Sci - Fi Short Stories

OUR HERO - Entdeckung

Munich, Germany – 2013

“Careful, now…” the doctor said.

There was a silence filled with tension that made Doctor Tatjana Baumann shiver. They were about to perform one of the most daring experiences in History. And as such, it was a complete secret.

“Dr. Baumann, please help me here.” Dr. Stein asked. Sighing, the woman obeyed, still looking rather appalled to the boy floating in the tank, with many wires plugged in his head.

“What are we doing?”, she thought.

The answer was very simple. They were trying to get access to the memory of a boy who had been kept in a tank for almost 70 years.

A couple of years ago, after a search in an old concentration camp, the group of archeologists found a secret passage which led to an underground vault. It was a secret room where the most ambitious experiments with Jews were performed. As it was not surprising enough, they found a well-preserved abandoned tank, and a few notes from Dr. Mengele that explained his idea of keeping a boy inside of it. Sadly, most of his notes were missing, so it was not possible to determine the boy’s name, age or the purpose of that experiment.

Of course, the place was abandoned after the Nazism’s downfall. For almost 70 years, the boy was kept there. He, of course, was dead. It was a mystery why they decided to keep a dead boy’s body in a tank, but considering the weird experiments the Nazi performed, it was surely some attempt to relive a dead body or preserve it.

Sadly, the boy would never wake up. His brain was way too damaged to allow reactivation. Any attempt would make him collapse and it would all be lost. But Dr. Franz Stein had a good plan. After years of struggle, he developed a device that once properly plugged and synchronized to the boy, it would be able to read old and long gone brain activities, and then convert it in images and sounds, as they could see his memories in a movie. That way, they would be able to get the answers they wanted so badly. Who was the boy? How did he die? What was Mengele’s purpose?

“This might go so wrong…” a skeptical Tatjana has said, weeks earlier, to Dr. Stein.

“It might,” he conceded. “as well as it might go so right. We must try this, Dr. Baumann.”

“I think this might damage the body.” Tatjana insisted, looking at the group to find support. “Can’t we simply give this boy a proper burial? In respect to all he has suffered in life?” No answer. “Oh, come on, you people!”

“I need to keep my job…” one of them said, smiling.

Dr. Stein laughed. “All of you do. But most of all, it's important to have a job that makes a difference, boys. That's why I manually masturbate caged animals for artificial insemination.”

They all laughed, but Tatjana simply frowned.

“I need you in my team, Tatjana.” The man said, frankly. “Are you in or not?”

And there she was now, contemplating the floating boy, ready to get to know the hidden and forgotten story of a little Jew, or completely screw it up.

“And… plug.” Dr. Stein said, and Tatjana pressed a button on the monitor.

For everyone’s delight, the black screen in the middle of the room turned bright.

“It’s working!” Tatjana said, excited.

Slowly, an image started to form in the screen. Slightly blurred, but it became clearer and clearer after a few seconds.

“That’s it, guys.” Dr. Stein smiled. “You’re all about to watch a real Nazi story.”