Synopsis: A lab technician who must complete his tasks in pitch blackness accidentally sees the forbidden subject of his tests.
Eyes That Do Not See
There were no lights in the room where we kept the creature and, furthermore, we wore opaque goggles over our eyes when we performed our experiments on it in endless cycles of rotating shifts.
"You must never lay eyes on the creature and you must never hear it," my superior warned me as we all stood together outside the laboratory on my first day, zipping ourselves into protective coveralls and sheathing our hands in thin, tactile gloves. "Tell me if you understand."
I confirmed that I did. I had trained for six months to get my specialized lab technician credential and I knew the risks.
On my superior’s signal, we slipped the noise-canceling pods into our ears and lowered our goggles. Calming music enveloped me.
"Are you ready?" My superior's voice entered my ear canal in an electronically intimate murmur.
I subvocalized my reply just as he had his question, letting the mechanical caps on my teeth translate the unarticulated vibrations into speech. "Yes."
In a chain of bodies linked hand to shoulder, we shuffled forward to replace the previous shift at their stations, unfurling into a circle around the subject, each of us finding the recessed tile marking where we should stand as we performed our tasks. The data we collected would dismantle the barriers between humanity and the inhospitable stars.
My shift mates joked and gossipped in my ear, but they felt as distant from me as the moon. In the darkness, my world became what I could touch. The creature and I were all that lived there.
My only companion.
“It’s an extraterrestrial,” my shift mates whispered. “They brought it here from the Hermes colony right before all the colonists died. Maybe its kind killed the colonists and it wants to kill us, too.”
Even without their commentary, I was afraid of it. I knew the rumors.
My hands shook when I was forced to touch it. My subvocalized commands faltered as I cycled the computer through the automated tests I had been assigned to perform that day. My work was brave. My work was necessary. But I was still afraid.
What manner of being could be so terrible that it was forbidden to see its face or hear its voice?
Despite my initial trepidation, it did not take long before I became as comfortable in the thing’s proximity as my companions were. I laughed and speculated about its origins along with them, rough hands pinching and slapping the loathsome thing when it resisted the diagnostic instruments I punched into its flinching, knobbly hide.
Standing on the same tile I always stood on, all I knew of this creature was one bony appendage and a segment of its torso.
It was easy to hate it, this fragment of an interloper. I loved to grind my knuckles into the creature’s scant flesh while I dreamed of the fresh, cool breezes that had caressed my great-grandfather’s face up on the surface when he was a boy. Had this creature ever stood beneath the vast sky of its homeworld? Had it ever climbed a tree? Jealous, I gouged crescent imprints in its skin with my fingernails. I had never left these tunnels in all my life and never would. The Earth was burning and all our colonies were graves.
I didn’t mean to see the creature. I would not have lifted my goggles to scratch the bridge of my nose if I could have predicted what would happen. All I wanted was to stay out of trouble and collect my paycheck, but I could not see the future and I did lift my goggles, nudging them up to my forehead just as the electronic door zipped open behind me. Dim, gray light washed over the room as a small robot trundled in on rubber-treaded wheels, carrying a memo for my superior.
I saw the creature on the table for a sliver of a second, and it saw me.
I recoiled. I dropped my chin to my chest, staring at my boots as I slid the blackout goggles back into place, retreating back into darkness. Calming music enveloped me. My heart pounded and my stomach turned.
I finished out my shift with trembling hands, swallowing bile, my thoughts a tumult because now I knew what made the thing so horrible and why we were not allowed to see or hear it.
It was a woman.
Just a woman.
She had twisted towards the faint, LED glow beyond the open door, stretching towards it like a flower starved for the sun. She was thin to the point of emaciation and shiny with scar tissue scaled over by fresh scabs. Her eyes were hollow and her pale cheeks were, too. A tube sprouted from her abdomen, delivering a nutrient slurry straight to her stomach, while another tube carried away her waste. She had opened her cracked lips and bared her teeth at me in an appeasing smile.
