he was sitting behind his desk, looking at something. When he heard me enter he turned and pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked through them at me. “There you are.” He began nodding and picked up a tablet computer that sat next to the laptop on the desk. “Have a seat; I need to have you fill out this questionnaire before we begin…” He handed me a clipboard and pen, then turned to walk away. I gave him a quick smile of thanks, which caused him to back away. I sighed internally. Even when I wasn’t trying to, I could drive people away from me.
The questionnaire took an annoyingly long time and asked some invasive personal questions (“How many sexual encounters have you had in the last seven days? Two weeks? Month? Six months? Year? Five years?”) Not like it was a difficult one, since until a few days ago I’d had zero human contact outside of Mom.
There were other ones that delved into health history, how I was feeling, when was the date of my last physical (“Never!” I printed in big, bold letters), when I first noticed a difference in my abilities – and on it went for a hundred and fifty questions, covering both the important (“Do you have any known allergies?”) to the mundane (“When was your last bowel movement?”). I thought about scrawling “None of your damned business” but ultimately I just answered the questions – almost all – truthfully.
The last question – “Describe in detail any unusual abilities or skills” – gave me pause. Part of me wanted to know more, to find out what kind of meta I was. Okay, all of me wanted to know. But that was tempered by the fact that I had only been here for three days and still had zero idea of who (if anyone) I could trust. If I told them I suspected I could use my dreams to communicate with others, would that be considered some kind of power or a sign that I was slipping in the sanity department? I believed I could talk to Reed through my dreams, but it was too weird to consider normal and as yet too unconfirmed for me to know with certainty I could do it. After all, it could have been his power, not mine.
I answered the question, “Superior Strength, Speed, Agility and Intelligence” (no, I didn’t put a smiley next to the intelligence part) and left any other suspicions off. As I had filled out the form, the doctor had milled around the lab, adjusting various pieces of equipment, humming as he skittered about.
He noticed me after a minute or so, and favored me with a smile as he approached. “We’re going to do some physical tests next, then I’ll give you this – a standard, multiple choice I.Q. test – and we’ll see how you do.”
For the next three hours, he put me through my paces. I thought maybe I had pissed him off in some way, because he was not kind in his efforts to “test” me. I ran on a treadmill at the highest setting for a long time, well past the point where I was bored and into the realm of thinking of casting myself into the place where the tread meets the plastic at the back, hoping to end my life with the added benefit that perhaps the running would stop as well. It couldn’t have been an ordinary treadmill because I swear I had to be running at fifty miles an hour.
He made me breathe into a machine (to test my lung capacity), had me lift weights (I cursed him because there was no measure of how much they weighed and he refused to tell me) and hit a punching bag. Then he handed me rubber balls and had me throw them at a target on a wall at full strength, which I did (until I turned all three of them into pancakes).
“It would have been easier if you would have taken your gloves off,” he said, looking over his glasses at me.
“Sorry, Doc. Rule number four.”
A look of confusion swept over his face. He led me over to a table in the corner. “One last thing.” He bade me to sit.
“The intelligence test?”
“Two more things. First—” He reached onto the table and picked up a needle along with a strip of rubber. “I need blood.”
My eyes narrowed. “I would suggest trying your local blood bank, because