"A short while ago I promised myself that I wouldn't write any more dark pieces. What a joke. Here's the latest from my serotonin-starved brain, inspired by my recent research into the CIA's now defunct Stargate project."

 

THE PSYCHOTRONIC CHIMP

John Jacobs

 

A voice called out in the darkness. "I have the ideogram."

"Splendid," replied a deep, cold voice over the intercom. "Location?"

"I'm falling toward a large metropolitan city. I see a body of water. I don't think it's New York ." Silence. "Wait, wait, I know it. I'm in Chicago . I'm outside a building. It's both very old and very new. I sense money."

"Can you elaborate?"

"I have an address—141 West Jackson ."

"Computer, lookup!"

A plastic, feminine voice replied from the intercom. " Chicago Board of Trade Building ."

"I'm following the signal line. I'm in a hallway in an older part of the building. I have a suite number—777."

"141 West Jackson, Suite 777 ," repeated the cold voice. "I think we have enough for now."

#

Hope wove strange patterns in the air with her tiny chimp hands. Her small head swayed side to side as she looked for patterns that only she could see through the goggles she wore. The CRTs around her flashed a disjointed, eclectic mix of alphanumeric characters and alchemical symbols. Occasionally a stock ticker symbol or futures contract name would pop up on a screen, then dissolve into nothingness amid the other digital noise. A tangle of rainbow-colored wires protruded from the base of the chimp's neck, moving along the floor and connecting into the back of a large, black-shelled mainframe next to where two people were standing.

Nadia Moon-Orchid watched intently along with Mr. Maxwell, the head trader and company president. Mr. Maxwell was an old, white-haired man with a scrawny build, worn out dark trousers, red suspenders and a bow-tie. At the moment he didn't seem to be enjoying the spectacle as much as the girl standing next to him.

"Nadia, please tell me again why I'm paying you and your friend Professor Nut Job over there in the other room..." he pointed across the office toward a closed door, "... to have a fucking monkey sit here all day and play video games?"

Nadia smiled warmly at the man but was unable to hide her nervousness. "Hope is the next generation of trader, Mr. Maxwell. We enhanced her brain with nootropic drugs and trained her in advanced psychotronic methods. We think that she can predict future price movements in the commodities markets and make us a boatload of money."

"So you're spending all of the firm's money...correction—my money, on some science experiment to create a psychic monkey?"

Nadia sighed. "Yes, Mr. Maxwell. A psychotronic chimp."

"Why should I not fire you and your friend, Dr. Dildo, right now?"

"Because it works," said Nadia plainly. "Hope has an 83% success rate in the precious metals markets, and about 75% overall. She even predicted that mini-crash in the Nikkei that happened two weeks ago. We think we might be on to something here."

Mr. Maxwell pulled a pad of paper from his front pocket—an old-fashioned order pad—and turned from the girl. He glanced back again as a candlestick chart flashed up suddenly on the large LCD screen behind her. Little green and red rectangles popped up sporadically at various inflection points along the graph along with digital wording in some mysterious, non-human language.

" Hope is an odd name for your monkey," said Mr. Maxwell. "Hope is the most insidious of human emotions. It keeps you in a losing trade long after you should have gotten the fuck out. This system of yours better work."

Nadia glanced at the man, then let her gaze gently drift toward the preoccupied chimp. "I named her that, Mr. Maxwell, because I think she can save the human race."

#

The door at the end of the office opened and a kindly man appeared. His blue button-up shirt was pressed and his beard neatly kept. Syringe in hand, he approached the back room. Nadia was in there with Hope, trying to sign something to the creature. Hope was gesturing back in a pidgin bastardization of chimp signals and American sign language.

"I'm not interrupting, am I?" said Dr. Nemean.

Nadia frowned and slid back in her seat. A voice blared over the loudspeakers above and around them: "employment numbers in five minutes!" There was an oddly calm chemistry between the aging professor and the young intern. One would call it fate, or synchronistic happenstance. Yet their respect roles in this lifetime together seemed to make sense in some strange way.

