Premonitions

               Robert Michael took a seat in the lobby of the research laboratory. Before he had much of a chance to look around, the tall, thin figure of Doctor Thorp walked up to him with quick strides and an outstretched hand. “Welcome, Mr. Michael! I am so happy you could join us here today. Please, follow me to my office.”

               Robert followed the doctor through several security doors and up a flight of stairs to reach the doctor’s office, all with an awkward silence. Upon arriving, Doctor Thorp gestured for Robert to take a chair and sat across from it. Robert sat, a little self-consciously.

               “I am grateful you are willing to be the first voluntary human test subject for our new military product,” said Doctor Thorp. “We have had successful testing on animals, and the results have encouraged us to move to humans. We reviewed several military applications and you are actually our first choice. Thank you for volunteering.”

               The doctor then got up and went to his desk. He reached behind it to flip a switch and press a button, then handed Robert a clipboard with several papers on it. “First I need you to sign these. We have a nondisclosure agreement, a liability waiver, and a contract to participate as a human test subject. After you sign these, I can tell you about what the process will be and what we expect from you to determine a successful test. Do you have any questions?”

               Robert glanced down at the papers before responding. “No, Doctor, but I would like a few minutes to read the paperwork.”

               Doctor Thorp nodded. “Please, read them and understand them. But we do need to start the procedure in the next forty minutes to maintain our testing schedule, and it will take about twenty minutes to get you prepped for the procedure. I can give you about twenty minutes to read and sign everything.” The doctor left the room, leaving Robert while he read the paperwork.

               The doctor came back a few minutes later, just as Robert finished signing the last document. “Are you ready, Mr. Michael?”

               “Yes, Doctor. But the descriptions are all vague. Tell me about what this thing is.”

               “Of course, but if we can walk and talk along the way? We do have a schedule to keep to, and I would rather be ahead of schedule than behind.” Robert got up and followed the doctor out of the room and they went to the stairs. They took several flights of stairs until they had arrived at the top floor of the research building, ten stories up.

               As they walked, the doctor talked. “We are testing a chemical drug that we are calling Premo, short for Premonition. Essentially, this drug enhances your mental capacity to predict when you will die, allowing you to experience a premonition. In theory, your mind thinks incredibly fast to predict what would kill you and then brings your awareness back to a time when you can make a choice to change that outcome. In practice, we believe that you experience time as normal until something kills you. Then you regain awareness before the event that kills you with enough time to make a change and avoid death.”

               The doctor continued, “We have tested this on several animals, but we cannot speak to them to understand how they experience it. But we do know that rats who have been given the drug are able to complete a deadly maze without a single mistake. From our perspective, they pass through the maze unscathed. But we believe that from their perspective, they go through the maze dozens or hundreds of times until they memorize how to get through it perfectly.”

               Robert was dumbfounded. “That sounds superhuman! That’s incredible.”

               They reached the top floor and started walking down a hallway towards a testing chamber. The doctor swiped his ID card into a scanner and a door opened. They both walked in. “Yes, assuming it works as we believe, it is quite superhuman.”

               Robert sat in a chair in the middle of the room. He looked around. He felt like he was in a glass box, with transparent walls all around him and a white tile floor underneath. Doctor Thorp set up an IV into Robert’s arm, then grabbed a cart from the corner and brought it closer. He hooked up a bag of yellowish liquid into the IV, and then pushed the cart to the side.

               “This is Premo. I am giving it to you as an infusion, as we’ve found that to be the quickest way to get it into the entire system. The infusion itself will take about thirty minutes, and then we can start running some tests. I will be back when the infusion is over.”

               As the doctor walked away, Robert felt a spike of anxiety. He hadn’t thought much about it, but the liability waiver did mention death and the contract did have a clause about if he died as a test subject. What would the tests be? If the drug helped him prevent his death, did that mean that the tests would be about killing him? But it was too late now. He watched the bag empty as the drug was sent into his system. He spent much of the remaining time studying the cart that the doctor had brought in, as there wasn’t anything else to look at except the IV stand and emptying bag.

               Thirty minutes later the IV beeped just as the doctor was entering the room again. He quickly turned off the machine, removed the IV, and put a bandage over the needle hole. “How do you feel, Robert?”

               “I feel normal,” Robert responded. “Maybe a little stiff. I certainly don’t feel superhuman.”

               “No, the others didn’t either,” the doctor said as he walked over to the cart.

