials were carried out covertly in ethics classes, debate forums, and social media accounts across the eastern half of the United States. The director and head of the trials, Doctor Ventura, considered this quite ironic in a way that would have made his bitchy crone of an English professor roll her glassy worm-ridden orbs that had once been her eyes. The stickler being that there was no irony, especially not any dramatic kind.

All he was doing was keeping secrets. Secrets that would have buried him and anyone associated with the project. And wasn’t that ironic, if only a little?

It was much easier to pretend during the first stage that the trials were hypothetical, some nebulous thing they had to do in the future that probably wouldn’t need to be done at all. No doubt the labcoats at the World Health Organization were already near a deterrent to the worst discovery on Earth. A very appetizing way of looking at the situation, yet the containment cells being constructed off the coast of Florida weren’t hypothetical, but that was just another thing to complain or ruminate on with anyone else that was in the know on the project and working to get candidates for the trials.

Isn’t this crazy?

Are we doing the right thing?

Is there any other option?

Variations of these questions were asked thousands of times between the staff (those few with clearance, at least) based in Doctor Ventura’s research laboratory. Ventura, with help from the CIA, had wired his entire building with microphones and listened to each of these conversations while he worked. He understood their skepticism; their need to be in on whatever was happening. But they couldn’t have known.

Nobody expected the director to be there for the in-person presentation. But he was, along with liaisons from various branches of the government. Ventura’s staff had assumed he would be as cold as possible throughout the project, only showing up to something if it was required of him. Yet he was there early that morning, shaking hands with dozens of people he’d come to learn about secondhand while he worked on the project. It annoyed the heads of the military as much as it impressed them: They’d already cut the right cords in their hearts and minds to force themselves to order what needed to be done and they doubted a bleeding-heart doctor could do the same.

The presentation was held in the largest of University of Central Florida’s auditoriums. Only a quarter of the candidates were students at the university. Most had been picked up via online application or advertisements posted around various community colleges. Some wore basketball shorts and plain white tees, some came in their best business casual. A few had struck up conversations with like-minded people, and by the time the director walked up to the podium, many were leaning or turning in their cushioned seats to ask others what they thought was happening. A low, anticipatory buzz could be heard throughout the auditorium before the director cleared his throat.

“Thank you for coming,” Ventura said into the microphone. He was a short, round man with a polo shirt and khakis. The candidates sitting up close could see the bags under his eyes.

“Before we begin, I’m going to give you the only warning that you will hear from me or anyone else to do with this project. In a few minutes, we will hand out Non-Disclosure Agreements. After you have signed, I’ll give you some information on the project, and then you will sign thicker Non-Disclosure Agreements. We will continue like this until we’re finished at the end of the day.

“My warning is this: If you want to leave with no strings attached, do it now. You will have opportunities to leave after this, but after you’ve signed the first agreement you will be forever tied to the global and government institutions taking part in this project. Some of my partners would rather not give you that much of a warning, but I’m giving it anyway.

“If you want out, this is your last chance.”

Out of the two thousand and five hundred occupied seats, only two hundred became vacant after the director’s warning. The rest signed the agreements, some very eagerly. Ventura frowned, took a deep breath, and continued. The lights in the auditorium dimmed as a presentation was projected onto a screen behind the director. Most of the candidates could tell it was a hastily thrown together slideshow as most of the slides were plain bullet points on white backgrounds.

“Last week, something landed two miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Two hours later, a yacht floated towards the beaches near the Kennedy Space Center, riding the waves without any apparent control from anyone on board. Members of Search and Rescue were dispatched to investigate. When the SAR team didn’t report back, another team from the Coast Guard was dispatched with HAZMAT precautions taken.”

That wasn’t the entire story, but the candidates didn’t need to know the entire story. Not for the sake of secrecy, but brevity. They’d find out soon enough what was so alarming without needing to hear of the dozen people who happened to be within screaming distance of the yacht. They were about to hear the screams themselves.

