Alignment - Matthew Harris, Steph [Redacted] (best short novels of all time .txt) 📗

The house was just an ordinary house. It had four walls and a roof, with both back and front gardens that were sectioned off from the rest of the world by a matching set of white fencing. The grass was cut to absolute perfection on both sides and a large oak tree offered shade from the harsh heat of the summer, a cool breeze blowing through the leaves to cause a faint rustling. Beneath this large Oak played a young boy of five years old. The Childs brown hair hung loose over his hazel eyes as he concentrated intently on the game he was playing. Grasped in each of his hands were a toy car and the child seemed quite content to push them around on the short grass floor in an imaginary race. At some points the yellow hatchback would overtake the red convertible, only to be put back in its place behind the red car by the Childs incessant movement.

At the foot of the garden stood an old shed, the paint of it flaking away to expose the warped wood underneath, the contours of said wood allowing anyone to view inside. The door of this shed was left slightly ajar; this was the direction in which the car wielding child was heading; each movement of his short legs and toy car laden hands bringing him further away from his house and closer to the rickety old shed. The interior of the shed was itself rather bare, the majority of tools that were kept by the family being hid within a cupboard under the stairs, this then causing the need for shed storage to be rather unneeded. The floor of the Shed was made of a similar wood of the walls, the age of this wood allowing small tufts of unchecked grass to push through the floorboards.

The child let out a large yawn, shivering slightly as he did so. It was around three in the afternoon, a time at which point his mother would usually collect him for a midday nap. After playing for so long in the heat, it was inevitable for the child to slip into the warm embrace of an afternoons sleep. It was at this point that the child's problems would begin. The mind of a child is not as pure as one may originally believe, in fact, this statement is incredibly untrue. Many nursery rhymes are in fact based on very grim and macabre subjects; and children relish them. The mind of this child was no different to that. No different except for one minute detail, a dream is not always a dream

xXx

Noah struggled against his bonds as he was forced down against the hard, cold, metal operating table. He had only agreed to the experiments he was about to undergo because they were supposed to be completely harmless and psychological in nature, and he desperately needed the money. As his wrist bindings were tightened he stopped struggling, realizing that struggling would by no means act as a method of escape and would instead only result in damaging his body and wasting his energy, energy that he surmised that he would need later on in the procedure to either stay conscious or scream with.

In the moment of calm that Noah found himself in, he allowed himself to take stock of his surroundings. The room was a small metal box of an area with a single double glazed window opposite him. The table that he was lying naked upon was raised at an angle, so that the business officials on the other side of the glass could observe the proceedings with ease. To Noah’s right a plethora of operating equipment was kept; Laser scalpels, skin stretching devices and a numbing pad. To Noah’s left was a beast of a machine. The device had a computer touch screen that Noah could not see, as well as a large number of wires connecting it to a wall that was used, no doubt, to relay a visual image of whatever the screen was portraying to the people in the room he was facing. Atop the machine were three, large, metal appendages that were tipped with very sharp points, along the side of each spike an L.E.D display could be shown reading a large zero percent emblem at the hilt.

A single Doctor was in the room with Noah. The man was tall and imposing, towering over the lying man. His face, although covered by a white mask, seemed hard and unfeeling; his stormy grey eyes seeming to convey a sense of loathing each time they glanced at Noah. He was dressed in typical Doctors attire, a white lab coat and thick blue gloves, as well as a blue hair net cap to keep his hair away. A name tag identified him as Doctor Kesslor.

“Now Noah,” the Doctor began, “This procedure has been designed to heighten your cognitive process. I shall not lie to you when I say that the procedure will be extremely painful, but, this pain shall not be lasting and as soon as it is over you will feel better than you ever have. We can promise you this. As by legislation of the contract that you signed, you will not be able to back out from this procedure now we have arrived to this point.” The Doctor stopped for a moment, leaning over his patient and gently resting his hand on his shoulder, “good luck, Mr. Holden. This shall be over quickly.”

Noah was unable to reply due to the leather strap and ball that were strapped firmly across his mouth, there clearly to stop him from biting his own tongue off due to the pain that the experiment was due to cause. Doctor Kossler turned to face the people in the opposite room, spreading his arms out with his hands splayed open as if addressing an audience.

