#spartan program

He had known this when Indy had painfully limped out of the darkness, a full foot taller than before, before collapsing on her bunk. She had been the first of them all to get ‘the treatment’ and when Winter was giving her orders to come the next day, they all knew it was only a matter of time before they all received it. They had all huddled together, doing their best to steel each other for what was about to come, but ultimately helpless to do anything about it.

It hurt seeing his sisters in pain. The muscle had grown past what skin could realistically hold, so the skin had burst and was subsequently bandaged. Suddenly they were accidentally breaking things with a newfound strength that they couldn’t understand. Migraines originated behind the back of their heads, where a thick wad of bandages hid a new implant to keep stronger fingers from picking at the wounds. Something was wrong, unnatural, but he lacked the age and wisdom required to understand how so.

He resolved to continue to love his sisters, attempting to hug the pain away when it became particularly bad. But it wasn't enough.

25 sisters had become 20. Then that became 17. He had no idea where the others went, but there was scarcely time to process what was happening before he too got his orders.

Mike had nowhere to run and hide, nor would he have tried to. Especially since he was fetched along with orderlies, big men with guns that had strictly told him to behave, or else. The lead doctor did her best to soothe him with the promise that nothing bad will happen. It will just be a little check-up, nothing serious to worry about. 

But MIKE knew better. He might have been small, but he was smart. His constant testing proved it, stacks and stacks of scantrons and boxes of little hand-made machines evident to his potential. He knew a lie when he heard one, and he could tell that the doctor was lying to both him and herself. Whatever it was, it was frightening to know that even a doctor wouldn't truly know what was going to happen.

The doctor had smiled, an act which set the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, and told him that he would be even smarter. Stronger. Braver. He would just need to cooperate and stay quiet and do what he was told. His entire life was just doing what he was told, he didn’t know any different, besides the brief flashes of warm hugs and smiling faces from a past he could barely remember. Maybe there was a time before when he didn’t have to do so, but when he saw the guard on the right flick the safety of a tranq gun, he knew those days were long gone.

He did what he was told, letting the doctors strip him down and buckle him to a table. It was cold, and a bright light blinded him. It was enough to distract him momentarily from the needles, that poked his skin and injected something that felt like acid into his veins. His world dissolved into agony as bones broke and reformed, muscle grew and skin split, regrowing only to be split again. His heart beat so fast he couldn't tell where one started and another began. Somewhere in the delirium of pain, he was convinced he was melting. He would be nothing but a puddle dripping through the small cuffs that held his ankles and wrists, doomed to never-ending pain as his nerves burned away and built themselves back again. A cycle of agony that ramped up so much that he finally, blissfully, passed out.

When he awoke, he knew that something was wrong.

The world was sharp, too sharp. The colors were bright and vivid, enough that he had to close his eyes a few times because they burned. It felt like someone had carved a part of his head out, and replaced it with something large and numb. He could feel the edges of something where the parts of him that remained cried out for the pieces that were missing. But…what was missing? Something was wrong, but he couldn’t understand what exactly it was.

“B106?” A stranger had spoken, and it took ??? a full second to pinpoint where it was coming from. Who was B106?

A hand tapped his face, and his eyes focused on the doctor in front of him. He balked, surprised by the sudden appearance of someone in front of him. The doctor, he was sure he knew who she was, but the name escaped him. She held a light in her hand, shining into parts of his eyes, and drove a spike of pain up into his head. “Who…?” ??? Swallowed a few times, his throat was dry and ached. He must have been asleep for a long time. “Who is B106?”

“You, you are B106.” The doctor now sounded somewhat nervous. He was glad they weren’t mad at him for forgetting who he was for a second. He wouldn’t have wanted to go to detention when he already felt so horrible. “Can you tell me what 5x8÷2 is?” B106 blinked and tried to recall what was being asked of him. A minute of silence passed as he pondered, before completely forgetting the question. “What?” He finally asked, thoroughly confused. Dimly, a part of him shouted that it would have known the answer in but a bare second, before that part was smothered under another wave of numbness. Soon, he forgot about that too.

The doctor’s brows knitted together as she looked to the side, swearing in a way that before, B106 wouldn’t have been able to hear it. But for some reason, he did, clear as if she was saying it directly to his face. Loud and sharp, like the visuals around him.  “I…” She looked B106 in the eyes and he could see into hers. There were flashes of annoyance, regret, and...something else he couldn’t quite place. It was sort of the way his sisters looked at him sometimes, eyes soft with worry, but was quickly buried under cold indifference. He paused at the thought. He had sisters, the knowledge of that so ingrained he didn’t think he could forget that, but...how many were there again? The doctor turned away to look at someone else, something he didn’t quite notice again, so focused was he on the doctor in front of him. “The implant and latest serum seem to have some...adverse effects. At least this one didn’t die. The rest with these symptoms scarcely lasted a few hours. How are his vitals?” “Stable,” Came the reply. “Still healthy, at least physically. We don’t need smart soldiers anyway-” “You’re wrong, idiots are a field hazard.” She interrupted them. B106 shrunk down in on himself like he always did when he was being spoken about, but this time he had to work extra hard to do so. He seemed to have gotten a lot bigger since his nap. “We’ll monitor this, and see if anything can be done to improve it. If anything, another medical breakthrough for the civilian sector will ease the fact we lost eight of our subjects."

She turned to look at him, and B106 shivered. “Take him back with the others, we will deal with this later. Maybe we will get lucky and this will only be temporary.” The other doctor nodded and gestured to some orderlies, who hooked B106 under the arms and hauled him to his feet. At first, he was boggled by the fact he was now chest height to these men, when before he scarcely could see above their waists. He had no chance to sort his feelings out before the sudden movement caused a spike of pain to render him breathless. He couldn’t breathe or fight back as he was dragged away from the infirmary, the doctor from before refusing to look at him as the door closed behind him.