Hope looked up at Dr. Nemean and smiled. She didn't mind the injections all that much. Besides, now she understood... The entities in her dreams had grown more vivid as of late, their message ever more clear. Half-human, half-beast, they were clearly of another order of existence. These hairless monkeys, homo-sapiens, oh how ugly they truly are, Hope often thought to herself. And how smug, how confident. If only they knew the truth, if only they could see who really held the leash.

It was about a year ago that the breakthrough happened. The good doctor's nootropic cocktails had triggered a psychotic break inside her fragile primate mind. Like the Siberian shaman in the clutches of ecstasy, Hope had found herself quickening from this world, sliding away into other realms as her body lay twitching in a laboratory somewhere on the Northwestern campus. She experienced existential terror as her primitive ego witnessed itself dissolving in a seething bath of green slime. Somewhere along the line she perished, inside the place that cabbalists call the Abyss. But she came back to life. And the EEG monitor registered something remarkable—the creature that was was no longer. Pan troglodytes no more, she'd hyperevolved into something else. Something entirely else .

Thank you, Hope signed to the man after he'd withdrawn the needle from her arm. Twenty-three paths through to Evernon the leafless tree beyond the garden where dwells the three-headed serpent you'll see, came her voice inside his mind in a tone like that of a human child's.

Dr. Nemean visibly shivered. Nadia looked up at him and noticed the redness under his eyes.

"Something bothering you, John?" she asked.

He looked directly at her and purposefully coughed.

"Excuse me, I meant Dr. Nemean ."

"Nothing, nothing really," he replied, but he was lying. Nadia caught an image of his ex-wife fleeting through the ether between them. Hope caught it too, and buried her little face in her hands.

"It's not her!" Dr. Nemean snapped, "Forget that bitch!" But he quickly righted himself. "I'm sorry, Nadia, I'm just under a lot of stress lately. You understand, right?"

Nadia smiled at him empathically, her eyes betraying more than professional feelings. "Doctor, I understand what you are going through. I respect you all the more for it."

"Thank you, Nadia," he replied. But there was still something wrong in his expression. "You don't feel it, do you?"

Nadia just stared at him with a blank stare.

"Nadia, unplug her," he said. "Do it now!"

With haste, Nadia did as she was told.

#

With a puppet-like expression, Jeanine, the secretary, led the two ghastly figures into the office. The poor woman couldn't even tell that she was being manipulated, and the cruel intentions of her controllers were so very purposeful, so crystalline pure that there was little she could do to fight it.

Dr. Nemean felt the burning sensation in his pineal chakra as wispy tentacles flailed at him from two blazing presences in the ether. Like serpents slithering toward his mind, they were always seeking, always probing. He fought hard to resist but he was tired.

"Dr. Nemean, here are the gentlemen from the committee. You had a meeting scheduled, remember?" Jeanine said in a lobotomized voice.

Dr. Nemean signed quietly. "Yes, Jeanine, I remember."

Like jackals moving toward their prey, the two approached him from either side. "We would have a word with you, Dr. Nemean," one of them said in a frighteningly androgynous voice.

Dr. Nemean motioned toward the oval conference table in the center of the office.

Sitting across from the two beings, Dr. Nemean felt himself engaged in a secret battle. Both virtually identical, the men were bald, ghostly pale in complexion and had deadly serious expressions bordering on sadistic. Their suits were of the blackest black, and tailored from a material that he'd never seen before. They both had their hands folded on the table and looked at him with eyes that could burn through lead. In synchronized manner they both reached up and adjusted their ties, one with his left hand and one with his right.

"As you know, Dr. Nemean..." said the one on the left.

"...we are not from the committee," finished the other.

"How did you make it past security?"

A high-pitched, inhuman laughter erupted from the two men. Their fiendish uproar filled the office, tearing at his ears but Dr. Nemean fought to maintain his composure. A sudden image flashed through his mind as he thought back to the night terrors he'd had as a young adult. Dr. Nemean saw in their faces the demons that had plagued him in his nightmares and sometimes in the daytime—the brutal, crippling, surreal visions of torture that'd forever scarred his soul. Like two emissaries of Hell, the figures before him were little more than shades of men.

"Security..."

"... is not an issue for us, Dr. Nemean."

