Chapter 17
The television in Lisa’s new home was originally programmed to play children’s shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Lisa only possessed a bare grasp on language at the time, and little to no memory or understanding of civilized behavior, and the scientists felt that watching shows like that would help Lisa’s intellectual development, since in many ways, she was still just a child herself.
But after two days, Lisa was bored with watching shows for children. In a very short time, she greatly increased her vocabulary, nearly perfected her understanding of syntax and grammar, and already begun to develop intellectual abilities far beyond what the scientists expected. In two days, she went from reading Dick and Jane books to reading and understanding regular newspapers.
The scientists didn’t know everything about Lisa, though. They only knew what little Lisa allowed them to know. They walked around her enclosure, taking notes and watching her carefully, studying her. Lisa knew what they were doing, although she pretended not to.
When the scientists walked away from her area and whispered to each other by the computer terminals, they had no idea that Lisa could hear them. It never occurred to them to test her hearing. If she listened intently, she could hear anyone talking in the entire huge room, although she kept that ability to herself.
While these scientists were obviously much nicer and more friendly than the scientists at the other lab she had been imprisoned at, they were still scientists, and Lisa had no reason to trust them. She was still an experiment, although this time she was a more willing participant, because cooperating with them was much easier than fighting them. By cooperating, she could gain their trust, and eventually, they would let their guard down.
Lisa was not brought to this particular lab by chance. Up in the ceiling, far over her head, there were special openings that looked like simple air vents. But in an emergency, the vents would spray a flammable gel like napalm into Lisa’s enclosure, setting the entire area ablaze. Blast doors would seal off the entire lab, and oxygen would be pumped inside to keep the fire going until there was nothing left to burn. It was the lab’s final emergency procedure, to be activated in case Lisa tried to escape or somehow managed to infect one of the scientists.
Lisa knew all of this from eavesdropping on the scientists’ conversations when they thought she could not hear them. Even though they were being so nice to her, they already had plans in place to kill her the moment she became difficult. So Lisa behaved herself, at least until the time was right.
One other thing the scientists did not know was exactly how strong Lisa was. They knew she was very strong, of course, but they still assumed her strength was within the normal adult range. But Lisa was much stronger than that. They felt that the thick plexiglass walls surrounding her would be enough to keep her contained, but they were wrong about that. Lisa knew for certain that she could break through the walls very easily if she wanted to.
This is why Lisa was not concerned about the emergency measures. If she wanted to escape, she could break through the plexiglass walls and get out of the room before the blast doors would even have time to close. And once she was out, they could not to anything to stop her. All they had were guns, and bullets were about as harmful to Lisa as bug bites.
So she remained in her enclosure, watched television, read books, and learned more about the world. Much of her past was still a hazy memory, but the past did not concern her anymore. She asked them for different shows to watch, more advanced books to read, and more things to learn about. And so far, they were more than happy to comply with her wishes.
But what Lisa really wanted, and what she knew that she was not going to get any time soon, was more visitors and more people to talk to. The scientists keeping an eye on her did not really talk to her like normal people talked with each other. Everything they said was a question or designed to get some kind of reaction. They spoke to Lisa primarily as a way to get information from her. Talking to them was difficult because they didn’t talk about themselves, and Lisa had to constantly be careful not to give anything away.
Talking to her friend Jill was a much more rewarding experience. Jill actually talked with her and engaged in real conversation, and she didn’t write down all of Lisa’s responses on a clipboard to be analyzed later. But Jill would not stay here much longer, Lisa knew that already.
The other person who actually talked to Lisa was the man named Carlisle, and he was very interesting. He was not a scientist like the others, and he didn’t treat Lisa like a subject. He didn’t talk to her like a friend either, though, the way Jill did. He acted strangely, and it took Lisa some time to figure out exactly what his goal was. Speaking with Carlisle was fun because he was so mysterious, as if everything he said had two possible meanings, and he was testing Lisa to see which one she thought he meant. In a way, he was studying her even more closely than the scientists, but he engaged her curiosity much more than they did.
Lisa flipped through a magazine and looked at pictures of cars and trucks. She had glimpsed such vehicles briefly when they transported her to this facility, and she’d seen many images of them on television, but so far she’d never seen a car up close. She wondered if she would ever get the chance to ride in one. One more thing to wish for.
She heard Carlisle enter the lab room, but she did not look up. Carlisle walked over to one of the employees and asked, “How’s she doing?”
“She’s been quiet all morning, sir. We gave her some new magazines to look at and she’s been reading them very thoroughly.”
“What about the television schedule?”
“We’ve sent up a list of possible shows for approval. Some cartoons, some educational shows, but nothing too advanced or complicated.”
“Maybe we could get her some old episodes of Mr. Wizard’s World or something.”
“Actually, we requested Bill Nye the Science Guy.”
“Never heard of him,” Carlisle said. “But hopefully it keeps her interest longer this time.”
“I know, sir,” the researcher said. “She’s advancing so fast, I’m worried about what she’ll be learning six months from now. Exactly how educated do we want her to be?”
Carlisle hesitated before answering. Lisa could almost feel his gaze on her. “I’ll talk with the Director about it,” he said vaguely. “Right now we don’t haven’t made plans that far in advance. We expect her intelligence to level off pretty soon.”
Lisa turned the next page of the magazine. She could hear Carlisle’s footsteps as he approached her enclosure, and the scrape of the chair as he took a seat on the other side of the plexiglass.
“Lisa,” he said. “How are you doing today?”
She pushed the magazine away and turned to face him, and then hurried over to the chair where she could talk to him. He didn’t flinch when she sat down and leaned close against the plexiglass, the way the scientists always did.
“Doing good,” she said eagerly. “Reading a lot. I want to know more about cars.”
Carlisle nodded. “Okay, we can get you some more magazines about cars. That shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Where is Jill? Is she still here?”
“She’s still here,” Carlisle said. “Right now she’s upstairs talking with some people.”
“What are they talking about?”
“Money,” Carlisle said. “We’re giving Jill a lot of money as a way to apologize for what happened to her.”
“Will I get money too?” Lisa asked with a sarcastic smile. “Is that how big companies apologize to people? By giving them money?”
“That’s pretty much the way it works.”
“How much money am I going to get?”
“I don’t know, we haven’t thought about that yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re still here with us. You don’t need money here.”
“But when I leave here, you
’ll give me some money?”
“Sure.”
“What if I don’t ever get to leave?”
At some point, Lisa always turned the conversation in that direction, and it amused her to see how much better Carlisle handled it than the scientists did. They always got nervous or uncomfortable and tried to change the subject, giving her some mumbled variation of “We’ll see what we can do.” But Carlisle was almost impossible to shake, he always took her comments in stride. It was one of the things Lisa liked about him.
“You know we’re going to do everything we can,” he said calmly. “But you have to give us some time. We know you don’t want to stay here forever, and we have no intention of keeping you here forever. But we have to take things one step at a time. We’re still going over all those preliminary test results, and it might take months before we have a full understanding of all the strains you’ve been exposed to. We’ve barely scratched the surface, Lisa.”
“Can I take a ride in a car someday?”
The random question did not seem to phase Carlisle at all, and he merely nodded in approval. “Sure, I think we can arrange that.”
“I also want to listen to music. I know that you can buy music and I want some to listen to.”
“What kind of music? There are lots of different styles.”
“Buy one of every kind. I’ll pick the ones I like and then you can buy more of that kind.”
“Okay,” Carlisle agreed, a faint smile curving his lips. “Any other requests?”
“I want more color,” Lisa said. She gestured at the floor and walls beyond the plexiglass barrier. “Everything is white, just like the other place. It’s boring. Paint the walls a new color. Or give me some paint and let me color inside here.”
“I think we could do something like that.”
Lisa slapped her hands down on the tabletop and laughed in her deep, throaty chuckle, gazing at Carlisle with wild eyes. “I like talking to you. You’re fun and you never tell me that I can’t do something. The other ones never agree with me.”
Carlisle gave her a calculated smile. “That’s because they don’t have the authority to make those kinds of decisions. They’re here to keep an eye on you and keep you safe, but they can’t give you permission to do things like that.”
“But you can give permission?”
“I can.”
“Are you the boss here?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what do you mean?” Lisa asked intently.
“It’s complicated,” Carlisle said.
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small square photograph with bent edges. “Here,” he said, sliding the photo into a plastic tray beside the table. “I got something for you.”
He pushed the tray into a slot in the plexiglass barrier and closed the lid. When the lid closed, Lisa could open another on her side and pull the tray out to retrieve the item. She gave Carlisle a toothy, eager grin and picked up the photograph.
When she looked at it, the smile gradually faded and she stared at the image with slack expression on her face. It was a small black and white photo of a young man in a business suit, standing beside a pretty young woman with dark hair, wearing a flowery dress. Held up between them was a little child, still just a baby, but the ribbons in its hair marked it as a little girl. The picture was faded and bent, as if having spent years folded up in someone’s wallet. Lisa stared down at the image and felt a sudden tightness in her chest.
She raised her eyes to look at Carlisle. He said nothing, so she returned her gaze to the photo, studying every detail. She turned it over in her hands, but the back of the picture had nothing written on it.
