Shades of White part 2

*EDIT* I think I've fixed the mistakes now!

And to my surprise, it was nothing but a girl. A normal girl. The only immediate thing I found abnormal about her was her paleness.

I shot a weak half smile at her, and she looked into my eyes curiously.

“This is M18890,” Gage told me. "But we call it M188 for short.”

It? I thought. M188 is clearly a girl, not an it!

M188 slowly approached me with her hand stretched out. I watched as she inched closer and closer to me, finally getting right up in my face. With her head tilted and grey eyes glittering, she gently placed her soft palms on my face.

“Hello,” I greeted kindly.

“She can’t speak,” I heard Gage mutter from behind me. “She’s mute, but she can certainly understand what we say to her.”

I directed my gaze to the floor. My mind began to drift off into thought. What is it like to not be able to speak? What was it like to not be able to share your thoughts and feelings? I felt a pang of sympathy for the young girl. Her life must have been horrible.

“Bjorn!” I heard my mother yell from outside the room. "We’re going home!”

It’s about time!

As Gage held the door open for me and I turned to leave, I felt a small hand touch my backside. I looked over my shoulder and saw M188 with a sad look on her face. Those grey eyes were filled with despair, and it looked like she was on the verge of bursting into tears. I didn’t know what to say to her.

“I might be back soon,” I whispered to her. I grabbed her hand and held it tightly. She looked up at me and smiled.

Michelle came into the room. “Bjorn!” she hissed. “I said let’s get out of here! You wanted to go home, and now you’re getting your wish.”
I waved goodbye to the small, black haired girl for the last time and rushed to my mother.

Back in the car, I asked Mom about M188.

I soon knew everything about the mute child. She was a “test tube baby" who was conceived from the gametes of generous donors. She was going to be used as a source of stem cells (Gage’s area of interest), but for some reason, Gage couldn’t bring himself to do it. Rumor had it that he had always wanted a daughter and was unable to have children, so he placed her embryo within a surrogate. Once M188 was born, he used her umbilical cord for stem cells and kept her alive.

“So why is she still here?” I asked Mom once we got home. “Why is M188 still at the lab?”

I watched as my mother shook her head, “I don’t know. I told him to get rid of her, but he had grown so attached to her.”

“If Gage loves her, than why didn’t he take her home and raise her like his own child?”

“Gage and M188 have an odd relationship, Bjorn. He loves her too much to give her up to a family who will love her, yet his heart is cold enough to do the unthinkable."

“And what’s that?”

“Keeping human test subjects is illegal,” Mom said darkly. “One can get into a lot of trouble for such an audacious act. Gage knows that it’s illegal, but he wants to use M188 as his own personal specimen to study only God knows what. I told him that if the government ever finds that there is a living human subject in our facility, he will be the one going to prison. I have nothing to do with it.”

I craved to know more, but sleepiness was getting the best of me. That night as I lay in bed with the covers tucked over my nose, I thought of the sad little girl confined within that white prison.

Over the next two weeks, Mom brought me to her work every night. While she and Gage continued their research, I would go into M188’s “home” and socialize with her.

While she wasn’t capable of speaking, she did know how to smile. She smiled a lot when I was with her.

One evening I brought in a book to read to her. It was a picture book about nature. I sat with my back against the wall and she sat close to me.

“That’s a zebra,” I said, pointing to a picture in the book. “I’ve seen one at the zoo before. They’re pretty cool.”

I glanced over and noticed her grey eyes filled with excitement as she studied the striped equine. I then turned the page.

“That’s a forest covered in snow. Isn’t it pretty?”

M188 slowly reached towards the book with her hand outstretched. I was confused. What did she want?

The pale girl gently placed her hand on the sun in the picture.

“The sun?” I muttered quietly. “What do you like about the sun?”

She turned to me, a weak smile upon her face. That’s when it hit me.

“You’ve never seen the sun?"

