However, she was more aggressive than you at an earlier stage of her development, and developed an interesting quirk: an extreme attachment to all her possessions, even casual ones, such as the toilet paper in her lavatory.”
“I understand,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a quirk. I have the attachment thing as well, though in me it’s not as strong.” I gave it some thought. “People messing with my stuff just makes me cranky.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Zielinski said, jotting down a note. See? Cooperative me! “Like you, she had moral qualms about the volunteer Transforms, and came up with a bright idea: ‘let me try taking juice from a woman Transform, interrupting the process before I send her into withdrawal.’ This sounded plausible, and Rose worked on slowing down her juice draw rate, to where it took five minutes. We figured out the draw rate and the timing needed to take the woman Transform from her before the woman would die.”
It didn’t work. “Why didn’t that work, Dr. Zielinski?” I asked.
“We still have no idea. All I can tell you is that when we took the woman Transform from Rose, Rose went berserk. For safety reasons she agreed to restraints, but she broke the restraints in her berserk fury. The woman Transform we pulled from Rose? She was dying, going into withdrawal and going Monster at the same time. Rose didn’t want her back after we took her and couldn’t be talked down. Rose didn’t swoon in a normal post-draw coma, either. She moved faster than lightning, something nobody had ever seen an Arm do before, or has seen since, grabbed two guns from the guards, and started shooting. She killed seven people and wounded fifteen, including myself, before the building guards shot her dead.”
I shared Dr. Zielinski’s pain, awakening buried emotions in myself. He had lost his daughter to the juice, same as me.
“The fourth Arm was Stacy Keaton. The FBI held her, supposedly cooperative – I have my doubts on this – and she became an exercise fanatic, as her muscle problems were worse than Rose’s or Mary’s. Her caretakers messed up, though, and got her a volunteer Transform a few hours late, once, driving her into withdrawal. She recovered, surprising everyone, but after the FBI’s mistake she turned uncooperative. She escaped custody not much later.”
“They all sound so different from each other,” I said. “Are you sure we’re all the same kind of Transform?”
“Positive.” He smiled. “It doesn’t make the papers, but Focuses are also quite different from each other, along a broad spectrum of changes and talents. My current hypothesis is all Major Transforms share this feature.”
Would this knowledge help me? I couldn’t see how.
“The others?”
“The fifth Arm was Francine Sarles. She proved to be, well, different.” We shared a smile. “She was a Calculus teacher at a Community College when she Transformed, and was into, um, alternate lifestyles.”
“Huh?”
“She lived in a nudist colony.” He sighed. “She was a socialist, an atheist, a free-thinker, a vegetarian, had an open marriage, and had experimented with every illicit drug she got her hands on. I think she had been addicted to marijuana, of all things. Anyway, she had severe moral issues with the volunteer Transforms. After the first one, she said that if we presented another one to her she would kill herself. I wasn’t in charge of her care, just the main outside expert, and she and I concocted a test involving a male Transform already in withdrawal. Dr. Dana Reddicks held the reins, unfortunately, as he didn’t possess the qualifications or knowledge necessary to care for an Arm. As usual he played the fool, refusing to restrain her during the test or afterwards. Initially, we thought we succeeded, although Francine said she could tell the juice she took was ‘bad’. She started to erupt in boils within an hour, and within a day she experienced phantom pains, hallucinations, and light sensitivity. She believed she was turning into a Monster. I thought another juice draw would fix her, but as I said she had no restraints, allowing her to steal a service revolver and kill herself.”
“Jesus! Two of the Arms killed themselves,” Carol said. “What’s up with the suicides?”
Dr. Zielinski studied his desk, and spent a moment rearranging papers. “Transform Sickness is a scary thing,” he said. “Nobody wants to go out by turning Monster or going through withdrawal. Carol, the suicide rate among unwanted Transforms who realize they are Transforms is about 50%. Two of the first ten United States Focuses committed suicide as well.”
Disquieting, but that path wasn’t for me.
“What about the next Arm? The one who had the muscle problems?”
