Wendy Smith collapsed into her office chair, and covered her face with her hands. She rubbed her temples, but it didn't help her headache or the accompanying nausea. It felt like her skull was too small. Wendy kept massaging, and hung on to the fact that the painkillers would kick in shortly. Even though she had medical training that told her it was just swelling in the sinuses and constricted blood vessels (probably due to stress), she still wondered illogically if they'd find her tomorrow morning with her brains leaking out the side of her head. She imagined the headlines now--“Doctor’s head explodes; details at eleven.”
What? How gruesome! This was truly out of character. Her migraines normally weren't this severe. The events of the last week must be getting to her, worse than she'd thought.
At least Lucas was out of medbay. At first he spent most of his time sleeping. He had a few semi-wakeful periods, where he seemed to be talking to himself--even arguing with himself. Most of the techs and a couple of the nurses seemed alarmed at this behavior, but Wendy let it pass. Most victims of psychic suggestion required this “sorting-out” period. She had never seen this phase last so long, though. She wondered if she’d done the right thing.
Wendy sighed, remembering the research they'd done at Chatton about psychic suggestion. She and Laura had discovered its effects, which they called “externally induced interfusion.” It was her first published paper, and Clay had been so proud of them both. In the lab, Wendy Smith and Laura Fletcher had been the team to beat. Out of the lab, Wendy and Laura had been inseparable, the best of friends. Then they were approached by the dean’s council about a high-level U.E.O. experiment The impact of synthium on psychic phenomena. Everything changed then. Especially Clay.
Synthium had been developed as an alternative energy source. In 2010, the world was finally waking up to the fact that existing energy sources were not viable. Fossil fuels were messy and nonrenewable. Nuclear power was unpopular, and certain unscrupulous governments were using its toxic waste as radiation weapons against their enemies. The forests were nearly cleared away. With the arrival of synthium, the U.E.O. public relations machine had found a winner. It was nontoxic, biodegradable, cheap to manufacture . . . they nicknamed it blue moon and raked in the profit.
It was only when they discovered the destructive properties of synthium that the U.E.O. began to backtrack. When combined with liquid nitrogen, a gallon of synthium could power a city for a year. When combined with a supersaturated nitrogen gel catalyst, a gallon of synthium could level a city to dust. “Blue moon linked to cancer,” the false headlines declared. A bunch of hand-waving and the display of some questionable statistics followed, and the public was begging the U.E.O. to tear down the power plants. The North Americans were especially duped by this scam. After a national history laden with steak dinners and heart disease, the organic backlash had begun. They lapped up every last warning.
The real reason that the U.E.O. had pulled blue moon off the shelf had nothing to do with power plants or weapons. In some classified Section VII experiments, U.E.O. scientists found that synthium enhanced psychic ability. Weak psychics became moderates, and moderates became advanced. Auras appeared clearer, and subjects could maintain telepathic contact twice as long before neural overload forced them to stop.
That was when they'd asked Chatton Parapsychology Center labs to intervene. It was a tremendous opportunity for the CPC. Clay Marshall saw it as a chance to prove his theory that “man could force himself to evolve to the next level of intellect.” To Wendy and Laura, it was a chance to combine their two greatest interests medicine and parapsychological research.
Clay’s intellect was astounding, and he knew how to get his way. Marshall took over the project two months after his first encounter with blue moon, displacing the U.E.O. from the project. Wendy didn't find out until much later that he'd been doing his own experiments on the side–-drinking synthium to increase his psychic ratings.
Last week on the Chatton-MR3 launch, he'd revealed the entire story to Wendy in a giant telepathic burst He had ingested more and more of the drug. Though his neural tissue was enhanced, synthium took its toll on the rest of his body. His stomach was a ruin of ulcers. In order to hide the side effect from his colleagues, he took the dangerous step of injecting synthium directly into his bloodstream.
The effect was completely unexpected and disturbingly powerful; injecting blue moon was three times more potent than drinking it. He took a little more each day, but he seemed to be building no tolerance for it. His mind screamed for the stuff, even as it killed him. The chemical was slowly melting his body tissue away. In order to combat the damage, Clay had his first cyborg limb implanted in 2017, a year after the project had started.
With less muscle tissue to absorb the synthium, the addiction became physical. No longer merely the fuel of his ego, blue moon had truly become the blood in his veins.
And now here we are, four years later, and it’s come to an end, Wendy thought numbly. Clay was dead. The blue moon was collecting dust, locked in a missile silo on some U.E.O. base. Laura Fletcher would probably lose her job. Dagwood would recover, and Wendy would move on.
The last loose end was Lucas. After a 36 hours in medbay, he was fully alert most of the time, hounding the techs with questions and advice, demanding meals at strange times of the day. In other words, his usual difficult self. As soon as he was able to speak in complete sentences and follow a conversation without drifting off, Dr. Smith sent him off to his quarters, so that her staff might get some peace. He returned for check-ups twice a day.
She knew he would need counseling after this ordeal. Wendy wasn't sure if she’d be able to provide it. She needed to talk to someone, too. Besides, Lucas was showing strange side effects, though he was probably unaware of it. Where she used to be able to read his thoughts and sense his moods, now his aura and mind were nothing but static. It was just like Dagwood, but more intense. A normal person would have a low “hum,” even if she wasn't actively reading their mind. Dagwood's thoughts were akin to a whirlpool of white noise--easy to ignore, hard to listen to. Lucas now felt like a feedback loop, like a microphone with too much gain. She had to close him out, so his screech (as she'd come to call it) would go away.
Wendy wondered what it meant. But the painkillers were kicking in now. Clay's last words echoed in her mind; “I died a long time ago. But before I died, I loved you.” She began to fade into sleep, thinking of a thousand ways she could have prevented all this.