Chapter 1 and 1/2

“Just a part of the experiment!” with those words still ringing in her ears she woke up from a restless sleep. Now that she was awake, she knew right away what was troubling her sleep. The unearthly moan that had been sounding like a background score in her dream, the moan which was as irritating as a splinter in her brain, that was what had woken her up. She had been hearing these moans pretty frequently these days and they are not menacing all the time. Sometimes they sound like a cry of anguish, sometimes a cry of desperation, a cry of exultation at times but the dominant one was that of a predator. There were two types of predatory cries, a famished and a satiated one.

She began wondering whether the quality of her dreams bore a direct connection to the cries, that her emotions, her feelings were some how feeding the monster, that the monster fed off the other hapless otherworldly creatures that she dreamt about, she wondered if she was stark raving mad. If there was any time that she missed her therapist, the one who went by the name ‘Dam’ these days, it was now. Contrary to public opinion she had seen the ‘saner’ side of the doctor and had seen his genius. She had witnessed first hand his slow transition to a being who believed that he could do anything just by doing it. Its always our will that drives us and he was of the belief that if you eradicate even the slightest of the doubts from your mind, if you could somehow surgically operate away the so called ‘practical’ portion of your mind there is nothing that a man cannot do.

Like Dam, she had her own theories as well. She had theories about how the signals are always red when its your turn to take a left, how its always the person before you who gets an untagged product at the supermarket, about how its always the thing that you want to happen the most that fails miserably, how in a competition you so want to win you are not even a runner up and so on and so forth.

She had her prediction mechanism for potential failure almost perfected. But there was one theory of hers that she had never voiced out aloud, not even to Dam. It had been to explain the existence of genii like Dam, Einstein and Stephen Hawking to name a few. She had always believed in the existence of life beyond the boundaries of this world, this solar system, this galaxy and heck even beyond this universe! That the existence of a handful of brilliant people completely contests the existence of the rest of the human population, that there is no physiological explanation to the workings of their brains has more often than not led her to believe that they are aliens as well. If not completely, at least biologically doctored proto-hume-aliens. She finally had proof and she also realized that none of these theories were going to help her alleviate the madness that has become her life anyway if she didn’t find Dam. She had to find him and find him fast, find him before ‘they’ do.