I am sure many of you are familiar with the concept of closed cities, particularly as part of the Soviet Union or to some extent even current Russia. But for those who aren’t, they are (as a quick Wikipedia search would also tell you or as their name quite explicitly suggests) cities, that hold a particular statute because of their strategic importance, which can stem from various resources such as uranium and nuclear power or production of different goods like weaponry and heavy machinery. Logically, there is a need to protect these cities mainly from foreign threats (or from secrets getting out). Therefore, these cities hold a particular statute and there is restricted access to them and in most cases, for those inside, restricted access outside.
Even if you have heard about these places, I am sure that you are most likely not aware that some existed also outside of Soviet Russia, or at least mine did (it was still in a communist country though). It is, however, not the only special thing about my city. What was also special about my former home (for merely 10 years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall) is the fact that almost nobody knew that it existed and the majority of the people that did, weren’t aware of its precise location, including my humble self. Again logically, this city was shut down after the iron curtain was lifted, but as far as I know, it is still standing, not so tall, hidden somewhere within the Carpathian mountains.
By now, if you have at least a tiny bit of curiosity encoded within your fragile DNA, you must be asking, what was the purpose of this city and what was the writer of this story doing there? Well, I will tell you at least a fraction of it before I join the great majority (or simply put, die). So quite likely this will be a series, but there is a small probability that it won’t be so.
I won’t prolong this any longer and just get to it straight. The purpose of our facility was to create an obedient nation. You see, in the seventies, the supreme leaders were well aware that even with their greatest attempts at social engineering there will still be a rebellious spark among their people making them thirsty for freedom, democracy and capitalism. So in desperation, they turned to a different kind of engineering (calling it this way for metaphorical reasons, what we did was sometimes related to engineering, other times less so). Our goal was to basically create a citizen that wakes up, goes to work where they don’t necessarily need to be that productive, comes home, eats some potatoes with cabbage and perhaps some meat from a can, watches the national television, on special occasions joins a parade to celebrate the regime, before Christmas stands in the queue for oranges and is content doing all that.
As I already suggested, we experimented with a lot of different means to achieve the set goal. This required the involvement of a significant amount of experts ranging from various kinds of biologists, and chemists to, believe it or not, historians and mythologists. Being a neuroscientist, I could consider myself one of the few lucky people that got to participate in most of the experiments. The reason for this universal need for my expertise is simple. Whatever we did, the most important outcome was the impact on the nervous system of the subjects and subsequently on their behaviour. You may have deduced that we experimented also on human subjects (all dissidents of the regime), but most of our work didn’t reach the level of human trials. However, this story isn’t about the horrors that those people experienced. This is a story about three of our experiments that got horribly wrong and frightened me to my core. Also, these stories will go from the least frightening one to the most frightening one at least from my subjective point of view. Just because I like building up expectations.
So, the first of these three experiments (which certainly is no surprise for at least some of you) concerned parasites. Our amazing parasitologists and geneticists managed to take the best of a lot of worlds and put together a behaviour-altering parasite (out of other parasites usually preying on various animals, mainly insects) creating a new species that was supposedly fit to help us achieve our goal on humans. Please, don’t ask me how they managed to do that. Either way, this project got to an advanced stage, and therefore, I was brought to observe the brain activity of our human subjects and everything looked absolutely perfect. Well, until it didn’t.
Because of my detailed notes, I know it was a stereotypical summer day that some people may call beautiful and we thought we were lucky because it was supposed to be the first day of our field trials. Our chosen subject was a woman, and if I may express some pure subjectivity, an absolutely beautiful woman. She had the kind of fair skin and soft features typical for a lot of Slavic women. But especially those eyes I will never forget, green, just like the thick forests encompassing our city. However, it wasn’t important as at that point there wasn’t a single original (or perhaps even autonomous) thought behind them. She was perfect.
We took her (the subject) out to the city, which despite being closed, could still perfectly provide the semblance of real life. From the start, everything went well. She wasn’t interested in anything outside the formal schedule that we presented her with, a schedule, which was identical to the daily routine of the ideal citizen. She followed it to the latter and didn’t interact with anyone outside the small talk about the beautiful weather.
It all went wrong when we walked past an artificial lake serving as the water reserve for our facility. After we got close to the water, the subject started sprinting towards it. A few members of our team, including the lead scientist on the project (for the purpose of this story we will call her Mrs Horvath), went immediately after her. I, on the other hand, was doing my job and observed her behaviour from a safe distance. When they tried to pull the subject out, she became very aggressive, almost ferocious and managed to free herself while slightly wounding Mrs Horvath. Afterwards, the subject swam away at the speed of an Olympic athlete and disappeared from our sight. We spent half an hour calling out for her but to no avail, so we decided to reinforce ourselves with more colleagues and created a proper search party.
After spending hours and hours searching for her, it inevitably got dark. We were asked to call it a night with the plans to continue in the morning. However, I decided to stay a bit longer to enjoy the fresh night air and to try to calm my nerves. As luck would have it, I caught a glimpse of something resembling a human shape (it was hard to be certain in the dark) moving, or perhaps floating, close to the edge of the lake. This time, I didn’t just stay on the side to watch from a safe distance. Instead, I ran to the water. Where I thought I had seen a human being just mere seconds ago, I, at first, found nothing. But then I felt it. Something I would describe only as mucous and thin, but somehow strong, judging but the pressure it exerted on me, touched my leg. And then I also saw it. It was a long worm-like creature moving clumsily in the water. From its body, it was releasing tiny fragments that were only visible, because they were illuminated by the unusually bright moon. I immediately ran out of the lake and hurried to Mrs Horvath’s office (I would expect her to be there even at this late hour trying to figure out what had happened) to share what I had just witnessed, because, despite having an idea about the explanation for it, she was the expert. However, the conversation didn’t go the way I would expect.
