The Dark Somnium - "My patient spent eight million years trapped at the Glenmont metro"

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

This Creepypasta scary story is from the Nosleep subreddit, posted by sarcasonomicon, make sure ot check out the original story and support the author: "My patient spent eight million years trapped at the Glenmont metro"https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/13ot7m0/my_patient_spent_eight_million_years_under_a/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

No person, well actually, no living thing, has experienced more suffering than clinical trial subject S-47. S-47 was a healthy male who volunteered to be a test subject for a trial of a drug called Mentanovic. Mentanovic typically yields mild improvements in memory and cognition. S-47 had a different reaction to the drug. I'm the research scientist who administered the dose of Mentinovics to this poor man. I consulted with his doctors in the ER after he was found crumpled under a bench at the

Glenmont Metro station. I have firsthand knowledge of the devastating trauma that a Mentinovix cross-reaction can produce, so I couldn't understand why someone would beg me to put them through what S-47 had experienced. Then I took the drug myself. Mentinovics is essentially a calcium ion accelerator paired with a protein that binds to certain dentritic neuroreceptors. It makes signals flow faster through the brain, a lot faster. When I administered a mental speed assessment to subject S-47, 30 minutes after I gave him 25 milligrams,

he was able to perform incredible inhuman mental feats. He finished a 50-word search in three seconds, solved a maze drawn onto a poster-sized paper in two seconds. His mind worked fast enough to catch thrown Cheerios with chopsticks. Mentinoviks had pushed him well into the superhuman range of thinking speeds. His mental speed was still accelerating when he left our offices. I told him to enjoy the extra time he would seem to have, since, to his super-accelerated brain, minutes would seem like hours.

At the time, I thought S-47 would view the drug's effect as a positive thing. I pictured him at home, happily speed-reading through books he wanted to find time to read. That's what I would have done, or so I thought. It didn't occur to me that, from his point of view, just getting home from our office would seemed like it took days. He must have experienced hours of perceived time just in the elevator from our office, a day waiting for the next train, and another day crammed inside a crowded and smelly metro car.

If I'd thought of that while he was still in the office, maybe I wouldn't have just sent him on his way with nothing more than a Menterovic's trial pamphlet. But what happened to S-47 was much, much worse than experiencing the equivalent of days on the metro. Ninety minutes after I sent him home, I got a call from the ER at the White Oak Hospital. A man had been found behaving bizarrely under a bench in the Glenmont Metro station. By the time he reached the ER, he was unresponsive. Personnel in the ER found the Mentinovix trial pamphlet in his pocket and called my lab.

I took a blood sample and ran an engram decay. I'm oversimplifying the neuroscience here, but basically the cell is in a conscious brain continuously make new connections and tear down existing connections. The new connections represent learning and the torn down connections represent forgetting. When we sleep, cerebrospinal fluid washes away the metabolic debris from this activity. The test I ran measures how much Ngram decay, forgetting, has happened since the last sleep cycle. Ngram decay is a good way of measuring the equivalent duration of consciousness. How long a patient has perceived they have been awake.

We use this in the Menterovics trials to measure the acceleration in thinking speed. More engram decay means the subject has perceived a longer period of consciousness. S-47's Ngram decay results were incomprehensibly large. I ran the sample three times to make sure nothing was wrong with the lab equipment. I got the same result each time. Subject S-47's brain had run so fast that in the 90 minutes between leaving the lab and winding up in the ER, he had perceived 8 million years of consciousness. The man had been awake so long in his perceived time frame that he had forgotten everything,

literally. His mind had been running so fast that even the nearly instantaneous act of blinking would be perceived as thousands of years of darkness. From his massively sped up perspective, his view of the metro station from under the bench must have been an eternal, unchanging scene. The near complete lack of mental stimulation he experienced, and the 8 million years of perceived time were utterly devastating.

His brain tore itself down in an act of forgetting. The ER sent me an fMRI scan. His cortex had no activity. His gray matter was essentially a collection of disconnected neurons. At the time, we had no way of knowing what caused this extreme side effect, but we noted that his blood work showed that he had recently taken a sleeping aid. We guessed that the 25 milligram dose of Menterovics already, usually active in this subject, interacted with the sleeping drug.

I compiled everything I had on S-47 into a report and sent it to the head office. The company published an adverse drug reaction bulletin and the MENTinovix trial was put on indefinite hold. I never learned what happened to subject S-47. Two months later, I was in my office preparing for a trial of a new blood pressure medication when the reception is called. There's a woman here to see you. Then he whispered.

She said she didn't need an appointment. Because of who she is? I met my unexpected visitor in the lobby, a woman in her late 30s or early 40s. She wore a black business suit and had a ratty red Jansport backpack slung over her shoulder. She introduced herself as soon as I walked into the busy lobby, as if she already knew what I looked like. My name is Helen, Helen Kaysen. I work for the Department of Defense, and I need to talk to you about Mintonovics. As soon as we got to my office, she pulled a stack of papers from her backpack and dropped them on my

desk. It was the MENTinovics adverse drug reaction bulletin. I need you to do this to me. You want me to induce the worst adverse drug reaction I've ever heard of in you? On purpose? The bulletin says that a high dose of flumenzoic could potentially reverse the reaction. I want you to induce the adverse Mennonovic's reaction in me. And when I give the signal, administer flumenzanil to slow my mind back down. The bulletin says potentially. Could potentially.

That's two weasel words in a row. The bulletin has a mandatory future research section they needed material for, so they put in the only wild-ass idea they had. In reality, nobody knows how to prevent, induce, or reverse this reaction. I'm okay with uncertainty. Why would you want to do this to yourself? For what purpose? Science. I want to watch someone die with my own eyes.

an extreme slow motion. I thrust the bulletin back at her. Whoever you are, Ms. Kaysen, your idea of what science is and mine are profoundly incompatible. I won't help you destroy your brain. I won't participate in what sounds to me more like a satanic death ritual than clinical research. Six weeks later, I found myself escorted through security in building G-164 at Aberdeen Proving Ground. My escort, Dr. Helen Kaysen. Those six weeks opened my eyes to what a truly well-connected person can accomplish,

no matter how demented their goals. Dr. Kaysen had somehow gotten a national interest exemption to the Menterovics ban. I received the original document, signed by the director of the National Security Council herself. Frankly, until then, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a national interest exception to a restricted drug. Helen had also somehow influenced the directors of the huge pharmaceutical company that developed Menterovics. The CEO phoned me and asked me to participate in Dr. Kaysen's important experiment. I asked her if she knew exactly what Helen was doing.

She said she had no idea, didn't care, and just told me to give her whatever help she needed. The way she said it made it abundantly clear that I was not to ask any questions. Of course, I did have questions. Why do I have to participate in this? Was at the top of my list. But I already received a counseling letter from HR complaining about my lack of judgment for letting S-47 go home while he was still in the grip of Mentinovics. I felt pressure to lay down and go with the flow.

