THIS

EQUALS

I read about NaNoWriMo in Felicia Day’s twitter feed. This lined up nicely with Sick Jane, the horror novel I’ve been writing to distract myself from my main job – watching progress bars (which has subsumed by secondary job, editing a movie).

My setup, for those interested is: 1 G5 Running After Effects 7 (where my best plugins live), 1 MacBook Pro running AE CS4 (yay!) and an EEEpc that I can type on. When I’m not playing Dungeon Hunter on my iPhone – which I beat handily, transmuting objects that used to aspire to own!

Here’s what I’ve done so far – a ROUGH draft – basically riffing, again – as I watch progress bars. But, 7,000 words ain’t nothing. How much more can I get done in November? That all depends on how slow my computers are…

So, here it is – the prologue…

CHAPTER 1. THE REDACTOR.

Media was viewed. Media was assessed. Media was destroyed. In a small, metal-doored room at the end of one of thirty cinderblock hallways, this was the work that filled his days. When he arrived in the morning, there was a sealed cardboard carton on the left side of his steel desk. Occasionally, it would contain sheets of paper, printed photographs, a VHS tape. More often, he’d get a disk. He’d start the beige computer with a small rounded key, a password, and answers to randomly selected security questions that confirmed his identity. The questions came from the biographical data he’d given when he was hired. His work day began with trips through his memory: stories he would have never strung together on his own. WITH WHOM DID YOU SHARE YOUR FIRST KISS? IN WHAT CITY DID YOUR STRONGEST MEMORY OF SHAME OCCUR? IN WHAT YEAR DID YOU FIRST EXPERIENCE THE LOSS OF SOMEONE CLOSE TO YOU?

Jackie Harvey. Enter.

Boston, Massachusetts. Enter.

1983. Enter.

And then the work would begin. When the contents of the box were tangible, they would be sorted in two. Media determined to be without risk would go into a wire basket, stacked neatly and awaiting review and classification by an unknown colleague in another cinderblock room in another hallway. Media that carried risk was destroyed. He would place it immediately into an industrial paper shredder to the right of his desk. The shredder was locked and he knew that its contents were sent at the end of the day for further destruction: an acid bath, incineration, he was not certain.

Every job has its secret, and the secret to his job was this: there was no penalty for destroying what need not be destroyed. Things left undestroyed, however, were full of the potential to end careers – both his and the careers of those above him. It was rarely the obvious that slipped by. Egregious misdeeds were either exposed by whistleblowers or erased in the field. In the few rare instances that photographic evidence or transcriptions of obvious crimes or criminal errors crossed his desk, he destroyed them immediately. Pictures of blood, reports of bodies, catalogs of burnt vehicles, maps of ruined homes, descriptions of weapons of any sort, recordings of crying bystanders, video of wounded soldiers… these could not be removed quickly enough. But would he notice that one man talking to two others is wearing boots issued only to Iranians? Would half of a seemingly senseless phone call connect to a hand-written note in a manner that exposed a conspiracy? He could not be sure, and so he would destroy them both.

The process for filtering information within the computer was the same: transfer the data from the disk to a folder on the network, destroy the disk, and sort the files, deleting most, saving a few to a folder that transmitted itself to a higher authority and then disappeared. At the end of each day the outbox couldn’t be entirely empty, so he’d leave scraps. There were often photographs of buildings, interior and exterior, without people. While he did not understand their purpose, this evidence of empty architecture was dull and threatless. He transmitted it forward and had yet to be corrected. In transcription, he found that most conversations, even conversations in the center of great danger, were fat at their commencement and conclusion and that all greetings and goodbyes could safely be kept and transmitted. The outbox was filled, but nothing of any consequence filled it.

This day had started badly. He arrived late. It was something that almost never happened. The job was one of regularity, and although the reasons behind advancement here were as hazy as the work itself, it was understood that mechanical adherence to the schedule was as important as the task of sorting. Coffee breaks and lunches were distinct here for the lack of personal information disclosed in conversation: there was no talk of the kids, the hometown, the upcoming reunion. They were distinct also for their clockwork precision. A lunch was twenty-five minutes long. This was enough time to eat a sandwich, engage in small talk, visit the restroom and be logged in at twelve-thirty precisely. There were no cell phones permitted in the building, so no time was taken by personal calls. This was a mercy for him, because he had no one to call. He had very little extra-curricular activity in his life, but this morning he had woken up early to be at the post office when it opened. He needed a money order for an auction he won online the night before: a set of three antique tin soldiers.

