Death's-Head

(T/W Gore, Death, Animal Abuse)

The microscope’s image was blurry and neither coarse nor fine adjustment was bringing it into focus. My eyes were strained and completely exhausted. I pushed my hands against the lab table and sent myself rolling backwards in my chair. I laid my head back and rubbed at my eye sockets with the back of my gloved hands. The white-walled sterile environment and bright LED lights above sent my head swimming. Suddenly feeling sick, I jumped up and headed to the lab’s exit. I slapped my hand against a red button on the wall, a pair of doors slid open followed by a down burst of air, sending my scrunchy-secured blonde ponytail flying as I walked through the invisible barrier and out another pair of automatic sliding doors. The rushing air had disrupted my equilibrium even further and I struggled to remain upright. I staggered forward as tiny sparkles danced in my peripheral vision. I stabilized myself by sliding my left arm along the large blue letters of my company’s logo painted on the wall of the concrete hallway.

M—N—E—M—O—S—Y—N—E

My gloved palm squeaked as it pushed past the —E—, and my fingers curled around the corner of the entrance to the women’s restroom. I made a few lunges toward the restroom’s sink while ripping the gloves from my sweating hands with a loud couple of snaps. I leaned my body’s weight upon the room’s stainless-steel countertop. I inhaled and exhaled deeply as I splashed cold water from the faucet on my face. Raising my head, I looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. The image was almost unrecognizable. My face, soaked with sweat and water, was swollen, and my gray-blue irises were surrounded by a spiderweb of inflamed vessels floating in a jaundiced sclera. My face was devoid of makeup, and my skin’s hue closely resembled the white lab coat I was wearing.

I had been living like a mole, confined, underground, in this damn windowless lab. The long hours in the lab were catching up to me. I couldn’t keep this pace up much longer and the consequences of me using myself as a lab rat were not helping.

“What the hell are you doing to yourself, Sam?” I muttered to the woman in the reflection.

My body shuddered and I vomited, covering the mirror and the sink below in a translucent green fluid. My knees buckled and I fell to the floor.

Something wasn’t right. Sure, I had not been eating properly, but there was no way my body had turned a delicious, vending machine delivered, Otis Spunkmeyer muffin into this nasty fluid. This had to be a side effect of UR-351, the memory rejuvenation medicine I had illegally and immorally used on myself.

Don’t judge me too harshly, I had to try it! I had to save my mother.

***

My mother was suffering from an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. She was my best friend, my sole support system, and life without her was not an option. She sacrificed her youth for me, a single mother raising me the best she could, pushing me to become the scientist I always dreamt of becoming. She never complained about the cost of me attending Baylor University, and when I was accepted to Harvard Medical School, she sold the old Texas farmhouse that her parents had left her, making sure I had the funds to attend. She gave me everything she could give. So, if it took me injecting myself with an experimental drug to save her, I would!

Five years ago, when Mom was first diagnosed, I pulled a lot of strings and had myself reassigned to the Pharmaceutical Development Department within my company, specifically the team working with the experimental memory drug UR-351, colloquially named Death’s-Head. Historically, a “death’s head” was the human skull that marked the entrance to ancient tombs, however it was also a type of moth that had markings resembling a human skull on its back. So, naming UR-351 "Death’s-Head" was a blended play on the meanings, representing the hope of restoring a diseased, dying brain into one that functions normally; a metamorphosis from death’s chrysalis into life’s first flutter of experiences and memories.

My team’s research began with the mapping of the human brain’s activity during and just after death. We began to see a pattern of electrical impulses and chemical releases in the brain in the seconds after the body’s physical death. This pattern was the same as the brain’s observed pattern when healthy, living, test subjects dreamed, recalled memories, or were in a meditative state. We replicated the chemicals being released in the brain by isolating them in the dissected brains of deceased subjects and we created the synthesized compound, Death’s-Head.