               “Others? What others?” Robert asked in confusion. Doctor Thorp reached the cart, grabbed something from underneath a cloth, and turned with a gun in his hand.

               “Welcome to the first test, Mr. Michael,” the doctor said, and shot Robert in the head.

               Robert felt a stab of pain in his forehead and reflexively closed his eyes. The pain wasn’t as severe as he expected it should be. An intense tingling in his nose then demanded his attention and his eyes opened.

               Robert was sitting in the chair, and the doctor had just put a bandage over the needle hole in his arm. “How do you feel, Robert,” the doctor asked.

               Robert paused, a huge feeling of déjà vu sweeping over him as the tingling in his nose faded. “I feel fine,” he replied.

               The doctor started to walk towards the cart and Robert instinctively stood up to interrupt him, hand outstretched to hold the doctor back.

               “Is something wrong, Robert?”

               “Um . . . You are about to shoot me with a gun that is hidden on the cart.” Robert felt almost stupid for saying it. But the doctor beamed and stepped away from Robert.

               “Wonderful! Now is the real test. Mr. Michael, you have two hours to exit this building alive. All the people you will meet in the building belong to a special security force. They have been told that you are a dangerous terrorist who has escaped. They have instructions to kill you on sight. If you get out alive, the test is successful. If you die along the way and don’t come back, then the test is a failure. Good luck!”

               Robert was stunned. This was the test? He was so shocked he didn’t react right away when the doctor pulled out another gun from under his lab coat. “Oh, and one more thing,” the doctor added. “Please try not to kill anyone. They all have families who would miss them if they don’t come home.” And with that, Doctor Thorp put the barrel against his own head and pulled the trigger.

               Horror added itself to the sensations churning through Robert’s mind. This was a sick, twisted kind of test. Alarms started to go off throughout the building and the lights in the testing chamber dimmed. Robert didn’t know what to do. He looked at the doctor’s limp body on the floor and not at the smattering on the walls and ceiling. Robert just stood there, unsure what to do, until he heard footsteps running down the hall.

               Robert turned and saw two men in full tactical gear carrying assault rifles. They had their weapons raised and pointed at Robert. As they got closer, they saw the body on the floor. Robert stood there, raised his hands, and watched them. One swiped an ID card and the door opened, and the other took aim and fired.

               Robert felt a stinging pain in his face this time, then the tingling in his nose. He opened his eyes again and heard footsteps behind him running along the hallway. He turned and saw two men in full tactical gear with assault rifles. Robert ducked behind the cart and neither man saw him right away in the dim light. He grabbed the handgun from the cart while one man swiped an ID card and the door opened. The two soldiers slowly entered the room. Robert was about to jump out and shoot when he remembered the parting words from the doctor: try not to kill anyone. With that advice in his mind, Robert shoved the cart into the first soldier, tripping him, and lunged at the second. A burst of gunfire met him in the air, and he felt another intense tingling in his nose.

               He heard the footsteps behind him again, and ducked behind the cart, just as he had done before. He grabbed the gun and waited until one soldier swiped his ID card and opened the door. As he watched them, he realized that so far, the first soldier had swiped his ID. But this time, the second soldier swiped his ID. Robert stood up, aimed, and pulled the trigger, dropping the first solider. He aimed at the second, who was watching his partner fall, and pulled the trigger again. But the gun clicked out of ammo. There had been only one bullet. Robert looked at the gun in surprise while the second soldier raised his rifle and fired.

               Robert started to get the hang of the sensations. As he worked through an encounter over and over, he started to recognize ways to think of a situation differently to overcome it. Robert had to use both guns, the one on the cart and the one from the doctor’s lab coat, and half a dozen more attempts to kill both soldiers who came to the testing chamber. Robert started to understand the stabbing pain showed him where he got hit, and the tingling in his nose let him know he was going back.

It took him several tries to get down a floor, which involved disabling an elevator full of soldiers from arriving at the top floor and avoiding detection from three more soldiers who came up the stairs. But the footsteps he heard running up the staircase led him to go onto the ninth floor rather than try to get out in that stairwell. Best to try another stairwell

The ninth floor was largely a game of cat and mouse, as all the lights were out and no one could see well. He found the path he needed to take to avoid getting spotted by anyone, although it took him another seven attempts. To get down a floor, he used an open window from the ninth floor to jump to a balcony on the eighth floor, and there was no one on the eighth floor.