John felt the weariness and fatigue washing over him. He didn't know if he could fight them, and he ultimately didn't know what they wanted but one thing was for certain—their intentions, whatever they were, were not good.

"Why are you here?" the scientist stammered.

A frigid silence followed. The pale, leech-like lips of one of them moved slowly as he spoke. "We represent the government of the United States , Doctor."

"We have a proposal for you," the other one finished.

#

Nadia stumbled through the turnstile in the lobby. Hope clung to her neck, smiling at the security guards on the other side. The scene was almost comical, the lanky girl running at breakneck speed, pushing through throngs of traders leaving for lunch, the chimp flapping on her back.

"Hey you, hold up..." one of the guards ordered. Nadia didn't turn back. "I said hold up, goddamnit!"

Nadia didn't dare stop. It could've been a trap, probably was a trap. By the looks on their faces the fucking carnival may as well have been in town. Nadia pushed through the revolving door and hit the pavement running as fast as she could toward the LaSalle/Van Buren el-train stop. A voice in the back of her mind was laughing, growing louder and more sinister as she ran.

"No, no, no... not now, please not now," she whimpered under her breath.

We all have an inner critic—that Jerry Lewis sounding motherfucker in the back of our minds, laying bare our flaws, our weaknesses, our mistakes. For Nadia it manifested as the voice of her foster dad, the abusive, heartless tone unmistakable. I fucking told you , he said.

Nadia felt, not saw, the eyes of something watching her as she stumbled up the rusting metal steps. She held onto Hope with one arm and fumbled for the CTA pass in her pocket with her free hand. She slid the card into the slot and jumped through the turnstile, running for the Purple Line platform.

The Board of Trade building loomed above her like some massive glass and steel monster as Nadia paced frantically on the platform. The laughter in her mind changed, mutated into something inhuman, its cruel tone increasing in pitch. There was another person on the platform—a trader—smoking a cigarette compulsively. Half-turned to her, Nadia saw that the badge on his coat lapel was an inverted pentagram. She gaped in awe and horror as it started to bleed, and then he—it—turned toward her and it was the mangled face of her foster dad, his face painted black and white in a fiendish carnivalesque manner. Bright red lips, eyeliner, and little red tear drops at the corner of each eye, here was a clown from Hell standing before her, moving toward her.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha!" he called to her. "Look at you, what the fuck do you think you're doing?"

Not real, Nadia. Not real , said Hope's little-girl voice in her mind but she was far off in some other place and the sickening laughter was drowning out everything, the demonic stare holding her petrified.

"Fuck you, you're not real!" Nadia cried out. It kept walking toward her, it's face shifting, mutating into more grotesque forms.

"Worthless little slut! I knew you'd end up like this. You cunt. You dirty little whore."

her brain was telling her limbs to move but Nadia was frozen in place like some sad abandoned mannequin on the moldy wooden platform a cold wind blew from behind her and dark clouds appeared overhead but that didn't matter because she was just an actor and this all wasn't real the hellish figure advancing toward her began drooling blood and the train that screeched past her on the other side of the platform wasn't real the railing buildings were fake all of them just cardboard props on this nightmare set she couldn't move couldn't move couldn't fucking move even though she wanted it wished it more than anything

The clown face was a mere six inches away from her, it's stinking breath like that of rotting meat. Its eyes stared like two lifeless orbs.

Not real, Nadia. Not real!

Chilling sweat poured from Nadia's forehead as its lips parted. Little black worms poked their heads from the pale, necrotic skin of the monstrosity's face and flapped in the breeze.

"I will tear the living flesh from your body," it said to her.

Nadia screamed and fainted.

#

John remained motionless, reserved.

"The work you've done is remarkable, Dr. Nemean. Absolutely remarkable," said the one on the left, smirking. The words rolled off his tongue as if he were reciting a well-rehearsed line. "Humanity truly owes you a debt of gratitude for your contributions to the field of Psi."

"Fuck you," John replied. "I know why you're here."

The man leaned back in his chair and squealed with impish glee. His twin remained perfectly still, staring across the table with a killer's calm, the confident determinism of a man who knew who was holding all the cards.

"You must have read my mind, Doctor," the man replied, and then they both broke into a fit of sadistic, cruel laughter.

