Unlucky

[Many Years Ago]

[Third POV]

"November 14th, 1995. Break room log number 133. I have finally discovered the means to understanding human emotions. Our cognitive and behavioral traits separated from one another. Our physical responses to our emotional counterparts. In layman's terms, I have finally understood the meaning behind the words pain in my ass because that is all that Doctor George Blakely has become to me. A real pain in my goddamn ass."

Deep, rumbling chuckles were heard as Doctor George Blakely shook his blonde head in wonder at the words that came out of his friend's, scientific genius Louis Aster, mouth whilst he sipped a delicious cup of black coffee.

Ahh, what a wonderful, refreshing cup of bittersweet caffeine.

Just the perfect pick-me-up that I needed this morning.

George thought to himself as he held the mug between his cold hands, the words Greatest Father-To-Be written across in a scratchy font that he hadn't exactly approved of but his wife, Elizabeth, had insisted that the mug was a perfect gift to receive for a baby shower.

He never quite understood baby showers to begin with, what was the purpose of a shower when there was a baby yet to be born?

And the purpose of a shower was to clean the body of oneself, could Elizabeth's friends who organized such an event be unknowingly suggesting that their unborn child was somehow dirty?

Perhaps they were simply giving into society's demanding and demeaning ways of childbirth and all that it came with.

Like needless mugs with sayings printed across them that our friends say they had exclusively made on a website called Amazon.

Blasted society for forcing our friends to commit to outrageous prices on oversold and overpopulated websites.

Although he wasn't too eager about the pressure to perform well as a father, he was eager to meet his bundle of joy that would be arriving in the next five or six months.

And whilst he would never admit it to his wife, George prayed that the child was a boy, for he wanted his firstborn to be a son who could carry on the family name and legacy as a Blakely.

Though he would be happy with either gender, he simply wanted a healthy baby and a healthy family to come home to in the evenings after a long day of work.

"Perhaps you are confusing the meaning with someone else. Say, yourself, for an example."

George suggested to Louis who only merely laughed as he shook his dark head in return, dark brown eyes seeming to glow beneath the florescent lights of the break room at the back of the hidden scientific lab that not many in the public eye knew about.

George and Louis were good when it came to keeping secrets, especially when it came to hiding things that needed to be hidden for safety purposes.

And they may not know it but the public would soon be onto their antics, their dark secrets that they thought would never reach the light of day would soon expand across the globe as a nation and divide even the strongest amongst them.

Their world as they knew it would become a political and crime ridden catastrophe.

But they weren't there yet.

Right now, George and Louis were more focused on their tasks at hand, protecting their valuable assets at whatever cost it may be.

"Perhaps I am, but one can never truly know whether they speak of narcissism for themselves or others."

Louis was fond of riddles and he often spoke of ones that sometimes George had a hard time trying to believe even as they were friends for many years.

But George only downed the last bit of his coffee as Louis turned off the recorder for his log book, the young scientist's hands that could have once belonged to a surgeon if he had applied himself to the right field works like his parents always told him to do sliding the recorder into his pocket for safe keeping as they exited the break room and went back into the lab to finish up the last of their latest trials at A.E. Testing.

The abbreviation stood for Abnormalities Experimental Testing, something that neither of them were too familiar with at first but were initially curious to dive further into.

While Louis wasn't too fond of how the experiments have been going so far, most of them resulting in severe or fatal, he was more excited to learn about the new developments then his partner, George, was to hear about the news. George frowned as he stood beside his best friend since childhood, the man who said that their secret experimental trials of a new drug programming device wasn't going to be exposed anytime sooner than Big Pharma was going to be in bed with them, whilst reading the chart of the patient, a younger man, who was strapped down and subdued to the white medical table beneath him.

The patient was safely locked away in a padded cell like room for his own safety and the safety of the medical and scientific team behind the two way glass window peering into the room, George's frown deepening further as he read over the medical report before turning to address Louis who was entranced by the medical devices hooked up to the patient which were steadily beeping or still altogether.

"Louis, his vitals aren't looking too good. His cortisol levels are continuously spiking along with his epinephrine and vasopressin. I'm also starting to see surges of somatotropin, which is rather uncommon and unusual for a man of his age, even as young as he may be. In other terms, we have stressed out his organs too much over these last few hours and the effects are taking a toll on his body."

George tried to stress this matter to Louis but the man wasn't listening, his gaze still locked upon the younger man who was momentarily unconscious due to the amount of several pharmaceutical relaxants that George had ordered to keep pumping into him via an IV format.

George knew that, depending on when the man would wake up, the results could be detrimental to the patient's mental and physical health.

The patient's body was under too much stress in a short amount of time and the brain wavelengths results that George was currently monitoring as well were erratic and yet consistent at the same time, similar to that of someone suffering from multiple seizures or schizophrenic episodes.

George could tell that the patient's mind was seizing, something that needed to be dealt with immediately if they wanted to make sure this last experiment didn't end in another fatality like their previous test subjects.

Before the testing had begun, George and Louis were confident in their last patient of the testing process, the young man barely older than his earliest twenties counterpart, especially since the patient was male and the younger women who had been their previous test subjects had tragically passed away due to the pressure that the testing program placed upon their bodies.

George couldn't figure it out for sure but he was confident that the program wasn't as harsh on the male body as it was to the female, that is, until he saw the new results from their last resort for test subjects.

