Modified - Part 2 The meeting finishes quickly, and soon I'm back in the corridor. As I walk back to my office, a young Asian man stops me. 'Excuse me,' he says, 'are you Professor Renn?' 'Yes, I am,' I say, annoyed at having my thoughts interrupted. 'Good. I gave doctor Stephenson a memory stick, and she told me to give it to you. It's my epilepsy research. Can you review it?' 'Sure,' I say. 'Oh, thank you, sir. I actually left it in your lab, so I don't have it. Is that ok?' 'Er... yes, fine.' the young man talks incredibly quickly. It's extremely distracting. I thank him and leave. Soon I'm in my office. In a hurry, I stuff my laptop in my bag. I swipe the memory stick - the Asian student must have put it on the wrong desk, because it isn't on mine - and go home. An hour later, back at the university, a man walks into an office. There are three desks, a lot of papers, a printer and some photos of the scientists' family on the walls. He ignores these and goes to the middle desk. He searches for something for several minutes, then curses; he hasn't found it. He turns to leave, but as he does, he spots something that stops him in his tracks. He's seen a memory stick, just what he was looking for, but it's the wrong one and on the wrong desk. It's on the desk of Jason Renn. I open up my laptop, sigh, and insert the memory stick. But when I open the file, all I find is video files. Confused, I click on one, then yelp and jump in the air. The video is of a prison cell, being filmed by a camera in the top corner of the room. In the cell sits a solitary man of about eighteen. His clothes are ragged and filthy. But he's sat perfectly still, cross-legged, with no visible signs of injury. Out of sight, a door opens and an older man enters. The sitting youth opens his eyes for the first time. Instantly he's up and has a hold of the other man's lapel. As if he weighs nothing, the boy flings him across the cell. The man crumples against a wall and falls to the ground. The youth darts over to him and starts pummelling him. Then he stops and falls to the ground; he looks like he's trying to block his ears of a deafening sound. The other man, who doesn't seem to be able to hear the sound, makes a break for the door. The boy suddenly stops rolling on the ground. Instead, he focuses on what must be the source of the noise: the camera. He takes two steps' run up and jumps. The camera's got to be at least four feet above his head. But he still wrenches it from the wall, and the last thing the camera sees is his livid face, and a glimpse of his yellow eyes. This can only be what they talked about in the meeting I gatecrashed.
Modified - Part 1 I barge through the crowded corridors, my phone still in my hand. It bears the message - "Where are you Jason? Meeting has started." I send a man sprawling as I bowl past him. I hear him swear loudly, but I don't stop. I reach the lift just as the doors begin to close. Forcing my way in, I punch the button for floor three and check my watch. Only five minutes late. It's not too bad. The doors slide open and I dart out. In seconds I reach the end of the corridor and rush through the door. I have just enough time to hear the words 'We had to shoot the last specimens, Declan, and if you call that success-' before the room falls quiet. And then I realise- I've walked in on the wrong meeting. Seven people are sat around a table. All of them are watching me with frigid glares. A frog jumps into my throat. I manage to blurt out a 'sorry' before I step back through the open doorway. Then I run for it. I find the correct meeting ten minutes late. The subject is "brain activity during an epileptic seizure" but after two minutes my thoughts are straying. Instead, I find myself thinking about the meeting I just gatecrashed. I only heard one sentence of what they were saying -"We had to shoot the last specimens, Declan, and if you call that success"- but the more I think about it, the more it troubles me. By "shoot" they surely meant an injection, right? And "specimens" could be anything. I mean, most of my experiments involve mice, or even rats. By "shooting specimens" they could mean anything. And yet... Somehow, all I can think of is people being murdered in some crazy experiment.
Diseased One day, an old man named John Reeve woke up with a terrible pain in his gut. He had never, in his seventy-nine years of #life, experienced anything like it. So he rushed to the hospital to find a doctor. The nurses frowned when he shambled through the doors, but they found him a bed, and soon a young female doctor was sat beside him. 'Now sir,' the young woman said, 'I need to tell you something. This may alarm you, but try to remain calm.' Reeve nodded. 'Now, firstly, you are experiencing stomach pains because, as I have told you three times this week, you are diabetic.' John wondered how they knew this before they had given him any tests. But he let the doctor continue: 'The reason that you keep coming here, is because you have Alzheimer's!'