Experiment X

CHAPTER
12

The sterile hum of the lab was comfortingly familiar, a low-frequency backdrop that soothed Aria's heightened senses as she worked. Noon sunlight filtered through the narrow overhead panels, their diffused glow softened by layers of dust and artificial tint. Most of the facility had emptied into the cafeteria for the midday meal, but Aria remained at her workstation, eyes scanning rows of data on the high-resolution holographic display hovering before her.

It had started as a routine self-diagnostic—something she often performed to monitor her ocular degradation. The steady march of genetic decay in her eye tissue had become an obsession, a puzzle she hoped to crack before her vision failed entirely. But today, as she fed her own DNA sample into the scanner and watched the sequences begin to unfold, she felt her pulse quicken.

Something was wrong.

At first, she assumed it was a formatting error—maybe a glitch in the sequencing program. But as the analysis continued and her genome parsed out in cascading columns of nucleotides, her breath caught. Her brow furrowed behind her oversized black glasses, the lenses catching a soft reflection of the screen's ghostly blue light.

A foreign pattern.

At first subtle, buried deep within the intronic regions of her DNA. But the deeper she looked, the more it revealed itself—structural shifts, codon substitutions, regulatory anomalies. They weren't human. They weren't hers. Not originally.

She enlarged the segment, isolating the mutated sequence. Her hands moved with surgical precision, but inside her chest, her heart hammered against her ribs. She knew these markers. She had seen them just days ago—buried in the labyrinthine architecture of a genome that had defied classification, defied science itself.

Specimen X.

Aria froze, staring at the screen. She rechecked the sample label—her name, her ID number, timestamped just twenty minutes ago. The system wasn't confused. The data wasn't corrupted. The changes were real.

She had his DNA.

But how?

She sat down slowly, legs buckling beneath her, and folded her arms tightly around herself. Her mind raced through every possibility—every moment of contact. The day she first stepped into his cell. The vial of blood she'd handled. The samples, the air, the proximity.

No, she told herself, this isn't possible.

But it was. The pattern was unmistakable. The same adaptive signatures that defined X's mutating genome were present in hers now, albeit in trace amounts. They were small shifts, not enough to cause visible changes—but they were growing. Her cells had already begun integrating the foreign sequences.

Was this infection? Contamination?

She stood abruptly, nearly knocking over the stool, and brought up a secondary diagnostic. This time, she checked for vector transmission—nanoscopic viral agents, airborne particles, anything that could explain genetic absorption. The screen blinked for a moment before returning results:

Biological compatibility: 87%.
Foreign sequence expression: In progress.
Stability index: Unknown.

Aria pressed her hand to her mouth, trying to steady her breathing. A cold sweat formed along her spine. Her hands trembled—not with fear, but with the sheer implication of what this meant.

She wasn't just studying the specimen anymore. She had become part of the experiment.

The implications spiraled through her mind. If this was real—and every data point confirmed that it was—then exposure to X had triggered something in her. A transfer, perhaps even a deliberate one. But that would mean X knew. That he'd done this... on purpose?