The Cerebral Pitch Experiment

“Hello?” Peter hoped his nervousness wasn’t obvious.

“Hello,” a soft, pleasant female voice replied. “Is this Dr. Peter Dillinger?”

“Yes. It is I.” He stuttered into his phone. “It’s him. Sorry. Yes. Speaking.”

“Good day, Dr. Dillinger,” the woman continued, unfazed. “This is Rebecca from E-Marrow Corp. We reviewed your file and are pleased to offer you a junior research position in our bioengineering division. If you are interested and would like to move forward, the next step . . .”

Rebecca droned on, but Peter had zoned out.

He was in tears from the sense of relief washing over him. Twelve years of academic pressure, culminating in high school. Four years of intense graduate school. Another exhausting three to earn his doctorate—and finally he was near the start to the end of the debt tunnel he created.

“Mr. Dillinger? Hello? Did I lose you? Are you interested in the position?”

“Y—yes,” he stammered, “I would love to accept.”

* * *

A few days later, Peter, dressed in the typical uniform of a junior research scientist—chino pants, plain shirt, and shoulder bag—entered the lobby of E-Marrow Corp. It was a sleek, monolithic building in the center of the city.

After he checked in with security, he made his way to human resources. The onboarding process was very thorough. Peter was not surprised. Their innovative research on life extension garnered a lot of attention from competitors.

The vetting process included on-site DNA testing, a deep dive Internet search, and a four-hour mental health assessment. Peter spent the day proving he was who he said he was and that he was mentally, physically, and emotionally up to the task of working on sensitive research.

An administrator assigned to his onboarding took his picture with an expensive camera and five minutes later handed him his ID card. She instructed Peter to report tomorrow morning to the “Cerebral Pitch Lab” in sub-basement level three, room 318 at 8 AM. More information would be provided at that time.

Peter went home, cracked open a bottle of celebratory wine, took a few sips, and went to bed.

* * *

The elevator struggled to reach sub-basement level three; the last floor assigned to the panel of key-required buttons on the elevator that Peter was alone in. He held a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. As soon as the elevator doors opened, he noticed he had no reception.

The floor was empty. A long, sterile hall led away from the elevator. There were plain, windowless doors pockmarked down the hall. Peter searched until he found 318. There was no other indication of what lay beyond. No window. No titles. Just a number.

Behind the door was a lab.

A nondescript man in a lab coat with his back turned to Peter was seated at a desk near the entrance. The man did not look at Peter as he entered. He stared at something on the opposite side of the room.

Peter cleared his throat to get the man’s attention. Nothing. The man did not respond. Peter glanced around.

One side of the room was an observation station. The man was on a small plastic chair at a small desk. File folders were stacked in a neat pile on the left side of the desk, and a sheet of graph paper was in front of him. Behind the desk was a filing cabinet and a coat rack hosting another lab coat.

There was nothing digital anywhere in the room, not even a camera. An old analog clock kept track of time near the door.

The room was split in the middle with a thick, plexiglass barrier. There was no door through the barrier and no door leading out on the other side.

The only object on the other side of the plexiglass was a large, hourglass-shaped object made of clear tempered glass.

In the top half of the giant hourglass was a thick black substance. The pigment was so intensely dark that it had an almost complete lack of refraction. The bottom of the hourglass had a smaller amount of the same substance pooled into the concave surface.

Peter squinted and leaned forward. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw a viscous bead of the substance drip down from the top of the hourglass.

He felt it pull at him from behind the glass.

He studied it for a long time. He stared for so long his legs started to get numb. His body ached. His mind felt like gel. But, if he pulled away, even for a second, he would miss the next drip.

He heard the distant sound of a door opening and closing. It distracted him just enough that he was able to break his gaze. It felt like coming out of a coma, disoriented and confused. He felt ill. Nauseous, anxious, paranoid—layered with a sense of despair.

He looked at the desk. The other man was gone. Peter was alone.

He looked at the clock. It was quarter to ten. It felt like he had entered the room only a few minutes ago, but it had been close to two hours.

Peter put on the lab coat and sat down on the plastic chair.

He looked at the pad of graph paper. There was a laminated notecard on top.

“The Cerebral Pitch Lab Experiment,” he read aloud to ease his nerves and to cut the edge off being alone.

He skimmed past legal information informing him that if he shared instructions, outcomes, or talked about what he saw, his employment would end, and he would be sued into an early grave.