“The HAZMAT team all wore chest-mounted body cameras. I’m about to play a small clip of audio from the crew’s initial approach of the yacht. After it’s over, you will sign another Non-Disclosure Agreement and we will continue.”

A few candidates left. Most stayed, at least until the audio was played.

Throughout the audio there is a constant sound of waves lapping against boats, men and women shouting orders and confirmation of those orders, and a constant high-pitched sound that most listeners of the audio assume, at first, are some sort of alarm going off either on the yacht or the HAZMAT crew’s boat.

When the audio finished playing, around five hundred of the twenty-five hundred seats still had occupants. That is due to most listeners realizing that the high pitched alarm-like noise that could almost be ignored wasn’t an alarm at all, but a constant, screaming chorus of agony. The people screaming weren’t just doing so at the top of their lungs, but as loud and as fiercely as they possibly could and to the very limit of their lung and throat capacities. When that had been exhausted, they took in air as sharply and violently as if it were its own kind of scream. After they had, the process repeated.

You could hear their vocal chords ripping apart from the effort.

“I hope all of you understand,” Ventura told those that remained seated, his voice echoing across the mostly empty auditorium. “That what we are dealing with is of the utmost importance and secrecy. The next round of papers will sign away any chance of you repeating this story to the general public under pain of imprisonment for the near future. This is both a plea and a promise before we show you the video and divide you up for group interviews.”

The director stressed, under many different terms, that the students that remained would be needed for the next step of the operation. In what was already a day for half-truths, this was the one moment of sincerity that the director’s colleagues saw in the man.

When he was done, two hundred remained and signed the last level of non-disclosure agreements. After they’d signed, they were shown the video.

It was from the point of view of a small camera attached to a suit and hung against a woman’s chest. She was standing near the bow of the HAZMAT boat, with nothing but meandering purple ripples in the ocean between her and the yacht. The screaming is still prominent, but the screaming has taken enough of a toll on the victims in the yacht. They can barely gargle blood, vomit, and bits of their insides through their throats.

“This is fucked up,” a man off camera whispered. The horrible, prolonged screams got louder and clearer as the HAZMAT response boat approached.

“No shit,” said the woman behind the camera. She would occasionally rub her hands along bow’s safety rails with a thickly gloved hand covered in yellow plastic.

The yacht was small at about sixty feet from bow to stern. There was a main body, a deck where the steering and controls were seated, and a small lounge area on top. Yellow and green paint wrapped around the hull in vine-like patterns. There was nobody on the front-facing areas of the yacht, but as the response boat made a wide turn to approach it from the rear, they finally saw who was screaming.

Eight people, four of the original boat’s crew and four of the initial Coast Guard crew, were on the stern platform of the yacht, writhing as they screamed. It’s hard to make out on the video at first, but they all have their eyes squeezed shut and arms held tight across their chests in what would have been a complete fetal body lockup if not for their legs kicking wildly, digging their feet into the floor of the yacht and scraping as if to get a grip on the carpet.

There’s commotion behind the camerawoman as she grips the bow’s rails, her arms trembling. Voices from behind the camera are extremely hard to hear and require subtitles on the video:

“I’m not getting any closer.”

“Me neither.”

“Yes, you will. We need to help them, it’s what we signed up for.”

“Sir, all due respect, I didn’t sign up to kill myself. Who knows if whatever is affecting them can get through our filters? We might already be infected!”

“But we can’t just leave them there!”

“Fine, we’ll draw straws.”

“There’s no time to draw straws, look at them! A few of them are slamming their feet into the boat with broken ankles!”

“I’ll do it!” Someone yells behind the camera, loud enough not to need subtitles. “For Christ’s sake, I’ll fucking do it alone then!”

The camerawoman watches the man, the acting captain of the unit, jump from the stern of the HAZMAT boat onto the yacht. Everyone holds their breath (both on camera and in the auditorium audience) while the captain takes a few tentative steps onboard.

“I’m okay,” he yells back to his crew. “I’m okay. No tears in my suit.”

The captain checks the passengers and confirms that there are two Coast Guard members missing. They were never found, though after Doctor Ventura skips forward in the footage, it isn’t hard to guess what happened to them.