The line at the post office surprised him, but he allowed time for it. He was confronted, as he often was on frantic errands, with the weakness of his hand. At birth his right hand was curled and lame. Surgeons had attempted first to make it look normal, then to make it function. Neither attempt was fully successful. He got along with his left hand (he would have been right handed if born with a right hand that could fulfill this tendency), with a labored scrawl and a tendency for dropping things. Waiting for a clerk, he rushed to fill out a packing slip while pushing his notebook and envelope along the counter with the inching progress of the line. He reached the front of the line and was triple-checking the ZIP code when a bell rang and a computer monitor flashed the number of the awaiting clerk. The number was gone before he could gather his things into his left hand and look up to see it.

The woman behind him sighed emphatically. He’d noticed her slip into the line behind him: young and well-appointed – perhaps a first-year attorney, gorgeous and in a hurry, punctuating each minute by slipping her Blackberry into and out of her Fendi purse, tapping out a email, checking her watch.

“I didn’t see the number,” he explained.

“Seven.” Another sigh.

He turned, dropping the envelope and form. He reached out for them with both hands. She noticed his right hand and softened: “I’m sorry. Excuse me.” This was always the way. If she had not noticed she would have remained irritating, a little intimidating, and he would have responded with the same casual impoliteness. Now that she noticed, she was surrendering somewhat. His planned retaliation, an overly harsh “Thank you,” or echoed sigh of frustration, would make him seem, as he often had, the bitter cripple. It was rare that he stood up for himself, for fear that legitimate anger would be perceived as a chip on his shoulder. If he had to contend with rudeness, he liked best that it be with someone he knew or someone at the other end of the phone.

Incidents like these always left him out-of-sorts, his mind reeling with alternate comebacks, ways he could have left the offending party feeling stupid instead of feeling stupid himself. He was in such a state that it took several turns of his car key in the ignition before he noticed his car would not start. He had only twenty minutes to make it to the office. He would be late.

The helplessness of the morning worsened as he flagged down busy strangers to ask for jumper cables. A few kids pulled over to help, but they did not have cables and they did not understand the urgency of his need. The mop-haired boy in a Best Buy work shirt was chatty and amused at the distraction of playing good samaritan. He flagged down cars with a wave, targeting drivers he thought looked responsible. He told a circular story about a series of breakdowns he experienced on the way to a concert, a roundabout explanation of the lesson that he had been helped by strangers, therefore he stopped to help strangers. Eventually the Best Buy clerk succeeding in pulling over a station wagon with cables. It was exactly nine o’clock when they first attempted to start the car.

When they had his car running, he prepared himself to be thirty minutes late. This was not the end of the world. The clerk tapped on his window with a goofy smile: he was proud of himself. “Cut the engine. See if it turns back on. It might be your alternator.” He cut the engine. The car would not start again. They reconnected the cables and jumped the car again, so he could drive it to his mechanic. The young lawyer from the post office line walked by as he was thanking the strangers who stopped to assist him. He nodded out of familiarity before recognizing her as the source of the morning’s queasy shame. She flashed a smile of sympathy and he felt it in his stomach. The back of his neck was hot. His face was flushed.

He left the mechanic at ten-thirty in a rental car. The unregistered car meant he would be delayed at the security gate. He drove the suburban streets at highway speeds. He would chance the ticket. He estimated that he would be sitting at his desk at eleven-fifteen, maybe eleven thirty once he had explained the delay to his supervisor. There would be little time to sort before lunch. He hoped the day’s work was easy, unsubtle. He would make arrangements to stay late.

Things took longer than he expected at the security gate. There was a new guard who did not know him and who mistook his state (emotional, sweating) to be cause for concern. Any hope he had of slipping in subtly was removed. His supervisor was called. He explained his morning to the supervisor, the guard, the head of security. An incident report was filed. He walked down the cinderblock hallway and arrived just in time for lunch. He sat, away from his usual companions, eating a turkey sandwich and scowling. No one asked what was wrong, because no one ever asked what was wrong – the answer might compromise an identity.

