Occasionally while on guard duty, scientists would come in with someone in an Order uniform and ask them to touch the artifact. Each person that touched it seemed to have a different reaction to it, apparently the reason for the experiments. One man who had touched the artifact declared that he now knew how to cure cancer and asked if he could be supplied with a computer and a group of scientists. The scientists with the man during the experiment assured him that he could, and they all left without saying another word, leaving Michelle and the other guard on duty, John, to wonder what in the hell had just happened.
Various other people touched the object, with varying reactions, to a dumbfounded look of surprise to one woman having a grand-mal seizure, falling to the floor twitching and starting to froth at the mouth before she was hauled out of the room. Within a few days and a couple of other people coming in and out after touching the artifact, the woman came in; the one who had been "terminated" according to rumors.
The woman walked in the room with two scientists and said: "You want me to touch that egg thing?"
The taller scientist whom Michelle had seen dozens of times, but still didn't know the name of, said "If that's what you see, yes, please. Just touch it once and let us know what you experience."
The woman seemed unsure, but said "Okay" and walked forward, putting one hand on what Michelle always saw as a box. The woman's face went blank for a split second and then reverted to normal. The woman looked at both of the scientists at Michelle and John, the other guard on duty, and back to the scientists.
"That's it? Was it supposed to do something?" the woman said, appearing confused.
"That depends," the shorter scientist said. "Everyone experiences something different when they touch it. Did nothing happen to you? Anything, even seemingly inconsequential, that you experienced could be beneficial for us."
"I kinda feel like I need to pee?" the woman said, phrasing it like she was questioning if that's what they wanted to hear.
"Okay, let's get you back to your room so you can go to the bathroom. We can talk more after." The shorter guard opened the door, nodded at Michelle and John, and they all left the room.
It wasn't until after her guard duty that Michelle heard what had supposedly happened to the woman. A guard who was walking back to his room after his duty was over said he heard someone running, followed by a woman screaming. This was followed by a solitary gunshot and silence. It was just a rumor of course, but when everyone made such a big deal about the secrecy of everything, even among those of the same clearance level, rumors held more value than in the real world. Below the Warehouse, a rumor was a rumor. Inside the Warehouse, a rumor could lead to loss of your clearance level, or worse.
There was no real way to tell who the woman was, or if it had been the same woman from the experiment conducted in C-116, but Michelle had a sinking feeling in her gut that it was. The blank expression on the woman's face seemed somewhat feigned to Michelle. She couldn't put her finger on it, but there was something in the woman's eyes that belied a truly "blank" look, and what the woman was attempting to convey. Michelle assumed the scientists had been trained to look for details like that, to help them judge when participants in the experiment were telling the truth or not.
For all Michelle knew, they had hooked the woman up to a lie detector after she went to the bathroom. With the strange things they had in the Warehouse and the level of secrecy involved in everything, Michelle was pretty sure they had a way of detecting if someone was lying. When she had first applied to work for the Order they had hooked her up to a small device that went around one bicep and then they started asking her questions. What her name was, where she lived, had she ever done drugs, random other things. The interviewer would look at a separate device occasionally and nodding, as if subconsciously ticking off a box on a checklist.
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Touched - Order of Odium: Book One
कल्पित विज्ञानThe Order of Odium is an extremely secretive and often deadly organization of some of the most powerful people in this world, and possibly beyond. In a floating building they call "The Warehouse" they store and experiment with countless artifacts th...
