Chapter 16: Experimentation

A wreck? Janet froze. The owner of the hotpot restaurant was a wreck. He was the same kind as Janet. So he wasn't sick at all, but a natural physical decay. Janet had looked up some information on mutilations. Everyone was born with a genetic test. After genetic screening, genetic defects would be detected. The side effect of all this technology was that it predicted your future directly and very accurately. Genetic diseases could be diagnosed immediately after birth, and even the approximate future life expectancy could be detected. Bioroids, cyborgs, and replicants were actually artificially created species. The defects they produced were more like operational errors on an assembly line, and as long as they were mass-produced, there were bound to be some that were not up to snuff. Genetic agents could improve defective products, but the effect varied from person to person, and there was no guarantee that they would be no different from normal people. "I don't know how much I can remember; my memory has become confused since I came in," the man's voice said over the recording. "Hailey told me earlier to write down my memories while I was awake; she's been keeping a journal every day lately. But I live with Tony, and I can't write; I can only record on the toilet seat. If you hear it, you don't have to call the police for me because you probably won't be able to walk out of here either." Hailey would be the cashier, and the person recording could be another employee. Janet pushed open the door. Behind the door, it was very cluttered. A lot of white plastic cloth was hanging from the ceiling all the way to the floor. Janet closed the door behind her. The room was large, with two rows of shelves on either side of the wall, and the white plastic sheets hindered Janet's view. Janet moved forward cautiously with her gun in hand while listening to the recording on her headphones. "We're usually under the store manager's control, and we've never even seen what the boss looks like. That day, Tony asked me to help carry a giant healing bin into the basement. I only saw the boss; he was half paralyzed and couldn't even stand up." "I thought it was a shame that such a young owner was disabled at the time. Tony told me to keep it a secret and not to tell anyone, saying that it would be a catch for the competition if I did. I knew that the store's good business made many people jealous, so I kept it to myself, and it wasn't really any of my business anyway." "But that day, I was resting alone in the staff quarters when I suddenly saw a figure standing before me." "I woke up with a fright. As it turned out, I realized it was the boss standing at the end of my bed, staring at me. He seemed to be looking at a piece of meat." "I called out to him, and he didn't even respond to me and turned away. I was staring at him for a long time before I reacted. Wasn't the boss paralyzed? Why was he standing up? Later, I realized that he seemed to be doing some kind of experiment." Suddenly, Janet's boots seemed to have stepped on something; it was a glass bottle. Janet picked up the discarded medicine bottle, and the broken bottle read - Forever Pharmaceuticals. This should be a drug storage room. So Janet carefully picked up the plastic sheet and opened it. The shelves here were densely packed with medicines; there were injections, glass bottles of potions, and, surprisingly, a set of scalpels. Attached to the side was a pink card with a smiley face drawn on it—welcome to Forever Pharmaceuticals' free experimental program. The man's voice, mixed with electricity, continued to come through the headphones. "It was getting more and more wrong back there. The meat in the kitchen was getting stranger and stranger, the hot pot restaurant was getting more and more fragrant, I was getting more and more mentally ill every day, and my memories were all mixed up until one day." His voice stopped, and he spoke in a sobbing tone, "Hailey disappeared." "I offered to look for Hailey, but Tony didn't care. He immediately wrote job announcements for new employees, not only cashiers but also many cooks and waiters, but the store didn't even need that many employees." "I had the feeling that as soon as I died, someone else would be able to step in." Bang. Janet turned around, and her back hit something. In the darkness, something three meters tall stood inside the room, and part of it was pressed against Janet's back. The giant thing was shrouded behind a plastic sheet, like a monster looking down at her. Janet's instinct was to shoot immediately. But she quickly calmed down. She pointed the muzzle of her gun at the giant, her finger pressing the trigger. The monster looked down at him. Hold the fire, and don't act rashly in a contaminated area. "I wanted to call the police, I wanted to leave, but I always felt like everyone was