We tested the drug on a plethora of laboratory mice hoping to see an increase of activity in the memory structures of their brains. However, while the mice survived the initial injection, and their brains would show a promising spike in hippocampus activity (the brain’s episodic memory bank) it was unfortunately followed by massive cardiac anomalies resulting in sudden death. We made several adjustments to the levels of the synthesized drug, and tested it on the mice relentlessly, but the results were the same. The team’s working theory related to the deaths of all the mice was that the dose of Death’s-Head could not be administered in the proper proportion for the mice due to compound degradation. The small amount of the drug being used was unable to maintain its combined chemical properties and was breaking up, causing the cardiac events. This meant that, theoretically, the drug could still work in a human patient as the increased dosage level would sustain its composition.

I was running out of time; my mother was rapidly losing brain function and I could not wait on the slow wheels of Mnemosyne’s federally regulated, experimental trials to save my mother from her impending death. So, I decided to test the drug on myself.

I thought the most responsible way to do this would be to start with a very small dose of Death’s-Head, mapping the effects carefully, and halting the testing at the first sign of negative results. My first test was last night, and while it was successful in that it had not resulted in my death, the side effects were still bothering me the following day. However, the real success could not be ignored. The small dose had brought forth what I thought was a memory, and that experience made me feel too close to a solution to worry about the small health concerns I was feeling.

At first the small dose burned a little when injected, but the burning turned into a numbing buzz and soon I fell asleep. I was in a dreamy state and dreamt of a very dark room full of fluid. Within the fluid I could hear a drumming. It sounded like a band’s bass drum rhythmically pounding, vibrating my body. Then, it was suddenly over, and I awoke, gasping for breath and of course the emesis of green fluid was involved.

The dream didn’t feel like a normal dream. It was as if it was an experienced memory. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe what I had experienced was a memory from the womb. Maybe it was my earliest memory? How fitting would it be if my earliest memory, restored by Death’s-Head, was of my time inside my mother—the woman I was trying to save!

***

I was feeling better, so I stood up from the restroom floor and collected myself before cleaning the green puke from the mirror and the sink as best I could. My head had stopped spinning and that gave me the energy to focus my mind back on my experiment. I knew that I wasn’t feeling right, but I could not stop experimenting, not after achieving the small success. I was on the doorstep of greater things—things that could save my mother!

I returned to the lab just as the last technician was exiting. I ducked my head low to hide my sickly face and gave a slight wave goodbye to the tech, which was silently reciprocated. I waited for a few minutes to pass just in case someone had to return for their forgotten keys or briefcase, and once I was sure I was all alone I prepped my equipment.

Leaning forward in my chair, I opened a small refrigerator under my desk and removed a glass vial of Death’s Head from its Styrofoam holder. I placed the vial into an autoinjector. I held the injector up between the ceiling lights and my face. The vial’s label displayed the Death’s-Head logo, a silhouette of a moth with a colorful PET scan of a human brain, in axial, on the moth’s upper back. I watched the amber solution swirl in the light behind the label, the combination resembling a fiery abyss.

I dropped my hand holding the injector into my lap and began crying. I knew that experimenting on myself broke all legal and ethical laws to which a scientist holds themselves accountable, and that would have disappointed my mother.

In between sobs, I quelled my vacillating resolve with verbal reinforcement, saying “I don’t have time for small steps—I need to try a full dose—I have to do this for you, Mom.”

I climbed atop my lab table and stretched my legs out. I placed the injector against my thigh and pulled the trigger. A surge of heat instantly began spreading from the injection site. My hands began shaking and I dropped the injector to the floor. I pushed my trembling hands against my thigh, trying to smother the burning sensation. The burning in my thigh began racing through the rest of my body, and I screamed as the pain consumed me. I could feel the drug’s scorching advance enter my chest, and my heart started to spasm. I was having trouble breathing and my vision was fading. My chest was tightening, feeling as if I were being crushed.

The pressure increased momentarily and then suddenly released. My vision came rushing back in the form of a blurry blinding light. I was still struggling to breathe when I was shaken by a forceful blow to my back. A viscous fluid poured from my mouth, and I gasped for air. My lungs ached and I tried to scream but instead I let out a strange, high-pitched, cry. A sharp pain shot deep into my stomach, and I let out another bleat-like cry. A cloth was aggressively wiped over my body and across my eyes— I could now see clearly. A female nurse with a crooked smile was staring into my eyes. I looked down at myself and saw that I had the body, arms, and legs of an infant. The knotted flesh of a severed umbilical protruded from my belly, which explained the sharp pain I felt only moments ago.

