I am sure, when they handed me the formula and a blank cheque, they did not know what they had created. As memories come back to me now, squashed short somehow as if to make room for others yet to arrive, I wonder that perhaps they did not create it at all. Regardless of their intent, it seems the formula’s true product was not the compound, but this me that I am becoming. That I am become. They could not have known this, could not have engineered it, and could certainly not have desired it.

I remember writing the zeros, watching with the corner of one eye to see when they would balk or blink. They didn’t.

The lab was sealed. Hermetic. White walls and benches and clear tubes and glassware. In my first requisition I ordered indicators I didn’t need, just to make coloured solutions to scatter about the room in beakers to keep me from going crazy. A door in one wall led to a bathroom and a bunk, and in the other wall the ‘airlock’, through which came the supplies and requisitions. And, sometime around the end of the first month, Rose. Other than the mice, she was the first contact of any kind I’d had since entering the lab. She looked somehow familiar as she introduced herself, like an old lover whose name and face I could no longer recall. She was to be my assistant, she told me, though as I look back it seems unlikely that was her true purpose.

With someone as smart as Rose in their employ I do not know why they needed me, yet she took no initiative of her own, only following my terse directions and providing a sounding board for my ideas. The first time I headed for the bunk after she arrived, perhaps a day and a half in all, she followed. I did not turn her away.