I could not bring myself to look at her again, yet I discovered her image on the backs of my eyelids, waiting for me when I blinked or tried to sleep. Her smile chewed my stomach. My fingers smarted knowing they had tweaked her wasting flesh, my palms stung with the memory of slaps.
After that, I shrank and shriveled throughout my shifts, cowed by my companions’ cheerful cruelty. They reminded me of what I was capable of, even though I was sure we were still all good people.
I reasoned with myself night after night. If we were good, then perhaps it was the woman who was bad. Perhaps she deserved to be on the table. If I repeated it often enough, perhaps one day I could believe my rationalizations.
I didn’t know how to broach the subject of what I had learned with my shift mates. I was weak and afraid of being shunned. When we went for drinks after work, I laughed along when they brainstormed all the vicious ways we could dispose of our detested extraterrestrial when the experiments were finally over.
“The experiments don’t end. They go on until the ugly fuck dies on the table and then we get another one to test,” said our most senior shift mate. “This is my third.”
His third. My drink curdled in my mouth. I swallowed it, my stomach churning.
“What are the tests for?” I asked. I was not a scientist. I was trained in the hows of performing our experiments but not the whys, and, before, I hadn’t cared that I didn’t know. Now I craved an answer.
Our senior shrugged, swishing his synthetic whiskey around in his mouth before he swallowed with a satisfied sigh. “You know as much as I do. We’re just the grunts.” He smacked his lips. “You know, it pisses me off we waste perfectly good food on that thing. Why do I gotta pay out the ass for stale rations and that ugly fuck eats for free? It’s not even from this planet.”
I bowed my head over my drink with a wan smile.
The next day during my shift, I loosened one of my ear pods for the first time, breaking the noise canceling seal. On the table, the woman murmured to herself, reciting poems I half remembered from when I was a child in school. We had all been expected to memorize them once upon a time. Her voice was pained, tightening whenever one of us initiated the next test in our assigned sequences, but she did not stop croaking out the stanzas.
The next day she described the plot of a film I had never heard of. At the bar with my shift mates that evening, I repeated what she had described and asked if they knew the movie. One of them lit up and told me it was his favorite.
The day after that she muttered a list of names that tickled my memory but still meant nothing to me. When I looked them up that night, I discovered they were all from Hermes colony.
The next day I arrived for my shift early and destroyed our goggles. I took them from their hooks and cut the straps and smashed the impenetrable lenses. I threw them on the floor.
“What happened here?” asked my superior when he came in minutes later, less early than me.
“They’re broken,” I said.
My superior grunted. “Damn punk kids. Well, get your other gear on. We’re still doing the job.”
At shift change, we shuffled in to take our stations in our usual chain, left hand to left shoulder with our right arms across our eyes. I peeked across the top of mine.
The woman was basking in the brief light once more, relishing her seven minutes of artificial day.
I took my place on my recessed tile as the previous shift’s workers filed out the door, goggles intact. The door zipped shut and night fell on the room. Not a single glimmer of illumination leaked through. There were no stars for us while we tarried there. Not yet.
At our superior’s command, we uncovered our eyes.
My shift mates chattered about our sabotaged goggles.
“Why would someone do that?”
“Probably just some stupid kids with too much energy. There’s not enough room in these tunnels to run around.”
“I think we should get hazard pay. We’re doing this without full protective gear.”
“Did anyone peek at it?” I asked, deep inside my throat. My noise canceling ear pods whispered my own taboo question back to me.
The chatter stopped. The silence seeped around us, soaking into the blackness, painted over by the endless strains of the calming music piping into our ears.
“No one?” I said. I didn’t feel like myself, and hadn’t in weeks.
“Don't act stupid,” said my superior.
“What if it’s a human?” I persisted.
“It’s not,” one of my shift mates replied.
“It might be.”
“It’s not.”
“But it could be,” I said. “Don’t you ever wonder why it has five fingers on its hands?”
“What is wrong with you?” asked another shift mate. “Stop it.”
“Let’s look at it together,” I said. “Let’s turn on the light.”
“No. It's dangerous to see it or hear it,” said my superior, quick and tense and final.
“Why?” I asked.
