Free NLI-10 by Lee Isserow

trial will be our shining light amidst the dark days of those previous.
     
     

Sitting at her hand-carved mahogany desk in a room deep in the depths of the Cultybraggan facility, Marion Whark signed off and sent in her report to her superiors. She looked around her office, the furnishings from the Shadwell pop-up relocated and arranged with identical feng shui, as they had been at all the recruitment centres. The LED wall behind her was displaying London's skyline as the sun began to rise in the distance. She took a deep breath, trying to contain her rage, and reached to the intercom on her desk, pressing a button.
    “Come the fuck in.” she said, sternly.
    Her anger was not easily restrained when she didn't have to represent herself as the matriarch of the project.
The two orderlies entered, towering over her in stature, but their faces were carved with expressions of terror at the slight woman sat before them.
    “What the legitimate, actual fuck happened last night?”
The two gigantic men looked at one another, neither wanting to be the first to speak, yet both wishing to implicate the other.
    “This is un-a-fucking-cceptable. Do you understand that? Do you know how it makes me look that my fucking Neanderthals can't look over their fucking shoulders to see a collective of little shits following them into the bowels of a top secret fucking experiment?”
    “But...” the first started, and then trailed off, warned to silence by Whark's glare.
    “No fucking 'buts', you moron. Dinner tonight their food is drugged, gas in the living quarters, knock them the fuck out and inject RFIDs in all of them. Do. You. Under. Stand?”
They nodded, looking at the floor with shame.
    “Good. Now get the fuck out of my sight.” she revolved her chair around, looking out over the LED window at London's skyline, her seething anger washed away slowly by the serene tide of the Thames.
    She waited to hear their plodding footsteps leave the room and the door lock behind them before turning back to her desk, taking another deep breath that was expelled with a growl. She pulled out a pile of files and leafed through the subjects until she found Sarah's. Opening it, she scanned the pages until she found the heading she was looking for.
     
    Daughter of APEX employees Scott and Jennifer Kirkland, retired from service in 2015 after A-Eye 1.2 discovered intentions contrary to The Company's best interests. Termination of employment enacted under order of NLI Project director, Marion Whark.
     
    She smiled to herself at a job well done. Having invested so much into the company to raise it to the global stature it had occupied for the last twenty years, she had been rewarded greatly for uncovering the Kirkland's plot to whistle-blow. She grinned as she flicked back to the beginning of the file, a photo of Sarah paper-clipped to the front page, and relished the notion of experimenting on the progeny of the couple who tried to take her company down. Having Sarah as a subject in the trial was a suitable denouement to the whole tale, she thought, given that it was her parent's research that had got the NLI project this far.

6
     
     
     
    The next morning the seven subjects awoke feeling groggy, each of them complaining of pain at the base of their spines. Checking one-another, they discovered that they all had a small circular bruise three to four millimetres in diameter.
    “It's between the fourth and fifth lumbar.” noted Farah as she looked at the bruise on Alex's spine.
    “What does that mean?” asked Rob.
    “It means they knocked us out again... it would have been fucking painful if they did a spinal tap when we were awake...” said Micah.
    “What would they do to our spines?” asked Leah.
    “Could be anything,” said Farah “Depends what they were testing for... Cerebrospinal fluid can show signs of infections, or a huge range of disorders. MS, Guillain-Barré, cancers --”
    “You think they were testing for cancer?” Leah