The girl slightly nodded. A tear rolled down her face and hit the page with the snowy, sunny scene.

“Please don’t cry!"

Before I could close the book, M188 was completely in tears. I gently wrapped my arms around her, whispering, “don't cry!"

“What’s going on in here!?”

We both looked up and saw a very angry Gage looming over us.

“Did you make her cry?” he snarled.

“No!” I exclaimed. "She just started crying and-”

The old scientist grabbed M188 by the wrist and jerked her up off of the floor.

“Where are you taking her?” I demanded as I got to my feet.

“I think it’s time to put this human subject to the test, Bjorn. After years and years of endless work, I think I’ve created a breakthrough in human medication.”

My heart sank. “You can’t use her!”

“Oh yes I can,” Gage hissed back. “It belongs to me… It is what I’ve been saving this child for all these years for. I didn’t dissect its embryo for stem cells like I should have. I let it live so that when this medication was ready to be tested, I would have a subject.”

“Use some grown ups to test your medicine! We learned in class about control groups and stuff-”

I was violently interrupted.

“Are you mad? If the medication doesn’t work, it's a lawsuit waiting to happen! Why go through all that trouble when I have a specimen right here? Bjorn, this could be the cure to cancer! I can‘t wait to test it on adults, anyway. I’m going to test it tonight.”

I held my head down. He did have a point, after all.

“But don’t worry. Your little friend will be fine when you come back tomorrow.”

My spirits were lifted. “Do you promise?”

Gage did not reply. Instead, he began to drag M188 away. We quickly exchanged glances.

I would never forget the sheer horror in her eyes.

~

The next evening came at last. I was practically running through the hallways of the facility. I couldn’t wait to see M188. I hoped that she would be okay.

“Don’t run!” I heard Mother scold from a good distance behind me. "You’ll run into something!”

I didn’t care if I ran into something. I couldn’t wait to see M188’s beautiful eyes beaming up at me as I read to her. Today I had brought a book about the sun and the stars.

I burst through the doors and into the white room, a wide smile upon my face. But the smile disappeared and my heart was in my throat as I saw specks of scarlet on the colorless flooring.

I dropped my book. There was something on the grey, metal table in the center of the room. I couldn’t really tell what it was. Slowly and cautiously, I inched closer and closer to the table.

Once I saw what lay on the table, I screamed.

“What have you done!?” I yelled, breaking into a hysteric cry.

Gage came into the room from his office, his white coat drenched in bright red blood.

“Bjorn!” he exclaimed. “The medication! It did something horrible to M188’s immune system. A vivisection had to be done immediately.”

With tears clouding my vision, I gazed up onto the table. The small, frail body of the pale girl lay on the metal, her internal organs exposed as her skin was peeled back and stretched out like a canvas. I could clearly see each organ in its entirety. I winced when I saw her large intestine sliced open, revealing even more gory things inside.

“You cut into her when she was ALIVE!” I screamed through my frustration. I sank to the floor and heard Gage let out a sigh.

I sat on the cold floor, gazing into my own reflection. The innocent girl who was never loved. The innocent girl whose skin never soaked in the warm sunlight. And now, the innocent girl who was tortured alive because of the morbid curiosity of her own kind.

The angel in this hell now lay in front of me, bloody and ripped apart. After that, the only thing I could remember was crying into my mom’s shirt.

I was never the same after that. I never saw people the same way as I did previously.

As I grew older, sometimes I would just sit in my room alone and cry. I would glare out the window and into the city below, watching people walk by.

People. I now abhorred the word. When I thought of Homo sapiens, I thought of death, despair, and hatred.

How could the world be run by creatures who judge, torture, and murder their own species? None of it made sense to me.

Sometimes, I still think about poor M188. She was murdered because Gage was curious. My last memories of that sweet girl were of her organs being preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

I often wonder, What will happen when our curiosity gets the best of us? That is a day that I fear.