Best Laid Plans (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

Nicole sighed, rolling over in the hard laboratory cot and trying unsuccessfully to find rest. She was “free” to leave, of course, but the sterile place had become like a prison cell when she so naively agreed to take part in the human trials of a mysterious corporation’s newest cell regeneration procedure. Regretfully, she hadn’t bothered to learn much about the group, not after they offered her steady money and a warm place to sleep, but once the experiments required getting her hooked on a drug that inflicted terrible migraines and hallucinations if she didn’t continue the treatments, Nicole had become like a lab rat for these people, addicted and trapped. Now her nights were spent in isolation while waves of nonlethal radiation warmed the room to test the effects in combination with the daily pills.

She was used to feeling discarded, of course, being homeless and often sneered at by more-fortunate passerby, not to mention the racial prejudices she faced on top of those challenges. And while it was nice to be out of the cold during the night, she still hadn’t been offered a bath in weeks, and the filth and stink of her difficult life hung thick in the claustrophobic room, a reminder of how stuck she was.

Pressing her face into the pillow, Nicole curled her thighs toward her stomach and rubbed her thumbs in relaxing circles around her soft brown soles, which still ached with calluses from walking bare on concrete for months. Her fingers chipped away at crusted dirt clustered in the doughy crevices between her long toes. She wasn’t used to the feeling of softer fabric pressed against the bottoms of her deep-arched feet, and this was a small pleasure to be found in the otherwise suffocating situation, so she took full advantage, massaging her mud-flecked feet back and forth along the sheets. Dizzy, fearful, and simply desperate for the experiments to run their course so she could take her money and get the hell out of this eerie complex, Nicole fitfully managed to fall asleep.

After a few weeks in the lab, Nicole had become accustomed to rude awakenings by technicians prodding her in the ribs and taking notes on her status after another night of treatment. When she arose the next morning, however, she was startled to find sunlight streaming through the clouds, a sight she never enjoyed within the enclosure of her cell. Though it wasn’t an unwelcome sight, Nicole’s first thought was that the company had given up on using her for human trials, and tossed her back to the streets without her pay.

Frantic at the thought of losing that money and, worse, the withdrawal to come from not taking the medication they’d forced upon her, the woman leapt to her feet. Her jet-black braids swung like whips as Nicole looked all around in growing confusion. She wasn’t back in the concrete labyrinth of the city she knew, but in a serene outdoor environment complete with lush grass bedding and intricately shiny insect habitats sculpted into the earth. Was she in the nature park downtown?

“Hello?” Nicole called out, cupping her lips to be heard. “HELLO? Is anybody out there? Is… is the experiment over? I… want what you owe me, okay? I’m n-not just gonna walk away empty-handed. You hear me?”

Receiving no reply, nor seeing any sign of life against the densely misty horizon, Nicole felt woozy again and took a hard seat back on the bumpy green terrain. Only then did it occur to her that maybe this was just another hallucination brought on by a change in dosage. This was still part of the test, and she was being made to undergo a disorienting trip for their benefit. She supposed it could’ve been worse, since this visage was far more peaceful than her cell, but Nicole was terrified of the side-effects. What if the headaches came back and she couldn’t escape the visual nightmare of the greenspace?

She ran her fingers through her hair, trying and failing to calm herself from panicking, as that would just worsen the drug effects. Repeating the soothing act from the night before, only on the pockmarked soil, the woman set her long bare feet atop the earth. Despite her worries, the sensation of crunchy mulch formations molded in the dirt, almost as though frosted by chilly morning dew, was incredibly satisfying. Loamy substances built up in anthill-like pillars bent and smushed to masses of her feet, caressing the deepening wrinkles of her arches the further she pressed. Though Nicole merely brushed her soles over the tiny shapes to begin, it was so pleasing that she stroked her foot back and repeated the gesture, this time pushing her peds down hard and flush with the ground.

Again the surprisingly crisp protrusions of the terrain, not much larger than Nicole’s experimental pills, descended under the meaty brawn of her unwashed soles, then turned to powder once her toes curled into the moss. A pair of Nicole’s ample footprints, complete with flared toe-pad divots, adorned the smeared mud patch. Strange flecks of silver scattered through the flattened mess now molded to the smooth curves of her ample soles like clay, and though the woman was still too anxious over side-effects to study these impressions for more than an instant, it seemed to confirm she was simply rubbing her feet through frost-crusted insect habitats. She was calmed by this, though still not enough for the hallucinations to end. Then an idea came to her.

“I’m okay,” Nicole called out, deciding to tell her captors exactly what they’d want to hear, in hopes this bizarre test could end soon. “I’m… not scared. I c-can’t… see my room yet, but… it’s all right. I can… take it. I’m cool, I’m calm. See?”

For demonstration, she tilted her head back, exhaling a slow yet shaky breath, and then dragged her feet back through the dirt. The harder she pressed, the more moisture sponged up through the ground, turning it soggier and more malleable, almost as though the earth was licking the bottoms of her feet with cool wet tongues. When Nicole flexed her lengthy toes apart, mud glided ticklishly along her the fleshy brown shafts, glossing a fresh layer of dirt in the sockets between, but she didn’t care. It probably wasn’t real, anyway. Regardless, she’d come to miss the outside world so much, Nicole discovered she was more comfortable here, in the hallucinated sunshine and textured mud with its gritty bug building blocks, than on that laboratory mattress.

As the minutes ticked by, and the withdrawal didn’t set off a palpitating freak-out, Nicole began to savor the unreal effects. In fact, she was almost sorry to think of what it would be like when the illusion of nature vanished and she no longer had this pleasant swath of intricate earth to tend her aching feet, but instead only those same stone walls and addiction pangs.

She resolved not to think of that, however, and kept on plowing her feet back and forth over the same stretch of ground, which erased her detailed footprint in the cakey mud. Instead the grassy surface of her massage became like a canvas of greens and browns painted by her heels and the firm balls of her feet, not to mention her slender toes, leaving smudged tracts of her relaxation in between the many yet-untouched patches of silver-speckled ground, though Nicole intended to make use of all these gifts before the test was over. It would be a waste otherwise.