#Vadimblog!

[stellaralchemist]

Sleep

(A scene from a few weeks ago) Guy’s surgery had gone well... as well as could be expected anyway. Dr. Volescu had congratulated Vadim and then sent him off to go talk to Gypsum. Gypsum had a baby and she was perfect... and Gypsum was perfect. And food was perfect too. 

Though it did occur to him he had probably eaten too much in one go.

Vadim hadn’t said most of what he wanted to to Gypsum but that was fine, there was plenty of time. Eternity probably. At least a few weeks. 

He checked on Guy, who was asleep in bed with all manner of wires and tubes sticking out of him. Vadim took a few readings and tucked the chart back where it belonged. 

Already anticipating the view around the corner of the divider Vadim picked up a spare pillow on his way through. Elenia was curled in the fetal position on the floor, her datachron beside her. The datachron went on its charger, the pillow went beneath the doctor’s head, and Vadim resolved to tell Marko so he could deal with her. 

Dr. Volescu was always grouchy after surgery and Vadim had never been paid enough to deal with that. 

Out into the evening air and, standing beneath the stars, Vadim considered how nice a bit of a run might be.

[stellaralchemist]

The Taiga

Once on a train heading to a meeting somewhere on the other end of Pallasova, Elenia had picked up a magazine and flipped through and become engrossed in an article written by a geologist studying out in the desolate taiga. The article had told the story of a family, six people, who had abandoned the safety of the Enclaves and of civilization and had carved a miserable life out in a river valley far north.

Suddenly disinterested in the consultation work she was going to perform she had found herself entirely absorbed into the lives of this little clan. There was a father, an old man whose political beliefs had resulted in his persecution within his Enclave. His wife had died in the wilderness but left behind the children. Two boys and two girls. The oldest boy had recalled the world before they found the taiga and so clung to his father’s political beliefs but the other children were half-wild, they only knew of hardship and wilderness and life out in the plains.

Forced to abandon the magazine on the train to hurry along for work she had spent an inordinate amount of time after lunch (one of the few such days she could remember entirely abandoning work) searching around for their fates. Three of the children died very quickly after meeting the geologists, a mixture of inevitable repercussions from their limited diet and from infections introduced by the outsiders. The father passed of old age, and that meant one single woman, the youngest daughter, left behind in the taiga.

The geologist reported that she had told them to go on after burying the father and that had bothered Elenia immensely after the article concluded. It had bothered her that the last thing this woman had said to any other person had just been “Go on” and that they had left her out there in that valley.

For years afterwards, she had remembered the story and thought about the woman, who had never seen an Enclave or a car or a datachron. It always bothered her that she didn’t have a satisfactory end to the story.

“Obviously she has died by now,” she concluded to Vadim as she explained this story. They were cleaning the lab, a long and unpleasant process performed every afternoon.

“Perhaps,” he agreed, scraping at a bit of something on the table with his thumbnail. “Is this blood.”

“What? I don’t know. Just scrub it off.”

“Perhaps she survived. She might even be Ravenous, wandering around the taiga eating animals.”

“Is that better or worse?”

Vadim paused at his scraping, his brow knit somewhere amidst the metal that supported his face. “Dr. Volescu, I need to tell you something.”

“Hm?” She was only half paying attention, thinking of the family out in the taiga and the lost woman.

Sometimes when Vadim tried to speak but couldn’t decide what to say a soft, repetitive noise sounded, the very first note of a word begun and stopped and begun again. It came on now, click-click-click-click.

“Dr. Avinoff?”

Click-click 

“It’s not really important.”

“Are you sure?”

Click-click-click 

“Yes.”

She shook her head briefly at him. He had always been a little odd, really, she reasoned.  “We need to reexamine what we’re working on,” she said thoughtfully. “No more non-essential projects. There has been too much going on the last few months. From now on we’re isolated.”

“Out on the taiga,” Vadim agreed and nodded along. There were a few more clicks, lost beneath the sound of a scrubbed tabletop.

[stellaralchemist]

The Story of Vadim

Who Once Had Hobbies

Renata and Arseny never made it back. By the time it became really serious Leonid was already sweating and sickly looking. Now they watched in silence as he, previously thought to be dead, tapped on the glass of the office door. His head contorted at a strange angle to the side and his nostrils flared wide. He tried to smell something.

“What does he want?” Fedosiya asked, sitting cross-legged on the table with a blanket over her shoulders. She kept complaining it was cold.

“To eat our brains, probably,” suggested Misha from where he sprawled on the floor. He had his book in front of him, he was ostensibly going through for important notes, but he hadn’t turned a page in ages. Like the rest of them he stared at the door.

“Don’t say that. He’s not a monster.”