John struggled to keep his composure. He was alone in the room with these... things— where the fuck did Jeanine and everybody else go? —and he wasn't sure what they were going to do to him. He felt the pull of time warping around them, saw the mustard yellow vintage 70's clock on the far wall suddenly stop— my God, what are these things? Clearly he was helpless against the two of them. The most he could do is shield himself temporarily.

"We, and the agency we represent, would like to contract you for several specific fields of study," said the man. "As you well know, the United States is beset on all sides by hostile enemies who would do harm to both our government and the citizens of our great country, like yourself. We feel that the lines of research that you've opened up will yield highly effective wea... tools for use against present and future terrorist threats. You come highly recommended to us, Doctor."

John breathed deeply. "My research is for humanitarian purposes only. I'm not interested in developing psychotronic weapons or implements of torture," he replied.

The two men looked at each other.

"I would like you to understand," said the man on the right, "that you will be awarded a generous grant for your research, along with gratuitous, top-level access to government resources and technology."

He bent over the table, glaring at the scientist with a look of malcontent. "Please also understand, Doctor, that during times of national crisis many are called to the service of the government," he growled.

He suddenly looked over toward the back room. His twin followed suit. Ah yes, this is where the signature was coming from. Something outside the ordinary...

"You gestapo assholes don't scare me," John replied in a deep, low voice. "I will fight you tooth and nail every step of the way."

The two men sat quietly, both staring through John with expressionless faces, though the scientist knew better. It was all but obvious that they were communicating behind the scenes; perhaps they even shared the same mind. Dark thoughts fluttered through his mind and he shivered. They both immediately smiled. It was obvious that they could smell fear as well.

"We already have the full cooperation of the University," said the man. "Your departure is all but assured. Your career will be over and your reputation forever tarnished. Academia will no longer be an option for you—not at Northwestern, not in the US , not anywhere in the western fucking hemisphere. Do you understand the dilemma you find yourself in, Professor? Or should I state it more plainly for you?"

John sighed. "I will need some time to consider."

"Please don't take too long, Dr. Nemean. We are on a very tight schedule."

The men got up simultaneously, each sliding into a long, hooded trench coat of blackest leather, and turned from the conference table. Then like two wraiths in the night, they slipped away into the hall. John was alone at the table.

#

Nadia felt a throbbing in her head. There was a light pulsing somewhere in the distance, no it was right in front of her. Had she been taken? Were they operating on her already, slowing chipping away at her psyche? She imagined she'd wake up in a lab somewhere, bound to machines and at the mercy of her captors—vicious animals who sought to break her from the inside out with a cruel barrage of psychotropic drugs and mind control technology. The light flickered sporadically in an elusive pattern, burning her eyes through her closed eyelids. Hands prodded at her face, pulling at her skin.

Nadia felt a jerking motion. With effort she dragged her eyes open. She was on a moving platform, no, a vehicle. As the blinding light fell fully upon her face Nadia realized that it was sunlight, the heavy orange glow of the late afternoon sun flickering across the tops of the skyline buildings in the distance.

"this is a purple line express..." said a mechanical recording.

She was on the train.

"...the next stop is Fullerton ," said the voice. "doors open on the left at Fullerton ."

A little black face popped up in front of her. A small primate hand grabbed at the soft flesh of Nadia's cheek and pulled hard.

"Oww! Damnit, Hope, I'm awake!" Nadia yelped.

A long face spread wide in a smile. Awake glad , the chimp signed.

"I'm glad to see you too," the girl replied. Nadia slouched in her seat as the train slowed to a halt and the doors slid open.

"This is Fullerton . The next stop is Diversey..."

Aside from the two of them, the car was completely empty.

"What happened, Hope? How did we get here?" said Nadia, but the chimp just shook her head.

Images flashed across the back of her consciousness, mutating forms and split-scene visions, like some madman had spliced together an disturbing blend of old horror movies and modern newsreels and was playing them in slow motion, then backwards, then in fast-forward. Two tall, alien-like forms moving across a hall with a slow, inhuman grace like they were literally floating above the floor. Goetic symbols in neon violet twisting and turning against a starfield backdrop. The face of Dr. Nemean grimacing in terror and anguish, the image growing suddenly yellowed and grainy like a clip from an 60's indy film.