“Your goal is to observe the substance. The data you collect will be a record of how long you can sustain a continuous view of the material. If at any point you look away, record the time difference on the graph paper provided. Blinking does not count. We encourage you to try any methods you feel will help extend your observations. We look forward to your results.”

Peter put the laminated card down.

He looked at the material. Instead of feeling drawn in like his first, unofficial attempt, this time when he tried staring at the impossible black material. The sense of anxious nausea started immediately.

He was forced to look away.

He recorded a few seconds onto the graph paper.

He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, took a few deep breaths, and looked at the object again.

The nausea rolled through him instantly.

He marked a few seconds on the graph paper.

Before he looked again, he searched his station. The folders contained graphs from other researchers. They were organized by date. He felt relief when he saw most of the notations were in seconds. The longest entry he found was for five minutes. Even notations a minute long were rare. The file cabinet held completed graphs in the top two drawers. The bottom drawer held blank graph paper. Other than that, there was nothing in the room.

He made a few more attempts. None lasted more than a few seconds before he felt overwhelmed with vertigo and pulled away.

He studied the instructions again.

Was this physical reaction expected? Was he failing to notice something? Was this a test? Was he in an experiment as a subject and didn’t realize?

Peter noticed it was noon. He took off the lab coat and went up the elevator to the cafeteria.

He tried to engage in small talk with a random sampling of coworkers he found. Each time he tried to ask about the “Cerebral Pitch Experiment,” people backed off. One woman told him to leave her alone in harsh tones. Most were put off by his questions, and a few feared him.

Peter went to the bathroom to compose himself. When he saw himself in the mirror, he considered walking out and never looking back. The face he saw in the mirror, the same face that woke up excited for a well-paying research job, looked like it had aged ten years.

He held the side of the sink, lowered his head, and sighed.

* * *

The lab looked the same. No one had come in or out.

Peter glanced at the hourglass. It was impossible to tell if more of the substance had fallen into the chamber below.

He felt a chill down his spine. He shook it off.

Peter carefully changed back into the lab coat and made sure the graph paper and the pen were ready.

He glanced at the black material with its voided and fluid ends. He felt the pit of his stomach drop. The ends seemed to stretch for eons. Fear gripped him in every cell of his body.

He looked away. He recorded four seconds.

Before he looked back, he pinched himself on the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Hard. Pain blossomed from the soft flesh, and Peter looked back at the black mass.

The fear was still there.

The nausea followed a close second behind.

But the pain he felt helped Peter keep his vision locked on the darkness.

He pinched the same spot again, harder. He did not look away. The nauseated fear subsided into a dull drone.

He felt in control. He felt confident.

He felt that this whole thing had just been a silly test. How could he fear a void? He decided after a full hour of staring into the abyss, he should record his result.

He tried to look away. He couldn’t.

He felt the terror return. It twisted at his guts.

He couldn’t look away.

He felt his mind twist and contort into impossible shapes.

He could see a line of impossible black between the two masses—the large and dominating one up top and the smaller mass down below.

Was it flowing or frozen in time? Unclear.

Up to the large mass? Down the small? Neither? Both?

He tried to wrench his eyes away. He tried to scream. Nothing came out.

The line thrummed, the reverberation distorting into a new reality before immediately ceasing to exist.

There was no sound. Just awful notes of pure chaos.

He tried to look away. He tried to scream.

The impossible black line grew larger.

It undulated, changing to an infinite sequence of droplets. Some smaller than a quark. Some larger than the universe.

The two ends of the line merged.

The mass expanded beyond the glass.

Time lost meaning.

The shred of reality that left him connected to the world was a dull pain in his hand. And it was fading fast.

He tried to look away. He tried to scream.

Nothing.

Distantly, a whole other lifetime away, he heard a door open. He couldn’t look away. Blackness was everywhere.

There was so much impossible black, he sensed he would never come back to . . . to where? To when . . .? He couldn’t remember.

His last thought before the blackness reached his mind was how lonely he was.

How helpless he felt. How scared he was.

Then nothing.

* * *

When she heard the door close, Jennifer Tully forced herself to rip her gaze away from the black material. She shuddered and clutched herself in a tight embrace. She looked at the desk.

The man who had been sitting there was gone.

Desperately needing this to work out despite the overwhelming anxiety she felt in proximity to the strange hourglass, Jennifer sat down and read the instructions, printed on a laminated card, sitting on top of a pad of graph paper.