And that's exactly what I did. Helen met me in the lobby of the massive office building. When she visited me at my office, she wore a black business suit. Today she was wearing a white lab coat with Kaysen, embroidered above the pocket. Thank you for coming. I trust you have the drugs. I showed her what I brought, a 100 milligram vial of Mentinovix HCL.

She had requested the Mentanovax be compounded in an injectable form and a box of Ambium pills. I also had a single vial of Flamazanil, which, according to the hastily written adverse reaction bulletin, could potentially reverse the Mentinovics cross-reaction with Ambion. The guard in the lobby gave me a red badge. displaying the letter E for escort required, and Helen led me into the offices beyond. Helen's office was a windowless chamber with a floor-to-ceiling whiteboard covering all four walls and even the back of the door. Equations and strange diagrams featuring stars, circles, and what looked like electrical engineering symbols, or maybe ancient ruins, filled the whiteboards.

Helen watched me gape at the weird symbology that surrounded us. She laughed. It's just math. These. She pointed at the markings that looked like ancient runes. Or just stochastic tensors. The whole thing is just a giant probabilistic differential. Never mind.

She thrust a clipboard of paperwork at me. Sign these, please. They're non-disclosure agreements. I worked through the paperwork while Helen rummaged around in the piles of binders and boxes in the corner of her office. You can wear this. She said, and he said. handed me a lab coat. I handed her the signed paperwork and put on the lab coat. You're going to destroy your brain, you know. The patient who had the cross-reaction was left with a completely

unconnected cortex. There's no coming back from that. Thank you for your concern, but I have a plan. I sighed. This was really happening, and I was a part of it. What's the plan? I'm going to predose with the sleeping aid. I will also take 50 milligram of dexenphetamine so I don't fall asleep. Then we wait. Wait for what? We wait for the test subject to die. When Helen visited my office and told me she wanted to watch someone die, I thought she was a lone lunatic. Someone who did their own research, you know what I mean. I was completely wrong. Whatever Helen was up to, it had the full support of important people. The head of the Friggin' NSC signed the National Interest Exemption memo, and apparently it is in the national interest to overdose Helen on an experimental psycho-oeverendant

psychoactive drug and let her watch someone die. Is this an animal study? The test subject is a human with a terminal disease. He volunteered to participate in this experiment. She turned to her desk and sorted through a stack of papers and folders. She found what she was looking for and handed me a green folder. We have institutional review board approval for this. I know it's a little unusual, but everything that we're doing today is approved.

I remembered telling Helen that her experiments sounded more like a satanic death ritual than legitimate science. Now, in Helen's office, with the walls full of strange mathematical symbols and diagrams of stars inside of circles, the same thought again occurred to me. Despite all the trappings of authority and approval, I cannot see how this ludicrous experiment was legitimate science. The phone rang. Helen answered with a terse. Yes. Whoever was on the other end of the call spoke briefly. We will be right there.

Helen said and hung up the phone. We have to go to the capture chamber. I will explain the plan in more detail when we get there. We marched out of her office, Helen in the lead. We wound through the halls of her second floor office suite, then into the stairwell. We descended ten floors through the fire doors at the bottom of the stairwell, then into another security vestibule. More checking of IDs, more signatures on sign-in sheets. I put my phone in a small cubby.

I was given a second badge that read, detain and blindfold if unescorted. Then we passed through a glass enclosed, one person at a time, man-trap and into a long corridor. I read the signs on the doors we passed. Some were normal basement corridor sorts of things. Electrical, custodial closet, HVAC. Then the signs got weirder. pharmacy, theology, hospice. We stopped at a door fitted with a small sign that said,

Capture Chamber. Helen entered her code into the keypad lock. I heard the lock click and open, and I had a sudden flash of fear, panic almost. The feeling was more than just a strong distaste for whatever Helen was doing. I sensed that whatever was behind the door was wrong. Not just ethically wrong or scientifically misguided, but cosmically wrong. and dangerous. Helen held the door for me, and I entered the room in which I would spend the next 120 years. The capture chamber was a gigantic space, like a Walmart with all the shelving removed.

A flawless, white tile floor reflected the ranks of hundreds of fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling 50 feet above us. A hospital bed was positioned in the center of a raised circular platform in the center of the room. Even from the door, a good 150 feet away, I could tell you, tell that there was a patient in the bed. A vital signs monitor stood to the left of the bed. A man sat in a metal folding chair on the right. The platform was surrounded by heavy machinery. Huge cams mounted on shiny stainless steel shafts were linked to a maze of interlocking rails that surrounded the bed platform. A tangle of brightly colored cables wove through the equipment like tree roots or caterpillars, giving the apparatus the look of something organic. Another raised

platform stood outside of the ring of machinery. Instead of a bed, this platform held a black leather reclining chair that was oriented so that whoever sat in it could observe the test subject. At least two dozen computer monitors were mounted on a metal framework surrounding the chair. Helen led me to this second observation platform. The test subject. She pointed at the patient in the hospital bed. Stopped oral intake six days ago and lost consciousness 36 hours ago. We are monitoring his respirations.

and mandibular movement. We believe he will die in the next two hours. Who is the man sitting next to him? That's his son. Our protocols specify that the terminally ill test subjects must be comforted by one family member. Because both the test subject and the family member must have top secret clearance, finding test subjects that match the protocol criteria is quite tedious.

Something about the way she said this suggested she thought having family members members present was a waste of resources. We climbed a short flight of steps to the observation platform with the leather chair. The chair faced the center of the platform with the hospital bed, where the test subject lay dying. Two huge mounting stands, holding a dozen computer monitors each, stood to the left and right, framing the view of the hospital bed. The monitors flashed and flickered patterns that appeared to be random noise. Helen walked to the leather chair, and I stumbled behind, slack-jawed,

trying to make sense of this bizarre experiment, or whatever it was. Helen continued talking to me, oblivious to my confusion. I'm going to predose with the Ambien and Dexamphetamine now. The dexamphetamine will counteract the Ambien. So I should have no problem staying awake. We will wait until his respiration slows to be six breaths per minute. Then you will inject me with 40 milligrams of Mintonovics. She sat in the chair, a surprisingly ordinary recline.

She was a shining armchair. Please put the drugs here. She gestured to a small table to her right that held a tall glass of water and a prescription bottle labeled Dexamphetamine. Bolted to the left arm of the chair was a gray metal box that held a small garden of switches and lights. A large red mushroom-shaped button labeled Dose Now stood above the others. Once the test subject dies and I have observed what I need to see, I will press the Dose

now button and you will immediately inject me with 200 millerobes. of Flumenzanel. She pointed to her left shoulder. A small square of fabric had been cut out of the lab coat, exposing her shoulder. This is where you will inject the Mennonovics. You will inject the Flumenzanil directly into my neck. I will need it to act as rapidly as possible. Helen, did you actually read the bulletin about S-47?

