When The Sleeper Wakes

by Kim EM

Part 06: Changes

"When the Sleeper Wakes" Created by Kim EM and Debra Rachel

Chapter Six: CHANGES

Bill Nelson was wide-awake, alert and rested, feeling well, his body at peace, and more worried than he’d ever been. Things like this just didn’t happen.

The previous night he’d had an accidental needle stick, one that could have passed to him any number of diseases. He’d be tested regularly, of course, but it would be at least six months before he could reasonably say he hadn’t caught anything from the dead man’s blood.

On the way home, tired and lost in thought, he’d ripped his shoulder open on the projecting lip from the paper money slot of a MetroCard machine. Once home, he’d rapidly undressed, cleaned the wound, bandaged it, and then gone directly to sleep.

Asleep at Nine AM, exhausted and aching, he’d dreamed much that doesn’t bear repeating. Before he awoke, though, the dreams faded, and his restless sleep calmed as his body recovered.

He was awakened at noon by a loud noise from the street below, and he lay in bed, surprised at how good he felt after only three hours sleep. Realizing he hadn’t felt the ache from the gouge in his shoulder, he reached back and didn’t feel any pain when he depressed the bandage. He pulled it off, then incredulously felt the wound – but there was no wound. Somehow, in a three-hour span of sleep, a long, deep gouge in his shoulder had healed itself. Things like this just didn’t happen.

How in hell, he wondered, had the wound simply vanished. The bandage was there, with dried blood impregnated in its fibers, so he knew he hadn’t just dreamt it. He sat up, feeling better rested than he had in years. In a daze he padded his way to the bathroom. After taking care of his business, he stood at the sink, staring wonderingly at himself in the mirror. Something was different, he was sure of that. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, there was nothing obvious, but something just didn’t seem right. He’d seen himself in the mirror every day of his adult life, and something, damnit, what could it be, struck him as off-kilter.

He started an inventory. Two eyes, one nose, mouth, chin, and everything else he expected. Was there a slight softening to his jaw line, or was that just the fact he wasn’t a kid any more? He pulled the hair away from one ear, which proved to look just like he’d remembered it, low-hanging lobes and all. He laughed at the thought. Okay, he was being silly. Suddenly he took another close look – he’d had to pull the hair aside to see the ear! Given that he kept his hair short cropped, about two steps away from shaved, how the hell had his hair grown so long?

That was more than puzzling. Aside from the obvious, there was no condition he could think of that would make hair suddenly grow a couple of inches overnight. On the other hand...

He put the toilet lid down and sat heavily. What if? No, that didn’t make sense. But if something unknown had sped his metabolism to unheard of levels, could it explain his overnight healing and the rapid hair growth? Something he’d picked up by the needle stick? But what, what condition could possible do that? There’s nothing he’d learned of in med school, nothing he’d even heard rumors of, that could produce effects like that.

Was it possible for a disease to just spring up out of nowhere? Oh, there had been diseases discovered as though they were new, but when one started checking things out, they had been around, only unrecognized. Two that came to mind were HIV and Legionnaires Disease. But something like this, with such gross effects? There wasn’t any way he could fathom for it to have lurked undetected. Besides, he thought wryly, as he lifted himself up, could something that healed like this, some sort of ‘healing factor’, be classed as a disease?

Standing once again at the mirror, he gave his face another inspection, started for the bathroom door, then hurriedly returned to the mirror. His face mere inches away from the reflective surface, he stared into his own green eyes. Green? He didn’t have green eyes, his were gray and always had been. Now this was getting weird. He’d heard of spontaneous changes in eye color, but nothing so rapid, and definitely not linked to any kind of ‘healing factor’.

What the hell was going on?

Staggered, he left the bathroom, wandered aimlessly through the apartment, and wound up in the kitchen. He needed food, the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach told him that, at least if it wasn’t just shock. No, he was hungry, and only a few hours since his meal at the little diner near the office. This was seriously weird. As he went refrigerator diving, it struck him that the hunger could be caused by whatever was happening to him, if in fact his metabolism had sped up.

From the freezer – was he hungry enough? Yes. – he pulled out a frozen lasagna and stuck it in the microwave. While waiting, he wandered into the living room, opened the blinds, and stared at the busy west side street. Everything seemed so normal; the world continued as it always had. What was happening to him, and what – his blood chilled – else would happen?

At the ding from the microwave, he went back to the kitchen, grabbed the lasagna, and started eating. After only a few bites, he was interrupted by a buzz from the intercom. Sighing, he went to the hall and hit the switch. "Yes?"

A cultured voice came from the speaker. "Doctor Nelson?"

"Yes."

"My name is Jay Hunter. I work for the Medical Information Bureau. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about a body you did the post-mortem on last night?"

Nelson thought quickly. Now another strange thing, also related to that body. What was going on here? "Sure. Come on up; I’m in 3-F."

"Thanks."

Bill hit the door release button, then slipped into the bedroom for his robe and a pair of slippers. A few moments later there came a knock from the door. When Bill opened it, he found a black man, mid-20’s, short hair, wearing an expensive black suit. "Please come in. Sorry I’m not dressed, but I work nights."

The man stepped into the living room and gave it a quick look before turning to Bill. "Don’t worry about it. I know how these things go."

"I hope you don’t mind, but I was eating breakfast."

"Please, don’t let me stop you. If it’s okay, we can talk while you eat."