One civilian is still on the yacht while the others have been gagged, restrained, then laid on the stern of the HAZMAT team’s boat. The director has muted the audio, to the thanks of everyone in the auditorium, but they all clearly see the last person on the yacht fall into the ocean after a rogue wave shakes the boat. In the few seconds one can see the body in the water, it thrashes around violently, arms and legs lapping the ocean water into a froth.

Suddenly, they stop. They don’t move, long enough for the water to calm. Very slowly, the person blows all of the air out of their lungs and swims deeper into the sea.

The last thing that the footage shows is the captain unplugging the respirator from his HAZMAT suit to dive into the ocean to save the civilian. As soon as he switches the respirator to allow open air into the suit, he freezes, then drops to the floor of his boat, convulsing, writhing, and screaming.

The video ends.

Ventura, looking very pale, walks back up to the podium. He looks at his notes, briefly, then sighs and shoves them into his pocket.

“We don’t know what this is,” he told the stunned interviewees. “Everything that could be tested within thirty feet of the yacht, and the initial Coast Guard team’s boat, has been tested. There is nothing. No viruses, no bacteria cells, no medium of infection. Yet it will transmit through open air, and anyone infected will lose control of their bodies instantaneously.

“To put it bluntly, we need your manpower. Your help, so to speak, because we need to study this and…”

The director’s hand gripped the microphone extending from the podium.

“We have found only one way of examining what this could even be, and before I go any further, we’re going to split into group interviews to determine who is willing and able to move forward in this project.”

***

“Human experiments,” one of the interviewees said, his teeth chattering very softly. “You need help performing human experiments.”

Doctor Ventura, who had volunteered to help conduct one set of the interviews, nodded. He was in a dimly lit campus classroom with five interviewees, all sitting in a circle like they were each going to give a fun fact about themselves before starting a group project. The interviewee that had spoken up was one of the few UCF students left and the only person younger than thirty in the room. He wore a topknot, plaid shirt, and designer jeans, all of which shook as he shivered slightly.

The room was cold, in both the physical and aesthetic sense. The director had turned down the thermostat and the room, meant to hold upwards of fifty students, was only occupied by nine people. Three of those people were armed guards holding automatic rifles. That hadn’t been the director’s idea, rather the Department of Defense’s. The director had asked the head of the D.O.D. to be in attendance at this first round of interviews, but he’d never replied.

“Sir?” The student asked. “Are you allowed to say what happened to the people on the video?”

The director was focusing on keeping his own shivers from erupting all over his body. The effort had become sort of a mental exercise to keep his body under control after which, hopefully, his mind would follow suit.

He wasn’t convinced.

Not of the trials, not of his own actions, and absolutely not what he’d ordered all of his staff to do.

He didn’t really want to be convinced either. Maybe if these candidates said the right things, put up some sort of fight, this whole thing might be able to be called off.

“The infected died within fourty-eight hours of recovery,” the director said, pressing his fingernails into the palm of his hand until the pain had brought him back to the present. “They each died of brain aneurysms in the order they were presumed to be infected, starting with the yacht-goers, then the initial response team, then finally the captain.”

The lady next to the student, an overweight librarian with purple highlights and billowy black clothes, raised her hand. The director almost laughed to her face from the misplaced politeness but instead nodded for her to speak.

“Why do you need us?” She asked. “Why are we even here?”

The other interviewee, a bald construction worker, nodded in agreement.

Ventura’s hopes that they could at least have a few minutes to go over banal questions about the deceased were broken. The head of the DOD would have loved this group, eager to get things started and out of the way.

“We need manpower,” said the director, some of the stiffness and professionalism deflating out of his voice and posture. “And the current administration doesn’t want anyone already in the government system. ‘Covered in red tape,’ as the lady in charge of the Judicial department put it. I agreed. This project is large enough in scale that taking the amount of medical and law enforcement professionals we would need out of service would be unfeasible. We need volunteers to help us, and that’s how we found you.”

