Sean entered his bedroom and sighed, sliding down the door on his back, he removed his mask for a moment to rub his eyes. He was so tired of all this. Dragging himself over to his bed on hands and knees, he crawled up onto the bed and closed his eyes. He was dreaming before his head hit the pillow.

The date was 4/23/18. Birds were flying home from the extended winter, the grass was dying it’s hair green once again, and children were just beginning to make mud pies in the melted snow. On this beautiful spring day, best friends Myles and Sean were cooped up in a government research facility. Since Myles had an engineering masters degree, and Sean had one in Biology, they had both gotten jobs at the base, where giant machines were being used to try and create living, breathing weapons; superhumans, if you will.

The catacombs of this building were made to withstand anything and everything: with solid steel walls, concrete ceilings and floors, and a huge stone wall around the perimeter with barbed wire on the top; this was the place to be during a zombie apocalypse. Within these cold, lifeless rooms, Sean and Myles were doing overtime. They were supposed to have left over an hour ago, as it was well past closing time, but they had made a deadly mistake with the mental structure of subject 643-NU and subject 394-SH and they were too engrossed in their attempts to fix it to simply drop it all and leave.

Subjects 643-NU and 394-SH were special cases among the several superhumans they had created, simply because of the fact that they had retained a physical form without having to use someone else’s for more than three months. All of the other subjects, (754-SU, 326-EL, 495-BR, 219-AL, 562-DE, 784-EY, and 483-CH) had long since retreated into coma-like states, and had to have their personalities transplanted into already living organisms. The survival of the subjects was crucial to the continuation of the project, and so Myles and Sean had graciously volunteered to house their personalities in their minds until new bodies were provided; which would be a long time, as it would take a tremendous amount of atomic energy to create one new body from scratch, let alone nine of them. Subjects 643-NU and 394-SH had lasted the longest in the physical plane, but they had succumbed to the temptation of sleep about two hours ago, and it seemed that Myles and Sean would have to volunteer once again.

Inside a small, cramped room filled with various doctor's equipment, Sean lay unconscious on a bed with an IV in his arm. Another body lay on a table to his right in a comatose state, its shallow breaths barely filling its lungs to full capacity. Myles scurried between the two people, connecting wires and machines to their heads to begin the transfer. The heart-rate monitor beeped steadily as Myles connected the final wire and wiped the sweat off his brow. Breathing heavily, his hands shook as he peeled off his rubber gloves and pressed a red button on a control panel hanging on the wall.

Almost immediately after his finger made contact, a siren began to blare and the heart-rate monitors went wild. Myles worked quickly to change the IV and regulate the heat being produced by the machines. This was not the first time he had done this, but it didn’t make it any less terrifying. Sean lay drugged and asleep on the bed, oblivious to the consciousness that was slowly seeping from 643-NU’s body into his. Alarm bells and other various equipment noises hammered at Myle’s eardrums as he feverishly began flipping switches on his control pad. 394-SH’s lifeless body lay on another bed on the other side of the room, as his personality had been transferred into Myle’s head about an hour ago, and he could feel the new persona waking up and being greeted by the others in his mind.

Myles nearly jumped out of his skin when all of the alarms suddenly went quiet, including the heart-rate monitor. He nearly tripped over a cart of doctor’s supplies, as he ran over to the bed where Sean was confined. Pressing two of his fingers to Sean’s neck told him that his friend was still alive, and the power had merely gone out. He let out a shaky breath he didn’t know he had been holding, and let himself relax a little bit. It would take at least another half-hour for Sean to wake up, so Myles sat himself in a little chair by the door, and waited.

The clock on the wall had a steady pattern. Tic Toc, Tic Toc, Tic Toc. It was mesmerizing. Tic Toc, Tic Toc, Tic Toc. Myles hadn’t slept in days. Tic Toc, Tic Toc, Tic Toc. His eyelids were so heavy. Tic Toc, Tic Toc, Tic Toc. The clock ticked on, and Myle’s eyes fell closed.