He perceived being conscious for eight million years. His mind was gone when he got to the ER, completely devoid of cortical connections. His suffering was unimaginable. I've done the math. She replied testily. With the dosage I'll receive, I expect to experience only three to five hundred years of consciousness. It should be a nice break, frankly. A nice break?

Nice? Five hundred years. Years of just sitting in this chair watching a corpse while these monitors flash noise at you? Those monitors are displaying reading material. That one. She pointed to the upper left monitor on the right side bank of the camera. crazy flashing screens is displaying Wikipedia pages at a rate of 500 per second. The one next to it is scrolling through 20,000 works of English literature at 500 pages per second, and so on

for the rest of the monitors. News archives, scientific publications, social media, and so on. We bought special monitors with a 500 hertz refresh rate just so we could display information fast enough. I stared at the two banks of flashing screens. I couldn't perceive anything but painfully bright flickering. You're going to read for 500 years while you observe that poor man over there? And catch up on a few emails. She rotated a computer keyboard out of a slot in the arm of the chair.

Let's get ready, shall we? She produced a headset from the pocket of her lab coat and put it on her head. This is Helen Kaysen. This is the audio record of observation activity 54. Observation 54. How long had she been watching people die in this bizarre room? Helen continued talking into her headset. Current time is 1423.

I am predosing with one Ambien and 50 milligrams of dexenphetamine. She popped an Ambien out of the blister pack and downed it with a swallow of the water. Then she took two pills from the Dexamphetamine bottle and swallowed them. Now. She said, turning to me. We wait. She pressed a few keys on her keyboard. One of the monitors in the right bank of screen stopped flickering and instead displayed a standard computer desktop background.

Helen clicked on icons and slid windows around the screen. When she was done, the screen held three windows. At the top of the screen was a data strip, slowly updating graphs of what I assumed were the patients. Sorry, test subjects, vital signs. Blood pressure, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, and so on. Below that was Helen's email box. 1,478 unread items, and a word processing window open to a blank page. I understand that once the Mintonovics kicks in, audio energy will be attenuated to the point where I cannot hear anything.

I will not have enough fine muscle control or breath control to speak, so I will type my observations and anything else I need to communicate here. She moved the mouse cursor to the word processing window. Please keep an eye on it as we proceed. It will be the only way I have to communicate. We waited. Helen ignored me while she read and wrote emails. The patient's respiration slowly decreased. I wandered off the platform to get a closer look at the machinery surrounding the patient.

Stay away from that area! Helen shouted at me. I'm going to start the capture sequence soon, and there are a lot of mechanical hazards present when it's operating. Feeling a little like a chided child, I sauntered to the short flight of stairs leading to the platform with the hospital bed. Aside from Helen, the dying man and his son were the only two people in the huge room, or chamber or whatever. The test subject was an emaciated man who looked to be at least 90 years old. He slept.

Rather, he was in a state of unconsciousness that did not look at all restful. His bony, withered body barely made a dent in the soft mattress of the hospital bed. Bruises up and down both arms betrayed a long battle with disease that required a lot of intravenous medicines. Hey, I said to the son, a middle-aged man sitting next to the patient. He looked up from the book he was reading. Before he could speak, Helen shouted across the chamber. No communication with personnel on the test subject platform. The patient's son rolled his eyes and whispered to me.

Helen's a bit of a stickler for protocol. I nodded in agreement and wandered back towards Helen on the observation platform. I walked about, examining but failing to understand the machinery surrounding the test platform. I stared at the flashing banks of screens, trying and failing to proceed. even a single screen of content. I stood behind Helen and surreptitiously read a few of her outgoing emails. Subject. Risk analysis of portal capture experiments.

Subject. Military benefits of applied theological research. Subject. Time card failed floor check. Helen glanced back at me with a glare that clearly communicated she did not appreciate me reading emails over her shoulder. I returned to strolling about the perimeter of the room. An hour passed, then another.

I thought about Helen's plan to spend centuries of perceived time in this room. I had only been here two hours, and I was desperately looking forward to getting the hell out. To spend multiple lifetimes here, to look forward to spending lifetimes here, was a sign that Helen was different. It's time! Helen shouted at me across the room. I jogged to the observation platform. Helen had already prepared the injection of Mentinovics. On the far platform, the son was standing over the bed, holding his father's hand.

Helen was speaking into her headset when I got to the top of the stairs. Blood pressure is dropping. Respiratory rate is down to six. The probability of death in the next ten minutes is over 90%. Starting the portal stabilizers. She flicked a few switches on the control box that held the Dose Now button. A claxon blared, red cop car-style lights on the machinery started flashing, the apparatus surrounding the patience slowly came to life. Motors hummed with rising pitch.

Shaffs turned faster and faster, their cams pushing the strange grid of beams up and down. The fastest moving parts of the machine started to glow and flash, giving it the look of a carnival ride. The machine spun and gyrated faster and faster. The grid of blowing beams blurred. The machine kept accelerating, and the seemingly random flashes became synchronized

with the movement of the grid beams, resolving into a glowing five-pointed star inscribed in a circle that rocked in crazy, unpredictable ways. Capture device trim active. Dosing with Mentinovics now. Helen spoke into her headset. She handed me the syringe. Dose me with the Mentinovics, then stay on this platform and watch my log entries. And what happens when I press the dose now button? 200 milligrams of Flunazanil in the neck. Yes. Prepare the injection now.

There must be absolutely no delays when I press the button. I took the syringe of Metanovic's from her. You're probably not going to survive this, you know. You will suffer terribly for what you perceive as centuries. Eventually your mind will tear itself down in a catastrophic act of forgetting. I'm aware of the risks. Now inject me. I did.

Helen was quiet for a minute. She looked at the patient on the far platform. She stared at the flashing computer monitors. Then she snapped her head to face me and said, I think it's starting to take effect. She blurted the words out almost too fast to hear. Your perception is definitely accelerated, maybe about ten times faster. Helen turned away from me so fast that she almost fell out of her chair.

She darted her hands to the keyboard and typed. The key press sounded more like a drum roll than a human using a keyboard. I can hear you, but your voice has slowed and frequency shifted. I cannot understand. I will communicate through this screen. Please type your response to me here. I leaned over her keyboard and typed. How long does it seem to take for my pen to fall?

I stepped in front of Helen. Her eyes were darting about in a frenzy. Her gaze oscillated between me and the computer monitors and the patient on the far platform. I pulled a pen out of my pocket and dropped it on the floor. Helen drumroll typed her response. Days to fall. Sound is gone. Time to get to work.