He started to pay attention to the time. He had to guess it was about 11:30 when the two-hour time limit started, but each reset made it harder to keep track of the time. To him, time felt like it kept moving on. Mentally, he felt like he had been fighting down for several hours, although physically it had only been about 30 minutes. He knew he’d have to go faster if he was going to get out in under two hours, although he didn’t know what would happen if he didn’t make it in time.

As Robert was working through the fifth floor, he kept running into a man who was holding a grenade without the pin. Anything Robert would do to incapacitate the man would result in the grenade going off and killing them both, but he kept going back at least ten minutes while he was still on the floor above. Robert got a strike of inspiration and thought about where he was in relation to the floor below. Rather than continue down the stairs like he had been, he followed a hunch and found a trap door that led into the space between the floors. He used that to break a ceiling tile for the fifth floor and was there to watch the man take the grenade off his belt and pull the pin, expecting Robert to come down the stairs. He didn’t get the soldier this time, but on his next try, he got there before the man pulled out the grenade.

As he started to pay more attention to when he went back, he realized that the premonition would also give him a suggestion to try. It was such a subtle impression that he hadn’t noticed it in getting down the upper floors. This helped him progress faster through the other floors of the building. The soldiers were also more spread out and he had fewer encounters with them. It was more about sneaking passed or disabling a few soldiers than fighting everyone he saw as the upper floors had been.

As Robert got near the ground floor, however, he started to hear a lot of chatter from the main lobby. Deciding to take a chance, he sprinted down the last few stairs and burst into the lobby, running for the front doors. The lobby had become a command center for the security force, with at least two dozen soldiers, half as many techs at portable workstations, and several men who must have been officers. He didn’t even make it halfway across the room.

Waking up right before he decided to run into the lobby, his hunch encouraged him to go back up to the second floor and try to leave from a window up there. Two tries and two deaths later, Robert found an open window that led him behind several bushes and out of sight of the patrols that surrounded the building. From there he found the entrance to a tunnel that led him out to the research lab’s perimeter fence. He crawled out and turned to look at the square building in the distance. He glanced at the time, and it was nearly 1:30; his two hours were going to be up at any moment. He heard another loud siren start to wail. Even from this distance, he heard soldiers yelling in confusion and fear.

Then the building erupted in a massive explosion. The flash was blinding, the sound was deafening, and the heatwave was scorching. Robert had just enough time to acknowledge the concussive blast and the heat before he felt the familiar tingle in his nose that told him he was going back.

“I am grateful that you are willing to be the first voluntary human test subject for our new military experiments,” came Doctor Thorp’s voice. “We have had productive testing on several animals, including rats, dogs, and apes, and the results have encouraged us to move to human trials. We reviewed several applications from the military, and you are actually our top choice. Thank you for being willing.”

As Doctor Thorp stood up and started to walk to his desk, Robert stood up with him and held out a hand to stop the doctor.

“Wait,” he said. “Something isn’t right. What are you about to do?” The tingling in Robert’s nose was subsiding, which meant that he still had a choice to make now that would save his life in a couple hours.

“I’m sorry? What do you mean?” the doctor replied.

“You’ve done this already. You are about to go to your desk and hand me some papers to sign. Hold on, that means that you haven’t given me Premo yet. Have you?”

“Is everything alright, Mr. Michael? You’ve just arrived at the facility. You are correct, I was about to hand you the nondisclosure agreement, the liability waiver, and—”

“—and the contract,” Robert interrupted. “But something is wrong.” Robert was thinking fast to remember what else the doctor did right before handing him the clipboard. “The switch and button on your desk. You were about to hit them. That’s connected to a bomb that destroys the building, isn’t it?”

Doctor Thorp looked awestruck as Robert glared at him. “You’ve been here before, you said? But you are right, I haven’t given you the drug yet. And yet you know its name. You know what I was about to do.” The doctor’s enthusiasm was rising as he spoke, until he was almost yelling in excitement. “That means I was right! The experiment is a success! The drug is strong enough to take you back before you received it, if doing so will prevent you from dying after you receive it! Haha!”

Robert turned and ran, out of the office, down the stairs, through the lobby, away from the building. He didn’t know what to do, but he knew he had to get away. He had just seen a madman who had created a murderous situation to test a wonder drug. And that drug had now turned Robert Michael superhuman.