Insatiable A Dark Romance

My leg is throbbing. It’s always worse after a day of walking around, and when I’m alone with nothing to distract from the pain.

I look at the vial again. And I start to think.

Scientists throughout history have tested their inventions on themselves. We wouldn’t have a polio vaccine if Salk hadn’t dosed himself and his family. Hoffman tested LSD on himself. And I guess the Curies technically discovered the effects of radiation on themselves too, albeit far too late. So, will taking this make me a Salk or a Curie? There’s no way to know.

What I do know, is that I’m in pain.

Pain that will never go away. Pain I’ll never adjust to. Because it is the pain of death, creeping slowly through my body one little bit at a time.

Nobody is here to stop me from putting the vials into my bag. And nobody blames me when I head home early. Nobody ever thinks to suspect the man they pity. I’m too pathetic to worry about as I leave the lab with thousands of dollars’ worth of illicit, unapproved, highly toxic drug.

Regenermax is stable at room temperature, so it won’t need any special handling. I have enough to treat a single person for months. At this stage, I’m not necessarily intending on taking it myself. Right now, I just want it to survive. This is all I have worked for, and I know they’ll destroy it if I leave it behind. That’s not going to happen.

I retreat home, to the apartment that is too small and too dark to ever be nice. Small spaces save money. They’re also easier to get around in when you’re caught in the throbbing throes of your nerves sending panicked signals, the same way they have for many years, never really learning the nuances of this broken frame. My body rejects my injuries. It wants to be strong again.

I microwave dinner. I avoid my cell phone and the text messages I am sure will already be piling up. I don’t want to be part of the world anymore. I want to escape from the events of the day, the bitterness of defeat not because I couldn’t formulate a treatment, but because a bureaucrat wouldn’t sign off on it.

I get angrier and angrier with every passing hour. This is bullshit. This doesn’t make sense. I want to take my cane and beat the hell out of them for stopping the next phase of trials.

The vials are still in my bag. I start to wonder what’s stopped me all this time. I could have started taking this weeks ago, but I was waiting for official trials. Official results. I was playing by the rules. I was trusting others to do the right thing. In the end, it was pointless. In the end, I have only myself to blame and myself to cure.

Earlier, in the laboratory, I wanted to drink one of the vials. But it was daytime then, too bright to entertain that behavior. Light suppresses illicit impulses. The dark of night is freeing.

Nobody will ever know that I took a dose. And if I can prove that the formulation works in humans, who have far more advanced capacity for emotional regulation than rats, then perhaps trials can be put back on the table.

Or at least, I’ll be able to walk without pain.

I began this journey in the attempt to help many millions of people. In the end, I might only be able to help myself.

The decision is already made. It feels like it was made a very long time ago. Almost as if it was inevitable. Maybe some part of me knew how this would end even before I began. I feel a sense of fate sinking through me. Not the airy-fairy type of fate people swing crystals to, but the rock-solid connections of cause and effect that inextricably lead from one thing to another. The moment I started working on this medicine, I was going to end up taking it.

It’s just a matter of following through.

I uncap a vial. Think about whether it would be better to mix it with something or do it straight, like a shot. I choose shot.

It hits the back of my throat. I swallow immediately. There’s a metallic sensation around the back of my teeth that spreads unpleasantly across my tongue in the aftermath, but it’s not too bad.

I settle back down into my chair and I wait.

Five minutes in, it feels as though absolutely nothing has happened. The dose I took should have been more than enough, and in rats the effects seemed to be somewhat immediate even if they took a few hours to days to fully manifest.

I wait, watching the clock. Waiting to feel better. Waiting to feel worse. Waiting to feel… anything at all.

It turns out that there’s something worse than having my life’s work shot down by a paper pusher. It’s finding out that it never worked at all.