Helen did exactly what she said she would do. She jerked her head back and forth between the screens, reading whatever information they were flashing at her. She opened emails and slammed text into the response window. Occasionally, her eyes would linger on the patient in the center of the whirling machinery. Then she would return to the frenzy of reading and writing. Minutes ticked by. I tried to calculate how long she perceived those three minutes to be. If the quarter-second drop of my pen seemed to take days for her,

then each second that ticked by would seem to her to be about a week. Three minutes would be over three years. I watched her closely. She didn't appear to be suffering. She could push the dose now button at any time, but so far had chosen not to. Her pattern of frenzied motion and typing suddenly ceased. She fixed her gaze on the patient for a second. Two seconds.

Three. Three seconds were weeks of her time. Helen shot her fingers. at the keyboard again. This time she typed a message in the journal window. He's dead. Chaos broke out. A moment after Helen typed her message, the vital signs monitor threw up a red warning message. Respiratory zero, heart rate zero. Helen's hands raced over the control panel in a blur, flicking switches and turning dials. The churning satanic carnival ride of a machine came to an abrupt stop with a screech and a bang. The floor shook as the foundation of the building

absorbing the forces involved with bringing tons of spinning and thrashing metal to an instant stop. The circle and star shape glowed brighter than ever, held fixed at a strange angle by the frozen machine. In the same instant, the patient's son screamed in pain and he fell to the floor. No, it wasn't that simple. I looked closer and saw that he didn't fall. His legs collapsed under him, bent like they were made out of rubber or melting plastic. His legs continued to melt until his torso sat on the platform in a pool of red goo.

The man tried to scream again, but the severe trauma or whatever it was that ruined his legs started to affect his abdomen, with his diaphragm destroyed, screaming was impossible, so was breathing. Every instinct in me urged me to run to the door, to get out of that room, but I had a duty to administer the antidote to Helen. I would not be responsible for another person going through what S-47 had. That, Helen hammered out another message. He's taken his second death in the portal. Dose yourself with MentaNovex now, or you will die.

I had no idea what the first line of Helen's message meant. Second death, portal. Those words meant nothing to me, but the second line I understood. And there was no way I would dose myself with that drug. To live a thousand lifetimes in this bleak underground facility, I'd rather die. On the far platform, the son of the man, who apparently died five seconds earlier, continued to dissolve. His chest splashed apart like a breaking water balloon.

His head and arms fell into the puddle that his body had made, floated like a horrific pool toy for a moment, then melted away. I had seconds to think about what Helen wrote, Take the drug and live. He took his second death in the portal. What would happen to me if I didn't take the Mentinovics? I literally liquefy like the son of the test subject? As bad as that looked, it would be far better than 8 million years of sensory deprivation the S-47 experienced.

What the hell did second death even mean? But where I only had seconds to think, Helen, in her hyper-accelerated mental state, had the equivalent of days to decide what I should do, to decide what she would do to me. I turned from the screens to look at Helen. She was staring at me, studying me, with unblinking eyes. For her, every slight micro-expression that flashed across my face, every tiny change in my body language, would be an hours-long process. She probably knew what I was going to do before I did. I was not going to take the drug.

Helen rose from the chair before I could even nod my head to signal no to her. Her pre-oception system was running 10,000 times faster than her body. With that kind of disconnect and mind and body control, moving normally would be nearly impossible. Helen discovered this problem as she tried to stand up. She misjudged the force required and literally threw herself from the chair. In another setting, her fall to the floor would have been comical. She launched herself in a twisting arc. Her arms and legs flailed about wildly, but she was unable to control her fall.

She landed face first on the platform and continued to thrash her limbs uselessly for a few seconds. From her warped perspective in time, her fall must have taken a day or two. These futile efforts on the floor occupied a week of her time. Whatever else Helen may be, it's pretty clear that she's smart as hell. She can figure stuff out and learn quickly. That's exactly what she did on the floor. She froze, then methodically began moving one limb at a time. She lifted one leg, then let it drop.

She brought her other knee to her torso. She pushed herself up onto her left elbow. She steadied herself with her right arm. Then she rose. For a moment, I thought she was going to fall again, but her movements this time were more controlled, purposeful. She had learned how to move under the influence of metanovic's. Blood ran from her mouth and nose where she smacked her face on the floor. She glanced at the far platform.

The test subject's sun was still busily liquefying. Then she turned towards me. Her movements were more like a birds than a human's, a sequence of blindingly fast motions, punctuated by short intervals of motionlessness. She moved sideways with a lurching twitch and grabbed the syringe and the vial of Metanovic's from the table next to the chair. Her eyes continued to burn into mine as she stabbed the needle through the seal of the vial and filled the syringe. No! I knew shouting was useless because she couldn't hear, but fear had decoupled my mouth from my brain. Panic and fear replaced all other thoughts. I turned to run. I started to turn

In any way, Helen had hours to watch me slowly shift my posture and start to engage my muscles. She lunged at me, perfectly anticipating where my neck would be when her arm reached me. For her, physical struggle must have been an intellectual activity like chess and not a physical endeavor like fighting. In the split second I tried to get away, she had analyzed my face for tells, saw all the small ways my body telegraphed what I was going to do, then calmly made a plan to stop me. Despite my attempt to duck and dodge, she stabbed me in the neck with the needle. Even though her attack was lightning fast, she managed to inject the metanovic's directly into my jugular.

I was already off balance trying to duck her attack with the needle when she slammed into me. I fell hard to the floor. Well, actually, no, I started to fall towards the floor, but the massive dose of the drug, injected directly into my neck, took effect almost instantaneously. All sound dropped in pitch. then died away entirely, as if the soundtrack of life was a vinyl record that suddenly stopped spinning. The world froze before I hit the ground. In one instant, I was struggling like a madman to get away, and in the next, I was frozen in midfall, like a bug fossilized in amber. I was suspended in mid-air.

Helen's lunge into me knocked me into the air, both my feet had left the floor. I could see Helen's ankles and left hand at the edge of my vision. The syringe was still stuck in my nose. neck, an annoying, painful pinprick that didn't let up. I assumed it was empty, and Helen had pushed all 100 cc's of the Mentinovics into my bloodstream. I waited. Nothing changed. I was still falling at the floor. Helen's feet were a blurry feature in my peripheral vision. I waited. Nothing changed. I had started screaming when Helen slammed into me. My chest was still tight. My abdominal muscles were compressing my lungs and pushing air through my voids. vocal cords, but there was no sound, and the pressure in my chest didn't diminish. I was still

screaming, but with geological slowness. My view of the floor remained unchanged. I returned to the thought that I was like a bug fossilized in amber, fossilized, with nothing to look at but the floor. I had plenty of time to think about that word. It implies millions of years. From the perspective of the fossil, that's millions of years of nothing, nothing but endless wading in the dirt or deep inside a sedimentary rock, in unchanging darkness. S-47 experienced 8 million years of consciousness in the metro station. That's a geologically significant amount of time. That's longer than it took for ancient hominids like Lucy to evolve into modern humans. Imagine everything important that has ever happened to the human race.

