*SAGE
New York City was different than Canta, Kansas.
People. Everywhere.
No open tracts of land. No fields. No cows.
We pulled up to a high rise with big black letters above the door.
VASTERIAS ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL
So, they were real.
Sven handed his keys to a parking attendant and led the way through the front doors.
Inside the building my eyes saw one thing: white. White everywhere, white floors, white walls, white lights. Only a few hints of green—the chairs, a front desk—broke the expanse of white.
At the back of the lobby, we loaded onto the escalator and rode up to the thirtieth floor.
Sven knocked on a door at the end of a long, white hallway.
A rigid voice came from inside. “Come in.”
Sven swung the door open, and a woman sat behind a desk across an office space; her chin-length black hair, black blouse, and black skirt contrasted everything else in the room.
She didn’t stand from her chair to greet me or introduce herself. Instead, she waved me over, a look of annoyance on her face. Sven shut the door behind me, saying he’d be waiting for me whenever we finished.
I hesitated by the door, and the woman waved me over again. “Come.”
Once I’d lowered into the chair opposite her at the desk, she spoke.
“I don’t waste time. We’ll be performing a series of tests to gather data on you. Some we’ll conduct here in my office, others we’ll complete in the lab. We’ll begin with the hearing test. Put these on, please.”
She reached over her desk and handed me large, leather headphones.
“My name is Dr. Stanstopolis, by the way. Just raise your hand when you hear the beep.”
Her direct approach left me no choice. I put on the headphones.
She tapped into a tablet on her desk and then constructed a barrier between my line of sight and her tablet by setting a folder upright on her desk. I could still see her face though, over the folder, and I stared straight at her, waiting.
I waited. Ten seconds went by.
I waited.
Another ten seconds.
Nothing.
Another ten seconds.
Dr. Stanstopolis raised her eyebrows at me.
I stared back at her.
Nothing.
She rolled her eyes, lowered the folder, and held out her hands for the headphones.
“You couldn’t hear anything?” She crossed her hands on top of her desk, disbelieving.
I shook my head.
She frowned, pulled out a drawer in her desk, and removed a clear glass container the size of a pill bottle. She opened the lid and took out several strips of paper.
“Place these in your mouth one at a time and tell me what you taste.”
I did as she asked for no other reason than to get it all over with.
All the strips tasted the same: bitter.
Again, this didn’t satisfy Dr. Stanstopolis.
We did the same with a series of strips she instructed me to smell.
I couldn’t smell anything. Only the scent of the paper itself.
Finally, Dr. Stanstopolis shoved away from her desk and stood.
“Over here,” she said, carrying her tablet with her toward the window. Her wide hips swayed while she walked, accentuated further by the height of her heels.
“Now. My device will project an image. Just look out the window and tell me the farthest numbers you can read.”
I didn’t need to pretend. I could only read the largest line of numbers. The line was the closest in the stack of glowing red numbers shooting out into the clouds above the skyscrapers. With each successive line, the numbers grew progressively smaller.
“547825633331.”
“And the next row please,” she said.
“That’s all. I can only read that row.”
“You’re lying to me,” she said. “Now read the next row.”
“I can’t.”
Her jaw tensed. She squinted at me, her eyebrows knitting together, as if she might be able to read the thoughts inside my head if she worked hard enough.
Maybe I should have been disappointed that my skills had somehow shut down, but I only felt the thrill of it. It was brilliant. Vasterias wasn’t getting what they wanted from me, and even though it was not by any control of mine, I reveled in the fact that my test results weren’t sufficient for her.
Dr. Stanstopolis snapped the tablet cover closed. “Let’s head down to the lab. We have a treadmill in one of the rooms. I’d like to extricate the full spectrum of your physical capabilities.”
Extricate?
My throat tightened at her choice of words.
As she moved toward the office door, her curvy hips did the weird swaying thing again. She lifted the white lab coat off a hook hanging by her office door and waved me into the hall.
*
Within a few minutes, we’d made it down to the lab.
Dr. Stanstopolis placed her tablet on the counter and pulled out a pair of reading glasses from her coat pocket. “Ascend the treadmill, please.” She leaned down toward the counter, typing into her tablet.
“You mean get on right now?”
She blinked at me over her spectacles. “Yes. Get on.”
My stomach sunk, thinking about how fast I was likely going to sprint on this thing. “You want me in this dress while I run?”
Again, agitated, blinking from over her spectacles: “I didn’t know style was an issue for you. Would you prefer something different?”
“It’s not an issue,” I said. How was this lady making me feel so stupid?
“Whatever,” I said, stepping up onto the treadmill. “It’s your dress ….”
“That is not my dress.”
“Well, it belongs to your employer.”
“I’m not employed by Vasterias. I do my research here, and they fund me. That is all.”
Wow. Research must be the only thing she ever did because she certainly didn’t have any friends.
“Place this over your heart,” she said, handing me a thick, square sticker with a white wire attached. She plugged her end of the wire into the treadmill display board.
After I attached the sticker over my heart, she handed me another one. “This one attaches to your right temple.”
