Chapter Text
Subject E has been outside for a long time, now. He would have had to endure at least four Tests by now, if he hadn’t got out. E doesn’t know where he is, where the lab techs or Sir are, and he doesn’t care, except that he knows he never wants to go back. He likes outside, at least the green parts with plants and without concrete or staring faces.
He ran for days once he got away. Days and nights, hiding or making his way through hedges, in alleys and empty buildings, anywhere he wouldn’t be seen. He found food sometimes. Once he stole it. The window was open and he was hungry. It tasted good.
This part of outside is strange. There’s a very large building in the middle of it; large enough to be a centre or several labs. But it’s made of lots of stones; stone and glass, wood and metal. E likes to look at it. It’s mostly empty; an old man goes inside a few times and that’s all. The plants around it are clearly laid out deliberately, the colourful ones and the trees and the grass all make shapes, patterns. Some of it is too low and open for E not to be seen if he goes there by day, but at night there are no searchlights, no alarms or dogs. It feels safer than most of the places he’s seen since he got away.
E decides to stay a little while.
There is a lake, for water if E is thirsty or dirty, and there are bins in other houses near enough, if he gets hungry, and the people there are very wasteful. There is less metal lying about in the outside here, so he gets into the habit of keeping a ball of it; made of cans and nails, in the pocket of the trousers he found. They are thin, and marked with another colour in splashes, but they are dark, meaning they are harder to see, and less ragged than the pair he had in the lab, so he wears them over the other pair.
He found a grey, fuzzy top in one of the bins by the road; it’s torn but it’s warmer than the T shirt from the lab.E wishes someone would throw away shoes that fit him. The lab shoes wore out and fell apart in the first few days he was outside, and he hasn’t been able to find anything else. His feet are very cold now, and sometimes they bleed. At night, he wraps them carefully in his blanket, but he nearly always wakes up almost frozen.
He’s still not going back.
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E has been living quite happily near the very big old building, for some time when suddenly, more people start going in and out of it. At first he thinks he about moving on, but then he decides, as long as none of them spot him, he’s probably ok. This is partly because none of the new people look like they work in labs or test people. There are no white coats, no sneering faces, and no bad arguments that E can see or hear or smell.
He can’t see any test subjects being brought in, and there’s still no medical or scientific waste in any of the bins. It’s also partly because the waste that does go in the bins is quite good. E finds fruits and cooked meats and sweet things, often hardly wet at all, and mostly not rotting yet. E doesn’t go through them every night- too obvious, even if they don’t have dogs or alarms. The other houses have food sometimes, and if not, well, being hungry hurts less than the tests did.
The people in the big building are interesting to watch. They don’t just work in the inside, they come outside as well. Sometimes Test Subject E can’t tell if they are working or on a break. Some of them are smaller, children, maybe. All of them are young; no one is old enough to be the scientist or tech. It’s odd.
The children a’re the ones E is most worried about. They are easiest to hurt by accident, he knows. Also, they get everywhere. E takes to spending more of his daytime hours up a tree, where he’s harder to spot. It makes it easier to watch them all. He’s high enough to look through more of the windows, now. He can’t see a single laboratory thing.
The smaller ones run about sometimes with the bigger ones, and maybe they’re having tests on speed and endurance, but that can’t be right because they seem to be enjoying them. Nobody screams or yells in pain or anger or fear. There is a lot of yelling, but not that kind. E knows those kinds of yell very well indeed.
There’s one E watches in particular. He’s a young man with very blue eyes. Sometimes he sits in a metal chair with wheels; sometimes he limp-lurches about the place on two sticks. They are metal, too, and E thinks he straps metal to his legs as well. The other people all smile at him, and he hears them call him “Professor”
That worried E, the first time he heard it, because it sounds like the names the lab workers used for each other. He doesn’t want to go back, so he’s careful to keep an eye on him all the time. The fact that he usually has metal on him or very near him makes it easier; E can sense distinctive metal, and knowing he could tie this Professor up with his own chair makes him feel safer on days like today, when the other man is outside, sitting on a bench.
E is hungrier today. He’s learnt to doze, hidden in a tree or a ditch, but the hunger keeps him alert. The bins haven’t had anything edible for a couple of days, so he’s been drinking lake water and hoping someone will fill a bird feeder soon. He thinks that’s what they are; at least he sees birds and squirrels eating the food and no one chases them away. He’s not sure why people feed animals that they can’t use or learn from.
No one ever fed him for no reason, Before; even if he did well in a test and didn’t scream too much. It doesn’t make sense, that people have to earn food and wild animals get it free. Perhaps the tests on the animals happen when E can’t see them.
E’s not really people, anyway. Not according to Sir.
E is a resource, a tool. Nothing more. Just like the other test subjects, the ones who died, or went to zoos or were sent away to other labs. Sir said that E was the most useful, so he had to stay. Everyone else went away. Then E sent himself away too, and he’s never going back. Still, E is glad people do leave food for animals. It keeps him going.
He can’t always eat the food, but if it’s nuts or bread or scraps he can. As long as he does it at night, or early in the morning, people simply assume the birds were hungry, or another animal got to the food. And bird feeders are usually further away from doors that the bins for waste, so they’re safer to go for.
The professor shifts on his bench, and picks up another book. E watches him, warily. He glances up from the page and looks around him. E freezes, breathing shallowly, until the young Professor goes back to reading. He’s probably too far away to be identified, but E has no intention of being spotted, ever. Sir said that he’d keep him forever, because no one else wanted him. E thinks that’s probably true.
E knows that if he’s seen, he’ll be sent back eventually. His calf cramps painfully, protesting at the crouched position E has forced himself into up in the tree. The foliage should give him cover, but he can’t risk shaking the canopy; so he sets his teeth and ignores it. He bites his lip and counts his breaths. The pain will go away soon enough. It’s only a cramp, not anything else. It’s bearable.
The professor turns another page, reading slowly. E wonders what he’s reading. It seems interesting. E can read, too. A little. One of the janitors taught him the alphabet, and showed him a book, a long time ago. He can usually puzzle out the sounds of words, if not their meanings. It’s helped before, until the tech realised they had to hide their notes from him.
E wasn’t supposed to read. There was nothing E would need to know, in books. That’s what Sir had said about the reading, when he sent the janitor away- that it was nothing E needed. They’d set up tests, trying to trick him into reading, but E was clever. He’d been frightened, so he pretended to have forgotten, as soon as he could. The tests had hurt. Sir had stopped hurting him faster, once he was satisfied E no longer knew what letters went with what sounds.