The invention of language, use of fire, the slow development of agriculture, Sumerians, pyramids, the feudal system. Imagine spending all that time in silent darkness. Was that what I was facing? I felt sick with fear and despair. I waited. Nothing changed. I thought about ancient hominids. I thought about all the movies I had seen and the books I had read. I thought about my childhood and about my career. I waited. Nothing changed. How much perceived time had I experienced?

Five hours, a day, without anything changing except my thoughts, judging the passage of time, the perceived time anyway, is hard to do. I was still screaming. Air was slowly moving out of my chest. I had not inhaled for hours in my time frame. I waited. Something changed. The floor was closer.

Helen's feet and hand had shifted slightly, relative to each other. other. This meant I could still perceive the forward motion of time. Perhaps a tenth of a second had passed since Helen jabbed me with the syringe. I remember that I was falling face first out of control. It sounds funny, but I'd forgotten that I was in mid-air, reeling from a high-speed, high-energy collision with Helen. So much time passed in my time frame that my ongoing fight with Helen was a distant memory. Even though it would take days, a week maybe in my time frame before I hit the floor, I had to start planning for my landing now. I willed my arms to move upward, to protect my head when I slammed into the floor. Then I found ways to pass the time. I wrote poems in my head

and memorized them. Then I thought about Menterovics. Helen predosed with the sleeping aid for the drug but caused S-47 to have such an extreme drug interaction before I injected her with 40 milligrams of Mentinovics. According to the adverse drug reaction bulletin, the extreme mental speed-up that killed S-47 was likely caused by the interaction between Mentinovics and Ambien. But I hadn't taken the sleeping aid that caused the cross-reaction. Why was I having a reaction to the drug like S-47 did? Maybe because I got a hundred milligrams of it directly to the neck. What did I know about the pharmacoconetics of Mentinovics? Quite a bit, as I was the principal researcher for the human trials. Because me, Helen, and S-47 had taken

in different doses in different ways, we had different absorption and distribution rates of Mentinovics. My extreme reaction could have been due to the enormous dose I received rather than interaction with another drug. What does this mean for the antidote? Will it work for me? Flumazinil is a benzodiazepine antagonist that is used for the complete or partial reversal of sedative effects caused by benzodiazepines.

Mentinovics certainly isn't a sedative. It does affect the same gaboreceptors that Flumazinol binds to. My educated guess was that the antidote would work for me. The only problem was it could take years from my perspective to simply walk to the table with the antidote and inject it. My arms eventually moved upward, like plants slowly growing towards the sun. My arm started in an arms out pose to push Helen away from me, and slowly rose to shield my head from the slow-motion fall. The floor was even closer to me now. I was accelerating toward it. The act of moving my arms introduced a twisting motion to my fall, and my view slowly changed from the floor

to Helen. She was falling with me. The way she leapt at me had sent her into a trajectory, though it eventually sent her to the floor behind me. This complicated motion slowly developed and evolved over hours and days. Helen's ankles slid into view after I began moving my arms. I tried again to find ways to occupy my mind so that the days-long wait until I hit the floor would be bearable. I started writing a novel in my head. I eventually saw Helen's knees. I tried to remember the lyrics to every song I could ever remember hearing. Then the hem of her white lab coat moved into my field of vision. Then finally, her face. Her eyes were fixed on me. Was she studying how I moved through the air? Was she planning on optimizing her next moves based on how she predicted I would land?

I fell through most of a year. If Helen hit me in springtime, I spent summer airborne preparing to hit the ground. When I finally felt my arm gently touched the floor, it was like the first day of autumn. Imagine spending an entire summer staring at one face that was looking back at you, an entire summer trying to imagine what she was thinking, thinking about what she was going to do next. Thinking. I was already so tired of thinking. Every conceivable thing I could think about I had already dwelt on over and over again

all over the course of a second and normal time. I practiced meditation, learned how to clear my mind. It made the time pass faster. I landed on my shoulder. Impact began as hardly a noticeable tickle in my upper arm. Then the tingle grew into a gentle pressure. Then a not so gentle pressure. Then pain.

I tried to adjust my body so that. that the fall would turn into a roll, but the disconnect between thinking about moving my body and actual muscle movement was too vast. I managed to twist into an even more awkward fall, saving my shoulder at the expense of crushing my face. My cheekbone hit first, like my shoulder, impact started as a gentle tickle, but as inevitable as the coming of winter, and nearly as slowly, turned into a pressure, then pain. I imagined an extreme slow-motion video of a boxer taking a punch to the face.

In the instant the punch lands, the boxer's face becomes an unrecognizable mess, bouncing and stretching skin and cartilage. It felt like the same thing was happening to my face, but in my sped-up time frame, my face was stuck in a distorted, crushed, and smashed mask for weeks. The skin above my eyes tore in a slow, painful, unzippering, and something slowly bent and then snapped in my nose. Pressure on one of my molars simultaneously pushed the tooth into the inside of my cheek and popped it out of my jaw.

I winced what would normally be just a quick blink and experienced days of darkness. I practiced meditation again. I got good at it. Zen master good. My eyelids finally bounced open and I was rewarded with a different view. Between Helen's simultaneous fall away from me and the sudden twist in my neck that my headfirst that created, I found myself looking across the capture chamber at the far platform. The bloody and bizarre stuff happening on the far platform now seemed like a problem from years

past, even though only a few seconds had passed since the test subject died, and his son liquefied in front of me, but whatever was going on over there had spurred Helen to inject me with Metanovic's. Now, with a hundred milligrams of it screaming through my brain, I saw what Helen saw. There was a hole in the space above the test subject's deathbed. A perfectly pentagonal black pit was hovering in the air about three feet over the bed. It wasn't a trick of perspective or the light in the room. It was a floating hole.

A neat, clean cut through our three-dimensional space to somewhere else. I remembered what Helen typed on the message screen immediately before she injected me. He's taken his second death in the portal. This floating five-sided hole in the air must be the portal she was talking about. There was more, though. Something, a tongue or a tentacle had reached out of the floating pit and was busy slurping up the goo that the test subject's sun had become. I started to scream.

Of course, in my hyperfast state, no scream came. Sound would eventually come out of my mouth, seemingly months after my brain had sent the scream and blind terror signal to my lungs and vocal cords. but without the release of hearing a scream, my mind stued in fear and terror for what felt like a long, long time. I eventually managed to mentally talk myself down to a more managed state of fear. I was still scared, but I was able to pay attention to what was happening and able to figure out a way to safety. Looking back, during those long, fearful moments when I started to realize just how dangerous and evil Helen's experiments were, I thought whatever would happen to me would happen relatively quickly.