He returned from lunch to find a small box waiting in his inbox. He guessed and was correct that it held a single disk. He logged in and inserted the DVD into the tray. It held a half-dozen video files. It was the first relief of the day: he could catch up. He opened the first file and began. It was something new. The footage was of rats – white rats – in what he surmised was a military lab. The sleeves of the hands that placed rats into the plexiglas cages were in sand-colored camouflage. The rats, visually indistinguishable from each other, were in clear cases marked with serial numbers. The footage had corresponding numbers, a cluster of information in superimposed text: batch numbers, date, trial numbers, sample numbers, a lab number. The specificity of this information meant he would be destroying them. Even if the contents were completely benign, these dates and numbers could be cross-referenced and serve as a rosetta stone for decoding the activity of whatever facility the recordings were made in.

The rat footage depicted a repetition of action. The repetition was so consistent that he might have thought he was watching a loop if the serial numbers on the rats did not jump from

to clip. The rats were first treated with an aerosol, sprayed from small cans into the air over the rats’ heads. In each clip, two rats – one at either end of a cage bisected by a removable steel divider – were dosed, inhaled the spray, and were unaffected. In the hour of clips of these sprayings, the most dramatic response from any rat subject was a shudder followed by a rigorous self-cleaning: paws scraping the mist from the rat’s back, rat licking mist from paws with hurried annoyance.

He looked at the timecode on the file. There was half an hour remaining. He was tempted to fast-forward through the material, but he needed something for his outbox. He watched another five minutes of the aerosol treatments. Finally, there was a transition in the angle of the camera. Pixellated digital glitches filled the screen. This was followed by someone fumbling with the camera. It was running and the operator was unaware. There were flashes of cages. A hallway. A storage room with refrigerators, canisters. The camera caught no identifying marks that might betray the place or activity. There were no titles superimposed. He clipped this portion of the footage and uploaded it to the server. It was enough to justify his day, even if he deleted every frame of video that followed.

Soon the superimposed text returned. The rats’ numbers, the date, time, location and trial number were crammed in the four corners of the frame. Again two rats were set at opposing ends of their cage. Again the rats were separated by a steel sheet. Now, instead of an aerosol dispensed by an unprotected hand, a syringe dipped into the cage, held in hands gloved in heavy chemical gloves. The movement of the hands was much more cautious than it had been when dispensing the spray. Were these different hands? Perhaps the compound being given to the rats was more dangerous? One rat was injected. The other rat was left undisturbed.

The timecode jumped ahead. One hour past the injection, the mesh separating the rats was lifted. The rats approached each other, sniffed, then returned to their corners. There was seemingly nothing special in this interaction. The divider was reinserted. This was repeated at two hours, four hours, eight hours, twelve hours, the next day. The rats response did not change. The clip in his computer ended. He deleted it.

He started the second clip. It picked up where the last clip concluded, then jumped to forty-eight hours after the injection of the rat. The divider was lifted. The injected rat approached the control rat. The control rat initially stepped forward, but upon sniffing the air, it retreated, gagging as though gassed. Curious, the injected rat crossed the line of the divide, inspecting its sick cage mate. With each inward breath, the control rat got worse. The gagging became vomiting. Its eyes watered. It convulsed. It was terribly ill. And yet, as soon as the injected rat returned to its corner, the control rat improved.

In his office, he could only laugh. Had the injection made the rat stink? Was this a new tactic? If so, who would our military make stink – us or our enemies? If he were allowed to talk about anything he saw here, he would talk about this forever.

The superimposed text indicated a time lapse. Two hours later the injected rat had the same effect on the control rat. Four hours later it was weaker but pronounced. Eight hours later the control rat could tolerate the injected rat. The next day, both rats had returned to normal.

The timecode jumped ahead a whole week. The rats appeared normal. Gloved hands entered to administer another injection. Again, two days of intermittent tests passed without a perceptible reaction when the divider was lifted. On the second day, the reaction was pronounced. The control rat sniffed the air, pounced on the injected rat and began a rigorous attempt to mate. The injected rat writhed away from the assailant, but could not; the control rat’s desire was too strong. Eventually the injected rat stopped resisting, and was mounted by the control rat for hours. Was this a weapon? The stupid comedy of the experiment made him laugh aloud.

