The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,18

experienced: EKGs, MRIs, CAT scans, and blood tests. It seemed to Landon that they studied everything about him.

Once he finished what he thought was another MRI, he felt exhausted. He hadn’t eaten anything all day and these tests seemed to go on and on. There appeared to be no end in sight.

“Okay, Landon, we just have one more thing to do. If you would follow me.”

After a brief walk down the hallway, Dr. Márquez led Landon into Room 132. It was a rather large room, compared to the others, and it was bathed in bright white light. In the middle of the room a steel gurney was bolted to the floor with a small metal tray sitting beside it, and along the back wall was a long mirror.

“Landon, if you would just take a seat on the gurney, someone will be with you shortly to administer the final test,” Dr. Márquez said from the entrance, after which he shut the door.

Landon was alone and consumed by silence and sterility. He wandered around, trying to kill time until the other doctor came in. He walked up to the long mirror and took a close look at himself. He was so thin. Weeks on the streets had taken a toll on his body and he now saw nothing but skin and bones. At least I’m clean, he thought.

Eventually, he strolled over to the steel gurney and sat on the flat portion of it, but for Landon, waiting was a bad thing. As he sat there he began to notice things; things like the leather straps attached to the gurney, and that sitting on the small metal table beside him rested a large syringe with a long needle and next to it, a vial of a strange opalescent chemical. Landon picked up the vial to see if he recognized the name of it, but it wasn’t labeled.

• • • • •

“It’s a unique compound of my own creation,” Dr. Dodgson said as he rotated around in his swivel chair. He sat at a console of monitors, each of them showing the test results from the numerous examinations Landon underwent. Brain scans and body measurements were all displayed on the various screens, showing every angle of Landon’s medical profile. “It’s a mixture of a psycho-stimulant that excites the cerebral cortex, as well as a cocktail of psycho-suppressants that reduces any extraneous activity in other regions of the brain. I also added a small quantity of a general anesthetic and paralytic to render the subject unconscious and immobile while the compound takes effect. Without it, subjects displayed signs of extreme pain.

“I developed it to verify the status of the subject and to determine how advanced their abilities are. In layman’s terms, it allows the subject to experience their apocratusis internally while manifesting their abilities externally. In their mind, they are reliving the moment that triggered their abilities, but the interesting part is that their abilities are part of the memory. So, when the memory comes to the forefront of their mind, their abilities will reappear externally, especially with the aid of the compound. Now, judging by the evidence, we’re in for quite the spectacle.”

The small observation room from which Dr. Dodgson operated was hidden behind the one-way mirror in Room 132. Joining him in the room stood Dr. Longfellow and a man in a well-tailored blue suit. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a stoic demeanor.

“What evidence exactly do you speak of?” the man asked.

“Well apart from his test results, which show the medical cues consistent with our other subjects, the field team says that the site of his apocratusis looked as if a bomb had gone off. The entire place was destroyed. But to top it off, look at this.”

Dr. Dodgson rolled over to a blank computer monitor and brought up an Internet browser, clicked a few times and typed in something quickly.

“This is a story that popped up on a blog about three hours ago. The story states that the writer was on a private tour of a museum this morning, and that when she was leaving, she watched our subject stumble into the street. He apparently lifted an oncoming bus off the ground to save himself. Evidently, he drew in quite a crowd but ran away shortly after.” Dr. Dodgson continued to scroll down the blog entry. Once he reached the bottom of the page, he turned to the man and said, “Sir, you’ll want to see this. They seemed to have snapped