“What do we get in return?” The construction worker asked. The librarian shot him a look that he either didn’t notice or completely ignored.

“An up-front payment of ten thousand dollars,” said the director. Each of the interviewees’ eyes went wide. The student raised his eyebrows and whistled.

“That’s not even the best part, either,” continued the director. A bit of his soul left his body as his brain took over the pre-established selling points that it had taken weeks of precious time to iron out with the other department heads.

Free insurance, of every kind, for life. The government couldn’t give you the lottery, not from the taxpayer’s hard earned dollars, but they could give you the next best thing: Security in life that only the mega-rich or mega-influential could afford. This also came from the taxpayer’s dollars but much easier to layer and camouflage than a blank check.

“To do what?” The librarian asked again, “what will we actually be doing!?”

“That question has two answers,” said the director, “the first of which is this: Due to the nature of the infection, we’ve had to build an offshore hospital that needs staffing with specially trained workers, from your average registered nurse or even janitor.”

“Seems like an awful lot of caution over something with a small infection area,” the ex-military man said.

“You’re right,” DoctorVentura said, “if the disease was as simple as what I’ve described so far, none of this-” he waved to the empty classroom and guards with rifles, “would be necessary. But it is, because there’s one last aspect to the disease.”

The last piece of information was very intently given this late into the interview and why there were teams of guards nearby with tasers and restraining equipment.

The interviewees sat quietly while he explained that, no matter what was done to the bodies of the infected, any piece of them was a sort of radiated matter that infected anyone that approached a twelve foot radius. Even the smallest piece of skin, in the middle of a sterile room, would kill anyone that got close to it. Yet even after another deluge of tests and experiments, nothing showed up on any sort of reading. No waves, no cells, not even a change in the infected’s body during x-ray and MRI scans. In the weeks it had taken the off-shore facility to be built, thirty more people had died testing the limits of this unknown phenomenon. A few had been close friends of Ventura, who himself was just the presiding doctor at the nearest hospital that happened to have enough experience and renown with local officials to be slapped with the title of “director” and tasked by every major power in the world to figure out what was happening. In all that time, they had only loosely begun to put an MO on this invisible pathogen.

“Only two people have shown any difference with their infection.” The director took two pictures out of his coat pocket and put them on the table. A dead body was on each, one of a very old man and the other of a very young girl. “One was a senile man with Alzheimer’s, the other a little girl with Down Syndrome. The old man had signed a release form for emergency tests while the… The girl had snuck away from her room and wandered into a surgery suite that had been left open by staff.”

The interviewees all stared at him. Their voices screamed inside of the doctor’s head, objections and shouts of rage that he would have deserved. None of them did any of that, what he had expected, no, wanted. Instead they all looked down to the pictures on the table then back at the doctor.

“What happened?” The librarian asked.

“They both died of cerebral hemorrhages. The Alzheimer’s patient only muttered and talked to himself after exposure, all the way until his death. The little girl didn’t show any symptoms until she collapsed dead in an isolation unit.”

“That’s who you’re going to be testing on,” the librarian said, breathless.

The room exploded with angry questions, rebukes, and insults. Or at least, the director wished it would. Instead each of the interviewees simply looked at their feet then to the pictures of frail, white-haired bodies.

“There’s more of this, whatever’s doing this, isn’t there?” the student asked.

“Yes,” said the director. “We were unable to track how many, but new areas of infection are being found all over the western seaboard. By now the states near it have been called into a state of emergency, and as far as Homeland Security is concerned, the water itself may as well be poisonous. And it might be, for all we know.”

“Just say it,” said the construction worker. “Say what you need volunteers for, for God’s sake. Hell, were we all picked for a reason? Did you fuckers have a ‘file’ on me and saw that I have a little girl-”

“You were all picked at random,” the director said, the half-truth rolling around in his brain, making him stab his fingernails into his palms again to keep his emotions controlled. “Given the ethical nature of what we have to do, and I do stress, have to do, we need people open to the idea. I assure you, if we had any other option, we would take it. I promise you that we are trying- I am trying to do this as humanely as possible. Whatever will have to be done will be done swiftly and with care.”