Her surroundings on the train still had an air of unrealness to them, like the train was a carefully constructed prop. Even the slight hint of urine in the air was a well-placed theatrical effect.

"This is Belmont ," said the mechanical voice. The doors swung open and a group of teenage punkers boarded, their bondage pants jingling as they moved.

"Hey monkey!" one of them exclaimed, groping for the chimpanzee.

"Fuck off!" Nadia yelled. The punker gave her the finger back.

As the train picked up speed Nadia felt an uncomfortable sensation. She looked over her shoulder toward the front of the car and saw the punker talking to two CTA employees, pointing in her direction. Pointing at Hope.

Oh shit, oh shit... thought Nadia.

The two men started toward her, their navy blue nylon pants whooshing against the roaring clatter of the train. She saw the reflective stripes on their pants out of the corner of her eye.

Nadia closed her eyes and focused with all her will. They were right next to her. One of them tapped her on the shoulder.

A lanky, academic-looking girl with octagonal glasses and long brown hair stared back and smiled, though there was something strange about the way her one hand kept twitching nervously. She clung to her backpack with her other arm. Sitting next to her was the most homely-looking excuse for a human being they'd ever seen. Squat, crooked posture and a mongoloid face that could make the most humble person cringe, surely here was a sideshow outcast. An old woman of oompa-loompa stature who'd climbed up the ugly tree, hit every branch on the way down, then climbed up and fell off again. The old woman smiled at them with gnarled teeth and waved.

"Damn, that be one ugly Chinese lady!" one of them exclaimed. They both laughed. "When the lord was givin out looks she be out taking a piss!"

"Yeah, I ain't see no monkey, though," said the other one.

"Can I help you?" Nadia asked him.

The two of them looked at each other and shrugged.

"Nah, sorry," he replied. Then to the other man, "Why was we over here?"

"The door, motherfucker," his coworker replied. "Use it!" he said, pointing to the door across to the next car.

The man swung the lever and pulled the door open, blasting Nadia with a cold breeze from outside. Then they both stepped through and the door slammed shut.

Nadia breathed a sigh of relief.

#

A blue translucent humanoid form, floating in the endless void. Harpy screams of life forms unimaginably strange to the human mind, creatures of an entirely different order of being moving through space at inconceivable speeds. The humanoid form, startled by one, jerked it's "head" just in time to see something collide with a comet and explode in a catastrophic annihilation while Alnilam, the most kingly star in Orion's belt, shone with a blinding fury 10,000 times greater than that of the Sun.

Another comet shot past toward the blue-white inferno that shook the ether like some massive, unrelenting cosmic deity. A dark, Jupiter-sized globe off it's right flank, perhaps a mere couple hundred AU from the gargantuan star, stood in silent, listless respect. This was Archonis—the demon planet, the dark child. And just beyond that rose the craggy wall of debris that was the asteroid belt, the gravity there much too fierce for planets to form but not so strong as to pull the jagged, rust-colored rocks, some of them as massive as the Earth, into the gaseous furnace around which they orbited.

In the distance some tiny object—a planetoid, perhaps—collided with the surface of the celestial giant, an unwitting sacrifice to the godly star, succumbing to the beast's gravity at long last. Tiny ripples appeared along the star's surface and little shooting streaks flared up from the spot where the collision occurred. Then all at once one enormous geyser of scorching plasma and star stuff exploded off the surface in a violent display, shooting far into space and arching slowly over the massive surface of the star in delicate, serpentine grace.

Like a star unto itself, the long streak of burning plasma shone against the dark canopy of space with a bold luminescence. Then suddenly, erratically, it jerked backwards! Slithering along the surface of the star like an eel through water, it grew ever more cylindrical, snake-like as it moved until it at last bent outward and shot straight off the face of the star with a violent detonation like a thousand hydrogen bombs. Whiter and hotter it grew as it sailed across the asteroid belt, tearing through the rocky matter with torturous, reckless abandon at Einsteinian speeds, it's trajectory directly in line with the humanoid form.

In her cage at Northwestern, Hope began to whimper.