“Where did you get this?” Lisa whispered.
Carlisle let her study the photo for a few moments more before he answered. “We tried to find out if you had any living relatives. Your father was an only child, and so was your mother, so you don’t have any aunts or uncles or cousins. I’m afraid that all of your grandparents passed away years ago as well.”
“But …?”
“But your paternal grandmother had a sister who is still alive. She is ninety-four years old, but she is suffering from dementia and is confined to a nursing home. She’s your closest living relative. We got permission from the people at the nursing home to go through some of her possessions, and we found that photo. We believe it was taken around 1966.”
Lisa held the photo gingerly, afraid that she might accidentally tear it with her large hands. She felt a lump in her throat, and swallowed uncomfortably, setting the photo down on the table. She had never felt this emotion before, but she knew exactly what it was.
“Thank you,” she managed to say.
Carlisle leaned forward and set his elbows on the table. “It must be very hard for you to be contained here in this lab all the time. You’ve spent almost your entire life trapped in a lab, and it’s not fair that you experienced your only taste of freedom, just to be put back into another lab again. I know that you want to be set free. But we can’t let you go free right now. You might have to stay here for several years, until we are certain that we fully understand your condition. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Lisa said softly, still staring down at the picture. “I know.”
“But no matter how long you are stuck here, and no matter how much the scientists might treat you like an experiment, you have to keep in mind that you are a person. I brought you that picture to prove that we have your best interests in mind, that we aren’t just going to lock you away forever. Terrible things have been done to you,” Carlisle said sincerely, “and we can’t change that. But we’re going to do whatever it takes to give you your life back. I promise.”
Lisa didn’t know what to say. She sighed heavily and wondered if this was a time when normal people would cry. She didn’t cry though, she didn’t think she knew how. She picked up the photo once more and held it close.
“I can keep this?” she asked.
“Yes, you can.”
“Thank you for finding this.”
“You’re welcome. You deserve to have something to remember them by. And there’s something else I should tell you as well. We’re trying to find the people in charge at the other lab, the one that held you captive for so long. If we find them, I promise you that we’re going to punish them. They deserve to suffer for what they’ve done. Not just what they did to you, but what they did to all the victims at that lab.”
Lisa nodded and touched the front of the photo. Her memories of the distant past were so hazy and unclear, but now she had a solid image to match those dreamlike memories. For the first time, she had real evidence of her past. Proof of who she used to be.
“I wonder if those bad people ever thought about me as a person,” she said softly, bad memories surfacing once more. “I was there for so long, they probably forgot that I used to be a little girl. I wonder if any of them even knew who I was. They never treated me like a person at all.”
“I know, Lisa,” Carlisle said gently. “And I know that we can’t change what was done to you, but hopefully we can give you a chance to have the normal life that they took away.”
The faces of the people who imprisoned her for so many years were lost to her, they were nothing but blurs, no different than the faces of the people she thoughtlessly killed for so long. She never knew their names either. If she ever heard them say their names, she did not understand what was said anyway. Her only real memories were of the chains, and the victims she mutilated, and of the moment she was finally freed from her captivity.
She realized that the only reason she was even alive now was because one of them deliberately set her free in the end. Otherwise, she probably would have died when the labs were destroyed, although maybe not. But the man who set her free must have felt some reason to do what he did, whether it was guilt or something else. Maybe it was simply curiosity that led him to do what he
did.
“Maybe the man in the dark glasses felt guilty for what they did to me,” she said absently. “Maybe that’s why he let me loose. I wonder about that sometimes.”
Carlisle slumped back in his chair, staring at her with a stunned expression.
“What did you just say?” he asked.
“The man in the dark glasses,” Lisa repeated. “He was the one who set me free. He shot the chains and let me go. I wonder what happened to him.”
“You never told us that someone set you free from the lab. We thought you simply escaped when the infection broke out.”
“I didn’t really think about it until just now,” Lisa said. “I don’t have very clear memories of that time.”
“But you remember who set you free? And he wore dark glasses? You mean like sunglasses?”
Lisa shrugged, unsure what its significance was. “I think so. I just remember he had dark glasses on his face. I don’t know who he was.”
Carlisle looked away and then cleared his throat and stood up. “I have some things I have to do now,” he said distractedly, “but I’ll come back down with Jill later today and talk with you some more, if that’s okay with you. Take care, Lisa.”
He hurried away from the table before Lisa could respond. As he headed out the door, the scientist who spoke to Carlisle earlier, and who observed their whole conversation, quickly asked, “What is it, sir? Who was she talking about?”
“Nobody,” Carlisle snapped. “Nobody at all.”