I would either soon be killed by whatever was groping its way out of the portal, or I would dose myself with the antidote and escape. Even after being imprisoned in time itself for what I perceived as more than a year, I had no idea the length of the ocean of time that lay before me. To my overdosed mind, my struggle for survival would last longer than a human lifespan. My first impression of the thing that reached out of the portal was that it was a a tentacle. On further study, and I had plenty of time for further study, it looked more insect-like

than octopus-like. It had five elbow-like joints that I could see. From the point of view of my frozen face-smash, it looked like it had an exoskeleton or a crab shell. It was dotted here and there with small hairs and pores. A tangled clump of wet-looking, finger-sized bits of red flesh poked out of the holes in the tip. Each one curled like a dog's tongue, drinking the liquefied glop that had been a man a few seconds ago.

As horrible and strange as it was, I was glad to have something to look at besides the view of the floor. I stared and stared and stared at the far platform. I studied this unchanging scene with the intensity of a homicide detective studying photos of a scene of a long unsolved murder. I noticed that the five-sided portal was aligned exactly with the pentagonal center of the glowing star in the circle, made by the weird equipment that surrounded the test subjects bed and the platform it was on. The sign on the door to this vast underground space said it was the capture chamber. Was this equipment here to capture the portal?

Capture it from what? Why did a man need to die at the center of the swirling machinery for the portal to be captured? The word portal implies a passage between locations. If this capture chamber was one end of the portal, what was on the other side? While Helen jabbed me with a huge dose of metanovic's, I couldn't see anything other than the liquefying man on the far platform. Why could I only see this with a hyper-accelerated mind? I developed and refined these questions over what felt like months.

I searched for answers, both in my memory and in the details of the scene. I studied the strange equipment that appeared to have captured the portal, developing theory after theory about how it worked without any way of determining which, if any, was correct. Eventually, the complicated forces I had set in motion with my flailing and twisting fall rotated my bleeding face away from the far platform and back to Helen. She had already hit the ground by the time I could see her again and had started pushing herself back to standing. She wasn't staring at me anymore. Thankfully, her eyes were now fixed on the portal.

I drew my knees to my chest and thrust my hands at the floor. I mean, I started to perform these motions. I meticulously planned how I would stabilize my fall and bring myself back up to standing. Then I waited for my limbs to cooperate and for gravity and momentum to slowly bounce and slide me across the floor. Occasionally, I would make slight changes to where my hands and foot were going. At one point, I spit out a molar that was knocked loose when I smacked my face. I stabilized myself and rose. I felt my autonomic nervous system switch my breathing from an exhale to an inhale.

Everything that had happened since Helen stabbing with the syringe had occurred in just one breath. I kept my eyes on Helen as I rose. Helen remained fixated on the far platform. Something about her looked different. I waited. I meditated. I designed a mechanical clock in my mind. I meditated more.

Helen's face changed further. She now had a look of fear. She extended her index finger and began to raise her arm. I recognized the gesture, even though she had only just started making it. She was pointing to the far platform. I twisted my neck around to glance at the portal. Incredibly, my situation had gotten worse. A second, long, jointed probosciscus had emerged from the hole.

This one wasn't aiming for the man-puddle on the floor. Whatever was in the portal was thrusting this second appendage into the chamber and towards us. The second five-jointed exoskeleton human liquefire and feeding tube shot out of the pit and reached into the space in the center of the capture chamber. Of course, when I say it shot out of the pit, I'm speaking in relative terms. My mind was super accelerated to the point where a single breath seemed to last for a year or two. The second interdimensional death probosciscus moved fast enough that I could perceive minuscule changes in its position after each long meditation session that I engaged. In, to the unaccelerated mind, it must be moving lightning fast, like a barracuda or venomous snake making a kill.

Helen was eventually satisfied that I saw what she was pointing at and stopped wasting time getting my attention. Instead, she flung herself toward the keyboard by the machine. I followed her motion, and eventually the banks of the computer monitors rotated into view. Before Helen dozed me with the drug, the monitors appeared to be flashing nothing but seizure-inducing noise. Under the influence of the mind accelerator, however, I saw that what Helen said was true. Each screen was being updated with new data 500 times a second. One monitor was displaying the

Wikipedia page for Bolivia. The screen next to it was scrolling through some old work of fiction. He tossed the still-lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves. The same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. The screen below that one showed part of an academic paper full of equations. I couldn't even guess what the subject area was. I can't exaggerate the relief I felt at seeing this random and eclectic set of information on the screens. These computer monitors gave my mind something to do. I read the Bolivia page over and over. I memorized the page of fiction, and I studied the mathematics so thoroughly that I began to understand it.

Eventually, the screen displaying the Wikipedia page updated. A slow process where I got to watch the screens. slowly redraw itself one row of pixels at a time. This is what a 500-hertz update rate looked like when overdosing on Mentinovics. Helen started typing. She could take her time, I thought. As boring as the information on these screens might be under ordinary circumstances, they gave me something to do, stuff to think about besides whatever my mind and memories could conjure up on their own. Days later, the first two letters of Helen's message appeared in the word processor window.

We need to. She wasn't wasting time typing spaces. The second proboscis had visibly stretched further into the room. I read dozens of Wikipedia pages and about a hundred screenfuls of the work of fiction that flew up the screen. It was Moby Dick. I wondered what Helen was trying to say. We need to what?

Eventually, more of Helen's message showed up. We need to shut it to. I guessed what she was. She was communicating. We need to shut it down. Shut what down? The portal capture machine? I took in more of the information scrolling past on the 500 hertz monitors.

After the seeming eternity with nothing to look at but the floor or Helen's face or the horrific stuff unfolding by the portal, reading Moby Dick and random Wikipedia pages felt like pure hedonism. Helen finally finished her message. We need to shut it down. Breakers on distribution cabinets on left and ruff. Right. Helen didn't spend time turning around to see if I understood.

She jumped off the platform as soon as she finished the message and started running towards the equipment on the right side of the portal. I made a snap decision, which in my mental state meant that I thought it was over for what seemed like days. Helen, I guessed, assumed that I would take on the job of turning on the breaker on the left side of the chamber. She just ran off to the right without checking with me. What if I did this?

What were the risks from coming close to the interdimensional horror that was thrashing out of it. Would I even recognize the distribution cabinet if I saw it? Would I be able to figure out how to turn off the power? There was simply no way to think out the answers to these questions. They could only be answered definitively by committing to the course of action. If the answer to any of them was the wrong answer, then things would get even worse for me than they already were. What was the worst-case scenario? That the portal monster would liquefy me, and in my mentally accelerated state, liquefication would take months, not seconds. That was a pretty bad worst-case scenario.

Frankly, it was utterly terrifying, but even after mulling over every possible way I could think about the situation, I couldn't come up with a better idea. Staying on the platform and waiting for Helen to shut off both boxes amounted to spending additional centuries in this room. What if Helen got killed shutting off the breakers that I was supposed to shut off? I willed my legs to move, to leap off the platform as Helen had done. The commands to my muscles formed and screamed out of my brain at light speed, only to slam into my glacially slow muscles.