Bill escorted the man to the kitchen, then asked, "Can I get you something to drink?"

"Soda, by any chance?"

"Sure."

Bill pulled two cans of Diet Mountain Dew from the refrigerator, and asked, "I hope you like Diet Dew? I’m afraid it’s all I have."

"That works."

Bill passed a soda to the man, then sat back to his lasagna.

"Lasagna for breakfast?" The man cocked a brow at the tray.

Bill colored slightly, and said, "Well, as I said, I work nights, so my eating schedule is a bit mixed up. So, what’s up? Why is an insurance industry organization interested in my patient?"

The man looked slightly embarrassed. "Um. Well, I have to tell you, I lied slightly downstairs. My name is Jay Hunter, but the Medical Information Bureau thing is just a cover. I actually work with NASA, in their biomedical security operations."

Bill goggled a bit at this. "Biomedical security? For NASA? You’re putting me on."

The man pulled a card case from his inside coat pocket and passed it over to Bill for his inspection. "No, really. It’s a function we don’t talk about much, but somehow along the way the bureaucrats decided we belonged in NASA."

Bill shrugged. It was weird, but seemed pretty much in tune with the way this day was shaping up. "So why is NASA interested in my patient?"

"Well..." The man hesitated, then went on. "Your patient, so to speak. Brett Davis. He doesn’t seem to exist."

"WHAT?"

"There’s no record of anyone by that name fitting the description, and not at the address listed on his identification. Beyond that, we ran his fingerprints, and they didn’t match anyone on file."

Bill looked up sharply at that. "Surely that’s nothing unusual? There must be millions of people without fingerprints on file."

Jay gazed steadily at Bill. "Less than you think. The government has quietly been building a database of biometric data for the past twenty-five or so years."

"That’s incredible. This has gone on for twenty-five years without the public’s knowledge? How? Beyond that, why?"

Jay stood and walked to the kitchen door, then turned to face Bill. "How? A lot of time, money, and effort. A LOT."

"But why?"

"That, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you."

Bill got up and walked past Jay into the living room. He walked to the window, looking down at the street below. "Why tell me anything? Why not just let me go on, fat, dumb, and happy? I don’t know anything about the patient beyond what I discovered in the post."

"What you discovered in the autopsy was a lot more than you think."

"Uh-huh."

"Also, you had an accident last night. Needle sticks can be quite dangerous."

Bill laughed bitterly. "Tell me about it."

"Let’s back up a bit here, first. You need some background on this whole matter."

"Whoa." Bill raised his hands in a ‘warding off’ gesture. "Before you tell me even more things I probably don’t want to know, why me? I don’t have any government clearances, no particular interest or knowledge of security matters, and no desire to get involved in things that don’t concern me."

"Ahh," Jay Hunter said. "That’s the point, the point exactly. You are involved. As a matter of fact, you’re in the thick of it."

Bill sighed and walked to his favorite chair. He settled in with a sigh, and gestured Jay to a facing chair. "So tell me, what’s up that I need to know about? And before you start, let me tell you I have problems enough of my own without borrowing yours."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Interlude: ELSEWHERE

Within a building famous in certain circles, in a plush but windowless office, stands a person familiar to us. The person faces his superior, a well-tailored, gray-haired woman.

The superior speaks. "So, he’s vanished?"

"You could say that. It’s not as though we have any way of keeping tabs on him, all things considered."

"And we don’t know if he’s undercover, captured, or dead in the street somewhere. Remarkable."

"It’s in the nature of the technology. Even if he were to be captured, there is no way of identifying him. Not even his DNA, if they had a sample, would clue them in on his true identity."

The steel-haired woman walks slowly around her desk, sits, and stares thoughtfully at a portrait dominating one wall. "And if he’s killed?"

"It deteriorates rapidly. If he were to die, the material would be useless and unrecognizable in a matter of hours. Therefore..."

"Therefore," she interrupts forcefully, "if he’s caught they could extract a sample from him, and if he’s killed, the Americans have a several-hour window where they STILL can get the material."

"It breaks down within that timeframe, so they would need to not only get it, but figure out what it is, and then use it, before it decays."

She shakes her head slowly. "I regret not canceling this project when I took over. I can’t begin to imagine what my predecessor was thinking when he approved it."

"It makes our officers virtually..."

The superior interrupts. "I know the rationale. Even so, if other nations discover what we are doing, it could irreparably rupture relations with our allies. And now, his vanishing. I hope we haven’t made an enormous blunder."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Interlude II: ELSEWHEN

The lab hadn’t changed much in the intervening time. The huge metal tanks, frost-rimed and vibrating with a low thrum; the impersonal aura of the white tile floors and walls, the aluminum gurney, the huddled doctors, and of course the general. As I woke, I became aware of all these things as though I’d never been asleep, never been part of this strange testing procedure.

The general stepped forward, then paused, distracted by the groaning of some equipment back in the ‘tank farm’. He shot a look at the doctors, who held some sort of hurried consultation. One double-timed to a control panel, where he twiddled a few knobs and then nodded. The doctors looked at each other, reached an unspoken consensus, and nodded to the general.

The general stepped to my side as I weakly looked up. He stood a moment, looking grave. Personally, I thought he was posturing, trying to increase the drama of the moment, but then again, he was a general and I a mere sergeant, so who was I to say?

Finally he spoke.

"Welcome back, Sergeant Wells."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

To Be Continued....

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -