The 34th Degree

PRESENT DAY
118

The light faded, and Sam Deker woke up strapped to a chair inside the DARPA labs beneath the VA Hospital in Los Angeles.

Nobody was there.

He removed the fiber-optic shunt from his skull and jerked from the spark inside his eyes. It was as if he had pulled a plug from its socket. Then he carefully removed the IV drip that had been pumping photosynthetic algae into his veins.

He staggered to his feet. He felt weak and exhausted as he looked around the lab. He was all alone. The computer systems were up and running, but there were no people. Only surveillance cameras. Always surveillance cameras.

He sat down at a console and got to work to hack into the security feeds. He didn’t care who saw him. But when he called up the surveillance of the lab he was sitting in, he could see only himself in the chair. He dialed it back a few minutes, then a few hours, then a few days, and finally, weeks. Always he was strapped in the chair, completely out.

Just how long had he been here? And where had everybody gone?

He was about to get up when he caught sight of a label on one of the surveillance feeds: Advanced Sleep Labs. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as he tapped into the feeds, found the sleep lab in Century City, and eventually found a feed named “Sam Deker.”

He dialed in to his last night at the sleep lab, before he’d ever heard of the 34th Degree.

There he was, checking in the night before at nine p.m. Giselle the “sleep aide” had helped strap him into his heart and sleep apnea monitor to record biology, given him some sleeping pills to help, and tucked him in.

The surveillance footage showed him restless for a full four hours. Finally, shortly after one a.m. he fell asleep. The image looked like a still photograph as he fast-forwarded. He stopped at 1:45 when a stab of light shot into the room. He expected to see Giselle again, checking in on him.

What he saw instead were three figures gather around his bed like phantoms. The sight froze his veins. They set up an IV drip and plugged a glowing purple line to his head.

“Goddamn monsters,” he muttered.

They had been experimenting on him from the start, planting ideas, driving him insane.

He smashed his fist on the console and stood up. He had seen enough.

He looked at the camera in the corner and marched to the doors outside, where he expected to find a couple of MPs.

Here, too, however, he found nobody. Only the long dark corridor he had come through. He started walking into the black.