Adonis Chapter 1.02

It was not long before the girl found herself repeating the same lonely walk she had just completed in her trek to the man behind the desk, bringing about a mild case of déjà vu. She still felt odd that she did not interrogate the man further as she left, but she pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind as the conference room came into view. The room was vastly different from the locations she had visited so far, set up with large-screen monitors on each wall, as well as a giant oak table surrounded by cushy chairs atop a carpeted floor. It felt more human than the other rooms, though she was not shocked by the lack of human presence in it as well. The room itself came to life upon her entrance, as the lights dimmed while the monitors all flashed on, briefly showing a logo for Adonis Laboratories which promptly faded away. Her gaze fixed upon one of the screens, she pulled out a chair and sat down, her mouth opened slightly in anticipation for what she hoped would be information overload.

“Adonis Laboratories–the future of you.” Speakers in the room echoed those words with the voice of a middle-aged woman, while synthesized music one would expect at any half-rate business presentation played in the background. “Here at Adonis Labs, we have worked hard to bring you the highest quality in body modification technology the world has seen. The number one complaint from a scientifically-created survey sample of five thousand people was in some way or another related to their bodies. From those who wished for a better solution to fighting their obesity, to people expressing issues with their height or perhaps their hair color or body structure, all the way to transgendered men and women seeking a more viable solution than a long set of surgery they could not afford, as well as those with genetic disorders and defects that affected their outer appearance and inner processes, Reformation offers a solution for every one of these cases and more.”

While the screens flashed images of classically undesirable body types to illustrate the message being presented, the girl watching with all the focus she could muster began thinking about what her connection to the process was. Clearly she had been a part of this Reformation or she wouldn’t be here, she thought, so why did she do it? Did she dislike her previous hair color that much…? Or maybe she had been a horribly disfigured girl… or what if she had been a boy? Dying of some sort of disease? For the life of her, she couldn’t remember a thing, which only served to worry her further—she couldn’t build a puzzle without any pieces.

“The process in its entirety is very complex, requiring a variety of stages,” the electronic voice continued, “each stage bringing you one step closer to your ideal self. Firstly, a consultation with one of our skilled scientists will help you voice your concerns with yourself, and give a description of your ideal form. Be as vague or as detailed as you like, our scientists are trained to handle even the most exhausting of cases!” The screen showed a textbook-case scientist, complete with glasses and a lab coat, sitting at a desk talking to a married couple. Everyone in this obvious re-enactment had smiles on their faces as the cheery digital music carried on.

Shifting in her seat, the girl continued to wonder about the process, questions piling atop others in a dangerously large heap in her mind, which undoubtedly would topple soon if she could not answer some of them. At the top of the pile was questions about her current body, whether she made the choice or someone else did to give her white hair. Maybe that was an accident? She had no clue. Just because it was such a strange color doesn’t mean it was necessarily anyone’s fault in the first place, after all.

The screens faded to what looked like diagrams, simple representations of humans standing in a Reformation Chamber similar to what she woke up in. “Stage two happens once your form of choice has been cleared by Adonis executives. In this stage, you are introduced to the Reformation Chamber, which will be where you will spend the remainder of the entire procedure. Do not worry, though! While the process is lengthy, you will not be awakened until the final stage. We painlessly put you into a relaxing sleep, and biosensors are placed everywhere in the chamber for constant monitoring.” Each chamber on the screens began to change colors, from clear to blue, as if they were filling with water. “Stage three is when the process really begins to get technical. While your body is asleep, a specially-formulated liquid, which delivers nutrients and oxygen to each individual cell, is constantly circulated into your chamber. This keeps your cells alive and your brain active while body functions such as respiration and circulation shut down.”

The girl tilted her head slightly to the side as the animations continued. The human figures appeared to be… dissolving.

“Stage four is comprised of many substages which this video will not explain in detail, but technical notes on the procedure can be obtained from any Adonis Labs staff member. In layman’s terms, targeted undesirable cells are removed from the body, in a process known as Stripping. Nanites, or small robots able to handle cells singly, take care of this process. Over time, each unwanted cell is removed, which could be relatively few, or it could be nearly your entire body. For small body adjustments, it is possible for this step to be skipped altogether so long as the proper arrangements are made with an Adonis Chamber technician.” The graphics changed to where there was nothing but brains floating in each chamber, an eerie sight to the seated woman even if they were just cartoon images. “Stripping usually is not as easy as simply removing each cell, oftentimes the nanites will construct synthetically-made ‘pseudoparts’ which connect to certain bodily organs, allowing for others to be stripped safely. Generally, this process allows the nervous system to retain a variety of connections to the body which aids in overall reconnection of the Adonis-created cells for your new body. Think of it as a ‘bridge’ to keep your brain healthy and active during the procedure.”

Tapping her fingers on the desk, the girl wished she had a fast-forward button. It wasn’t that the video had no insight into her predicament and possessed a wealth of knowledge–it was more that the process was slightly sickening to think about to her, as in her mind it seemed awkward to imagine herself as a person whose flesh was basically removed piece by piece, and she was glad there was no waking up during that.

