“Please step away from the Harry Smith,” came a voice from behind Harry, presumably from the warehouse. The thugs approaching him stopped looked up, but saw nothing, which confused them greatly. “Please step away from the Harry Smith or deadly force
will be used.”
Far from being relieved, Harry relieved himself.
Oh great, just frigging great!
The men then looked around and at each other, trying to make sense of what was going on. Soon all eyes were on the apish head of the gang, who broke the brief silence.
“Just agitprop, boys,” he said. “Just agitprop.” With a small motion of his head, he thugs proceeded with the dramatically slow encroachment of Harry's personal space.
Suddenly, the voice spoke again: “This is your final warning. Step away from the Harry Smith or deadly force
will be used.” Hearing it more clearly, Harry realized that it sounded like a cheap text-to-voice synthesizer like Microsoft Sam.
Ignoring the voice this time, the thugs met a blaze of gunfire from one of the warehouses' broken windows. They all died in seconds, most from the condition known as “exploding head.”
“Holy frig!” shouted Harry, involuntarily stepping back, flattening himself against the warehouse wall. “Holy mother-frigging frig!”
The voice came again, though it wasn't particularly comforting to Harry: “Mister Harry Smith please step through the door. We have been expecting you.”
“Uh,” Harry said timidly. “This is 933 Whirlpool Street?”
“Yes,” said the voice in its dreary inhuman tone. “Slash exasperation.”
“Slash... oh, right.”
Looking around, Harry saw a rusted old metal door on the warehouse and went through. Inside, he saw a typical abandoned warehouse, not unlike those found in countless old B-movies.
“Uh, what do I –”
“Please enter the lift to your left.” The voice sounded like it was coming from everywhere at once.
Harry looked to his left, and saw an old-school lift that looked like it wasn't used for years.
“Are you sure this is safe?”
“Look,” said the voice. “Do you want your radiation poisoning cured or not? Slash irritation.”
“Well, if you put it that way – ”
“Please enter the lift to your left.”
“Oh fine,” said Harry, rolling his eyes. He entered the lift and waited. “So, uh, this is gonna be...
CRAAAAAAAP!”
The lift dropped. It dropped at a heart-stopping speed. Sparks flew as Harry clung on one of the random bars for support. Against the blooding rushing through his ears and the scratching metal, he could make out elevator music playing in the background.
The ride was over almost as soon as it started, and Harry got off quite shaken and gasping for air. After he'd calmed down, he saw that he was in a depressing old laboratory, with rust and gray as its theme. Beakers and test tubes of colorless substances simmered and boiled on some tables, while on others rested machines that looked like they came straight out of science fiction, or at least one of military's latest black projects. The place was dry and cold, and smelt of pine air freshener.
Coming out from behind one of the monstrous machines was a wizened old man, bald, wrinkled, and covered with liver spots. He wore large, round glasses, which rested on his long, pickax nose. He smiled at Harry, showing his unnatural white teeth.
“Welcome, Mister Harry Smith,” the old man said in a raspy voice worthy of Christian Bale's Batman. “Welcome to my lab. I am Doctor Radiation.”
8
“Uh, hi Doctor... Radiation? Is that your legal name?”
“Yes.”
“No crap, really? Since when?”
“Since I was a teenager.”
“Those must have been pretty hard prom nights, huh?”
“My personal life's history is none of your business, Mister Smith.”
“Okay, Doctor
Radiation, but maybe I like to know more about doctors who –
AAAAARGH!”
Doctor Radiation took and squeezed Harry's bad hand. The dark fluid of earlier turned out not to be blood, but some black substance. Doctor Radiation observed it intently, rubbing his chin in a stereotypically “intelligent but cocky” manner.
“Very interesting,” mumbled the doctor. “I have never seen
this symptom before.”
Harry was feeling dizzy with pain. “So, doc, can you cure me?”
“That depends,” whispered Doctor Radiation in response. “I am going to run a few tests on it.”
