1 . Name: Maenad @ 2011-03-03 20:26

The BLU Medic finished lining up his surgical knives, each sterile instrument in its proper place, each shining blade aligned perfectly with its neighbor. The Medic was an organized man, he liked to see everything in rows and alphabetized (color coordinated, too, if he could get away with it). Some days, when there wasn’t much else to do, he could be found in the kitchen, lining up the condiments in descending order from most to least popular, with Sniper’s Vegemite at the very back of the line.

With his instruments in order, he turned towards the operating table. It normally took three people to do this level of surgery; the doctor, the assistant, and the anesthesiologist. He was getting by with only himself. Dangerous, yes, but it wasn’t the first time he had done this sort of thing solo, and to reveal his actions to anyone else would jeopardize his studies. ‘And we can’t have that,’ he thought to himself as he checked the patient’s vitals.

It had taken a lot to get the RED scout strapped down and sedated. He was a kicker. ‘And he bites…’ Medic frowned. Well, this time he had been able to get his fingers out of the way before getting nipped. Medic readjusted his rubber gloves with a snap and reached for a scalpel.

~*~

“Hgnnn….fuck.…”

“The first thing you do is swear. That is very revealing, you know.” Medic smiled widely as Scout groggily tried to raise his head. The boy was strapped down tight to the gurney. Medic was sitting at his bedside, clipboard in hand.

“Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you have some rage issues that need working through?”

The Scout turned his head and blinked at him, still a bit stupid from the after-affects of the anesthesia. Then he groggily looked down at his chest. “…the fuck?” He didn’t stay groggy for long. He looked back up at the doctor with a mixture of horror and violent fury twisted on his face. “You fucking shitfaced cocksucker! What the fuck did you do to me?”

Medic smiled indulgently and made a mark on his clipboard. “You certainly do bounce back quickly, don’t you, Häschen?”

Scout sputtered and tried to tug his arms out of their bindings. “Gimmie back my fucking clothes you Nazi psycho!”

Medic frowned. “Stop flailing, David, you are going to pull out your stitches.”

“Fuck you, freak, I…” Scout snapped his mouth shut and blinked at him. “David?” he asked.

Medic smiled again, letting the smugness he felt creep into his expression. “Ja, I know your name, and if you can manage to shut up for one moment, dummes Kind, then I will answer your first question.”

Scout clenched his teeth and glared at the German. Medic raised an eyebrow and made a note of the response on his clipboard. It was a bit unusual that the Scout listened to him the first time he told him to stop talking. Perhaps the anesthesia dosage was a tad high?

“Yes, well, as to what was done to you while you were unconscious…” The Medic reached for the small side table to his right. With a pair of surgical tweezers, he picked up a tiny computer chip, no bigger than half the size of a pinky finger nail, from where it sat in its sterile dish. “Do you know what this is?” he asked the Scout, holding the chip up for him to see.

Scout frowned and tried to focus on the tiny chip. “What, a spy camera or something?”

“Close.” Medic nodded. “This was the monitor installed over your right ventricle in your vena cava. It keeps track of your heartbeat and sends the information back to your base.”

“My right ventriloquist vena whata?”

“Right ventricle in the vena cava,” Medic corrected. He put down the chip. “And, of course, now that it is no longer registering your heartbeat, you may as well be dead.”

“Wait, that thing was inside my heart?”

‘Eyes as big as dinner plates,’ Medic smiled fondly. Precious little David was so easy to impress at this stage. The next couple of weeks were going to be very fun. “Nein, it was near your heart. Now, David, a question: Did you ever wonder how the respawn machine works?”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Be patient,” the Medic leered, “and answer the question.”

Scout swallowed nervously. “I don’t know, chucklenuts, you die and then you wake up in the machine and then you go and kill more people. Now give me back my fucking clothes and get me out of here.”

Medic ignored the last part. “Dummkopf. Did you think this was a video game or something? Nein, when you are dead, you are dead. The respawn machine does not bring you back to life.”

