O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
to clean himself up and returned in the middle of the night to the
VTV office building.
The nervous sweat of anticipation moistened his palms as he
entered his passcode to the laboratory. It was a highly classified
project, and no one at the office except Harvey, Gareth, Johanness
and Cain knew of the machine’s ultimate purpose. He chuckled. In
truth, only
he
knew the machine’s ultimate purpose.
As the door opened and Harvey walked in the lab door he was
surprised to see that the light was on. There was a lot of noise coming
from an empty room. He heard the voices of Gareth and Barth.
Instinctively, he hid in the dark, behind a bank of shelving. From
there he could see his employers, standing with some technicians
there he had never seen before. He saw then what they had never
intended him to see, indeed, what no one would ever want to witness.
And, what was more, he realized, he was responsible for it. It all came
to him in a flash: Above all else, what kind of experience would a
company obsessed with mortality want to transmit? The greatest
mystery of all, the final frontier.
Strapped to a chair directly in front of them was a man. The man
seemed to be gazing casually into the distance, but on closer
examination, was not quite there. He was either dead, or almost
there.
There was a gag around his mouth. His tanned, weathered skin
and long, uncombed black hair suggested to Harvey that he had been
living on the street. He could have been forty years old. He could
have been sixty.
The man looked up and Harvey saw in his eyes the look a dying
dog makes when it knows it’s all over. There was a tube attached to
his arm, dispensing oblivion. As he died, Harvey shuddered as if the
man’s ghost had flown through him.
All at once, nothing mattered to him anymore: not his job, not
the project, not his plans to use it on himself. All that counted was
that he undo the wrong that had been indirectly perpetrated by his
own intellect.
How many people were they planning to murder? Or torture?
For the sake of entertainment. How had he not seen this? He had
split an atom of experience that should have remained untouched.
How he wished that he had been born a dunce.
Harvey snuck carefully out of the laboratory. He jumped into his
Buick and headed directly for the local police station.
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