Everything They Wanted
1128 Words
The medical evaluation began at eight in the morning and showed no signs of ending anytime soon.
Callum had expected the standard routine—blood pressure, blood draw, maybe a treadmill test if they were feeling thorough. What he got instead was five hours of increasingly invasive scrutiny conducted by a team of six people who spoke to each other in low professional voices and wrote things down with the quiet satisfaction of people finding exactly what they were looking for.
They measured everything. Blood pressure, heart rate, lung capacity, reflexes. They drew enough blood to make him lightheaded. They put him in a machine that scanned his brain in seventeen different configurations while a technician monitored the feed and occasionally said "interesting" in a tone that Callum found deeply unsettling.
Owen had been directed to a waiting area on arrival and given no further information, which Callum suspected was intentional.
By midday, Callum was sitting on an examination table in a paper gown, eating a complimentary biscuit and trying to look less alarmed than he felt, when the door opened and a man walked in who was not Dr. Sharp.
He was perhaps fifty, with silver hair worn slightly too long and the kind of face that was handsome in a way that made you uneasy—symmetrical, controlled, designed for first impressions. He wore a white coat over a suit that cost more than the medical equipment.
"I'm Dr. Silas Vaughn. I oversee the Enhancement Program." He extended a hand. His grip was firm and dry.
"Dr. Vaughn." Callum shook it. "Nobody mentioned you'd be here."
"No, I imagine not." Vaughn settled into the chair across from him with the ease of a man who sat in rooms like this every day and owned all of them. "I like to meet candidates personally when the results are particularly noteworthy."
Callum went very still. "Noteworthy."
"Your scans are remarkable, frankly. Neural pathway density, synaptic response times, baseline cortisol management—you're extraordinarily well-suited for the procedure. Better than anyone we've assessed in the last two years." He said it the way a collector might describe a rare find. With satisfaction. With ownership.
"Is that good?"
"For you? Potentially life-changing." He smiled. "For us? Very exciting."
Callum studied him. There was nothing overtly wrong with what Vaughn had said. Nothing he could point to. But something about the man's enthusiasm—the particular quality of it, the way his eyes stayed just a bit too focused—made Callum feel less like a patient and more like a specimen.
"What exactly happens to me after the procedure?" Callum asked. "Not the official version. The real one."
Vaughn raised an eyebrow. "The official version is the real version."
"The consent form mentioned 'acceptable variance' in neurological changes. What does that mean?"
"It means the human brain is not a standardised system and we account for individual variation in response."
"And if the variation isn't acceptable?"
Vaughn's smile didn't waver. "We manage it."
We manage it. Callum tucked the phrase away alongside prior subjects and acceptable variance, building a small private collection of things that sounded fine but felt wrong.
"Any other questions?" Vaughn asked pleasantly.
A hundred. He asked none of them.
"No," Callum said. "I think I'm good."
---
Owen was pacing when Callum emerged into the waiting area two hours later.
"Five hours," Owen said. "They had you for five hours. What were they doing in there?"
"Tests. Lots of tests." Callum rolled down his sleeve over the latest blood draw. "I'm cleared. Procedure is confirmed for Friday."
Owen stopped pacing. "Callum."
"Don't."
"I just—"
"Owen. I'm doing this." He said it quietly but with a finality that his friend recognised. They'd had this particular conversation in different forms for twenty years—the one where Callum made a decision and Owen knew the argument was already over.
Owen exhaled. "Fine. Friday." He paused. "Did you meet anyone interesting in there?"
Callum thought about Vaughn's smile. The way he'd said very exciting.
"A doctor," he said. "Dr. Vaughn. He runs the programme."
"And?"
"And he seemed—" Callum searched for the right word. Professional didn't cover it. Brilliant didn't either. What Vaughn had seemed was invested, in a way that had nothing to do with Callum's wellbeing. "Fine," he finished. "He seemed fine."
Owen clearly didn't believe him but let it go.
They took the tube home, not talking much. Callum stared at his own reflection in the black window across the carriage—same face, same jacket, same person who'd gotten on the train at seven this morning with twenty-six years of ordinariness behind him.
Three days until that changed.
He noticed, as they surfaced from the underground, that the headache he'd had since leaving NeuraDyne had quietly disappeared. He hadn't taken anything for it. It had simply gone.
He didn't think about it again until much later, when he would understand that it had been the last ordinary pain he'd ever feel.
---
That evening he called his sister Rachel.
She answered on the fourth ring, a child screaming somewhere in the background and the sound of a television too loud.
"Cal. Hold on—" Muffled shouting. The television volume dropped. "Sorry. Ethan's having a night. What's up?"
"Nothing. Just calling."
A pause. "You never just call."
"Maybe I'm turning over a new leaf."
"Mum told me you visited yesterday. She said you seemed off."
"I'm fine."
"Everyone in this family says they're fine and nobody ever is. It's like a genetic condition."
He almost told her. Almost said the words: I signed up for a medical trial, Rachel. They might do something extraordinary to me or they might kill me and I needed you to know before Friday in case—
"I just wanted to hear your voice," he said instead.
She was quiet for a moment, and in that quiet he could hear her understanding that something was wrong and choosing, the way siblings did, to let him keep it.
"Well you've heard it," she said. "Come visit soon. The kids miss their uncle."
"Yeah," he said. "I will."
He hung up and sat in the dark of his room for a long time after, the phone warm in his hand.
Then he set his alarm for Thursday morning, turned off the light, and tried to sleep.
He was almost there when his phone buzzed one last time. The same unknown number from the night before. This time, no link. Just seven words.
They know what you are. Do you?
Callum stared at the message until the screen timed out and went dark.
Then he put it face-down on the nightstand, closed his eyes, and didn't sleep at all.
- Writer
