Free NLI-10 by Lee Isserow Page A

stammered, breath fast, a quiver on her lip. “Could the trial have given us cancer? Is that what they were doing surgery for?”
    Rob put an arm round her and tried to calm her down.
    “What if they weren't taking anything.” Sarah said. The others turned to her and a silence fell on to the room.
    “So, rather than remove fluid... they put something else in? On top of the surgery?” asked Alex.
    Sarah didn't have an answer, and the room was quiet once again but for the tones echoing through the walls, until interrupted by a chime resounding through the speakers. It was time for another round of tests.
    Once again, they were placed in darkness in yet another room beyond another new door on the maze of corridors. Sat adjacent to one-another in deep leather chairs, they were instructed to keep their eyes open and concentrate on trying to recall the grid in their mind's eye. The room tones roared loudly from the shadows surrounding them, punctuated with asynchronous beeps, taps, sharp squeals of digital noise that sounded like a computer being stabbed in its electric heart. The cacophony and the darkness seemed to last for hours, but as it went on, each of them realised the grid was laid out before their eyes without having to think about it, as if the sonics were calling it out of the ether of memory, summoning it without their control.
    More hours passed, and the grid was not only hanging in their vision wherever they turned in the black, but felt like it was steadily populating with some kind non-visual data. Accompanying it was a hormonal release, serotonin relaxing their bodies and minds, letting the information flow. None of it was decipherable, but there was now some kind of depth beneath the shapes they could see in their mind's eye, as if there were something being installed in the grid that they couldn't access.
The tones came to a crescendo, then stopped in an instant. The lights came on, grid fading from view as the room became illuminated. They could all still picture it, but not as evocatively as in darkness. The orderlies took them back to the mess hall for dinner, where they shared their vivid visions.
    “It felt kinda like an acid trip, y'know?” said Alex “Like, you're aware what your seeing isn't real, but it feels like it's always there, beneath the surface, the patterns connecting the universe, connecting us all.”
    “What do you think it was?” Sarah asked Micah.
    “Do you want me to be honest, or say it was just another average day in the bunker?” he asked. She wanted the former. “You know that feeling we all had, that pressure of... data or information of some kind?” she nodded, as did the others. “I think they're installing something in our subconscious, through the tones and the drugs.”
    “Like NLP?” asked Alex, who then had to reluctantly explain Neuro Linguistic Programming to Leah, who was visibly disturbed by a medical-sounding acronym. “It's nothing to be afraid of. Once you're aware of NLP it's less effective, because you're looking for it.”
    “But this isn't normal NLP, is it?” said Farah. “NLP doesn't have a side salad of surgery, noise and drugs.”
A chime through the walls told them it was time to go to the living quarters for sleep, but none of them were tired. Adrenaline and fear of surgery as they slept was keeping their bodies ticking through to the early hours of the morning. In the darkness, they couldn't shake the image of the grid, as if haunting them in a waking dream. The lights came on to signal morning and none of them had slept a wink, yet didn't feel tired.
    At breakfast they tried to make sense of getting through a whole day and night without exhaustion.
    “Y'ever try Modafinil?” Alex asked Micah, who had. “Kinda feels like that, huh?”
    She proceeded to tell the rest of the group about the drug that the US Army had given to the troops to keep them awake for two to three days straight without loss of mental clarity, none of the jittery