As I already mentioned, I kept meticulous records of almost everything at the time, often including conversations. I also transcribed (not verbatim as my memory isn’t perfect) and now translated our discussion:
Me: “Mrs Horvath, I think I just saw our parasite in the lake laying eggs.”
Mrs Horvath: “Uh huh.”
Me: “Would you like me to elaborate?”
Mrs Horvath: “Wasn’t the weather just lovely today?”
Me: “Excuse me?”
Mrs Horvath: “Oh, sorry! What were you saying?”
Me: “I think I just saw our parasite laying eggs in the lake.”
Mrs Horvath: “Thank you for letting me know. Have a good night.”
At that point, I left. I found the discussion strange, but I attributed this strangeness with the overall lethargic attitude of Mrs Horvath to her being exhausted from the events of the day. I would talk to her the day after at the search party either way.
However, the following day, Mrs Horvath didn’t show up for the search party. We collectively thought (or perhaps it was the result of the groupthink effect) she decided to work instead, so we didn’t even think of looking for her. On the other hand, we considered ourselves lucky when we finally discovered the subject. Or as lucky as someone could be in relation to discovering a dead body. Our pathologist (affirmative, we indeed had a pathologist on site), almost immediately concluded that the subject, to no surprise, simply drowned. Due to the events of yesterday, I followed him to the morgue. I was interested in whether there were any parasites still present in the subject’s body and as I suspected, there weren’t any.
With that information, I, once again, set out to Mrs Horvath’s office but she wasn’t there. Finally, I became worried and we soon had another search party on our hands. It, logically, led us to the lake, where a gruesome, yet familiar, scene played out right in front of my eyes. A significant portion of the party, following the previous behaviour of the subject, sprinted towards the water and quickly got lost. The rest of us, those that seemed unaffected by this hysteria, tried to stop them, but to no avail.
Immediately, several hypotheses arose in my head: (1) Mrs Horvath got infected with the parasite when she was wounded by the subject explaining the behavior from yesterday; (2) others must have gotten infected at a later stage possibly from simply drinking tap water in the facility; (3) the parasite can develop quickly in the human body; (4) the parasite, in the last stage of its development seeks out water, where it lays eggs and while doing so, kills the host; and finally, the most frightening of the hypotheses, (5) at least a portion of the people that are left, must have the parasite growing inside of them. There was also one important question, does it include me?
I had no time to waste. I explained the situation to my colleagues, advised them not to drink for the time being, and ideally confine themselves out of the view of any larger bodies of water. Yet again, I found my way to the office and this time also inside the adjoined laboratories of Mrs Horvath to search for a cure for this parasite (before you go after me asking why I had not searched for her in the laboratories before, they were perfectly within earshot from the office, I had called our to Mrs Horvath when I been looking for her previously, but there had been no response). As a general rule, we tried to have countermeasures for our experiments, but sometimes it was simply not possible. Therefore, I was not even certain it existed.
When I got there, I found the laboratories in a state of disarray. It seemed that perhaps Mrs Horvatch had arrived at the same conclusion I did and tried to makeshift a cure last minute with her genius mind slowly slipping away from her. I started to feel my blood run cold out of fear, but I tried either way. After all, it was not only me in danger, it was all of my other colleagues as well. After approximately an hour I found a note with a barely legible scribble leading me to believe that such a cure does indeed exist. Though, I would have to make it myself following the chaotic instructions on the note using my now uncontrollably trembling fingers.
While making it, my worries were confirmed as I started to feel less and less focused on the task at hand. My fears increased even more (at the instances when I could actually feel fear) when I stepped onto some broken glass and a liquid exactly the same color as the one I was making. At that point, I assumed Mrs Horvath even succeeded to create the cure but did not manage to inject herself before losing it completely. Now, however, I know exactly what had happened to her and soon you will as well. When I finished the solution, I searched for a sterile needle to inject myself, but I, unfortunately, did not manage to finish that simple task. I only remember laying my eyes on the sole window in the laboratory. To my misfortune, there was a small pond clearly visible behind it. My mind went blank the moment I spotted it.
Mercifully, I recovered consciousness a while later with one of our research assistants at my side as they managed to revive me after they found me in the pond with no clear signs of life. Apparently, they came looking for me in the laboratory after they had not heard from me for a suspiciously long amount of time. For that, I am very grateful to this day. On the other hand, unfortunately, near my lifeless body, they also found the one belonging to Mrs Horvath. It was significantly colder with rigor mortis already setting in.
Afterwards we managed to recreate enough cure to inject everybody that was left. We also set out to retrieve the bodies of our former cohabitants. What worries me to this day, however, is that after we finished, three of our colleagues were still unaccounted for. So if you live somewhere in the Carpathian mountains and there were some inexplicable drownings in your area sometime in the eighties, you now know how they were possibly caused.
Also, in case you are curious, this project was abandoned after the incident mainly due to the main brain of the operation being dead, but do not worry, I have two more stories, I would like to share with you that may help quench your appetite for fear and at the same time unburden me of my past at least by a small amount.