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A follow-up to http://www.livejournal.com/users/scottums/2005/02/12/

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I don't trust elevators. How can you. You're relying on its indicators to tell you how many floors are being passed and what the destination is. All the travel is hidden from you. And the thing of it is, no one notices. People either space out or talk to the people next to them, but they trust the elevator to go from ten floors up or five floors down. All that time when the doors are closed in between is a blank.

And I like to check out blanks.

I, and others like me, explore the blank spaces that are on the maps, the places people never notice or have forgotten about. Or have deliberately hidden in plain sight. That's what I'm going after today.

Wethersfield Memorial Medical Center is a sprawling mass where it treats everything from lung cancer to acne. To handle the relentless march of modernization and people who have more and more medical complaints, it is in a constant state of construction. We have a list of construction firms that build secrets from panic rooms to underground bunkers. Doing a routine search of the various subcontractors for hospital construction, I noticed Williamson Construction was one. I doubted the Chief of Surgery needed a panic room, so whatever it had built should be interesting.

I started with the plans for the hospital. Since I'm only 13, I couldn't fake being a doctor with the white lab coat and a stethoscope. But keeping to visiting hours and carrying a flower basket works just as well. The hospital corridors are a chaotic mess of nurses rushing about, patients in beds, wheelchairs, or walking with IV poles. There was always a prevalent chemical odor that removed the smells of sickness. The thing was the absence made you notice it even more. Using a pedometer to track how big the floors were, I walked unnoticed taking sniffs of my flowers to keep my sanity.

Now to the elevators. Hospitals have a lot of them. Not just because a hospital is big and you want elevators to be convenient, but emergency personnel have to get to operating rooms, labs, and patients rooms fast. So there are elevators in some odd places. And I'm going to see if one goes to an odd place.

The elevator gives access to the seven floors of the north wing. The elevator itself has doors on the front and back for greater access and the buttons reflect this. Each floor except the seventh has a pair of button, for example '3' and '3R'. The seventh floor only gets one. However from the measurements I took and looking at the building itself, there is a section that can be accessed by the elevator rear doors. Of course, it's not listed on the hospital directory, but it's there.

I must explain something about myself. I have certain abilities not usually found among so called normal people. One is that locks unlock for me. Doesn't matter what kind from simple key locks to the latest biometric security systems, they want to open up and show me what they're hiding. Some people have looked into it to see if I'm some sort of fairy changeling or X-Men mutant. But they never can find the cause. Doesn't bother me much. I care only about the result.

So when I was alone in the elevator cab and it reached the seventh floor, I walked confidently to the rear doors. By all rights, I should have banged my face on the doors, but they opened up and I walked through the doors into a corridor like all the others in the hospital. I need to stop building up my expectations. You very rarely encounter bubbling beakers and Tesla coils. I peeked into the first room lit only by the display of several machines. I saw what looked like a woman laying in a hospital bed hooked into several IV bags. A tube ran into her mouth and the rhythmic mechanical pump was in time with her breathing. There was no reaction that I could see when I entered. Was she in a coma? Then I noticed the bulge. She looked about six months pregnant.

I went to the room next door. Different woman, different stage of pregnancy, but same setup. What the hell? I finally saw a nurses' station and noticed no one sitting at the desk. I saw that there was a half full of coffee on the desk. I put my hand over it and still felt some warmth. OK, where's the nurse? I walked quietly down the hallway, listening for any sign. And I heard it. Grunting and moaning. I hope that isn't what I think it is.

It was. I saw a man in a lab coat with his pants around his ankles on top of another comatose patient. I got out my trusty taser, cranked it to full, and hid in the next room. And I was going to go easy on him. After a few minutes, I heard him squeal, then the rustling of clothing. I tensed and when he passed the doorway where I hid, I jammed the taser right in the back of the neck. Never knew what hit him. After that it a simple job to tie him up with spare IV tubing and cover his eyes with some cotton padding and paper tape.

With the pervert dealt with, I started trying to figure out what was going on. I saw that the desk was set up to monitor twelve 'patients'. But they were tracking both the women's health signs and their fetuses. All of them were pregnant. But that's all I got. Their charts were full of dense medical jargon and abbreviations. I excel at languages (another of my talents) but I'm not good at Tech-ese. I did gather that these women were pregnant by being implanted with pre-fertilized eggs. So all these poor women were just incubators? I also saw the phrase "persistent vegetative state". Were they already in that state before they were put into service? The paperwork didn't say.

Then I noticed a doctor's name amongst the lab work. Dr. Filitov. He was one of these fertility doctors who advocated successful men to donate sperm to increase the population of smart people since stupid people were breeding too fast. The usual eugenics crap. He had approached several members of the explorer's group for donations, but they brushed him off. Could this be where he's incubating his so-called super babies? Then giving to suitable parents to be raised as saviors of humanity or future overlords? I made copies of some of the files and took some pictures of this secret breeding pen. I would submit this to the Executive Committee and let them figure out what to do. They knew people who could sort all this out. But the credit for finding this bit of weirdness would be mine. But first, I would take a shower to get the antiseptic smell of the hospital off of me.