“Elsie Conger never woke up from her transformation coma,” Dr. Zielinski said. “She was morbidly obese when she transformed and her body couldn’t cope. Nothing I did, or anyone else did, could save her.”
Damn. So many dead Arms.
I promised myself I would do my damnedest not to be one of them.
Going with Keaton?
(Carol Hancock POV)
I couldn’t escape the realization I was now on the other side, a killer, even if the authorities called them ‘volunteer Transforms’. The only question I couldn’t resolve was how far on the other side I had wandered. If I gave myself to Keaton, as I had arranged, I would be giving myself to someone so far on the other side of good as to have joined the pantheon of names like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Eichmann, Stalin and the rest of those termed Antichrists in the books I read and the sermons I heard.
Surely, Keaton would not require me…
I had to think.
If I went with Keaton, I would place myself in the hands of a murderess, a sadist who told me she planned to hurt me. Who looked forward to hurting me.
If I didn’t, I would die.
Tap, tap. My heels marked the time as I paced the bounds of my room.
I didn’t have any other options. The FBI would kill me, directly or indirectly.
However, if they just left, leaving me incarcerated here indefinitely, that wouldn’t be much of an improvement. There should be a whole tank of volunteer Transforms waiting to use me as their way out of a horrific death. Over ten thousand cases of the Transform Sickness happened each year and only around thirty new Focuses transformed each year. Of those ten thousand, only around six hundred – only six percent – would survive to get a Focus. There ought to be about twenty-five Transforms a day seeking out my services. Why did they have such problems supplying me with Transforms?
I hurt. My shoulder screamed agony at me, and my ribs hurt worse. It hurt every time I breathed. I’d picked up a new pain in my hips, turning walking into torture. I tried sitting, but sitting ended up hurting worse. I paced. I had to. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Even if the FBI miraculously vanished, and the idiots here found a way to keep me in juice, I had this other issue – my muscle problems. I needed more help with that than I would ever get here.
No. Staying here wasn’t an option, either.
What if I ran? What if I ignored my deal with Keaton and escaped, taking off on my own?
Bah. How long before my muscles hypertrophied and broke my legs, dooming me to death by juice withdrawal? I didn’t understand how to fix them. Not a pretty picture.
I faced another problem: I wasn’t a criminal, revolutionary or secret agent, just a woman, a rather normal woman. The police, or the FBI, or someone would catch me easily. They wouldn’t bring me back here. Instead, I would vanish, likely ending up in the hands of someone like Agent McIntyre. He would put in a cage, like an animal, where I would die in juice withdrawal, shackled in steel, wired for science, like some experimental subject in a Nazi death camp.
Even if the FBI didn’t catch me, then what? How would I get juice? Withdrawal would finally catch up with me in some lonely place, fruitlessly waiting for a hapless Transform to walk by and donate juice and their life to me. I shivered, and my mind skittered away from even thinking about it.
Running away, on my own, would only be a more elaborate way of committing s
uicide.
Still, going with Keaton would be my biggest gamble ever.
Keaton. Her way was a chance at life, as she had survived as an Arm so far. I would put myself in her hands and let her do what she wanted with me. She was evil, I knew it, and she knew it. She didn’t care. I couldn’t decide, anymore, whether I cared or not.
The choice? Keaton or death. Keaton at least offered me a chance, a slim chance, at life. None of the other options did.
A half hour later, I grew scared. Why did Keaton agree to take me? Dr. Zielinski said, after I turned her down, that she would never even consider helping me again. When I sent the note I had been desperate, and I prepared myself for rejection, for something horrible to happen, or for a long drawn out negotiation. Keaton agreed to take me, without hesitation, only requiring me to escape first.
I couldn’t figure her out. She should have negotiated. She had the power position. I offered her myself, but such offers are meaningless unless the negotiators built specific terms into the deal.
Perhaps I had spent too much time looking over Bill’s shoulder when he did his deals. Perhaps Keaton didn’t look at things that way. Perhaps she did look at my offer as an offer of eternal slavery.
If she did, she was a fool, and I couldn’t believe that. If I did survive, I would end up as her peer. Nobody could enslave an Arm. So my gut