Until he saw how much damage their program was inflicting upon the patient's physical and mental state of mind.

"Louis, we need to pull the patient off the program. If we don't…"

George looked up as the young man began to stir upon the table, his conscious state slowly reawakening and George felt a ping of sympathy radiating through his body when the man let out a cry of pain as his body uncontrollably writhed against the restraints holding him down to the table.

He couldn't stand to watch the young man's body seize and spasm in unbearable pain and he turned to Louis, intent on having his partner turn off the machine connecting to the test subject, a heavy metal helmet placed upon the subject's head which was also connected to a large circular cylinder machine that was twice the size of their own bodies hidden behind the medical table.

That machine held the unique program coded deep inside the technological machine, a soft blue colored liquid that held the coding for the program circulating through the cylinders to pump the liquid inside the patient.

It was an incredible creation that George and Louis both constructed in the first place, a liquid that could activate several touchy areas in the human nervous system in a safe manner that could be used to improve overall general health.

George originally wanted the program to succeed in curing almost all diseases possible, the most incurable ones out there that nobody would dare to even be in the same room with.

But Louis had other ideas in the creation process.

Unbeknownst to George, Louis had engineered the A.E. program to be released into a gas form if need be and he had many reasons as to why it needed to happen.

"Louis, he could die. Pull him off the program immediately. I need to flush his system as soon as possible. Shut it down."

George ordered Louis but Louis shook his dark head, his mouth forming a hard line as he turned to his friend, the man he thought he could trust when it came to keeping dark, forbidden secrets.

But he now knew that their opinions differed when it came to such drastic, immediate decisions like whether or not to continue the experimental testing or to scrap it altogether.

And Louis had a different opinion on the decision to keep the program.

He knew that one life's sacrifice would do more good than harm when it came to the grand scheme of things in life.

"No, George. I won't stop the program because it is going to work. You'll see."

Shortly after he said those words, something miraculous happened.

The young male test subject went from twisting and turning in painful agony to his body contorting itself as a scream vibrated the walls of the padded room, George's eyes widening with disbelief and shock at the growth levels that were rapidly spiking rather than plummeting.

"L-Louis, his somatotropin levels are rising. His muscle bone structure appears to be changing as well. I think he's…"

George trailed off as he looked up from the computer screen of the vital check to watch as the patient's body began to expand in length and height, the male subject appearing to have several adolescence style growth spurts taking place over the matter of seconds.

George almost couldn't believe what he was seeing, the young man was becoming a literal giant over the course of a minute and dread filled his stomach suddenly.

Because with incredible size came incredible strength and George feared that if he rechecked the vitals, his worst nightmare would be proven true.

That the A.E. program hadn't cured the man's intense case of HIV. It had instead increased his bone structure by tenfold, the red and white blood cell counts tripling in size and if George's suspicions were correct, the program had also intensified the man's incurable disease.

Which meant that fatal mortality was inevitable, no longer avoidable.

"Louis! I said shut it down!"

George shouted at his friend as the sounds of rapid beeping and sirens were going off inside the padded room and control observation panel parallel to the room, not just the warning bells going off inside his head.

But Louis's hard gaze told him all that he needed to know, that his friend wasn't budging.

He was willing to wait out the spiralling changes in the program to the very end.

Even if it cost the man his life.

Even if it cost them theirs too.

But George wasn't willing to die for the A.E. program unlike his friend and so, they both lunged for the control panel at the same time, grunts were heard as they both fought for control over the automated injections still being forced inside the giant's body.

And try as George might, he was no match for Louis's hidden strength and agility, he stood no chance against Louis as with just a hard press of a secret button, Louis forced the A.E. programmed liquid to convert into a gas that was released into the air duct after escaping the high pressured chamber of the machine.

George let out a gasp as he quickly covered his mouth using his polo shirt beneath the white lab coat, his attention now on the betrayal of his friend instead of the giant whose body was now rapidly decaying, the dying moans and groans inside the padded room barely heard about the white noise buzzing inside George's head.

"Why….Why the fuck did you do that, Louis? Do you understand what you've done? The dangers that you've now subjected us all to?"

Louis only shrugged, not bothering to cover the orifices of his body that could be unknowingly taking in the vaporized programmed liquid that could trigger God only knows what inside their own bodies.

"I do understand but we will never know what this potion is capable of unless we try something. We face dangers everyday. Crime, poverty, famine, homelessness, diseases that we cannot control spreading throughout the nations. I just did what you could never do, George."

He said those words so casually that George snarled with disgust, he was repulsed by the dangerous actions of his friend.

He felt as if he didn't know Louis anymore.

Or perhaps, he never knew him to begin with.

"You're a monster, Louis."

George thought those words would hurt his friend but Louis had already lost his mind as he smiled wickedly in response,

"It takes one to know one, doesn't it, Georgie?"

Ending on that high note, Louis ordered the guards standing idle at the metal doors leading out of the lab to escort George out of the building and even as he put up a fight, George couldn't help but feel as if his world was falling apart beneath his feet.

Even as he saw the dead body of the giant who had once been a lonely young man struggling to find a cure for his disease, George was more focused on the events that would soon ensue from Louis's harebrained actions.

He would have no idea that the outcome would affect him so personally, so deeply close to his home life, that he would regret ever coming up with the formula for the A.E. program in the first place.

But that was just how it all started.

Not how it all ended.

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-Ro♥️