He had no answer. He was as ignorant as I was.
“Let’s turn on the light,” I said.
“Do not–”
I plucked both the noise canceling pods from my ears and tossed them on the floor as I abandoned my recessed tile and felt my way towards the door. The absence of the calming music shocked me. I had grown so used to having it in my ear.
Behind me, my shift mates shuffled and huffed, subvocalizing at me, trying to find me on my designated square, not able to see that I was long gone.
On the table, the woman was silent, observing the muted drama unfold.
I found the switch and threw on the lights. I was relieved that my short exile from my shift mates was over. We were going to be the same again now, and better people than we had been before.
On the table, the woman exhaled a rapturous sigh. She rattled her wrists and ankles inside her restraints.
“Peek-a-boo!” she sang.
I turned around. Like a quintet of identical figurines, my shift mates stood in their broken ring, circling the gnarled, ravaged woman.
They curled inward on themselves, each of them covering their eyes.
I went still. They weren’t supposed to do that.
Red-faced, my superior huffed and clicked his orders. My shift mates dribbled away from their positions around the table, congealing in a mass. They inched towards the door, sliding uncertain feet along the tiled floor. They bounced off each other in minute, Brownian collisions, their heads hanging with their faces in their palms.
I raced over to my nearest companion. He was oblivious to my approach, cocooned as he was by the noise canceling pods and his obstructive hands. When I grabbed his wrists and tugged on them, he jumped, then twisted away from me, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he tried to speak into my ear pod, not knowing that I was no longer on their channel.
I pried on his fingers, peeling them from his eyes and turning him towards the table. He would see and then he would understand why this was necessary.
I waited for him to gasp. I waited for him to thank me for showing him the truth. I waited for him to tell the others I was right all along.
He wrenched away from me instead, retreating on unsteady feet, arms extended. His eyes were screwed shut against the bright overhead lights and what they revealed.
I tried another of my shift mates with no luck, then another. They pushed me away, striking out with their fists and their knees, panicked by my insistence and the threat of sight.
One of my noise canceling ear pods was on the ground by my toe. I snatched it up and pushed it into place.
“She’s a person!” I subvocalized. “She’s not an alien creature. She’s just normal and we’ve been keeping her in the dark like she’s the boogeyman!”
“Shut! Up!” said one of them.
“Keep it moving and don’t engage,” barked my superior. “Security will handle this. They’re already on the way.”
“Please, just look,” I pleaded, pulling on his hand.
His arms shot out, slamming into my chest like sledgehammers. I flew back, crashing to the tiles.
“We’re not monsters like you’ve decided we are,” he said. “None of us would do anything to hurt another human being.”
He marched the others out, leaving me sprawled across the floor.
I screamed, pounding my fists on the tiles. I had done terrible things. This was supposed to redeem me.
On the other side of the door, I heard the tell-tale clatter of the security rovers. I heaved myself to my feet, and limped to the table.
“I’m going to get you out,” I promised.
She shook her head, staring up at the ceiling lights as I bent over her.
“You can’t do anything,” she said with a haggard sigh. “But it was nice of you to try.”
With the lights on, I could see the feed and excrement tubes had been surgically inserted into her body, snaking out of her belly like twin umbilical cords. I could find no mechanism to release the metal loops that bound her to the table.
My shoulders dropped. The door zipped open. The security rovers skittered into the room on multitudes of metal and rubber feet.
The woman’s eyes slid over to meet mine as the team of androids moved to surround me.
“Have you ever stood beneath a sun?” she asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t have the money for a trip up to the surface. I probably never would.
The security rovers lifted their nozzle attachments.
“I think today I’ll try to remember all the songs I know about the sun,” she said. “When you wake up, you should, too. It’ll help.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice cracking and disintegrating on that one small word.
The security rovers released a cloud of unscented mist. It stung my cheeks.
“Good luck,” said the woman.
My head began to spin.
“Thanks,” I said.
Then it all went dark.
Author's note: This short story was my way of dealing with my feelings following this most recent election. I'll leave it at that so you can take your own meaning from it if you want.
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