“Tests?” asked Harry, sounding a bit worried. “Those aren't going to hurt, are they?”
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?!”
“Your pain threshold.”
“Oh, I can assure you, doc, it's not very high!” squeaked Harry, who began to sweat despite the near-freezing temperature. “I can't stand flu shots, for one.”
“Well,” said the doctor, still holding and staring at Harry's bandaged hand. “Then it's going to be quite painful.”
Oh boy, thought Harry, as he was led to some medieval-looking device, like the outcast child of a dentist's chair which made love to the Spanish Inquisition.
9
The chair-device was surprisingly easy on the back, though the great big dangling things, blades and wires all around, and the rather tight restraining belts offset whatever amounts of comfy it had. It was set to an angle, so that Harry was almost laying down as Doctor Radiation was doing his thing, fiddling with syringes and little shiny metal tools and all that.
“So, doctor, this is all going to be for free, right?” asked Harry. “No hidden charges or anything like that?”
“Of course,” said the doctor offhand as he carefully filled a test tube with some colorless liquid.
“That's an awfully kind operation you run here,” said Harry, sounding skeptical. “What do you get out of this?”
“Guinea pigs,” replied the doctor, now setting the test tube on a flame.
“Erm, you're going to
experiment on me?”
“Goodness, of course,” said the doctor, tilting his head down to look at Harry as he put on medical gloves. “This is an experimental procedure, ergo everyone I test it on is technically a human guinea pig.”
“Uh, okay,” said Harry, little reassured. The doctor started removing the bandages, which felt like burning, only much more painful.
The bandages were removed, exposing a black-and-rend hand far too disgusting to be described here in detail. Suffice to say, it was a horrid sight.
“I think I'm gonna be sick.”
“In case you forget, Mister Smith, you
are.”
“Right,” said Harry, looking around. The doctor took a scalpel and a little rectangular glass plate and then scraped off bits of
things from Harry's bloated and disfigured hand, and that also felt like burning, only much more painful.
“Hey, doc, I'm not wrecking your concentration making small talk like this, am I?”
“No, my mind is far too sharp to be truly distracted,” said the doctor as he turned to mix the sample of
thing with the colorless liquid he was heating up.
“That's good to hear,” laughed Harry; it was a nervous laugh. “I gotta thank you for this and saving me back there, eh?”
“Saving?” The doctor was now holding some kind of electronic scanner attached to the chair, which he began hovering over Harry's eye tumors.
“Yes, you, uh... murdered... a bunch of thugs who were about to mug me.”
“I don't recall... no, I think you confuse me with Al.”
“Al?”
The cheaply synthesized voice from before spoke: “It was me who
beep” – the synthesized voice stopped here, replaced by a recording – “murdered... a bunch of thugs
beep.”
“Oh, Al,” said Harry. “You must be robot or something, right?”
“I am an artificial intelligence.”
“Oh, right,
Al – of course.”
A few more minutes of sampling and random sciencey procedures of varying pain on Harry passed in silence and screams, though Al did provide some soothing music.
“So, Mister Smith, how did you come by this condition?”
“Well, I was writing for the International Enquiry –”
“Quality paper.”
Harry tried to raise an eyebrow, but some kind of shiny clamp-thing was on his eye. So instead, he just continued relating his interesting discoveries about Conglomerate Inc.'s ink and his coworkers' cases of ocular cancer.
Doctor Radiation, doing his sciencey thing, simply said, “Interesting.”
Finally, after one last jab of some thermometer-looking thing into Harry's hand, it was all over.
“So, doc, what's the diagnosis?” Harry asked as the belts restraining him loosened, allowing him to sit up.
“It appears,” replied Doctor Radiation, dramatically wiping his glasses as he did. “That ink genes have mixed into your DNA, Mister Smith.”
Harry was incredulous.
Ink genes? “You're crapping me,” he told the doctor.
To be continued...