Once again, time jumped ahead in the video. The rats again incrementally returned to normal. A week jumped ahead. The glove hand returned with a syringe. The experimental rat was injected. The divider was lifted. The two rats approached each other tentatively, perhaps wearied by the previous experiments. The timecode jumped forward and ticked off hours as they accrued to days. In the timelapse, he could see the injected rat getting lethargic while the control rat continued to explore the edges of its cage. The injected rat moved once for every time the control moved. It shivered in the corner. It ignored food and water. The second day arrived. The rats were exposed to each other.

This third injection produced a result in the control rat even before the divider wall was lifted. It sniffed at the base of the steel as the lab tech’s hand came into frame and crawled beneath it as soon as there was space. The control rat rushed for the throat of the injected rat and gnawed it, pinning its victim as it stained the white fur of its neck with blood. The injected rat spasmed and writhed with pain, but the attack was wild, powerful, and ultimately irresistible. As it shuddered with the last twitches of life, the control rat chewed through its windpipe and esophagus. When the wound was exhausted – blood and fur but no substance, the control rat rose, mouth and paws wet and dripping, and paused. The rat was woozy, swaying. It teetered over the body of its freshly dead peer, then dove to the belly of the carcass. This proved more fruitful. The rat tore ragged incisions with its teeth and pulled organs from the body cavity. It ate until it could not eat. When it was full, it tore from the body and tossed the pieces over its small body, like a dog rushing to dig a hole.

The timecode jumped ahead. In an hour the victim rat was unrecognizable, a stain of blood and fur. The cage was filthy everywhere with the evidence of its violent death. In two hours, the control rat sharpened its yellow teeth on a leg bone. By the third hour, the control rat had retreated from the dead rat and was pressed into the cleanest corner of the cage, working to comb the mess from the hair on the top of its head.

Another pair of rats. Another cage. Now, the clip commenced at the moment the injection took effect. The control rat recoiled from the first shot. The second shot produced an uncontrollable desire to mate. With the third shot, the injected rat was torn apart. In this second pair, the control rat attacked the injected rat’s face, biting through its skull and tearing through its face as the dying rat frantically retreated. The cage was sprayed with blood. Both rats slipped through the slick of urine on the cage floor. Another pair played, progressing through the series of injections. Jumps in timecode introduced and then dispatched with eighteen more pairs of rats. The responses to the series of injections was consistent. The deaths of the rats were consistently brutal.

The second file reached the end. He deleted it. He felt unsettled. The video came from a large installation. Many people would have know about the test. It did not fit with the media he was usually assigned. If the hands were not so clearly military he might think that the last stage of the experiment, the clear weapon, were unintentional. The effect might be an accidental consequence of an exploration in an entirely different direction. Someone should have destroyed the material. Even if he slated it for destruction, he was sure another copy must exist.

He opened the next file and began to play it. The timecode and scenario were familiar. A cage, superimposed text and numbers, but in this file the subjects of the experiment were dogs. In the first clip, a labrador and a dalmatian barked and jumped in a separated cage. A lab tech wearing a padded suit with thick gloves and a hooded mask injected the labrador with the first shot. Again, breaks in the timecode fast-forwarded the effects of the treatment. In this clip, the agent took only a day and a few hours to take hold. The door separating the dogs opened. The labrador bounded playfully towards the dalmatian. The dalmatian yelped, pawed at its nose and began to retch.

Time reset the two dogs for the second injection and with the open door the dalmatian now leapt onto the back of the labrador, thrusting vigorously. The sight of it might have made him laugh, except that he feared for what the next injection would do to the labrador. He had no love for rats, and while he was concerned over the possible challenges in containing the rat footage, the deaths themselves where abstract – something from a nature documentary. Rat suffering was too small to elicit sympathy. This labrador reminded him of his first dog, and later the dog he had shared with his college girlfriend. It was dopey, seeming to smile.

He did not want to watch this dog die, but he did. The third shot was administered, time passed, the gate opened and the dalmatian attacked. The labrador bayed in a frantic mix of pain and terror, but the dalmatian’s bloodlust overpowered the labradors panicked fight to survive. When the life left the fallen dog, the dalmatian looked up at the humans presiding over the experiment. Its mouth hot with blood, it looked confused. The killing dog looked to the humans with a mournful whine. It cocked its head. A growl bubbled up from the dalmatian and the confusion cleared. The dog tore at the dead labrador. A jump cut in the footage reduced the labrador to gore. Another cut showed the dalmatian returning from its blood lust: whining, crying and inching away from the mess of slime on the floor.

