Chapter 2: The Experiment Begins
The silence in the living room stretched, thin and brittle as old ice. Stu stood there, holding the empty shaker, his knuckles pale. The furious color had drained from his face again, leaving behind a waxy, intense pallor. He wasn’t looking at me anymore; he was staring through me, into some horrific spreadsheet where the data column labeled ‘Source’ was suddenly, irrevocably filled with my name.
He set the shaker down with exaggerated care, as if it were nitro-glycerin.
Then he started to pace. Three steps toward the deflated couch, a sharp turn, three steps back past his abandoned gym bag. The floorboards creaked under his measured, heavy tread. He moved with the same relentless rhythm he used on the treadmill, but his eyes were wild, unfocused.
“It’s impossible,” he muttered to the wall. “There’s no peer-reviewed study. No plausible mechanism. It’s just… fluid. Amino acids, fructose, enzymes… trace elements. Nothing that would explain a ten-pound breakthrough.”
He stopped, whirling to face me. “What did you eat yesterday?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Your diet. What did you consume in the twenty-four hours prior to the… the incident.” He couldn’t say the word. His jaw worked around it.
I shrugged, thrown. “Uh… cereal. That pizza from Saturday. Some of those crisps. A banana, maybe? And, you know, the usual…”
“The usual what?” His voice was clipped, clinical.
“The usual… hydration?” I offered weakly.
He made a sound of disgust, resuming his pacing. “So nothing extraordinary. No exotic supplements. No systemic alterations.” He ran a hand through his short, dark hair, tugging at it. “This is insanity. I’m debating the biochemical profile of your… contribution.”
“Look, Stu,” I said, standing up from the couch. The adrenaline was fading, leaving a hollow, sick feeling in my gut. “Let’s just… forget it happened. A weird, one-time fluke. A cosmic glitch. You had a good day at the gym. I did a gross, terrible thing. We never speak of it again. We reset. I’ll even buy you a new shaker. A fancy one.”
He stopped pacing. He looked at me, and for a second I saw the old Stu—the one who would have demanded I sanitize the entire kitchen with bleach and then move out. But it flickered and died, smothered by a brighter, harder light.
“It wasn’t a fluke.”
He said it quietly, with absolute conviction.
“How can you know that?”
“Because my body knows.” He tapped his sternum with two fingers. “The feeling… it was cellular. It was systemic. The energy wasn’t jittery, like caffeine. It was clean. Potent. The recovery between sets was almost non-existent. My mind was utterly focused. I haven’t felt that… optimized in years.”
He walked over to his gym bag, crouched down, and pulled out his workout log—a weathered notebook filled with his tight, precise script. He flipped to the current page, his eyes scanning the numbers.
“See?” He thrust the book toward me. I saw columns of weights, reps, heart rates. Today’s entries were in a fiercer, darker ink, the numbers boldly surpassing all the previous ones. “The data doesn’t lie. The only variable that changed was the shake.”
He closed the book with a snap. The sound was final.
Another thick silence filled the room. The air smelled like stale pretzels and dread. I could hear the drip from the kitchen tap, each drop measuring out the seconds of this new, horrible reality.
Stu took a deep, shuddering breath. He looked at the floor, then at the shaker, then finally, reluctantly, at me.
“We need to test the variable.”
My stomach dropped. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, each word forced out as if it hurt him, “we need to establish a control. Isolate the… the active component. We need another sample.”
I actually laughed. It was a dry, cracked sound. “You cannot be serious. You want me to… for you… on purpose?”
His face was a mask of tortured resolve. The disgust was still there, swimming in his eyes, but it was pinned beneath a layer of fanatical curiosity. “For science. For data. To confirm or deny a hypothesis. If it’s a coincidence, then we drop it forever. If it’s not…” He trailed off, the implications hanging in the stale air.
“Stu, man, this is messed up. This is next-level messed up. I screwed up. I get it. But this… you’re asking me to…”
“I’m asking for a controlled contribution to a practical experiment,” he interrupted, his voice stiff. “You’ll produce a sample. You’ll deposit it in a clean container. I will incorporate it into my pre-workout regimen tomorrow under identical conditions. We will monitor the results.”
He sounded like a robot reciting a protocol. It was somehow creepier than if he’d shouted.
I just stared at him. My flatmate, the human monument to discipline, was asking me to jerk off into a cup for his gains. The absurdity was so vast it circled back around to feeling almost normal.
“And if I say no?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
He didn’t speak. He just looked at me. The look said everything: the betrayal, the anger, the desperate, burning need for an explanation that made sense in his ordered world. The look said I owed him this. And, god help me, I felt like I did.
I let out a long, defeated breath. My shoulders slumped. “Fine. Okay. But not in the kitchen. And you don’t get to watch. And we never, ever, under any circumstances, discuss the… the procurement process.”
A flicker of something like relief passed over his face, immediately buried under a nod of professional acknowledgement. “Agreed. A sterile collection container will be provided. Timing is critical—the sample should be fresh for maximal integrity.”
He moved with sudden, brisk efficiency, the awkwardness momentarily compartmentalized. He marched into the kitchen. I heard the cupboard open, the clink of glass. He returned a moment later holding a small, spotless glass jar that had once held gourmet olives. It was dried, without a label.
“This is chemically inert and clean,” he stated, handing it to me. It felt cool and heavy in my hand.
I looked from the jar to his dead-serious face. “You’re really going to drink from a jar that once held olives?”
“The contents are what matter, not the vessel,” he said, but a faint hint of a flush touched his ears. “Just… procure the sample. I have meal prep to complete.”
He turned and walked out of the living room, leaving me alone holding the stupid jar.
I stood there for a full minute, listening to him clatter pans in the kitchen, the sounds of his normal routine violently at odds with what had just transpired. The jar seemed to grow heavier. This was my punishment, I guessed. A truly bizarre, psychologically complex penance.
I trudged to my room, closing the door behind me. The space was a familiar chaos of clothes and game controllers. Sunlight filtered through the blinds, casting stripes across the unmade bed. It felt surreal, performing this mundane, private act now as a clinical duty.
I sat on the edge of the bed, the cool glass jar in my lap. The mechanics were simple. The context was incomprehensible. I kept seeing Stu’s face—the revulsion, the need, the terrifying curiosity. My own guilt was a sharp stone in my chest. This was payback. A transaction to balance the scales.
It wasn’t exciting. It was a strange, detached chore. My mind wandered to anything else—the drip of the tap, the pattern of the dust in the sunbeams, the precise way Stu had said ‘maximal integrity’. Eventually, it was done. I capped the jar, avoiding looking at the contents. It was warm in my hand.
I found him in the kitchen, weighing out chicken breast on a digital scale. He didn’t look up.
“It’s on my desk,” I said, my voice oddly hoarse.
He simply nodded, a quick, sharp dip of his chin. “Thank you. I’ll incorporate it into my 7 AM shake.”
He said it like I’d dropped off a parcel. He kept weighing chicken. The conversation was over.
Back in my room, I fell onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. The faint, musky scent of my own ‘experiment’ lingered in the air. I heard the familiar whir of the blender later as he made his dinner smoothie, a sound that had always been background noise. Now it felt accusatory.
I had done it. I had agreed. The line, once crossed, was now a blurry, negotiated border.
I wondered, with a cold knot in my stomach, what happened after tomorrow’s workout. If the data lied. Or worse, if it told the truth.