With a smile, the fisherman hauled the huge fish into his little boat. The copper and grey scales almost twinkled in the early morning sunlight as the fish's powerful body flicked and thudded against the inside of the boat, desperate to escape. The animal was the length of the fisherman's leg and twice as thick, the biggest he'd caught since coming here. That had been a while now, hadn't it?
The fisherman pondered this while he unhooked the large barb from the fish's mouth. Just how long had he been out here? It couldn't have been that long, he didn't have any more fresh water to drink and there was only so long he could eat fish. But then, when did he last eat a fish? When did he last eat anything? He couldn't recall. For the first time in a while, the fisherman was concerned. There were a lot of things he'd forgotten recently.
He waved a hand dismissively as if to help drive home the point that it wasn't worth worrying about. He was out here now and had no reason to return to, well, anything. There was no-one on the land calling his name for him to return and no legendary sea monsters chasing him from the great deep blue. Out here he was happy. That was all that mattered.
The big fish was still flopping around in his boat, completely unnoticed by the fisherman. He scooped it up with both hands and tipped it overboard, the fish disappearing beneath the waves. If he kept throwing them back they'd get the idea and stop biting the hook in the first place.
There was something odd about fishing that distracted him from these thoughts; these doubts and questions of which there was no-one to give answer.
He baited his hook and cast it out again.
The fisherman smiled.
* * *
L/XT-0117159
BP: 120/80
HR: 62bpm
o2: 20
Resps: 16
Doctor Archer glanced the patient's heart monitor before making a note of the values on the chart in her hands. She looked up to the sleeping man and wondered once again what he would be like if he was awake. The man looked tiny in the huge hospital bed, his pale skin appeared to fade into the bright white bed sheets and the stubble on his head from where it had been shaved a week ago now seemed to be coming in a lot lighter than it was when it was removed.
She quickly wrote this observation down.
Jennifer Archer had grown quite attached to this particular subject, she'd even started calling him 'L' instead of his full designation: L/XT-0117159. It was a mouthful anyway, she figured, but the fact of the matter was that she wasn't entirely comfortable with all this. She'd been transferred from the best hospital in Washington to this laboratory as a neurological consultant but found herself breaking more and more moral boundaries each passing day and she was beginning to lose count of the human rights they were breaching. Dr Archer was starting to fear that she was losing the ability to care.
All of the things she did on a day to day basis were in the interest of amazing technological advancements that could better the human race and save millions of lives. In other parts of the lab they were developing cures for cancer and aids, some were illnesses that the common American citizen hadn't even heard of! Because of their methods they were condemned as evil doers and thus the government had sworn them to secrecy. They could tell no-one of what went on here in this facility, that was a shame. Just another effigy sacrificed in the flames of progress.
Dr Archer didn't regret what she did, the choices she made. She was rational, logical. There's a broad line between cruelty and necessity, she believed. Sure, it was a little grey around the edges, but in the eyes of the common man everything they did here was grey.
Maybe even in the very deepest black.
Still, she could not allow room for doubt. She was not in this to satisfy any twisted urges to bring pain and misery to innocent folk. Dr Bennett had suggested to her once that she remind herself of the fact that the man they were keeping in a coma was a criminal, a psychotic religious fanatic with a lust for blood - that he'd just as happily leap forth from his bed and bite out your throat as he would spread his lies about false gods and 'punish' the heathens.
Nice try, Archer thought. She didn't believe him, though. Charles was a man of lower moral standards than her, it didn't concern him that they might be experimenting on a perfectly innocent human being simply because of a few 'special properties' - as long as they benefit science of course. Still, he wasn't a bad man. He had tried to make her feel better by bending the truth, but the fact was that neither of them knew the first thing about this man and his personality. They had as much of his medical history as they could find (which wasn't much), but about the man himself? Nothing. There was an equal chance of him being a serial child molesterer as there was that he could have been a scientist trying to save lives, just like them.
On the other hand, the scars did make her wonder.
* * *
Was that... a light?
The fisherman peered over the side of the boat into the deep blue once more, only this time he thought he'd found something... something he had not anticipated. On the lookout for great fish, sea serpents, The Kraken, anything... fishy.
But not this.
Anything but this...
The light was little more than a faint yellow glow, though it seemed to be growing brighter by the minute. The fisherman had been watching for some time now and he was convinced that what he saw was somehow growing closer.
The darkness beneath seemed to be rising, somehow growing even darker than before. The fisherman cared not for himself or his boat, made no attempt to row away from this gargantuan lurker from the depths. He knew it would be a fruitless pursuit. No, this thing was huge, bigger than anyhing the fisherman had imagined; but the quest for answers was strong within him and he had no urge to run away from the thing he'd spent what felt like years looking for.
The fisherman felt that burning sensation in his chest once again, it felt like his flesh was being torn from his bones. He groaned in pain and held his chest with one hand, his other resting on the side of the boat. Nothing would make him miss this.
His fishing rod remained untouched, the fisherman hadn't picked it up in the hours he'd spent just watching. No, this was no time for fishing.
The mystery was about to become undone.