“You’re off your fucking gourd, man.”

“Quiet. This is the important part.” Medic’s grin got wider. He was enjoying this quite a bit, but the best part was yet to come. “The respawn machine is not a conqueror of life and death. The respawn machine is a cloning machine.” He took a moment to bask in the expression of utter incomprehension on the Scout’s face.

“Every night, the scanners in your bed record that day’s memories, and when this little chip no longer registers your heartbeat, the machine wakes up one of your clones.”

“I…” The Scout’s eyes widened, “fuck, Doc, are you saying there’s another me running around outside?”

“Hmm, you figured that out faster than usual, Häschen.” Medic calmly made another note on his clipboard. “Interesting.”

“That’s fucking crazy, man!” Scout was wildly shaking his head side to side. “No fucking way, man, shit!”

“We shall see.” Medic rose from his seat and walked to the large metal cabinet directly behind the gurney that Scout was strapped to. He opened the double doors, revealing shelves full of bandages and dark amber vials. Medic fit his fingers into a seam at the corner and, with one strong yank, shoved aside the shelving. It disappeared into the wall, leaving a gaping entrance to a darkly lit hallway.

He walked back to the foot of Scout’s gurney. “Shall we then?” He grinned at the glaring teenager.

“Fuck your mother.”

“Tsk, tsk. Keep up that attitude and I will have to cut off your feet, Häschen.” Medic chuckled and pushed the gurney into the secret passage.

~*~

“Do you know the problem with most physical and psychological experiments, David?” Medic asked cheerfully as he pushed David along the dimly lit hall, his jackboots clicking sharply against the cement floor.

“How much longer am I gonna have to listen to you yak, asshole?” Scout grumbled as he stared sullenly at the ceiling.

‘For a long time.’ Medic’s grin widened. “The problem is that there are too many variables. People are too different. Herr Mengele did his work with identical twins, but there aren’t enough twins to go around. What I need for my experiments is, well…”

They had come to a door. Medic left Scout for a moment to open it, then dragged him inside. “Let me just turn the gurney around, and you will see.” Medic gave Scout an almost fatherly look of affection, and then did just that.

There was a pause.

“WHAT THE FUCKING HELL!”

Medic chuckled, casting a fond eye at the rows of cages lining the room. Neat, tidy, and perfectly organized; the Medic liked things organized. The cages were tall enough to stand in and wide enough to hold a narrow cot with a small amount of space left over. A few of the Scouts in the cages looked up at them listlessly, the bandages wrapping various parts of their anatomy looking ghostly in the shadows. The one with his mouth stitched shut was trying to glare a hole into Medic’s face. Medic smiled back at him, then caught the eye of the Scout in the cage next to his. The Scout flinched and looked away, drawing his knees up to his chin. Even though, with only a few bruises, he seemed to be the least damaged of the group, he was the only one trembling enough to rattle his cot.

Various experiments, not all of them showing the expected results. He was still waiting for the long term data from the two he had sewn together last week. They were in the third cage down on the left side. The Scout next to them, the one missing his feet, was staring blankly at the corner with dead eyes. One of them was crying softly in the back.

“Hey, man,” whispered the occupant of the closest cage, nodding at the Scout strapped to the gurney. Scout made a strangled sound in response. Medic looked down at him with a smile. This, watching the expression of horrified shock twist into sick fear on the Scout’s face, this was his favorite part of the introductory stage. “This is what science is about, David,” Medic explained quietly. “Creating a hypothesis, testing it, and then testing it again to compare the results.”
For once, Scout seemed completely unable to make a sound.

Finally, after a few false starts, he managed to croak out,
“Why…the fuck…?”

Medic ruffled the Scout’s short brown hair. “Why? Well, I do this because I am a man of science.” He stepped to the end of the gurney and began pushing the Scout down the hall of cages. “And that, David number eleven, is the only reason I need.”