I thought to myself, “This feels so real.”

The nurse walked me to the other end of the room, holding me in her arms, and said, “Mom, are you ready to see your baby girl?”

The nurse slowly handed me off to a set of opened arms. I looked up and there she was—my mother! Not the wrinkled, gray haired, dying mother I was trying to save with Death’s-Head, but my young mother! She was glowing with rosy cheeked happiness. It was wonderful seeing the mom of my past, the one that she could no longer remember.

She whispered, “I love you. My little Samantha Rollins. You are so beautiful.”

The nurse nodded and replied, “Yes, she is ma’am. She is perfectly healthy with all her fingers and toes.”

I let out a tiny cry as I tried to laugh, expressing the joy I felt as I stared into my mother’s eyes.

My mother’s happy face abruptly transformed into a look of fear. Her rosy cheeks turned ash gray, and she began to tremble. She slowly turned her head toward the nurse and said, “Something is wrong…”

The nurse grabbed me from my mother’s arms just as they went limp and fell to the bed. The nurse rushed to the door and called down the hallway for help. The squeaking of frantic sneakers echoed through the long hallway and as the nurse cleared out of the doorway to make room for the arriving staff, I caught a glimpse of a crimson pool forming under my mother’s bed.  I tried to yell “Mom!” but once again the high-pitched crying sound exited my mouth. The nurse squeezed me tight and headed down the hall with me.

I was placed in a small room filled with clear plastic containers, cradling several other infants. The nurse placed me into one of the empty containers, wrapped me in a pink blanket, and then left the room.

My mind raced trying to figure out what I had just witnessed. There was so much blood on the floor. This couldn’t be a real memory. My mother always told me that she had an easy birthing process with me. She would have told me about losing all that blood. So, if this wasn’t a memory what was it?

A cold tingle went up my spine as the possibilities pinged through my mind. Was I dead? Had the full does of Death’s-Head been too much for my heart to handle? Was this a post-life experience? Was I in some sort of heaven, hell, or a place of limbo in between? Whatever it was, this was a deviation from reality. Maybe a parallel reality?

My heart sank as I realized the ramifications of Death’s-Head not actually recalling experienced memories but creating parallel experiences. The time I had invested in Death’s-Head had been wasted and I was no closer to saving my mother—my old mother; the new younger one had her own medical battles she was facing.

Just then, a loud commotion erupted in the hallway that was filled with shrieks, screams, and the clanging of metal carts and their instruments crashing to the floor. The infants around me all reacted to the loud noises with whines and cries. I was confined within the pink blanket that the nurse with the crooked smile had wrapped around me, making it impossible for me to turn my head or move at all.

I heard screams at the doorway and the door flung open, slamming into the sidewall of the room. My eyes gimballed to the side, trying to see over the ripples in the blanket, but all I could make out was a wave of white crashing through the doorway. A nurse ran into the room, screaming while digging and pulling at her long curls of red hair. The surging wave of white flooded over her body and she collapsed to the floor. The white mass rolled its way toward my plastic container and soon the container was surrounded.

I struggled to break free from the pink blanket cocooning me, but my tiny appendages lacked the strength to free me. The white tide was rising all around my container and there was nothing I could do about it. I squinched my eyes tight and prayed that the Death’s-Head dose would wear off and I would find myself, once again, laying in a puddle of green vomit in the safety of my lab.

I kept my eyes closed and could hear my rapidly beating heart pounding fear in my eardrums. I tried to listen over the beating and when I did, I could hear faint squeaks and the pitter-patter of thousands of tiny feet. The sounds of movement suddenly stopped, and an eerie silence filled my container. I slowly opened my eyes.

The clear walls of the container surrounding me had been infiltrated by lab rats! Each one sitting motionless on their haunches, posed to pounce. One of the mice was perched upon my chest. I looked into the rat’s beady eyes and caught a glimpse of amber swirling within, forming a fiery abyss. I opened my mouth to scream for help, but the room only filled with the cries of an infant seeking attention. The rat on my chest twitched its whiskers, let out a tiny squeak, and the white hoard swarmed me.