Looking Through Another Kidnapped Pair Of Eyes

20261003

Written for the Second Indulgence Day 2

In Arnold’s defence, it was perfectly reasonable to assume that someone on the university campus, wearing a university branded polo shirt, walking around in broad daylight asking students to sign up as research participants, was affiliated with the university and everything had been properly checked and vetted and such.
And even with having made that assumption he conscientiously read the consent form they handed him, and found nothing out of the ordinary. Put down your address and contact details, did you have any of the following health conditions, acknowledge that to be able to carry out the experiment properly we can’t tell you much upfront, and if you were selected to participate you’d receive a coupon please choose one from the list.
Like any good student Arnold was enthusiastic about science and free food, so put his details down, chose the coupon for his favourite pizza chain, and carried on with his day.
Nobody contacted him. But then, they never said they would.
It was almost a week later that Arnold woke feeling disoriented. His head was fuzzy. He couldn’t move his limbs. His room was set up all wrong. There was a strong stink of antiseptic making him want to sneeze, but his nose was numb.
And he was looking at himself.
Ah, Arnold thought, I’m having a nightmare.
That was, after all, the only possible explanation for all this. For the machinery he could see strapped to his head and chest and wrists. For the fact he seemed to be in a lab. For the figures surrounding him, their body swathed in unmarked lab coats and nitrile gloves and their heads hidden behind mirrored face shields.
“Doctor? I think Subject B is awake.”
Unease resurfaced in Arnold’s mind as these words, crisp and just a little too taut to be truly calm, sunk in.
Subject B? Was that… him?
“Blast it, I told you redheads need more anaesthetic!”
That was the right kind of nonsense to make Arnold hope he was in fact dreaming. Because he was blond, and had been his whole life. But his gaze instinctively drifted towards the angry speaker, and as it did, he realised that he was strapped to a bed. Hooked up to dozens of wires. Just like he could see himself being. But… but…
The arm resting on the blanket, definitely connected to him, had ginger arm hair.
He…
He wasn’t having an out of body experience. Or dreaming. He was looking at him own body through someone else’s eyes!
“Subject B’s vitals are spiking! Emergency dose!”
Numbness oozed into his right arm and spread upwards. His limbs felt too heavy, the straps too solid, this oxygen mask meant he couldn’t even scream as the darkness descended once more-
~ * ~
If Arnold had made a habit of drinking at all, he would’ve assumed that he’d woken up with a dreadful hangover and the scattered, terrifying fragments he remembered were a wild nightmare. But he rarely drank, and certainly hadn’t last night, because Friday night was when he wrote essays.
He dragged himself out of bed and over to the window. Examining, in the painfully bright morning light, the spot on his right wrist where he remembered the numbness hitting his system.
Yes. The wound was small, it could easily be mistaken for a popped pimple, but there was an injection site. Arnold took as good a picture he could using his phone camera in his non-dominant hand. No, it wasn’t just that, and it wasn’t just the fog in his head; his limbs felt… dislocated. Like he was having to get used to them again.
Now what?
This… he had to report this. But he was going to sound crazy. And… that person had been wearing university gear (admittedly, stuff you could buy in the library shop) and walking around collecting signatures and stuff in the middle of a school day.
What if the university was in on this? Especially since, if he had been in a lab last night, they must’ve taken him out of his dorm room.
He shuddered and sat down hard on the bed. Staring at his door, which was definitely still locked. For all the good that’d done. No way anyone would bother breaking in, both to the dorm block and students’ rooms, to… suck out their brains and swap them?? Or whatever it was that had been done to him last night.
Wait. That was a thought - how many redheads were attending the uni? If they’d only collected ‘participants’ from here… he might be able to find the other person. See if they’d also woken up disoriented with weird memories.
Yeah. Better to sound crazy to other students, rather than staff. Especially staff who might be connected to using students as lab rats.
So he grabbed his laptop and opened up the student directory. Couldn’t search by anything other than name, so he’d just have to browse all the photos until he found a lead. Ugh. Fine. Not like he felt up to eating breakfast anyway.
Oh, that was a thought. Had…?
No, he still hadn’t received an email or text about ‘being selected’.
“Bastards could’ve at least given me the pizza they promised…”

Prompt was “You volunteer to test a new invention. The inventor won’t tell you what it’s supposed to do. You wake up the morning of the test and realise it’s already in progress. What is the invention, and what does it do to you?”