“Step six, the second-to-last step, also has many substages, which very much mirror Stripping, but in reverse. Through a procedure dubbed Linking, new cells that have been grown one-by-one with new DNA are slowly attached to one another. The liquid solution that nourishes your cells in the Reformation Chamber also prevents the cells from activity the entire time they are contained within it, so the cells do not reproduce on their own. This allows us to make sure that a long-term process does not consist of a body with parts in various stages of mitochondrial decay. As cells for bones, muscles, and organs are linked both to each other and to the nervous system, pseudoparts work like a mold for the developing body, allowing for multiple stages of growth as we make sure the body develops properly. The process up to now is not for the faint of heart to witness, but once bodily reconstruction is complete, the last substep is invisible to the human eye. The nanites, which had tagged all original cells that were kept in the body, find and deliver DNA that matches the new body to each tagged cell, swapping in the DNA much like a virus does, though with a much more delicate touch.”

Finally, the cartoon figures disappeared, once again replaced by smiling actors talking to smiling scientists in what looks like a very happy end result. Funny, the woman noted darkly to herself, there wasn’t a single mention of those happy people having to sit in a conference room and watch a horribly unentertaining video.

The voice cut into the woman’s thoughts again, giving the impression that the video was nearing its conclusion by its tone. “The last step in the procedure is re-awakening your cells and returning you to the world in your new life. While the procedure is currently in testing phases, clients may still begin to discuss their future with Adonis Laboratories staff. Upon the conclusion of our first successful tests, the procedure will be available to the public, in what we hope will change the face of the world. Remember, Adonis Labs is the future… of you!”

The video and music faded out, leaving the girl alone in the dim room for a brief moment, until the video monitors powered up again. This time, the monitors had prompts, tables, spreadsheets, all sorts of data which brought girl to her feet in a burst of excitement in order to view each screen closely. She discovered that touching each screen enlarged the images on them with extra data, and the girl read everything on what appeared to be her test readouts. Much of the data was very scientific and did not offer her much insight as to who she was, but every little piece was tucked away into her memory for questions to formulate from later.

The first thing she learned was that her body had undergone a full Stripping process, down to where there was nothing but her brain left. The DNA strand that was introduced to create the engineered body was displayed when she touched a double helix, thousands of A C T G combinations flooding the screen with sections flashing every so often to indicate what protein each section made. It was the next screen over, however, that gave her the greatest insight, even though it provided the least amount of information. It simply said “Test Subject One – HALEY – Subject successfully reconstructed. Pre-Reformation condition: None. Post-Reformation condition: experimental synthetic DNA. Total Stripping time: 06:03:12:07:39:15. Total Linking time: 13:05:28:22:09:58.”

Haley.

That must be her name.

She had the sort of numbing excitement from this discovery which caused a wave of heat to envelop her entire body, because even though her memory retrieval was practically nonexistent, she at least had a designation and some slight understanding of why she was here. A test subject… a volunteer, she imagined, since if her pre-Reformation condition meant what she thought, then Haley had no disease or anything that required she use the chamber–she was the control case for the laboratory. She could only assume, though, that she had once appeared radically different from how she did now, as the information on the screen said the DNA was synthetically made for her. To her, it meant the DNA was designed to produce wildly differing, and perhaps radical, results from the original strain, explaining her hair color while she did not display other traits of albinoism. While the findings were quite uplifting to Haley, her heart sank once she realized that the numbers in the time sequences displayed, as their highest value, years.

A panic attack struck Haley suddenly, as the shock that she had been in the process for nearly twenty years caused her legs to become weak, and she sat on the edge of the table behind her, grasping its edge. Surely, she had once had friends and family, acquaintances, pets, a digital video recorder that kept track of her favorite television shows, and it was within reason that people have aged, passed on, forgotten about her, or have been otherwise unplugged in the twenty years since the start of this procedure.

As the need to discover more to her identity increased, so did the intensity at which she scoured the screens for information. Behind her name on one screen was the icon of a manila folder, which she touched once the queasy feeling had subsided. Instead of an array of documents, however, she was greeted with a frustrating error message: This folder is locked to unauthorized users. Please contact your system administrator to allow your user account access to these files. What was previously fear inspired by new knowledge became rage brought on by the lack of it, and Haley spun on a heel to look for a trace of communication devices, and upon finding none, yelled out down a hall, “I could use some God-damned tech support right now!” at no one in particular, which was fitting as no one was down that hall, and thus there was no one to note her angry demand.

With an audible “hmph,” Haley took a seat on the table again, arms crossing over her simple white uniform. “Where is everybody…?”

She was allowed a grace period to think for a few minutes before blue arrows and glowing lines along the floor silently flashed on. Haley looked around again to try and determine how she was being monitored, assuming that someone was watching her, as a shiver ran down her spine when she felt a strange sense of loneliness. Yet the facility was responding to her presence, so something was pushing buttons, she hypothesized.

Haley resigned herself to follow the lights once more, knowing full well that she would think their seemingly automated activation was creepy whether or not she was guided by them.