You do not fear what you can not see, so I shut my eyes and see no evil. In my mind’s field of vision instead: a single, coral rose, remarkably bright against the darkness. The petals undulate in an endless spiral, inviting me to delve in its perfect asymmetry.
Not physically in front of me, fragrance fills my mind with suggestion. A field of meadow honey, damp moss, green tea…and banana? Maybe I’m hungry.
I open my eyes.
Inside a stark, MRI chamber, engulfed by cold, harsh chirping, my head is enclosed in a helmet and suction-clamped to a vibrating bed. A touch screen shows a ball, an apple, a flower, a tree. If only I could articulate what my mind perceives: infinite…indiscernible…beauty.
I touch the flower.
‘Your mind’s not playing tricks, Sazerac.’
Cristal’s thoughts waft, faint but clear, like an ocean breeze, ‘I do smell banana.’ In a study room across the hall, my fellow simian presses a rose to his nostrils and inhales, ‘These top notes are delightfully tropical.’
‘Try not to project your thoughts using words,’ I remind him. ‘It might confound his results.’
‘And what do you care if it does??’ My partner’s impatience snowballs each day, ‘The nude-skin hasn’t the faintest clue what he’s toying with!’
The experiments at the Quantum Neurophysics Institute were the brainchild of Dr. Anton Duperré. In a daring assertion of quantum information theory, he theorized that direct communication between sentient minds was possible if their oscillations, specifically their delta waves, were entangled. Although the implantation of the ‘quantum trigger’ he designed would be unethical in humans, nonhuman primates were a different story.
What Duperré never imagined was the height of telepathic rigor and intelligence our minds would attain as a result. Not only do Cristal and I teleport our thoughts, we can readily transceive emotions, memories, and insight from any sentient creature within proximity.
When Cristal and I return to our cages, Lenka, a negative control subject, lies in a corner. The mock implant inside her skull isn’t meant to work, but we feel her excruciating agony. Her labored breaths require medical attention but Duperré doesn’t heed our warning screeches.
‘Tell boss you think Lenka perfect, like you…then maybe he treat me nice.’ She clings to a toy crocodile. ‘It give me great pleasure.’ Soon she dreams of muddy streams and crooked trees.
By morning, Lenka’s dead.
‘It’s time to face facts, Sazerac,’ Cristal’s fury slams cold against my head, ‘We’re not getting out of this place alive!’
Maybe I’m the deluded one. Believing we were partners with the humans, dreaming our sacrifices would some day, somehow, grant us the means to speak. I watch as Lenka’s body is callously removed from her cage, and I know the humans to whom we’re yoked are incapable of even considering the possibility.
‘So what do we do?’
§
The attendant in charge of our enrichment doesn’t notice how we watch him now, study his movements, wait for opportunity. Cristal distracts him with loud pant-hoots while I unhook the bright, yellow key from his belt. The master. The one required to open, but not close, every padlock in Duperré’s lab.
Nobody said it would be easy, but Sweet Mercy…it’s as if the nude-skins wish for us to escape.
Back in our cages, we plan. Cristal suggests we wait for night and the change of shift.
I agree, but there’s something I must do first.
§
I climb through the open window in Duperré's office, a room I’ve seen a thousand times in his mind. I stare at the bottles of amber liquid in their glass cupboard and move closer to discover for myself the courage and comfort stored inside. Instead, I see his reflection, staring back at me.
He’s surprised, offended even, that I’m there. “What do we have here?” Clearly, a rhetorical question. “How did you manage to escape?” Followed by an obtuse one.
Across the small room, we track each other, maintaining eye contact and careful distance. Like chambers inside a combination lock, I hear his thoughts tumbling, assumptions reassembling.
“I think you understand what I’m saying,” his eyes cast towards the shelf and the box where he keeps a dart gun.
A small, threatening screech.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. I think you’re a smart, little monkey. Let’s go back to the lab.”
Even now, he doesn’t understand. I know what he knows: the adjuvant therapy for humans, the covert financiers, the code to that wall safe…what he keeps inside.
So instead of trusting his facade of benevolence, I jump onto his desk. Screeching from the limit of my lungs, I want my wordless voice to bounce from the walls and smash these windows.
Duperré stumbles back, then suddenly forward. For a brief moment it doesn’t dawn, but slowly, he feels the burning inside his neck as the room begins to tilt. Eyelids like hummingbird wings, he slumps to the floor.
For Cristal, standing behind him, dart gun in hand, it’s pure catharsis, ‘How’s that for a smart, little monkey, you damn dirty ape!’ Then making a straight line to his cabinet of cuvées de prestiges, ‘Do you see a monkey $#%@! tail?’
§
In a darkened parking garage, we hide in the back of a truck, wedged between biohazard containers and canisters of nitrogen. Once we safely pass the gate, we jump and flee into the woods.
To me, freedom feels better than the most eloquent words can express. For Cristal, the golden bottle of delicately aged intoxicant snatched from Duperré's cabinet is sufficient reward.
After a day's walk, we find an empty cabin beside a copse of fir trees and a fast-flowing stream. Lenka would have loved it. It’s littered with garbage and tiny pellets of burned tobacco, but there’s a fireplace with blocks of wood and matches.
We watch Duperré's external drive melt as it burns.
It feels strange to open my eyes each morning and see the natural world again. Each day I wake, I sidle to the stream, dip my hands in the icy water then raise them to the sun.
For the first time in a long time, I fear nothing evil.
Chana Kohl works in Jerusalem in clinical trials and research, traveling and writing speculative fiction in her spare time. As winner of the 2022 Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices, her professional debut appears in the May/June 2024 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. She’s also a grateful recipient of the 2024 Fresh Voices Grant for Odyssey Workshop. For updates, you can catch her flying ‘Bluer Skies’ or on her blog chanakohl.wordpress.com
Chana’s first appearance in our pages was “A New Emancipation Proclamation,” in Pete Wood Challenge #22. More recently, her story, “Murder in the Shuk,” appears in Stupefying Stories 26, which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. If you enjoyed this story, check it out!
STUPEFYING STORIES 26
DOUBLE ISSUE! TWICE THE STORIES! TWICE THE CHILLS!
- Jamie Lackey - “Blood Apples”
- Gordon Grice - “Stone”
- Allan Dyen-Shapiro - “Midnight Meal at a Kobe Noodle Joint”
- Karin Terebessy - “Bandages”
- Jorge Salgado-Reyes - “Neon Blood”
- Julie Frost - “Beverly Hellbunnies”
- Kevin Berg - “Faceless”
- Anya Ow - “Hungry Ghosts”
- Jesse Dyer - “Losing Things”
- Richard Zwicker - “Possession is Ten/Tenths of the Law”
- Made in DNA - “Something CUTE This Way Comes”
- Cass Sims Knight - “Slugging”
- Nick Nafpliotis - “The Cerberus Protocol”
- Beth Cato - “Water in the Bones”
- Don Money - “Department of Murderous Vixens”
- Chana Kohl - “Murder in the Shuk”
- Patricia Miller - “An Absence of Shadow”
- Robert Hobson - “Watershed”
- Ray Daley - “The Haunted Spaceship”
- Roxana Arama - “All Those Monsters”
- Evan Dicken - “Sunk Ghosts”
- John Lance - “The Mob”
This was beautiful. I actually got a little choked up at the mention of the stuffed animal crocodile. I think it’s because you capture their perspective and the individual voices with warmth and authenticity. Really lovely story.
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