watching me, Tony, the other employees, even the diners, they were watching me all the time. As soon as I move, they'll kill me. I can't even sleep well." "The boss is getting better and better; he's physically energetic every day and no different from a normal person. But the healthier he gets, the more scared I get; I feel like he's not human anymore. Today, he said that he wanted to close the store and concentrate on his illness, and he also said that the cost of the store's closure could be a bonus for a few of our employees." "I was hesitant when I heard a sum of money, thinking I should leave after taking the money." "Later, the store closed, but customers were still coming in late every night, and the store manager told us to serve them well." His voice got lower and shakier. "The customers started to get out of sorts. I saw a customer the other day stick his index finger into the hot pot and burn his whole finger, but he kept smiling." "It was like I was a murderer." Someone called to him on the recording, "Jack, where have you been hiding? Tony is looking for you." A man's panicked gasp was heard immediately afterward, and the recording suddenly stopped and ended. Ding. The system prompted that the mental level had dropped by 5 Janet suddenly reacted by saying that Jack's recording was a form of contamination. After listening to the recording, her mental state started to become unstable. The recording's pollution concentration was much higher than that of the diary, to the extent that an ordinary person might be brain-dead. She immediately turned off the recording, deleting the entire folder. She was affected by the mental pollution, so what was in front of her might not have been a monster at all. The most significant human fear was the fear of the unknown, and imagined fears killed people. With a clench of her teeth, she dryly ripped off the last plastic sheet with one hand. Sure enough, it wasn't a monster but a giant incubator! The three-meter-high culture silo was transparent all over, in the shape of a test tube, and the transparent glass had been violently smashed, and what was inside was already gone. What was in it? Jack's recording lasted a total of two minutes. Janet already had a rough guess in conjunction with the cashier's diary. The owner of the hot pot restaurant was a remnant, and he participated in the free experimental program of Forever Pharmaceuticals. But apparently, the experiment failed. Janet guessed that he might have turned into a contaminant. Employees Hailey and Jack are both mentally contaminated to varying degrees. Because Hailey and Jack were both mentally contaminated, what they said was not very credible. And there's no way to explain many things at the moment. The bell was still ringing inside the hotpot restaurant, which had been going on for six minutes. The concentration of contamination was getting higher, and Janet had to hurry. If the system said there was a survivor here, the unlucky survivor was probably close to brain death. Janet double-checked the incubation bin to make sure the contents had escaped. The light source was coming from a hole behind the incubator, where someone had cut a hole to see into the basement. Who did this? The hole in the ground revealed the basement. A warm orange light emanated from it, and Janet squinted to adjust to it. Pigman and the rest of the staff were gathered in the basement, kneeling in an orderly fashion. Pigman knelt at the front, the servers knelt behind him, and the customers knelt in the last row. They were well organized. At the very front was a hospital bed. A thing was lying on the hospital bed. A human-shaped mass of rotting flesh lay on the hospital bed; its body was writhing, and each piece of flesh seemed to be still growing. The rotten meat kept squirming and slowly overflowed the hospital bed. At this rate of growth, it might fill the entire hotpot restaurant. If she was not mistaken, the one lying on the hospital bed should be the boss. The Pigman led his employees to kneel before him and chant as if praying to God. While respectfully kneeling, Pigman took out his knife. What was this for? Suddenly, the Pigman's knife aimed at the man in the hospital bed and lopped off a piece of meat. The meat was still writhing after it left the body. The employee behind him took a black plastic bag and respectfully followed it. With each piece of meat cut off, the employee behind the scenes and the customer smiled with satisfaction. Janet: "WTF?" Those were the strange meat. Things were understood, and Janet had to leave the contaminated area immediately. Janet was just about to get up when she suddenly heard a clicking sound. It was a sound she was all too familiar with; someone had loaded a gun. A gun stuck out of the darkness and was pressed against the back of Janet's head. Sure enough, there was another person in this house.