“Can these electrocute me?” I said, hesitant to put one on my head.
“No.”
True to her standards, Dr. Stanstopolis didn’t waste any time. As soon as the squares were in place, she turned on the treadmill, raised the incline, and increased the speed until my legs moved along at a fast clip.
“We’ll warm up your muscles for a few minutes,” she said, watching the treadmill display flash my pace and the elapsed time in bright red numbers.
I felt the rhythm of my breath increase, nothing painful, but still, a definitive shift. I knew one thing, whatever came, I wasn’t giving up. Not with this. It was like farm work. You just kept working until the job was done. Didn’t matter how late it was, didn’t matter how much more was coming the next morning.
I wouldn’t ask to stop; I wouldn’t quit until she turned off this treadmill herself. It was the only way to leave this treadmill with a victory. Stanstopolis might have put me up here on this thing, but I wasn’t going to beg. She’d enjoy that far too much, I’m sure.
After three minutes passed, she pressed the button to increase the speed. The treadmill belt moved faster, increasing my pace to a jog.
After another two minutes, she increased the speed again. I was running full on now.
Sweat formed at my hairline and neck. I felt it roll down my back and chest. My lungs moved, in and out, in and out.
Dr. Stanstopolis leaned against the cabinet counter and observed my face. I stared right back at her.
“You and Jack are studies of possibility for us,” she said over the sound of my pounding feet and the noise of the treadmill. “We never knew human thought had so much power within DNA encoding. It’s amazing. For years, unbeknown to himself even, and yet with the power of his own thoughts, Jack was able to shield his full DNA pattern from us and potentially even change some of his coding altogether.”
Dr. Stanstopolis reached over and increased the treadmill speed before continuing. My chest began to ache slightly; my head thumped in rhythm with my heartbeat.
“And now look at you,” she said. “Your very own DNA capabilities laid dormant until you yourself were exposed to the truth about your own possibilities. Then, and only then, once you knew about them and believed the truth, only then did those capabilities actually manifest and express themselves within your body. How did you do it? And how are you hiding them now, Sage?”
Dr. Stanstopolis tapped the button again, and the belt moved faster, my feet pounding. How far would she push?
Air heaved in and out of my lungs now. My side ached. My head felt light. Surely she could see I was almost at my limit?
“We’ve come to only one conclusion: your thoughts are informing your DNA expression much more than we ever believed. What you think is possible plays a part in what is actually possible.”
Her hand reached to the treadmill button again.
Click, click, click.
“So you better start believing in yourself, Sage.”
I was in an all-out sprint. I think she was watching me closely now, but silver dots sprinkled my vision, and my concentration was solely focused on not falling off the end of the treadmill. My chest was heaving so hard I could barely hear the doctor’s words.
“In regards to the big scientific picture,” she continued, “this means that every human being has the ability to do this on some level. Not, perhaps, as obvious or as strong as your capabilities but certainly each human can, to some extent. Imagine what this information will do in the world. Imagine how it would shift the field of epigenetic research.”
I couldn’t imagine anything besides being done with running.
It felt like my legs would split and rip off if I continued at this pace for much longer. There was nothing but the pound of my feet, nothing but the speckles in my vision. And then, the speckles were gone, and the wall in front of me flashed gray. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything.
Instinctively, I grabbed for the side railings of the treadmill. My feet still pounded on the belt.
Dr. Stanstopolis’s voice pulled me back to the room.
“Oh no, don’t hold on. That will slow down the feedback, and you’ll have to run for even longer.”
Longer? I released the railings; my vision cleared a bit. I tried to focus on the display in front of me, then on the wall in front of that, then on Dr. Stanstopolis’s face. I couldn’t concentrate on any of these things for very long, though, because it took too much work.
“Why are you getting tired now?” she said, sounding frustrated again. “We’re only just getting started.”
Did she say that? Or did I imagine it? But then her hand reached up and pressed the button.
The speed increased.
My feet were flying. I’d hadn’t run this hard or this fast in my entire life, aside from that brief stint on the island, getting to that helicopter.
I couldn’t suck in enough air to keep up with my legs. My heart was going to thump right out of my chest. I felt both light and heavy at the same time. Speckles crowded my vision. I wanted to go back on my word. It was okay if I begged her to stop. I wanted to do that, tried to do that, but I had no oxygen to spare. I couldn’t say a single word.
My lungs were screaming.
Dr. Stanstopolis looked down at the display. “This is pathetic.” Her finger hovered over a button.
Thank the Lord. I was done.
I’d done it. I’d failed whatever she’d been watching for, and the test was over. Why wasn’t she pressing the button?
She didn’t push stop.
She increased my pace.
My heart beat too hard.
Too. Fast.
I give up. I tried to rasp the words out loud. I’m done now. I give up.
I swatted down at the buttons, aiming for the one that would decrease my speed or stop me altogether. But the speckles in my vision increased, and black closed in. I felt my legs collapsing, felt myself flying off the end of the treadmill.
Then, all of it disappeared.