“He came back from the dead, he’s a bit of a monster.”

“That’s horrible, Misha. I can’t believe you would say that.”

“Okay but I’m not wrong. Look at him.”

“He’s just sick. He’s not some kind of movie monster.”

“Movie monsters can be sick.”

“Can he see us?” Dr. Volescu asked from where she leaned against the table, her cigarette dangling out of her mouth. She always looked so sharp but now she was wearing some big knit sweater and it made her look positively out of place. Rumpled, that was the word. “Dima, go see if his pupils contract.”

It was very tempting to argue that Misha was her assistant and as such should have had to do this kind of thing, but now wasn’t really the time. He dug out a little flashlight and uneasily went over.

They had been on-again, off-again roommates for the last two years, frequently borrowing couches after nights out or using the safety of the other person’s flat in the midst of a crisis. Leonid had spent two months in his spare room after an eviction, Vadim had slept on his couch for three weeks when he briefly dated and subsequently broke up with his other roommate.

Mostly their friendship could be summed up in pictures, blurry photos from nights out after the others had left and funny jokes they sent in a long stream. He could count on his hands the actual conversations they had shared (those that were not bitching about work or just strings of poorly thought out jokes) but each one, shared in the first rays of the morning sun over a tall can of lager had been profound and life-changing.

Vadim raised the flashlight and shone it through the window on the door, squinting to try to see Leonid’s eyes as he flinched back from the glare. He lowered the light and Leonid came back up to the window, tapping, his mouth was moving but he wasn’t saying anything.

“No change, Doctor. I think he might be blind,” Vadim reported after a moment’s recovery.

“Misha write that down.”

“What?” he asked, already turning through the pages in a near panic to look for a blank page. “Why?”

“This might be the only near docile… person… anyone has in captivity. We have a chance to observe here, we ought to take it. Anyway, it will give us something else to do. I’ll probably have to pay you for all this time, we might as well get some work done,” she explained sensibly, picking at a spot on her sweater for a moment. “We are going to test all of his reactions.”

[stellaralchemist]

The Story of Vadim

Who Once Had His Own Vocal Chords

They had come at the last possible moment, the alchemists. One of their messages had gone through and now they stood, three, around the surgery table. The equipment for the tanks sat on a side-table and the three doctors looked down at the man on the table.

“They said they had not tried putting a tank into a Ravenous,” Dr. Volescu was explaining, the vitalus injections had made her look stronger, had made them all look stronger. But the point stood that they were all still sick. They wrapped handkerchiefs around their balding heads and bright eyes peeked out amid gaunt, starved features. Each of them now had sloshing tanks of cloudy liquid on their thighs, installed by the alchemists who had come through in their transport ship. They had been a bunch as desperate as the three scientists now gathered around the table but the liquid seemed to have worked. Vadim’s hand had stilled and the sick feeling had diminished.

“Is that really what we’re calling them? Ravenous?” Fedosiya asked.

“I didn’t make it up. You know what the Alchemists are like with their names. Now, we all watched the surgeries, yes?”

Fedosiya and Vadim both nodded, on the table before them lay Leonid, strapped tightly down and heavily sedated. He barely breathed on the table, though every few minutes his nostrils would widen slightly.

Dr. Volescu, in her sweater, her fingers all bound with gauze, held the instructions. She could not perform the surgery, her extremities had been going gangrenous and the new medicine had only seemed to hold the degradation in check, rather than reverse it. Fedosiya refused, on the grounds that she was not a surgeon and wasn’t confident enough to do it. The procedure was complex and could go terribly wrong. The Alchemists had said so.

Before he started school, Vadim had joined the military. His parents didn’t have much money and the training had been good for him. He had learned some basic stuff there and that left him to do it. He was grateful the tremor in his arm had subsided with the injection of vitalus.

“We need to hurry, he won’t stay down for long,” Dr. Volescu pointed out, needlessly. Despite his diminished metabolic functions he ran through the sedative at an astounding rate. He was docile enough behind glass or just after a feeding but he would be hungry if he woke up on this table.

“Yes, Doctor,” Vadim replied and focused down on the procedure.

“Do you think it will make much difference?” Fedosiya asked, quietly.

“They said they had never attempted with anyone so degraded,” Dr. Volescu replied dismissively. “At worst it will fix him in this state, from there we can try other things. But it does not make sense to allow him to get worse.”

The muscle had to be carved at, manipulated around the tank so it could be affixed, flush, to the skin. The procedure was immensely painful for the subject and difficult for the surgeon. It was several hours before he was ready to fill the tanks and in that time Leonid seemed to be drifting in and out of his sedation. His mouth moved at one point.

The Alchemists had refused to give them sufficient vitalus for all four, though they had given them an extra set of tanks, and so they had all underfilled their own, to put into Leonid, in the hopes that it would help.

It did not do much, but they only learned that later.

[stellaralchemist]

The Story of Vadim

Who Once Had Friends

Vadim spent most of his morning drawing blood samples from the rats. He knew it was silly but he named the ones that lasted longer than a month. They were genetically engineered to develop tumors at an exceptional rate, but any that lasted that long deserved a name. It was a rare honor anyway. He was so engrossed with his data sheets he didn’t even notice Leonid come in and sit down in one of the spinning chairs.

“There’s lunch upstairs,” was the first thing that broke the spell Vadim was under and he looked up.

“Is there?”

“Yeah, I grabbed sandwiches when I was out. Hey, can you keep a secret?”

“Why? What is it?” Vadim asked and leaned back against the counter, holding King Athenasius VI in his hands and petting his head to keep him calm.

Leonid leaned back in his chair and produced a little box. It took Vadim a second, just a second, to work it out.

“You didn’t…” he muttered, leaning forward despite himself to see the thing.

“Of course I did! You don’t think I want to lose this pretty face, do you?”

“She’s going to flip if she finds out you took that.”

“Doesn’t matter. This time next week I’m switching to Doctor Gruzhnov’s team. I just need some help, I don’t want to do the injection myself. Needles make me queasy.”

“Lyona, mate, I don’t know… You’re not going to tell anyone I did it, are you?”

“No! Come on, look at me Dima. You’re the only one I can trust here. And you know I’ve got your back. We drank so hard we threw up into the same gutter. That basically makes us brothers.”

Vadim couldn’t debate that logic, as much as he wanted to. He returned King Athenasius VI to his cage and made his way over, giving the elixir a once-over. The strangeness of the day pervaded his thoughts. The colors felt wrong somehow, as though they were in sharper focus. When he was young his grandfather had died and he remembered the whole day, even before he had found out, all of it in technicolor. Today felt much the same, something was going to happen. Something important.

[stellaralchemist]

The Story of Vadim

Who Once Had Family

They turned on the television to watch the big speech, all huddled around. Vadim couldn’t place what was different in Leonid, he just seemed… healthier. Better. In his starched collared coat he seemed to stand straighter, his skin was clearer. He looked like a portrait of himself, a painting or a digital manipulation only one left to stand in the cluster with a smug smile and a sandwich in hand.

“Oooh, there he is. He’s so much more handsome than the pictures, you know,” Renata was saying, looking up from her texting.

“It’s the Elixir. All the pictures of him are from before,” Arseny pointed out.

“And he’s just going to look like that forever, that’s so mad,” Fedosiya said with a little whistle.

“Well we all are, that’s the point,” Leonid pointed out. No one else had noticed, Vadim supposed no one ever looked at anyone very closely. Unless they were having some sort of existential moment on a tram.

“I just can’t possibly wait! I heard Doctor Gruzhnov had an opening on his team, maybe I can switch,” Renata was saying, talking over the reporter. They did a great panning shot over the crowd and out of the corner of his eye Vadim noticed a little whirl of chaos in the center, a minute hurricane, but it was quickly forgotten. Lazarin stepped up to the microphone (“That’s his daughter on his shoulders,” Renata explained.) and just before he could speak there was some sort of commotion.

A woman was attacking the doctor and the screen quickly cut out, to some reporter Vadim vaguely recognized, as she sometimes read the news when he ate lunch.

“It’s probably just some crazy person. I heard some man was trying to sue because his kid died of cancer last week and they wouldn’t let him try it,” Arseny pointed out. “It was all over that free paper they have on the train.”

“Enclave Weekly? Oh come on, you know that’s a rag, right?” Renata sneered.

“Yeah, they can’t just lie though. It’s a true story.”

“Sure, whatever.”

“No, you can’t just lie in a paper. Someone would stop you.”

“You’re so st-”

“Could you be quiet for a second,” Fedosiya interjected harshly. Vadim found his eyes wandering back to the screen and the newswoman.

“-are asking that anyone still in possession of the Everlife Elixir please refrain from taking it until further advised. If you have taken the injection keep…” She was still speaking and her hand was trembling, just a little, but he could see it on this screen. He looked back at Leonid whose eyes were firmly forward.

Renata’s phone started to ring and she ducked away. “Okay, calm down, just… just calm down, tell me what’s wrong,” she was saying quietly, her words intermingled with the newswoman, she was still trembling.

“-Taken the elixir please remain calm and stay indoors-”

“-Slow down, he’s outside? Are the police not there? Why aren’t the police-”

“-Reports coming in now, oh Kemos, reports of accidents in the central-”

“-Arseny just talk to her she’s-”

“-Panic as, as, I just don’t think…”

“Turn it down!”