As its movement slowed, the plasma-being's shape stabilized, becoming long and tadpole-like. Multi-hued sparks shot off its serpentine body from tiny pieces of space debris colliding. It slowed to a complete halt a mere one astronomical unit from the miniscule blue humanoid, its enormous bulbous forepart twisting and turning oddly as it began to take shape. The star canopy of the space behind the creature rippled and warped as its body continued to slither and sway from side to side. In fear and awe the little humanoid creature, a mere speck before the massive burning form, watched the plasma of its forepart fold in on itself, molding gradually into a terrible, yet beautiful, female-appearing humanoid face.

With eyes like black holes the star creature looked down. Its delicate, exquisite lips were still, yet there was a deep, thunderous echoing from all around in the psychic ether as if it were the very folds of space-time itself that were vibrating with the creature's voice.

I... come.

Imagine the voices of an entire planet screaming in pain, anger, jubilation, sadness, and every other conceivable emotion, human or otherwise, all at once. Such was the sheer splendor and terror and awe of the Alnilamethite's cry.

1,400 light years away, Hope's small primate body quivered and shook from the scorching heat.

The star god continued to stare down at the azure form before it.

I... see.

A pause in its speech like the space between worlds, and then...

Time isn't it, is it?

In her mind's eye Hope was overwhelmed by visions... the whole of terrestrial life exterminated in blinding flash of Luciferian light as the final straw is pulled, the last soul steps too far and then... human beings naked, walking backwards into the sea... time isn't it, is it? ... the sun streaking backwards at electric speed as white puffs of clouds shoot past across the sky... an ornate, brass clock running backwards and then suddenly melting into sludge in Dali-esque fashion... time ... all of the wars, every drop of blood ever spilled, mangled pieces of human flesh flying back together comically... little chunks of brain float through the air and fling themselves back together upon a frayed and bloody brainstem, forming a full brain and then a person's face as a hollow-point bullet slides backwards out of his forehead and down the barrel of a gun... an impossibly high tree with its roots in the earth and its branches in the darkening clouds, the black sky alight with lightning and chaos. But then it is no longer a tree, but rather a mushroom cloud and in its long grey stem are a billion screaming faces...

The cage was rattling but nobody could hear it. Inside Hope's body was shaking violently.

... dolphins swimming through a perfect blue sea... a clear night sky and the moon going down over a black ocean... a leafless tree floating in a blue void like that of a cloudless sky, rainbow-colored rings like the rings of Saturn floating around it... creatures , pointing at the sun as it dances across the sky and then suddenly, it goes out ...

The body of the Alnilamethite grew hotter, blindingly bright. Its dark coal eyes stared and gradually it's mouth began to open. The plasma of its lips parted, revealing a swirling maelstrom view of the cosmos in its entirety—entire galaxies forming and colliding in titanic, macrocosmic explosions, strange lights burning in the black void like a billion stars but far more massive, and even the soft, luminous light of creation. As its body slithered from side to side and shifted, so did the wormhole view inside its throat, the starfield bending and contorting with each motion. Hope was terrified yet oddly hypnotized by the sight, as if inside this creature lay the secret of all secrets, the answer to the question that can never be known, the very key to the universe itself.

The terror inside her grew as the starfield came closer, this mere glimpse of infinity enough to evoke overwhelming feelings of primal horror.

Time isn't it, is it?

A demonic laughter shook the ether around Hope, ringing in her fragile mammalian brain light years away back on Earth. The wormhole mouth contorted into a wide smile.

Is it?

In her cage on Earth, Hope shrieked so loud that the laboratory windows rattled. A student intern on graveyard shift heard the scream from two floors below and started to run for the stairwell.

The starfield swayed and the familiar vertigo sickness came over her as Hope's etheric body flung itself backwards at a velocity far exceeding the speed of light. The star creature followed closely, it's wormhole mouth still gaping wide, but then at once it fell back just about a light year or so outside the perimeter of its parent star. Its prey still retreating hastily, the Alnilamethite indignantly turned and slithered toward home.