The file now cycled through various injection cycles of various pairs of dogs. This footage played much like the rat footage, except in two cases in which a bull terrier and doberman received the third shot and were forced to kill their attackers – smaller dogs with less instincts for violence. What was in those needles? His curiosity was overwhelming, but he knew his personal laptop was monitored and if he started researching poisons, biological weapons, nanotechnology, it would be a breach of security. He had gotten around the constraint before: researching at a public computer in a coffee shop (and paying cash for his drink), but he knew that this would be like those times. He would find enough information to make his imagination run wild, but not enough to explain what he had seen. There were still secrets in the world beyond the reach of Google.

At the end of the twenty cycles of the experiment run on the dogs, the bull terrier and doberman were brought back. They were not injected, but paired as the injected dogs had been with control dogs. They sat on one side of a divider as the timecode jumped forward by hours. A day into this new variation on the experiment, the control dogs were snarling at their counterparts, sniffing at the seams. Whatever was in the injection was contagious.

The doberman fought desperately against a snarling mutt, but did not succeed. The terrier felled the rottweiler it had been paired against. The lab techs were now dressed in biohazard gear, bite-proof pads strapped over the bunched material. They entered the terrier’s cage and put it down with a head shot from a 9mm pistol. The last few seconds of the file showed the lab being purged with flame. More lab techs (or were they soldiers?) in biohazard gear dragged the bodies of dogs from their cages. Others blasted empty cages with a flamethrower. The light overwhelmed the chip in the video camera, reducing the scene to a snow of white. The file stopped playing. He deleted it.

Now there were chimpanzees in the cages and he grew more uncomfortable. Even in the first stage of the experiment, their primate faces expressed human shame when the injection caused the control chimp to spurn the injected subject for its smell. When the aphrodisiac injection was given what had been cartoonish animal hijinks in lower forms looked suddenly like rape. During the final stage, he found himself turning away. When the control chimps caught the smell of their injected partners, he could see the intelligence drain from their eyes as they turned vacant, sharklike. They maintained a physical instinct that was more sophisticated than that of the rats or the dogs. Attacking with a detached efficiency, they whipped through the flailing paws and biting teeth and peppered their victims with well-placed wounds. A bite clipped an artery. A jabbing paw crushed an eye to jelly. Each injury made the injected chimps wilder and more susceptible to these small, sharp assaults. Each assault brought them closer to death. None of the injected chimps survived the third round of injection. None of the dead took more than a minute to die.

Even when the reaction to the injection had worn off, killing left a lingering burden on the animals. Their expressions were consistently remorseful. Some wailed. Some covered their eyes. Many pounded on the Plexiglas walls of the enclosure, attempting to escape the bloody evidence of what they had done. One held the hand of its victim, stroking its cheek against the dead palm and moaning. The file came to its end. He deleted it.

He opened the fifth file. The video showed a new room in what he guessed from the walls and fixtures was the same building as he had seen in the background of the other files. The room resembled a prison cell more than a laboratory. At either end was a door with a picture frame window of shatterproof glass. The inward-facing sides of the doors had no handles. The room was bisected by a row of prison bars which had at its center a door that joined the two halves. This door was held shut by a heavy electromagnetic lock. A thick metal coil connected the lock to an external control.

His view of the room was cycled through a rotation of cameras mounted in the four corners of the ceiling. Plexiglas shields protected the cameras and imparted to the images they recorded the hazy glow of a soap opera’s dream sequence. Light bloomed from the doors of the cell as they opened in choreographed symmetry: at opposite ends of the room, matching soldiers pushed in nearly matching prisoners at gunpoint. The soldiers were masked in the biohazard suits they had worn while blowtorching the cages of the test dogs. The prisoners were bearded and tanned, he guessed Islamists, but he had seen white Americans left as sunburnt and unshaven after extremes of imprisonment. The audio was distorted, indistinct. He heard snatches of what might have been Farsi. As the soldiers shut the prisoners in the room, he thought he heard one of the prisoners ask the soldiers what they were doing. The words could have been anything. He shuttled across the distorted audio of the outburst, but the more he listened the less clear the words were. Soon it sounded foreign, but vaguely familiar. For a moment he thought the men might be speaking Spanish. He knew some Spanish, but what the man said did not connect with the Spanish he knew.