“We stand here, on the pinnacle of a huge leap in biological and Quantum Physic science.” He began, stepping one firm step toward those observing. “What we hope to achieve here is something that has been tried before and subsequently failed on all previous attempts. We hope to achieve contact with a universe exterior to our own.” He paused a moment, smirking beneath his mask. The shocked faces of his clients enough to spur him on with unbridled joy. “Science has already proven to us that other universes exist in corporeal form. Entirely different systems to our own that could contain direct or almost direct copies, of our own Earth. It is our aim to contact these alternate civilizations and try to assist them technologically, with resources and then vice versa with them to us.”  The Doctor finished off, at this point his audience smiling; some in disbelief and others in awe.

The masked man turned away from his audience once again and returned his gaze to the man on the table, shivering from the cold metal that was pushed against his bare back and legs. His hazel eyes were wild in fear, the tips of his hair only just pushing itself over his eye line. His body was slightly toned, the muscle on his body although not overwhelming was still defined. A small part of the Doctors mind hoped that he did not ruin this one as they had all the others that had passed through this process, he would otherwise have made a grand edition to the working forces of the world order.

Wasting no more time, Doctor Kesslor began to work. Dabbing a small piece of felt into the numbing agent, he rubbed the solution onto Noah’s forehead. The solution got to work instantly, rendering the patch of skin completely numb and unfeeling, the only sensation Noah was able to derive from this area being a slight buzzing. Kesslor then repeated this action atop the left and right sides of the top of Noah’s head, the hair that was previously in these locations dissolving instantly to leave two equally sized circular bald patches; these areas going instantly numb also.

“Now Noah, this shall hurt quite a bit. Feel free to bite down on the rubber ball that we have provided you with.” Kesslor advised as he picked up the laser scalpel.

Gently pushing the device against Noah’s forehead the Doctor tried to hold his nerve. This was always the hardest part of the operation, and it never got any easier for him each time. With a resigned sigh he activated the scalpel. Instantly hot plasma shot from the device and began to bore a hole through the man’s skin. Due to the nature of the gel that had been applied to his head he did not feel it, but the smell that filled the room was horrendous. As the skin covering the man's skull melted into nothingness the strong scent of cooking meat filled the air. Nothing can prepare you for the scent of another human’s flesh being cooked straight from their body. It was when the beam hit Noah’s skull that he finally began to scream into his gag.

The white bone cracked and pierced at the intense heat of the laser beam, slowly being bored away as Kossler moved the device in a circular motion to get at the soft brain tissue within. For the five minutes that this first section of the experiment took place, Noah could not stop screaming. The pain was unbearable for the man. As his skull cracked and splintered away his vision began to blur and he thought that he would slip into the embrace of sleep. He did not; as his mind began to be too addled with pain to function the pain receded to a dull ache. The crack of bone falling from his head to the floor audible for all to see. This pattern was repeated two more times on the remaining bald patches on the top of his head.

“Now we will begin the final stage of the process,” Kossler spoke weakly, mopping his forehead with a tissue that he had obtained from his lab coat pocket. The people behind him, visible only to the barely conscious Noah, looked on with a mixture of fear, repulsion and anticipation. All witness, and thus part of, the barbarity that had so far occurred in the two rooms, yet wholeheartedly believing that it was worth it for the future of this revolutionary technology.

Kossler turned his eyes to the machine in the corner of the room, the spikes sticking out of the top of the device beginning to look more foreboding as he forced his body toward them. The spike would be inserted directly into the Frontal Lobe, and Parietal lobes of Noah’s brain, forging new neural pathways and increasing his mental capacity by tenfold. At this point in time physical cross-dimensional travel was impossible. Instead, the Red Pyramid Corporation wished only to send the mind of a person through the breach, and then pull them back out to confirm their theories. If a connection between the universes was made mentally, then it was only a matter of widening the breach to allow for physical transportation. The first of the three devices felt heavy in his hands, no other mind had been able to handle the power surge through the brains. It had always seemed as if a connection were to be made, when instead the brain rejected the information and shut itself down, leading the victim to end up in a comatose state.  He plugged the first node in, thumbing a small button on the hilt of the device as it made contact with the flesh of Noah’s brain. Noah only winced at this action, the feeling of a foreign body entering his brain not eliciting any pain due to the neural make up of the organ.