DR. NELSON - SIDE FICTION

(One week before Orientation Day)

Dr. Stanley Nelson sat at his desk with the stack of folders in front of him and wondered, not for the first time, how a man got to a place in his life where he could look at another human being’s paperwork and think, This one will do. This one won’t be missed.

Nelson had been at it since noon. Fifteen folders. Fifteen people. Reynolds had been very clear about the number. The old doctor rubbed his eyes until colors swam behind his lids, then let his hands fall to the desk with a soft thump. His fingers were stiff and his back hurt in a way that felt permanent now.

“I can’t do this,” he muttered.

Nelson had started the Nexus Mind Research Center thirty years ago with real hope, curing Alzheimer’s, helping people remember their own lives. Somewhere along the way it had turned into this. Six weeks ago, when his lab in Western Massachusetts was on the verge of bankruptcy, the CIA had come knocking. They offered funding, new equipment, and a chance to keep his research alive. All he had to do was run their trial for something called Formula 35C.

Nelson had only received the first batch of doses earlier that week. They hadn’t explained what the compound actually was, only that it was “for the brain.” They hadn’t explained the risks either. When he asked for more information, they told him he could look, but not too closely. He and his team had been forced to sign strict NDAs, with the clear understanding that breaking them would mean prison time.

Nelson stared at the remaining folders on his desk. The warnings were still fresh in his mind as he returned to his task.

Most of the applications he'd read today were predictable. People who were already broken in ways that made them easy to overlook. People who owed money, or had nowhere to sleep, or had already been written off by everyone who was supposed to care about them. Nelson had read so many of these files that the details had started to bleed together. Gambling debts. No family. Eviction. Criminal record. Substance abuse.

Then he opened Jake McCoy’s folder. Inside were the online application, IQ scores, aptitude tests, and a thick stack of background information the CIA had already compiled on him. Nelson didn’t like how much the government knew about all these people. Made him wonder what they had on him.

He read through it slowly. Jake was a high school dropout, but had surprisingly strong test scores. The CIA info revealed the young man had gambling problems and was deep in debt to some people called the Manzonis. His mother was disabled and also an alcoholic and his father, John McCoy, was serving twenty-to-life for murder. The man had grown up in a world of  violence and instability and was still living in it.

Nelson stared at the page for a long time.

This one, he thought. This one might actually last longer than the others.

The thought made him feel sick. Not because it was cruel, but because it was practical. Nelson hated how he was already thinking like them.

He dropped the folder onto the finished pile and let out a long, tired breath.

“Fifteen,” he said. “That’s what he wanted.”

His bladder had been bothering him for the better part of an hour. He got up slowly, joints popping, and made his way down the long, silent hallway to the men’s room. The lights were too bright in there. They made his reflection look worse than it already did. The bags under his eyes were the color of old bruises. His skin had taken on a grayish tone that didn’t look healthy.

He stood at the urinal and pissed for what felt like a very long time.

When he was done, he washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror again.

“What the hell are you doing, Stanley?” he asked the mirror.

The mirror didn’t answer. It just stared back with tired, guilty eyes. 

Nelson thought about Marge, the way he always did when the night got too long. He thought about the fireplace at home and the ratty blue robe she refused to get rid of and the way she would look up when he came through the door, tired but still glad to see him. He thought about the cocoa she would have waiting, the little marshmallows she always put in his even though he told her he didn’t need them.

But there was no cocoa tonight. No fire. No Marge asking him how his day had been in that careful way she had when she knew he couldn’t tell her the truth.

Just this building, Special Agent Reynolds and fifteen handpicked subjects.

He knocked on Reynolds’s door with the hand that was still holding his cold coffee. Some of it slopped over the rim and onto the gray paint. Nelson didn’t bother wiping it off.

From inside, a flat voice said, “Come in.”

Nelson stepped inside and immediately felt the blood drain from his face. Reynolds sat behind the desk in his usual black suit. The man was very tall, even while seated, with gaunt features and a pale, almost cadaverous face that made him look like he had never seen sunlight. His frame seemed unusually lanky, as if someone had stretched him out too far.

"Have you chosen the subjects?" Reynolds asked without looking up.

"Yes. Fifteen, as requested."

Reynolds glanced at him with deep penetrating eyes. "Leave the folders."

Nelson stepped forward and set them down carefully on Reynold's desk. "What now?"

"You wait for further orders."

Nelson nodded and turned to leave, but Reynolds's voice stopped him at the door.

"Doctor."

Nelson turned back, heart beating faster. “Yes?”

"Why did you choose these fifteen out of the hundreds that volunteered?"

Nelson hesitated. He felt the guilt rising in his throat like bile. These weren’t volunteers. They were broken people he was about to feed into a machine he didn’t understand. For a moment he almost told the truth, that he was terrified, that he knew this was wrong, that he was selling lives to keep his dream alive.

"Because most of them have very little left to lose. They’ll sign whatever we put in front of them. Some do it for the money. The rest wouldn’t understand what they were agreeing to, even if we explained it to them in plain language."

Reynolds stared at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once, as if that was exactly the answer he had expected, and went back to his papers without another word.

Nelson left the office and closed the door behind him.

Out in the hallway, he stood with his back against the cold wall, breathing through his mouth. The coffee in his hand had gone cold hours ago. He drank what was left anyway.

“Well, genius,” he said quietly to the empty corridor. “You’re in it now."

He walked out into the freezing night and got into his car. He sat there for a while with the engine off, the cold already working its way into the cabin. He didn’t feel like moving yet.

His phone vibrated against his thigh.

Nelson pulled it out and looked at the screen. It was a text from Ellison, one of the senior chemists at the lab. Ellison didn’t text him after hours unless something was seriously wrong.

The message was short:

Stan, we’ve been testing the samples you gave us all day and night. I don’t know how to say this without sounding crazy, but some of these compounds… we’ve never seen anything like them. They don’t match anything on record. Not even close. I don’t know where this stuff came from, but it sure as hell doesn’t look like it came from here.

Nelson read it once. Then he read it again, slower.

He sat in the dark car, the phone still in his hand, and felt something cold and sour settle in his stomach. For a long moment he just stared at the message, the words sinking in deeper with every second.

Doesn’t look like it came from here.

He thought about the fifteen folders sitting on Reynolds’s desk. He thought about Jake McCoy and the others… broken, desperate people he had signed off on with no regard to the fact that they're all just human beings trying to survive.

And for the first time, a single, ugly thought pushed its way through the noise in his head:

What the fuck did I just do?

Nelson lowered the phone and stared out through the windshield at the empty parking lot. The wind moved across the snow, but he barely noticed it. His hands felt numb against the steering wheel.

He sat there for a long time before finally turning the key. The engine coughed to life, too loud in the quiet lot. Nelson pulled out of the space and drove toward the exit, the phone dark on the passenger seat beside him.

But the words stayed with him, sitting heavy in his chest as he drove home through the snow.

What the fuck did I just do?​

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