Irrelevant Background Information
It was the smell that eventually woke Abigail up. You pile eight bodies in a repurposed school bus for long enough and it would develop a rather… pungent scent. Especially in the middle of summer. Of course, even with that abyssal perfume of body odor and cigarette smoke, it took her an exceptionally long time to do anything about it.
If she remembered correctly, she had only passed out a few hours before after being convinced that the trees had a message for her that they could only reveal in dreams. She thought she also might have cured irritable bowel syndrome, but she couldn’t remember for the life of her what the molecular makeup of the capsule had been. She should have recorded herself. Abigail was convinced that the best scientific discoveries were made while absolutely blitzed on a proprietary blend of acid and mescaline.
If only the broader scientific community agreed with her. Abigail and conventional science didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Ultimately, that was probably why she was out here, driving around the backwoods section of New England with a bus full of drugged-up, over-sexed hippies on their way to what would later be referred to as one of the most legendary music festivals in the history of, well, everything.
Finally, after a good ten minutes of breathing through her mouth, Abigail peeled her eyes open enough to realize that it was maybe a little later in the day than she thought. The frogs were already croaking in the swamp next to where they’d parked the night before. Groaning, she untangled herself from the mass of human flesh around her, and gingerly stepped between limbs, and heads, and other appendages on her way to the doors.
This whole thing had started out as a crazy little idea. Why not? Why not take a bus to Woodstock, see how many people she could pick up along the way, and how easy it would be to brainwash them into joining a drug-fueled sex-cult dedicated to the worship of Hastur, the King in Yellow. So far, it had gone almost too well. She’d expected at least a little resistance to some of the crazier bullshit she’d told them. But no dice there.
Abigail didn’t like being disappointed in humanity. She thought the desperate struggle of it all was the most fascinating part. Of course, what she was doing out here wasn’t real science. If she had any intention of doing this right she would have started with a mixed control group full of ordinary people. Maybe that would have been more fun.
Either way, this experiment had gone all wrong. Maybe she’d picked up people who were too vulnerable. Or she’d introduced the hard drugs too early. Hell, maybe she’d bandied around her doctorate too strongly, and gave herself too strong of an ethos.
There hadn’t been any resistance at all. Now she was stuck with a bus full of kids with too many daddy issues who hung on her every word. That wasn’t fun! That was irritating. She was telling them absolutely bonkers shit that she’d stolen wholesale from a Robert Chambers short story collection, and they ate it all up. Not a single intelligent thought between them.
Beyond the road, there was a ditch that slowly sank into an algae-capped swamp. Abigail wished she’d had a lake to stare into or something. And maybe that it was about ten degrees cooler. But she worked with what she had. She always did.
“Dr.” Abigail Hodge. It hadn’t been that long since she’d received the doctorate, so it still felt a little bit odd to her. Yet, while her peers were out writing books and changing society, here she was, ruining the lives of a couple of dumb kids. When Abigail had started out on this endeavor, she’d had plans of doing something great with it. She’d name the article something like: “Up Close and Personal with the Cult Mentality” and she’d coin something as the “Hodge Principle” or something dumb like that and it’d be used in deprogramming drugged-up rich kids.
Who was she kidding? It’d probably by used by corporations to do the brainwashing. Or worse, the government. A vaguely mushroom-shaped shape with the word “Oppenheimer” in it appeared in her mind.
Who was she kidding? No one would ever even publish that article, not when she’d used unwitting, unknowing test subjects. They’d all cry “ethics” and she’d be branded a heretic forever more.
As if she wasn’t already one, of course. Even if her scientific opinions weren’t public knowledge and the hammer of judgment hadn’t quite swung down yet, most people tended not to like Abigail very much. She’d spent most of her childhood wondering why she had to try so much harder than everyone else. At the time, she’d chalked it up to the lack of parents. Most of the kids in the orphanage weren’t very well liked. But as the mentality persisted throughout the beginning of her adult life, she’d more or less come to the conclusion that it was just because she was odd.
For a time, Abigail had wondered if there was something that had made her like this. It wasn’t as if she was actively trying to be strange. Which led her to her opening the storage locker that contained her father’s old things for the first time. Ultimately, the search had led to disappointment. From all the letters she found, Dr. Aaron Hodge seemed like a perfectly personable man. Her mother had died when Abigail was born, so there was less to be found of hers, but she seemed even more normal than her husband had been.
Abigail made fun of the hippies in her bus, but she probably had more daddy issues than all of them combined. It wasn’t about him, of course. He was more of a stranger to her than anything. But that was just it, wasn’t it? He’d never been there. Maybe Abigail would have been normal if he had been.
Probably not.
God, what was she doing here? Both the whole endeavor, and the fact that the swamp water was starting to cover her toes. And why was she even thinking about her father anyway? She hadn’t in years. Not before digging through that storage locker, anyway.
The term “quarter-life” crisis wouldn’t be invented for another few decades, but she was definitely feeling the mid-twenties malaise. Abigail was twenty-five now, and this was not where she had seen herself five years back. When she was just completing her undergrad, she’d been anticipating a big project that she could dedicate her life to. Something that might change the world. At the very least she’d envisioned some test subjects who would put up a fight. By the time he was her age, her father had already been recruited into his big project.
Wait. Was that it? Was that why she kept thinking about him? There had been some pretty extensive notes about “Project Paragon” in the storage locker, a whole filing cabinet, in fact. He probably wasn’t even supposed to have them, but there they were.
At the time, Abigail hadn’t been too concerned. That wasn’t really the information she’d been looking for. She’d known since before his death that he’d been involved in some sort of government research, after all.
But now that she was thinking about it: what had been the goal of that project? To create the “perfect human,” right? A fascinating idea, no doubt. Just what would that mean for that person? Abigail would think that it would make the rest of the world a little boring.
More importantly, what would it take to achieve such a feat? A combination of many things, no doubt. Extensive brain surgery would have to be involved, for one. Although she didn’t think the process could be considered truly complete if it didn’t alter a person on a molecular level. That would be hard to achieve. But if the government had figured it out twenty years ago, then it shouldn’t be impossible.
As her sandals made ripples in the stagnant water, Abigail realized that she was already considering the idea in a very real way. And why not? The research had nearly been lost to time, because it all went horribly wrong. Maybe her ego was a little inflated, but Abigail bet that with enough time, she could definitely succeed.
So was that it? Was she really going to do this? Why the hell not? She didn’t have anything else going on at the moment. And what did she have to lose? Absolutely nothing. But at the thoughts of what she could achieve, her mouth almost started watering. The thought of all the research she would have to do, the experiments she would get to perform…
It was all so… fascinating.
Abigail stood abruptly, and waded out of the swamp. She’d drop the kids off—once they were at the festival someone else would inevitably pick them up—and then she was free. First she’d go back to the storage facility and reclaim her father’s papers, and then the next step would be to go see the ruins of the facility itself. The place where it all happened.
It was located in an area she hadn’t been to in a very long time. A little suburb called Ede Valley.
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