The Experiment

She stood before them, a five foot ten vision of the future. Years had gone into her making, an immeasurable numbers of weeks, days, hours, slaving over everything that she was and everything that she was going to be. Theirs would be the name that went down in history; the biggest leap into the future that mankind had ever made, they would be remembered - always.
She wouldn’t understand what she meant, she couldn’t, perhaps even they hadn’t quite grasped the scale of their doing, not yet.
These men, they meddled, delved deep into our very core, played around with the very thing that makes us what we are. Human.
They have no souls, they cast them away many years ago. Cast them away along with the first experiments, the failures, the wretched lives they had willingly crippled, ‘all in the name of science’. Mankind had to keep moving forward, keep evolving. They would never be satisfied, not until we had been made ‘better’; until we were everything they thought we could be.

She stood inside an empty, sterilised room, white from floor to ceiling; she was scared but thinking with clarity. She didn’t recall how she had ended up here, she didn’t remember much from her life. It was all fleeting snatches of noise and bright lights. Things being shone in her eyes, drips and needles and people in masks. She had been moved from one room to the next all of her short existence and she took it for granted that this was how she would live, she’d never known anything different.
Her most vivid memories were of countless tests; being made to run for hours on end, but never going anywhere, holding her breath underwater, until she thought her lungs might explode, lifting heavier and heavier objects, till she couldn’t do anymore. Everything she did was recorded, every move she made, every breath she took, each beat of her heart; it all went into the databases. Her whole life laid bare in numbers and calculations.

They watched –they were always watching- from behind the glass. They could see her but she couldn’t see them, they preferred it this way. She was five years old but could pass for three times that, both mentally and physically. Vulnerability in infancy was a weakness; it had to be stamped out. She would mature more slowly from now on, keeping her reflexes, her vitality of youth. The people who kept her were carefully rotated so as not to form bonds with the child. She was to know no human kindness, she was all alone in the world, she was unique - she was perfection.

Her eyes took in things where others would not. They picked out the tiniest flaws in the smooth walls, the palest scuffs on the floor where feet had walked. Her body appeared relaxed but it was tightly coiled, ready to move at the slightest disturbance. She was built light, lithe, yet already stronger than the average man and getting stronger still. Every time she inhaled her lungs took in more oxygen than anyone before her, filtered along the way to get the most from every breath. Her heart beat stronger and faster than it should, larger and more muscular than what we consider normal. Making her capable of running faster, longer, she could make split second decisions whilst sprinting, turn on a sixpence and she was always holding something in reserve. She was their creation and she continued to marvel them every day.

The other experiments had never turned out this well. Willingly given eggs tampered with before they even knew they were alive, many never making it to the stage where they could be called alive. Mutated babies that wouldn’t survive for more than two days out of the womb, the only place of comfort they would ever know. Miserable creatures kept in life by machines, now only for the purpose of monitoring their slow spiral into death. Rows of cages of half successes, all hidden away where no one knew what terrible things were going on. The backing company was so rich they managed to buy their secrecy without the buyers even knowing what was being bought.

“Stop.”
She never heard the order for her termination. One word from one man changed the course of her life indefinitely. Not that she would know; she would just never wake up.
“Stop.”
This wasn’t survival of the fittest anymore, there was no doubt that she could out-run, out-smart, out-live us. This wasn’t some one’s life, this was just the end of yet another experiment.
“Stop.”
This was her final test, the test of mortality and with it her humanity.
“Stop.”
Although no one voiced it, everyone was screaming ‘Why?’
The instructions were followed through without question or fault. In their cold hearts and in their heads they knew the world wasn’t ready for her.