#

Away and to her right, the lights of the Chicago skyline were sparkling magnificently in the distance. The city was alive, a glimmering beacon in the otherwise pitch dark night. In stark juxtaposition lay the endless void of the lake before her. It was that eerie bleakness, the dark water stretching to the horizon that'd always made Nadia feel like she was sitting at the edge of the world. Waves crashed around her rhythmically as she sat prone upon the rocks at the edge of the Northwestern campus.

There was a picture of a unicorn, elaborately detailed, on a large flat rock beside her. "Female engineers—rare as unicorns. J.R. 1999," read the inscription. Part of the animal had been carelessly spray painted over by some asshole who'd tagged his frat letters on that same rock.

In a crevice close to the water, about a quarter mile down, a half-naked couple were quietly fucking. They were fairly inconspicuous about it, but Nadia knew they were there. She took a long puff from the last of her cigarette and flung it into the water, trying not to hear the girl's soft moaning in the wind. A memory began to rise to the surface but Nadia fought to push it back. A strong wave broke against the rocks at her feet, spraying her face with a fine, cool mist that mixed with the dampness of her tears. There was the sound of crickets chirping from somewhere behind her.

"A poetess deep in thought," said a voice behind her. Nadia sniffled, but didn't turn around.

"May I join you?" the man asked.

"Sure," Nadia replied.

His jeans creaked as Dr. Nemean squatted beside her. He was wearing his brown leather jacket. He reeked of pot.

"I can leave you alone..." he began to say.

"No, that's okay."

John breathed deeply, savoring the cool, clean air blowing in off the lake. The smell of orchids wafted over to him from the girl sitting beside him. Stoned and slightly embarrassed, John tried to divert his thoughts from the blood pulsing toward his midsection. Nadia remained motionless.

"I had another episode today, Dr. Nemean," said Nadia. "I think the stress triggered it."

"Would you like to talk about it?" he replied.

"Don't use that fucking psychiatrist voice with me," Nadia muttered.

John rose to his feet, the awkward briskness of his movements betraying his pain.

"I'm going to leave you alone now, Nadia."

A trembling hand grabbed hold of his jeans and a pleading, frightened face looked up at him. John couldn't help but think that she looked beautiful at that very moment.

"No, wait!" Nadia said sharply. "Please, John, I'm sorry. Please sit down."

Reluctantly, the older man obeyed.

"Let me make something clear," John said, slowly and sternly. "We are not in high school. You are no longer in high school. We are both adults. Do you understand?"

Nadia turned to look at him and began to cry. John put his arm around her shoulder.

"I'm sorry!" she sobbed, her tears soaking his jacket. "I'm sorr..."

A masculine hand reached up and caressed her face. John delicately removed her glasses and looked deep into her eyes. He pulled her face toward his, and her trembling lips touched his. Nadia moaned softly.

#

Despite the sweatshirt she had on, Nadia was still shivering. Off in the distance the antenna atop the Sears tower were blinking like two red eyes in the night sky. John put his jacket around her. Nadia sighed.

"Who were they, John? CIA? NSA?"

"I don't think so."

"Then who?"

"XOA. I believe."

Nadia began to sob hysterically.

"John, I'm scared," she moaned. "I mean, like really fucking scared."

She squeezed his arm, not seeming to realize that she was digging her nails into his skin.

"I am too," John replied softly. "I am too."

"I've seen them before, in a dream or a vision or something. Those coats they wear..."

"Yes, I know," he replied, not meaning to cut her off. "The leather is a bioplasmic insulator—psychic armor."

"But Doctor," said Nadia, still trembling. "I think that their coats were... made from human flesh."

John opened his mouth to speak but only a pathetic, raspy breath came out. He looked down at his hand around the girl's waist and realized that he too was trembling.

"This is a dark time that we're entering into, Nadia. I hope that you're ready for this."

"Honestly, John," she replied in a quavering voice. "I don't think so."

#

Hope was staring blankly at the ceiling just as the light went on in the laboratory. The intern ran up to the cage and stuck his hand through the wire mesh. Hope reached up with one frail hand and grasped onto the boy's index finger. Consciousness falling from her, she still heard his voice off in the distance, frantically calling for help.

"Dr. Nemean, please come immediately!"

A black tide washed over her, and somewhere in the void a deep, sinister voice was cackling.