This was the human trial. His stomach swirled with dread for what he knew was coming. His weak hopes that this clip might portray a different regimen only made the men’s fate all the more inevitable. It was not the first time he had felt the tug towards blowing the whistle. There was no chance that he could slip the disk through security when he exited. His belongings passed through an X-ray. The disks were tagged with RFID strips epoxied to the label surface. Even if he were to remove the tag from the disk, he often had to walk through a millimeter-wave scanner as a last precaution before the exit. Stripped naked by the scanner, there was no place to hide anything as large as a disk. If he were caught, he feared that his replacement would be observing him on some future disk. This was paranoid, he told himself, but labeling his fear as paranoia brought him no comfort.

It was not the risk of getting caught that prevented him from stealing the disk. He had observed bad things before, nothing like this, but bad nonetheless. He was certain that the very fact of his observation meant that the institution was functioning. There was a difference between a society that buried its secrets and one that processed them. Making mistakes did not come with a moral obligation to parade those mistakes before the whole world. When he saw bad things, it was proof that others had as well. He had faith that he had counterparts in his building and others like it who addressed the misdeed even as he addressed the evidence of the misdeed. The bad things he saw were certainly being erased as quickly as the media that documented them. While his room was not quite a confessional, it was something like it. If he were to tell the world what he witnessed today, what sense did it make to remain silent about the other things he had seen? There was a reason for his witness. He was not going to discard that reason because he saw something that upset him.

In the clip, three soldiers entered the right side of the cell. Two held the prisoner while the third injected him. The timelapse commenced. The men were not fed, nor were they given water. The time stamp on the video leapt forward by hours, before skipping back into real time. The test of the first injection was sounded out by a loud buzz from the electromagnetic lock separating the two men. The door between them was open. A voice, hopelessly distorted, came through a PA speaker in the room and instructed the men to do something. This time he was certain it was an Arab language. He hoped these men were terrorists. He wanted to believe they deserved what was coming, but he knew how slim those odds were. The injected man roused. He crossed to the door and opened it. The control subject met him at the door, and recoiled, spinning to dry heave towards the corner. The men retreated from each other, to opposite corners. Though he had not eaten, the control subject managed to vomit. The other smelled himself curiously, attempting to solve the puzzle of what had been done to him. Both men apologized to each other, strained and confused, and ashamed of the bizarre intimacy of this joint sickness.

Maybe the men were not Muslims. As the clip returned to a timelapse, he realized that he had not seen them pray. In clips of jihadis, there was usually a great show made of praying. It was the act that sustained the prisoners and made clear their defiance. Who were these two if not terrorists? Soldiers brought them food and water and they ate and drank very quickly. The meal was followed by bed pans inserted into the cages. The control man used the napkin from his meal in an attempt to sop the vomit from the corner he had soiled. The napkin was too small and thin to do much good.

The clip skipped ahead. The injected man said something to the control man. They stood and met in the middle, sniffing the air tentatively. The effects of the injection had passed. They embraced awkwardly through the bars of the cage. They reassured each other.

Three hours jerked by in fifteen seconds. The soldiers entered the right partition. When the prisoner struggled, he was subdued with a taser that left him incapacitated and bucking on the floor. He was injected. Across the room, the control prisoner yelled at the soldiers through the bars. English swear words were clear through the distortion, but there was the tinge of an accent to them – the broken swearing of a cab driver. The soldiers threatened the prisoner with a taser, but he did not back down. The soldier in his gear could not fit his arm through the bars to reach the prisoner. He swore back at the prisoner in clear and unaccented English. A second soldier barked at the first and all three soldiers exited, shutting the door on the swearing prisoner and his peer, who still lay shuddering on the ground.

He watched as timelapse again accelerated the effect of the experiment. He was morbidly curious about the second, sexualizing injection. The men, wherever they were from, had the macho bravado of soldiers, at least of men who fought. And if it was Farsi or Arabic they were speaking? This would be a thousand fold the shame of the Abu Ghraib humiliations.