The voice that broke through the noise was Dr. Volescu, standing with her arms crossed in the doorway. Arseny dutifully muted the television just as it went back to clips of a fire. Vadim felt immediately calmer, the presence of management meant an adult had stepped in. He should tell her about Leonid, how he had had an injection, how…

Around him, it was decided that Renata and Arseny would go to get Raisa, who was trapped in her flat. That all felt very reasonable, Arseny was even serious about it as well. They’d probably all be at a wedding next spring.

[stellaralchemist]

The Story of Vadim

Who Once Had A Job

The morning of that fateful day he admitted there had been a strangeness to the air. He walked up the street to catch the bus and the sound of a shouting man overwhelmed the music in his headphones. When he turned his music down he found a man shouting in a phonebooth and felt immediately out of place. Had there always been a phone booth there? He had lived in this neighborhood for five years, had walked the same way to the same tram to the same office every work day and he had never noticed the dilapidated booth with its shouting man in a dingy coat.

What was stranger was that he seemed to be the only person to notice.

The rest of the enclave drifted by the shouting man, consumed with their own lives. He felt as though he were in a moment, Vadim and this shouting man who did not notice him were the only people alive in the world. They stood in a painting that moved around them.

With his headphones out he could hear the world better. Had he ever walked up this street without music ringing in his head? The cars passed with a  low roar, he heard a woman laugh across the street and conversation slide past him. The shouting man was obscured and muffled by his glass casing, over him a bell rung. Had there always been a bell there? A bird flew overhead.

When he reached the office he had listened to every word that was said by every passenger on the tram for fifteen minutes, he counted on his watch. A woman and man were discussing their budget for purchasing the elixir, a woman discussed her babysitter with another mother, they called the girl dumpy, with a round face. A baby was crying under its lace cover and two boys were pulling at each others’ ears.

He even smiled at the receptionist, when he got into the door; one of the security guards was chatting her up. He had never thought about it but she was very attractive, he could probably ask her out sometime. Maybe next week when they had finished this project. Dr. Volescu always had a party after a project was done, he could invite her to that, those were always good. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a date. Maybe two months ago? He’d forgotten to text her back and then it sort of fizzled. He’d had a good time, though. He was just bad at answering texts.

“Morning, Dima,” Fedosiya said when he set his bag down. She barely looked up from the computer. “Bit mad, isn’t it all?”

“Huh? Today? All a bit mad, I suppose,” he admitted and logged into the computer. Everyone else filtered in, Arseny just settling into his desk when Dr. Volescu passed by and shut the door of her office so hard it shook the glass.

“What’s in her ass?” Renata whispered over her yogurt.

“Guess,” Fedosiya replied. “It’s immortality day.”

“She’s just pissed she didn’t come up with it first,” Leonid observed and leaned back in his chair.

“Or she’s pissed that most of the company is out to go take it, I can’t believe she didn’t just give us the day off,” Misha muttered, hanging at the end of the table with his coffee. He was probably avoiding having to be locked in an office with that stormcloud all day. Vadim didn’t exactly envy him.

“Well, what do you expect?” Arseny asked and stirred his tea. “I can’t believe she forbid us taking it. I’m pretty sure she can’t do that. Legally I mean.”

“No,” Misha responded, the resignation heavy in his voice. “She can. She had me check. She can’t fire you from the company but she can drop you from the research team. Then you go into half-pay leave for three months and if no one picks you up on a team you’re gone. It’s all in the Employee Resource Handbook. Did none of you… read the…” he trailed off as he was met by blank stares. Vadim shook his head a bit and looked around the table. There was something else off.

“Renata’s not here. Think she’s taking it?” He asked, only to be met with a chorus of curious sounds and a short, awkward cough from Arseny.

“Er… No, I don’t think so... We broke up last night,” he explained and, under a wilting gaze from Renata cleared his throat. “She was really into equivars. She has posters. She has one with her parents. She’s a total Equivar Girl. It was weird! Every fucking conversation with her was about her equivar. She wanted to introduce me to Molly before I met her parents. She literally told me that if Molly didn’t like me we’d just have to break up. I just couldn’t do it.”

“Yeah, but, mate come on…” Vadim was saying despite himself. It was odd for an adult to have equivar posters. He probably would have broken up with her. Renata was openly glaring now.

“No, you don’t understand. And anyway we work together, it’s suffocating. Eight hours in the same place plus I was going to hers almost every night. I just can’t do it. And the equivars, mate…”

The conversation died out and Misha retreated to his desk in Dr. Volescu’s office.