This story was originally intended to be posted on /r/nosleep shortly after the end of COVID-19 lockdowns in the US.
Since the pandemic, we have slowly been transitioning back to our office space. My job can be done completely remotely, I'm a remote support technician, but we're run by old men from overseas, so it's all about showing your face, and self-sacrifice for your boss, and whatnot. And to add insult to injury, only the support department was required to be here more than once a week. This wasn't the first time I was feeling cynical about it either. I miss being near the comforts of my home while working.
I've always had a hard time with public restrooms. The one at my office was no exception. I was especially happy during the pandemic, as I have a condition that requires me to visit the bathroom a bit more often than most. One of the sales guys let me in on a secret: The downstairs bathroom of our building is a lot quieter. I followed the simple map he sketched on a post-it for me. My company was just part of the upstairs area, the downstairs area was apparently common ground, but most of my coworkers used the upstairs one right near our office. As such, I wasn't familiar with this area.
I went around a corner, down a long, narrow hallway. The florescent lights above were uncomfortably dim, a couple of the tubes were even flickering. I kept walking down the hall. It almost seemed too long to fit in the building. I went around another corner at the end. There was a set of stairs leading down around another bend, with a metal pipe railing. The drywall ended here, and the wall of the stairwell was bare concrete. The bathroom was supposedly on the first floor, but this looked like it was going to a basement. This is when I started to feel uneasy. Was that sales guy trying to pull a fast one on me? Was this some kind of prank? The line on the post-it ended only a little past these stairs.
I rounded the bottom of the stairs. My footsteps echoed in a way that felt especially desolate. The hallway before me was dark, with a single light about halfway down on the left side. One of those lantern-like emergency lights in a cage. It cast an eerie amber glow around the dank, cool hallway. The walls, floor, and ceiling were concrete. I couldn't see the other end, it was too dark and the light didn't reach. I really should have just turned back right then. I was already getting the heebie-jeebies. But my bladder was about to burst, and if I turned back now, I wasn't sure I'd make it to the upstairs bathroom.
I opened my phone to turn on the flashlight. I noticed there was no signal. No reddit on the toilet down here, I thought. The beam still didn't reach the other end. I kept on walking. I came to a large steel door, like the kind that's meant for a freezer. I really, really should have turned around.
I reached for the handle. It felt cold and sterile. It turned in my grip with a shrill scraping sound. The door made a similar sound as I pulled it open. It was a heavy door, and I'm a little guy. It took pulling with the weight of my whole body to get it to budge.
Warm air rushed out through the crack. I heard the hum of an electric fan inside a duct. A tiled floor below. I couldn't see, I reached to the side and found the switch. Flourescent lights came on.
There was a small area like a coatroom, except it was very sterile. The closets here were filled instead with scrubs, labcoats, goggles, gloves, and the like. There were metal benches and hooks on either side, bolted into tiled walls. There were a couple sinks, and grated drains in the floor, but no toilets. No trash cans or paper towels even, just a single hand blower between the sinks. At the end of the room, there was a plastic partition over a darkened doorway. I should have stopped right there and turned around, and then I'd be so blissfully ignorant.
On the first wall, on the left, there were covered tanks in rows, like in the fish section of the pet store. But these tanks were covered in thick white tarps, with a red glow eminating from inside, through holes made for tubes and wires. I pulled back the tarp of one at eye level. I saw the series of tubes and wires going into a fleshy ball in the middle of the tank. Red and orange LEDs ran very hot around it. I could feel the heat where the light touched my face. I could distinguish little veins, and pink flesh, but that was all. I thought, this must be for that heart implant company upstairs, and I probably shouldn't touch them. I let go of the tarp and turned to my right.
The bottom of the right wall was filing cabinets, with a simple wood countertop laid on them. There were some pens, papers, and folders strewn about. Above, a bulletin board with similar papers. A lot of them had the heading "THESEUS DARWIN PROJECT". I opened one of the folders to the first page.
The first page had a name, DOB, and an identifier number. It looked like some guy's medical records, but it had rubber stamps and censored text all over it like a secret file in some Cold War movie. I peeked on the next page.
It was indeed a medical record, from birth to present day, of this guy. but it also detailed his social life, his education, his business pursuits, and compared them to that of his parents. It did so to a very fine degree, minus the censored bits. There appeared to be copies of records from his shrink, but there were other parts that seemed more like observations made from afar and through surveillance. I kept flipping through. There were some recent printouts of work emails, social media posts, and text messages that he wrote. What would prompt them to spy on this seemingly random and harmless guy?
I flipped back to the beginning of the thick file. I'd missed the first sections beyond the identifying stuff on the first few pages. There were a few ultrasound photos. The captions identified them as belonging to his mother, and that must have been the guy himself in the picture. I flipped back a few more pages. The same random person, less developed, again in ultrasound. Then a few more. There was an image of a fleshy ball in a tank, just like the ones I was looking at before. Suddenly, I felt cold all over.
My hand flipped the next page back. I saw what appeared to be a genome map, identifying bits of his chromosomes as having belonged to his mom or his dad. The rubber stamp at the top said "FINAL DESIGN CANDIDATE", and another right below said "APPROVED". I turned another page back. The details of the mother and father, including their names, birthdates, blood types, place of residence, place of employment, and more. Two reference numbers for their files. My eyes darted back to the mother. Her place of employment was my company, just upstairs. The father's company was just up the road on the other side of the office park. My shivering hands placed it back where I found it.
Then, I realized, my father had worked in this office park when I was little. And my mother had worked at a few nearby offices. The connections started popping off in my head, but before I could begin to piece them together, I pulled open a filing drawer. I quickly saw there was a correlation between the ID number and the DOB, so I was able to narrow it down rather fast. I had to know.
There it was, my name. My file. I opened it, shaking. I could no longer feel the urge to pee. There I was. Every detail. My DNA, designed from the start for technical prowess and social anxiety. My misshapen inner ear bones, to keep me from traveling too far. The scissors incident in kindergarten had been engineered to condition me. Many things had. They had set me up in elementary classrooms with other subjects of theirs, which they had wired to be aggressive and pick on the weakest link. There was excruciating detail on my parents' divorce when I was nine. They engineered that to make sure that my brother and I wouldn't inherit any property because they sold the house, keeping us in a certain economic tier. There was an engineered reason why my teenage dating pursuits never worked out. They even had transcriptions of the brutal breakups. They forced a teacher to flunk me so that I couldn't get into a good college, so that I would have to stay local and take a low-paying job, here. I was designed with my mother's creative and social instincts, and my father's technical ones. Designed into slavery.
It happened. I pissed myself. I freaked out and ran, as quickly as I could, back upstairs. I didn't even go to my office. I just left the building and went home, told my boss I was feeling sick. It wasn't until I got out of the car that I realized I forgot to put my file back in its drawer.