With a loud buzz, the electromagnet on the door released. The men retreated to opposite corners, as far from each other as they could stand in the small space. They mumbled assurances to each other. They gave looks of solidarity. One of the experimenters barked a garbled order through the speaker of the PA. The men were unmoved. The order came again, this time intelligible: “Approach the center of the room!” Again, the men ignored the command. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, from the murky audio of the recording emerged the whirring of a fan.

The control prisoner sniffed the air. Muffled audio: the injected prisoner asked him something, probably wondering if he was feeling ill again. The control prisoner crossed his legs, turned his hips, covered his crotch with his hands. He turned to lie prone on the floor of the cell, covering the cameras’ view of his erection. The injected prisoner asked a question, but the only response he received was an angry moan. The control prisoner yelled up at the cameras. The injected prisoner stood and approached. This approach intensified the smell and the control prisoner spun into a seated position sniffing at the air. The injected prisoner noticed his cellmate’s erection and backed away from the bars. He asked a question. The response came back half-cried. The control prisoner slapped his own face, then stomach, then groin, trying to quell the impulse the injection gave him. He shouted warnings to the injected prisoner. He rushed to the bars, then found the self-control to pull himself back. The injected prisoner retreated to his corner, alert and ready to defend himself. The control prisoner fell into a ritualistic loop of rushing towards (eventually through) the center door, then forcing himself away. The men yelled short warnings to each other. It was as though both of them were trapped in the room with a wild animal and each was trying to keep the other safe from harm. When the control prisoner reached the injected prisoner, he grabbed him roughly, trying to spin him towards the wall. The injected prisoner was a fighter and punched him hard in the gut. The blow knocked the wind out of the control prisoner. He gulped for air in hollow gasps. The injected prisoner yelled quick orders to him and pushed him back to into his half of the room, bracing the door shut behind him. The control prisoner fell to his knees, crawled into the corner, put his hand into his pants and began to masturbate. To allow him some dignity, the injected prisoner turned his back, leaning against the door to brace it closed.

They had beat the injection. Watching on the monitor, he felt relief wash over him with hope that the next clip would also be a triumph of self-control over instinct. He fast-forwarded, turning the men’s shouted assurances into a helium-pitched cartoon, only half-watching as they avoided each other’s eye contact. As humiliating as the experience must have been for them, he saw grace in the practicality of the solution. Trapped in buildings, earthquake survivors drank their urine. Surgery stripped patients of their dignity every day in order to save their lives. These prisoners had made the calculation. Some sexual shame for one of them was better than more for both. Even through the cloud of whatever had poisoned them they could work this out.

The clip leapt ahead to the final experiment. It took five soldiers to subdue the prisoner slated for injection. Again, the soldiers needed a taser to force the prisoner to submit. The control prisoner did not resist or taunt the soldiers – he sat in his corner staring spitefully at them. The soldiers exited. Time jumped forward, again to be stopped by the buzz of the electromagnetic lock.

Over the PA, the experimenters again attempted to instruct the men to meet in the middle. The prisoners ignored the sound. They were given some time, and then the fan was turned on. The control prisoner almost immediately changed. He stood, his shoulders pulling back, broadening his chest, his chin lowering. The injected prisoner asked him something. The camaraderie was gone: the control prisoner bellowed back at him sharply. The injected prisoner stood, crossed to the door and held it shut. This motion stirred the air in the room. The control prisoner bristled. He yelled at his cellmate, waving him back from the bars. The injected prisoner held on, bending his knee to give himself as much leverage as he could against the door. The control prisoner paced, looking up to shout madly.

The killing came and went in a few flashing moments. The control prisoner rushed the bars. The injected prisoner was so focused on bracing against the door that he did not defend himself when his attacker slipped his hand through the bars, grabbed his hair and pulled him into the bars. The impact shattered the prisoner’s nose, broke some of his teeth and left his right eye swollen shut. As the injected prisoner stumbled back from the door, the control prisoner swung through, pressing the door against him and throwing him against a side wall. Half-blind and windmilling his arms, the injected prisoner could not push the control prisoner from his neck. His single shriek clipped unfinished as his throat was ripped open, teeth chomping through his beard. The resultant spray obscured the lens of one camera. The other three captured his final moments: his eyes looking to the door in a vain hope that someone would help him; his hand flashing up to seal the hole in his windpipe; the control prisoners hands wrapping his head and bringing it smashing to the concrete floor; the spastic jolts of his nervous response to the impact; a foot stomping on the back of his neck; hands tearing his jaw from his head; his own teeth cutting into his chest, cutting through his stomach; his attacker punching and pulling through his intestines – splashing a slurry of blood, organ and shit. Another camera was completely obscured.

