Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

way and that, the dark empty eye-sockets red and jagged where he’d torn the eyelids away, too. And then he laughed, bitterly, painfully, and screamed, “I can still see!”
    Something hit the camera and knocked it over on its side. The screaming man disappeared, and all that could be seen was an area of blood-spattered floor. The scream rose and rose, beyond all human limits and meaning, then the screen went blank.
    “That’s all there is,” said Melody. “I don’t . . . that’s all there is.”
    “What did he see?” said Happy. “What could make a man do that?”
    “He must be dead, now,” said Melody. “He must be dead, mustn’t he?”
    “Poor soul,” said Kim. “What do you think he was seeing there, at the end?”
    “Don’t let it get to you,” JC said firmly. “Look around you. We just saw this laboratory, this whole floor, being wrecked. People screaming and dying. But look around you . . . there’s no evidence any of that happened. Do you see any blood, any bodies, or wreckage? Happy, are all our minds being interfered with, to stop us seeing the real lab?”
    “No,” Happy said immediately. “I’ve got my mental shields hammered down so tight God Herself couldn’t see inside my mind. And I’m seeing the same lab as the rest of you.”
    “So what did happen here?” said Melody. “Did someone . . . clean it all up? Or was the recording a fake?”
    “What we saw on the screen was real,” JC said slowly. “I’ve no doubt about that. But there was no time stamp on the screen. So who’s to say when it happened? I mean, it must have been after the drug trial, but . . . not enough time has passed to clean up the mess we saw. We’re getting conflicting information here, people. I can’t believe that’s an accident. Someone wants to keep us off-balance.”
    “I’ve found something else,” said Melody. Her voice was still shaking from what she’d seen, but her manner was as calm and efficient as ever. It took a lot to throw Melody. “More notes on the drug testing, from one of the doctors involved. He’s putting himself on record as being opposed to the LD50, but only after it had been administered. There’s a lot of mea culpa here, some of it almost hysterical, but . . . Yes. Here, he’s talking about ReSet, and how it didn’t just re-establish the human body’s factory settings. It went much further than that. You’ve all heard about junk DNA, right? All the DNA in the human genome that’s been there forever, but we haven’t got a clue what it does. What it’s for. ReSet awakened, or activated, all of the human junk DNA and set it to work making it do what it was originally supposed to do. To make us . . . into what we were supposed to be. There’s another vid file. Do you want to see it?”
    “Not really,” said Happy. “But we have to. We need to know what’s going on.”
    “Good soldier,” said JC.
    “Shut up, or I will slap you,” said Happy.
    This time, the doctor’s head and shoulders immediately filled the screen. Middle-aged, balding, in a white lab coat too small for him. There was a spray of fresh blood across the left side of his neck and shoulder, clearly not his. His face was deathly pale from shock, his eyes wide, his mouth trembling. He looked quickly about him, as though not sure he was alone, but there were none of the unnerving background sounds from the first vid file. The doctor squirmed in his chair and took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself. He stared into the camera and started talking, no name, no introduction, no build-up. Just the stumbling words of a man desperate to be heard.
    “ReSet never was what they told us it was. Curing problems in the human body was only the first step. The bait in the trap, to get us interested. We weren’t told what it would do next, what it was always meant to do. ReSet had another purpose. He knew. He knew that all along. That’s why he funded us. ReSet was intended to make us all that we could be. All we were meant to be. We were never meant to be human. Not merely human. Somehow, part of our DNA got shut down, suppressed, frozen in place. So instead of becoming what we were meant to be, we got stuck part of the way. What we know as Humanity was only meant to be a stepping-stone on the way to something else. But now ReSet has helped finish the job! Taken the test subjects all the way to the end of the line! They’re not human any more. They’re the New People. That’s what they are. Not