I imagined my mind as a Victorian-era woman trapped in a tower, writing a message with a quill pen. My dearest legs, I hope this note finds you well. Please jump off the platform. Then the message was sent by rider and sailing ship to the other side of the world while I waited for months and months alone in the tower. From the edge of the platform, I no longer had the view of the computer monitors. I was outside my refuge from boredom in front of the displays. Instead of reading Wikipedia articles and journals from the world of higher mathematics,

I spent the time waiting for my legs to obey by studying the death limb that was climbing out of the portal and into our universe. The portion of the limb that had emerged from the portal was dark brown with five elbow-like joints, arranged to odd angles. The design of the multir radial elbows appeared to give it the flexibility to bend around the complex obstacles. Something about the way it stretched into the center of the room made me think it couldn't see or sense what was there.

If there were eyes or other sense organs, they must have been on whatever incomprehensible body lay inside the portal. I passed the time thinking about what the rest of the creature might look like and what the environment was wherever it came from that led it to evolve into the man-liquifying monster that was climbing into the capture chamber. I finally left the platform. I was airborne for months as I leapt three feet to the ground. I configured my body well and didn't fall when I hit the ground.

It wasn't exactly the sticking the landing that earns you a ten in Olympic gymnastics, but it was good enough. Although I didn't hear it, my landing produced noise. The five-jointed arms seemed to change its pattern of motion. when I landed and instead lashed out towards me. Did it hear me move? I urged my body to sprint towards the back of the room to where Helen said the electrical distribution cabinets were.

I moved forward with the speed of grass growing. The arm pushed towards me, all five of its elbows straightened at once, launching the human liquefying mop-like end towards me at a speed that would have been faster than perception for a person under normal circumstances. I had plenty of time to think about the best way to dodge its attack. It was clearly much faster than I was. I judged that I might move forward about two feet by the time the arm was fully outstretched. I estimated the length of each of its inner elbow segments and guessed that at full extent

it was going to be long enough to reach me. In other words, I was going to die. If I was right that the extra-dimensional horror that was hunting me was working off the sound of my landing from the jump from the platform and it couldn't see me, a big if, then its thrust would probably tend to aim at my landing spot near the floor. If I leapt upward, then the fraction of a second of upwards motion I'd achieve before the arm's strike reached me would maximize the distance between me and my landing point. I leapt, then I waited.

I suffered through months of terrified waiting to see if I would survive the strike or not. I slowly left the ground, rising many times slower than the moon rising over the horizon. The arm got closer and closer. it was going to be close. What would it feel like? I wondered. Would the process of liqueification feel like being burned? A rending of tissue?

Maybe it would just be a dull numbness. I thought about each of these possibilities, trying to prepare myself for what would happen if the arm hit me. As tense a moment as this was, it still managed to eventually become boring. My life or death gamble felt more like a long-term financial investment strategy. buy and hold stocks, then wait and wait and wait and see if you made the right choice. I meditated.

I reminisced about my entire life. I pondered the mystery of the portal and of Helen herself. How did she learn about the effects of Mentinovics overdose and its possible antidote? That's when I realized the interdimensional death probiscus, or whatever it was, wasn't my worst problem. I had so much time to think of the plan since Helen typed her instructions to me, why didn't this occur to me? There was only one dose of the antidote. Whoever made it back to the observation platform first would save themselves, the other,

doomed to a literal eternity of silent glacial suffering. I was airborne, moving away from the observation platform, and waiting endlessly to see if the death probiscus would hit or miss me. Should I attempt to spin about in mid-air, risking a catastrophic fall and a most likely lethal interaction with the demon from the pit just to get a head start back to the platform where the antidote sat on the table? What was Helen doing? Was her typed message about the electrical distribution racks a ruse to get me to run away

so that she could take the antidote without a fight? I turned my head to look beyond the arm of death to the other side of the room. Weeks later, my view finally shifted enough to see Helen moving behind the portal machinery. She seemed to still be moving away from the observation platform. toward the back of the room where the electrical distribution cabinets were supposedly located. I made a major life decision. I decided to trust Helen. I didn't attempt to change course at all, just maintained a steady, all-out sprint toward the back of the room and hoped for the best. I eventually landed from my leap. The arm struck the ground 18 inches behind me. I ran toward

the machinery in the rear of the room and the arm didn't follow me. 20 or 30 years after I jumped from the platform, or about 50 feet later, I hazard a glance backwards, this initial year-long rotation of my head just to see that the arm was flinging itself toward the other side of the room, toward Helen. What would happen if Helen died? Was the electrical distribution system for the capture equipment dual redundant? If I switched off the equipment on my side, but Helen didn't reach hers, was this whole effort for nothing?

Would I have to try and spend another century running to the other side of a room to shut off the switches on hell inside. I ran for years. I mourned my old life, the life from 60 seconds of normal perception time earlier. And I forgot. That's what brains do. Learning and forgetting are just two sides of the same coin. Gaining experience and gaining ignorant are the same biological phenomenon. Five more steps. Another year. I meditated. I imagined new people and had years-long relationships with them. Another five steps. I rounded a concrete footing that held one of the huge shafts that drove the capture equipment.

Then I saw the distribution cabinet, a cabinet bearing a lightning bolt symbol and words in a language I could barely remember. High voltage. It was 40 feet away, years away. I ran, and I prayed. I prayed for the demon arm to return to emerge from behind the panels or sneak up behind me and strike me down, dead. Finally, there would be no more thoughts, no more oceans of time to suffer across. My prayers were not answered. I kept on living. Despite having a career-long amount of time to

anticipate arrival at the electrical distribution cabinet, I still misjudged the deceleration required to have a smooth arrival and slammed into the door. I grabbed the handle as I rounded off the sheet metal and flung it open while studying myself. Two banks of 70 amp breakers were mounted. in neat vertical rows. At the top, a chunky main power switch with a red handle. I grabbed the handle, an act that took months, and yanked it downward as hard as I could. Nothing happened. Were the power supplies redundant, both needing to be off to turn off the capture equipment? If so, perhaps I simply got to the left side cabinet before Helen reached the one on the right side, or maybe Helen had been killed by the demon arm before she could power off the racks

on her side of the room. Or maybe she had betrayed me and was sneaking back to the observation platform to take the antidote. I invested the time in peeking around the equipment racks to look at the portal. It was still there. A perfect pentagonal cut in space time. The star in a circle-shaped frame of moving machinery that somehow captured or created the portal still glow to cherry red. The capture machinery was still powered on.

Both of the dinosaur-sized insect-looking, arms still stretched out of the hole in space. One continued to slurp the liquefied man on the platform. The other arm, the one that had attempted to turn me into human juice, was busy with something that was obscured by the machinery. Then something changed. It changed fast, far faster than any phenomenon I'd seen since Helen injected me. It was the lighting in the room. Two dozen red emergency lights installed on the ceiling flickered on simultaneously. In my imagination, I heard emergency claxon began wailing too, but my mind was far too sped up for something as slow-moving as sonic energy to produce a noticeable signal.