He watched the control prisoner pounding the corpse of his dead cellmate. He was so covered in blood he was unrecognizable, his attack so violent that his own skin was cut and dangling from his fists. He shuttled back and forth through the clip. Was it fifteen seconds? Ten? The force was so explosive and the results so brutal that they seemed detached from any trace of humanity. It was like watching an avalanche or a house burning down: pure phenomenon, no emotion.

The timelapse returned, bringing the return of the control prisoner’s humanity. First he retreated slowly from his crime, then rushed, screaming at the cameras, pounding his chest, scraping the blood from himself. Then it came in a messy and alternating torrent – rage against his captors mixed paralyzing sobs of remorse. He fell to his knees. He begged God for mercy. He pulled off his pants and began fashioning a noose. The soldiers rushed in and subdued him with the taser.

The last shot of the fifth file paired the survivor, a day later, with a new prisoner. The survivor was near catatonic. The new prisoner walked in, caught his scent and began to display the same aggression the original control had displayed. The survivor did not respond when the buzz announced the opening of the lock. He did not defend himself against the new control prisoner’s attack. His death was as fast as the death he had perpetrated. His body was left similarly unrecognizable.

He deleted the fifth file instantly, his hand shaking. He went immediately to the sixth, anticipating more trials with more prisoners. There were no new subjects and no leap in time. While the body was gone, the room covered in the same blood and viscera he had seen in the prior clip. A soldier in a biohazard suit entered, wheeling what seemed to be a standard janitorial cart. The soldier went to work cleaning the aftermath of the experiment. The work was meticulous and captured in real time. The soldier used a step stool to clean the specks of blood from the protective sheets that covered the cameras, and then worked from the top of the room down, wiping up what could be wiped up, washing the rest down a drain in the floor. The soldier used a brush to clean the space between the bars and the corners between the rounded edges and flat steel supports. The brush was slathered in disinfectant and worked each corner into a foam the soldier had to wipe away in order to see if the work was done. While leaning in to scrub, the soldier pinched the top of the biohazard mask in the hinge of the door. The gloves made it difficult to free the mask, and the soldier wriggled to reach it. Finally, failing to free the mask at the hinge, the soldiers hands dropped to the base of the mask and disconnected it at the collar. The soldier pulled away, leaving the mask trapped in the hinge.

He watched as the clip cycled through the cameras, landing on the camera that captured the soldier’s face. It was a young woman. Her face was striking, somewhat alien: a face from another time. Her cropped hair and bulky uniform made her androgynous. Her eyes were large with a silent movie expression between guilt and curiosity, perhaps fear that she would be caught breaking protocol. Her mouth was stern, military. Her skin was covered in freckles. She looked to the camera, realizing she was being monitored. He paused the clip, completing the eye contact she had made unknowingly. It was a relief to look at her, but the relief quickly evaporated. Was she complicit in what he had seen? Had she administered the injection? If she was innocent, that was no comfort either.

The soldier freed her mask, shot one last look at the nearest camera and returned to work. He saved the final seconds of the cleanup. The room and soldier were unidentifiable. He logged out of his computer, finalizing his sorting. He placed the disk in the shredder. When he left, most of his colleagues were already gone. A janitor worked mopping the halls.

In the parking lot, it took him a moment to remember that he had rented a car. When he saw it, the events of the morning returned to him, but felt as though they had happened a week ago or more. He had not had a chance to transfer his booklet of CD’s to his car, but he found music on the radio that he liked. Arriving home, he received a wedding invitation from a friend and decided he would go. He sauteed a chicken breast and cut it into the leftovers of a salad from the night before. He responded to a few emails, placed a bid on an auction he had been watching, and went to bed. As he fell asleep, he tried to reconstruct his memory of the last soldier’s face. All he could manage was her eyes and her freckles. They faded across a half dozen faces of women he remembered but could not place. The woman from the post office came to him clearly, and after her the deaths he watched in the clips. The deaths came only in details, never whole. In small moments of the murders: spittle dangling from a tooth, unexpected crumpling of a limb, air leaving a body – he fell into an unhappy sleep.