When it’s the greater good is at risk the conscience wains. Scidad tried to tell himself he was doing what needed to be done. These experiments would someday lead him to the answers, the advancements no one but him could think possible. These advancements would change the world for the best, for the betterment of all mankind. Medical breakthroughs so great it would stop—if only for a second—and take notice. So he pierced the needle through her young delicate skin.

She winced at the stingy slice as it entered her vein but watched in amazement as the needle disappeared into her arm. She could feel the chill of the fluids as they began to slowly spread up her arm and through her body. Her heart began to beat like a mechanical thump. She turned pale and her breathing sped up, and a cold sheen of sweat glossed her forehead. He could see she was visibly scared. The greater good, he reminded himself.

She tried to move but her arms were bound tightly in wide leather straps that had been bolted on to each arm of the metal chair she was sitting in. The chair was place strategically in the middle of the room. He bound her ankles, like her arms, to the base of the chair’s frame. To keep her stable and upright a large strap belt was pulled tight across her waist and another at her chest. Her head held in place within a halo harness by a single padded chin strap which had been bolted to the neck rest. Thin wire springs held her eyes completely open and prevented her from blinking.

He had dressed her in a hospital gown so thin it gave no relief from the chill of the room. It had to be cold, she had to be in a psychological state, a state that could only be replicated by a near hypothermic conditions. He needed the physical response, the physical firing of her synapse. The chattering teeth, lethargy, confusion. Firing and non-firing synapses were all part of the symptoms he was looking for—and in fact needed. So he tapped on his tablet and lowered the temperature to 32 degrees.

The room itself was dark but large projections covered the floor and up the wall on to the ceiling panels directly in front of her. The images showed shapes and colors and designs flashing quickly in little boxes within the display. The boxes showed her scenes of the ancient master’s art and of war, of the beauty of nature—and its horror. Each scene, every design and color chosen for a specific visual synapse response.

Auditory responses from the hundreds of audio files played simultaneously as quiet as whispers within the halo and now seemed to scream at her. Beeps and whistles and noises of all types. Speeches and songs and the sound of the cooling fans. And there was an odd smell to the room. It was the smell of electronics, but she didn’t know that.

The data stream collected the information, the waves emitting from her brain, through a bundle of wires that draped down from of electrodes placed around her head from the pins attached inside the halo harness. It passed through the cables to a connected bank of supercomputers which converted the signals to a 3D holographic representation of her brain that he studied in real time. The brain the hoped would be his savior.

Scidad was a scientist. He wore a thick warm white jacket and white pants and white shoes and now leaned against a tall thin chair. He was the leading researcher. The inventor of the control measures, he wrote the parameters, all in order to discover the Map, her map. His program was designed to chart the growing adolescent brain, a brain that could be unlocked and influenced and manipulated.

The holograph in front of him displayed the different lobes in changing colors, the frontal and its pre-frontal cortex, temporal, parietal, occipital lobes. They each had there specific shades. Next to the holograph a hard monitor electroencephalograph, an EEG created jagged lines moving from left to right, recording exact times by the millisecond.

In true scientific form he monitored everything, her heart rate and oxygen and breathing. The heart was fast now at 108 beats per minute but it would slow down soon after she developed hypothermia. The oxygen was at 100 percent. Her brain was where he needed it to be, confused but firing.

The procedure was simply called mapping. It wasn’t new but he was introducing small charged particles in the experiment trapped inside the fluids molecular makeup. The chems created the hypersensitivity and hyper-awareness he needed to see in her head. It’s what he claimed mapped every active firing synapse, echoes would map the rest as gray matter. The gray matter was the prize he was going to switch on.

He pressed a button on a terminal in front of him adding the chems to her IV. Her heart-rate increased, 120, 140, 165. The girl’s eyes moved left to right and right to left. They moved faster than anyone else’s had before her. The reactions she exhibited looked encouraging, validating—scientifically. The man in white refused to smile. He was a professional and she was, after all, a little girl being tortured to advance mankind.

This was serious, life changing. The information in the data stream would be analyzed independently by a team of doctors and scientist to confirm his findings. Their conclusions would be reviewed and implemented by a panel of elected professionals a thousand miles away to check for conformity, for the plausibility of reaching their intended goals.

A decree from the sitting government: all children under the age of ten will be tested for aptitude and placed in specific training programs based on their score. Over-crowding of large population centers and a lack of general resources has driven the extreme necessity for government intervention. These tests were the beginning of the new way but they hid the real agenda, absolute control.

Employment was being made impossible to have without the testing results. Those scoring among the highest were ordered to submit to the Sodalitas Corporation for additional testing. The bar being reset higher with each success as high scoring children were placed in groups tagged for positions that would groom them for greater responsibility and power. The leaders of the future, beginning to be enhanced today.

Among those, a handful of the brightest, most intuitive, responsive, were chosen to sit where she now sat. They were unsuccessful, but she would be the key. The next leap forward in human evolution—aided by science. The spin for the population, for the greater good—even for Scidad. The Corporation could better understand the undeveloped mind and its potential more so than anyone.

Today’s results would be conclusive. They would confirm the reality. Prove his theories once and for all. Serve humanity and enrich their future. A new civilization, their own creation taking root. There was no doubt Charlotte, this innocent little ten year old, was the breakthrough he and Sodalitas Corporation had been waiting for, their patient X. She would be the first to successfully undergo every procedure, but not the last to receive The Gel injections.