“Why can’t you get death row inmates?” The student asked. “They do that in books and movies all the time, and I know that’s not real life, but it’s a good idea.”

Ventura pinched himself with his fingernails again, only this time it was to keep the most sardonic and mean-spirited smile he would ever give from coming out onto his face.

He, in fact, had fought for the use of death-row inmates from across the globe. The first issue with this, as his contacts in the UN had said, was that the standard for “death row” was not standard at all across the globe. If they went that route, then at least half of their subjects would be political prisoners or innocent scapegoats. The second issue, which the director hadn’t even believed at first, was that death row inmates in “Western” civilization had more rights to live than the average person in the eyes of the judicial system.

“When it comes to people with red tape,” the director summarized, “there’s nobody more wrapped in the stuff than those in the legal system.”

“You can’t…” The librarian hesitated. “You can’t test on animals? Monkeys?”
“The pathogen only affects humans,” said Ventura, a little impressed that this group had raised the question. “No mammals that were exposed, besides humans, show any signs at all.”

“And what about when you run out of old fucks and retards?” The construction worker asked. The librarian shot him another look but said nothing after seeing a tear come out of his eye. “Because that’s all my daughter is at this point, right? Just human meat that happened to be dealt a shitty hand?”

“No,” the director wiped away a tear of his own. Yet he still wanted to laugh, to call them all out, especially himself, for being the worthless fucking idiots they were. “They will never be human meat and they will be remembered for their sacrifices, just not until we can be sure there will be people to remember them.”

The interviewees nodded. It was clear they didn’t need further convincing. The first to sign was the librarian, and the director almost flushed the entire plan (and most likely all of humanity) by asking her a question just as she grabbed the pen. He couldn’t help himself.

“What convinced you?”

The librarian sighed, blew her nose, and said: “Well, if we learned so much about science and medicine from horrible human experiments, isn’t this just the next step? We’re going to sacrifice others for the sake of humanity, but at least they won’t be aware of it like we are, right? At least we’re not as bad as those that came before… Right?”

“Right. Exactly right.”

He gave the librarian a small, reassuring grip and looked to the entire room like the exhausted man that he was. Doctor Ventura had been convinced at last that the candidates that had gotten this far had no problem with “asking” others to do what needed to be done. They were just like him, only less qualified to run tests.

Reports from the other interviews told him the same thing. Nobody had questioned the truth that he’d presented, that there were some with resistance to the disease.

Out in the hall, armed guards incapacitated, then drugged every one the interviewees.

***

The librarian, who would only ever be known as “the librarian” in the eyes of Doctor Ventura, became aware.

She felt herself take a few steps across a wet lawn with sounds of playing children and pleasant conversation just behind her. Ahead of her was a white picket fence one second, then a concrete barrier the next, and then finally a shoddy wooden fence covered in graffiti. The sky was never a consistent color, changing in waves from blue, to orange, and then to purple.

She realized she was dreaming and screamed. Her senses and the dream both sharpened as she became temporarily lucid, seeing the dream for what it was. Another wave of dream washed over her, dulling and muddying her senses until she was a little girl crawling across an orange carpet towards what was first a couch, then a door, and then finally the corpse of a deer. She became lucid again, breaking out of the cocoon that was her nightmare, screaming as the deer rose onto cloved hind legs and used arms with long black fur to pull her into a hug she couldn’t resist.

Then she was ten years old, being served ice cream at a restaurant by her dead grandmother. Grandma looked just as she had at the wake and served ice cream the same color as the dead, powdered skin around her closed eyes. This time, in the wave of lucidity, the librarian couldn’t even scream. She could only hold herself tight, squeezing her eyes shut until the reason why they were being squeezed shut in the first place was a distant and unrecognizable memory.

If you sped up her experience by hundreds of times, the dull roar that surrounded her would have coalesced into these words:

“The infection has taken hold. Begin the first round of tests.”

Credit: Chance Kimber

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