The portal changes well. The once sharp edges of the pentagonal hole in space were now blurry. I thought it over. Then I thought some more, and some more. What else did I have to do? Helen, I concluded, had shut down the right-side power distribution rack. Without power to the equipment, the portal was closing or destabilizing, or whatever portals do when their capture machinery powers off.

The antidote. I still couldn't see Helen through the forest of machinery and equipment racks, but I pictured her sprinting like mad back to the observation platform to take the one dose of the antidote for herself. I couldn't let that happen. I launched myself back towards the observation platform, pushing off the electrical distribution cabinet for extra acceleration. Helen had injected me.

I knew she had reasons for doing it, but that didn't matter to me anymore. more. She co-signed me to a century of silent imprisonment in this room. I deserved the antidote, not Helen. I ran. I ran for years. Only 40 steps back to the observation platform. Each one a bottomless well of empty time that I had to fill with my thoughts. I glanced backwards twice. Each tiny gesture slowed me down slightly, causing months of delay. With my first glance backwards, 10 steps away from the power cabinet, I saw essentially the same scene as before, the portal starting to blur and warp, and the two massive arms still grasping into the room. 32 steps from the power cabinet, two dozen feet from the platform.

I looked back again. Now both death arms were flailing about. Were they in pain because the portal was destabilizing? Enraged? Still no sign of Helen. I dove onto the observation platform, laying out horizontally in the air like I was playing Ultimate Frisbee. I hung in the air for a long time, feeling a little like Superman, then like an extremely bored Superman. I eventually landed on my belly and slid from the edge of the platform to the chair in the center. I sprung to my feet and snatched the syringe of Flumazino from the table. I spun my head around, looking for Helen. By injecting myself with all the Flumazzo, I was effectively sentencing her to a death as awful as S-47s.

Was she going to attack me again to take the drug away from me? I saw her. My decades of worrying and scheming about Helen taking the antidote were completely misguided. Helen was still wearing her white lab coat, was still by the test subjects platform, scaling one of the pylons of the capture machine. What the heck was she doing? I grabbed the syringe from the table and immediately injected it into my neck. This process took months, only seconds of real time passed, but in those seconds I saw Helen

climbed to the business area of the capture machine, the topmost portion with the red-hot glowing rails. In one fluid motion, Helen vaulted herself over one of the rails and into the portal. She rotated to face me as she fell. Did she see me betraying her, taking the Flumazino myself? She was too far away for me to read her expression. Helen slowly fell away into the rift in space, and I pushed the dose into my neck. When Helen injected the Mentinovics into my neck,

neck, it took effect within a fraction of a second. The antidote, the flamanzanil, also took effect that quickly. But since I was overdosed on the Mentinovics, the fraction of a second waiting for the flumanzanil to hit seemed like weeks. Time slowly accelerated over those weeks. Helen's fall into the pit went faster and faster. The edges of the portal blurred and bent at a frantic pace. The huge five-jointed arm retracted into the pit, eventually moving so quickly that I could perceive

their motion like a minute hand on a clock. I heard a soft, low rumble. It sounded like thunder from a storm dozens of miles away. Soon after, the portal vanished. I didn't know if it finally closed because the capture equipment was turned off, or if it was still there, invisible to me because my mind was not running fast enough to see it. The thunder sounded again, the sound rising in pitch. I felt my heartbeat for the first time in over a century.

A slow squeeze in my chest. I sensed air rushing into my lungs. Then everything was back to normal. The soft, distant thunder was suddenly the deafening sound of a siren blaring. I heard myself gasping in air. I coughed. I screamed. I didn't recognize the sound of my voice.

My legs gave out, and I fell to the floor with terrifying speed. Everything moved too fast. There was no time to think about anything. Behind me, the door to the capture chamber slammed open. I screamed again, startled by the sound, and turned to look at the door. I didn't have to wait to see who was entering. My body immediately obeyed my wishes. A dozen men and women rushed into the room, security guards holding rifles, as they might

need to start shooting at any instant. People in lab coats holding Geiger counters and other sensors, a crew of paramedics. They moved so fast, it was overwhelming. How was I once able to exist at this speed? How can a person process information in a world where everything moves so fast? Half a dozen of them surrounded me, blaring commands to evacuate the chamber, asking questions about my conditions, questions about Helen. I tried to answer, but could only stumble out fragments of words.

I had forgotten how to speak. They rushed me out of the chamber, the room where I had spent the bulk of my century and a half of life. I was basically thrown onto a stretcher and wheeled to a medical facility that was off the same hallway as the capture chamber. They gave me a bottle of water. I choked on it. I had forgotten how to swallow.

They took a blood sample. I heard someone say the words Ngram decay later. They gave me the results of my blood work. My Ngram decay showed I had experienced 120 years of consciousness. I was 32 years old when I entered the capture chamber. My body is still 32, but my mind is 152 years old. Most of my life has been spent in anguish, struggling to survive and escape my torment in that huge underground room. I was in the medical facility for a while, days, I think.

It was like a flash, a blip. I know how to spend a year's worth of time doing nothing other than stare at the floor. Passing the time in the medical facility was no biggie. I recovered my ability to talk and to swallow and to walk. Then they let me go. Someone in a lab coat, one of Helen's colleagues. escorted me out of the deep basement facility and to the front door of the building. It was so strange, repeating the journey through the offices and lobby that I took over a century earlier.

Good luck, he said, and held the door open for me. I stepped outside. I saw the sky for the first time in 120 years. I heard the wind whistle and felt it blow my hair about. I wept. There were so many cars in the parking lot, which one was mine. I couldn't remember. I finally found one that looked familiar.

It opened with my key, and I sat at the driver's seat. A to-go coffee cup lay on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Was it mine? I didn't remember. I opened the glove box and found the registration. It had my name and my address. Which of these cars was Helens? Had she driven to work expecting to fling herself into another dimension?

I couldn't drive. It was too frightening. only having seconds to react to the changing traffic lights and motion of the other vehicles on the road. I walked to the main gate and got them to call a cab. The taxi delivered me to the address on my registration, a vaguely familiar-looking townhouse whose door opened with my key. Recovery is going quickly. Everything is going quickly for me, compared to my life in the capture chamber. The day is raced by with terrifying speed.

I spent a week writing down everything I remember from my long life in the camp. capture chamber. I'm posting the record of my experiences here. Whatever is going on in that government lab should not be a secret. I know I signed an NDA in Helen's office, where I agreed not to discuss what I saw and experienced. Frankly, though, I don't care. What are they going to do? Put me in jail for a few years for divulging secrets? Believe me, I can do the time easily.