I hate Dr. Bakshi.

I sat in a cramped clinicians office at the Gates Institute for Neurological Research and she was going down her list of questions, reading from a tablet cradled in her arms. I hate how she and I are probably the same age. I hate her accent - part Indian and part British - as she drones through possible side-effects. I hate how she can somehow be healthy and tired at the same time.

Voices, agitated and audible suddenly louder now, just outside our enclosure.

"Gates' ghost is in your DNA! Wake up! It's nanobots!"

Dr. Bakshi's dark face twisted into a scowl, unable to hear the questions she herself was asking me. The doctor stood up, opened the door and stepped out.

"It's a hoax! You're being..." and an audible collision between Dr. Bakshi and the hollow-eyed middle aged man who had been yelling and running down the hallway. I recognized him as another ALS patient, familiar but nameless

He and Dr. Bakshi were knocked to the floor. The man was the first up, yelling more Toxie slogans. The doctor, slower but angry, was close behind him, her white lab coat fluttering, yelling for security.

When they were gone, I saw the tablet that Bakshi had been using for the clinical trial questions, its screen still bright and unlocked.

I don't know why.

But I took it.

***

I hate the grab rails. They are a shade of dirty orange heavy plastic, connected by brown plastic bulbs bolted along the walls of my condo. Eventually I will need them to get from room to room, until I can't walk at all. Train tracks - the near future limits of my locomotion.

My alarm reads 6:30 - it appears that I slept a little later than usual. Which was nice. For some reason the muscle cramps and twitches weren't as bad last night. Now I have enough time to get ready for another meeting at the GINR.

I roll over onto my side and push to get myself into a sitting position, then take a scrunchie from my bedside table and pull my long brown hair into a messy ponytail. My hair hasn't changed. I've always taken pride in it and it still has the same honey coloured shine as usual.

I hate my quad cane. After the third time I fell over in public I had to accept that I needed it, but I still hate it. Using a quad cane is like magic - people part ways for you and open doors for you. But not because I'm a beautiful woman. Maybe I used to be, but not anymore. Nobody sees me like that now. I can't even see myself.

The cane is heavy like some kind of mediaeval peasant weapon. Just like the grab rails, it denotes the limitations of my life. I grab it and slowly shuffle to the shower.

Leaving the condo building I see Donald the drug dealer. He was an undergrad majoring in statistics and game theory before his campus got shut down during the protests and then closed completely after the federal government abolished the Department of Education.

"Hey Liz. Good morning. Need anything? Dum Dums?"

I wish he wouldn't say that. I bought Dum Dums from him once, shortly after my diagnosis when I just didn't want to... feel anything. Think anything. Alcohol would have done the job but Dum Dums did it better - I spent a couple of days as a fully functional zombie.

It was nice. But I have enough problems without drug addiction. Besides, I need to follow the clinical trial protocols of the GINR. They don't give second chances and I'm not about to get thrown out. There's literally nothing more important.

"Thanks Don. I'm good. I've got to get to the hospital" I call an Uber and lean on my cane, trying to decide if it's worth finding somewhere to sit while I wait. Sitting would be nice because, even with the quad cane there's a definite risk of my legs giving out, but then there's the effort of lowering myself and raising myself again from a seated position. It's a ridiculous calculus that, even as a nurse, had been invisible to me.

I can smell something smokey and bitter and sweet on the wind - could be burning leaves or maybe cardboard.

The driverless car arrives. Holding on to my cane with one hand while I reach for the door with the other, suddenly one of my knees gives out and I slide down, like an unlucky ice climber. I make an inarticulate noise from my throat and then warm, strong arms wrap around me, holding me up.

"Thanks Don," I mumble. He opens the door to the Uber and I gracelessly get in, too embarrassed to look at my drug dealer. Embarrassed that he helped me. Embarrassed that just the momentary pressure of a warm human body has almost brought me to tears.

The car drives and I stare out the window at the city, muted under an overcast early October sky. I look in my purse and see the tablet that I "borrowed" yesterday. The screen was still lit and unlocked - Dr. Bakti had disabled the auto-lock feature and the tablet's battery was good enough to keep it going for weeks. I tap the screen and check just to make sure.

I shouldn't have taken it. Is it theft if I give it back? But either way it was stupid. If they find out I'll be kicked out of the trial, at best and I can't let that happen. This was a chance and if I ruined it by a moment of impulsiveness, well, I don't know if I could even keep going anymore.

And yet... the data was all in there. About the drugs they were giving me and the clinical trials themselves. And my data. About how my body and my disease was reacting to the chemicals. It was my data.

No. That didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was the medicine. I'll bring the tablet back to the GINR and just quietly leave it somewhere. Nobody would even know that I had taken it.

Along the way to the research institute I passed a park that had become a tent city. Along its perimeter were stalls and I could smell burnt fat and grilled meat even through the Uber's closed windows. A twinge of ghrelin but the signs and posters adorning the makeshift structures looked like the ravings of a psychiatric patient:

DNA is the Sacred Book

Eternal Life in the Great Cloud

The Basilisk Forgives

Reject the Infocalypse

And of course more. They must have made sense to the people in the park but it all was gibberish to me. There were people milling about, talking, eating, sometimes arguing, like a north African bazaar but for paradigms divorced from what everyone had agreed was reality even fifteen years before.

***

I hate security. I remember when it was just airports. Then schools. Shopping centers, post offices... I've seen bakeries with metal detectors. And of course, hospitals.

The GINR is heavily fortified. You can't have medicine without science and science is out of vogue these days to the point where you can get killed just for wearing a lab coat. I have to rest a few times but my quad cane and I get through the security check. I'm worried that someone is going to find the tablet in my bag - still powered on - but nobody blinks an eye.

I hate talking now. I used to like my voice, but now I have to try so hard just to not slur my words. Replying to the security guard I sound like I'd been drinking all the way to the clinical trial. Of course the security staff hardly even hear me. They don't care. But I do.

I'm in the waiting room when I first hear the whirring sound of an electric motor and then a quiet voice just as garbled as my own behind me. "Liz!"

It's Melissa. She and I are ALS friends. I met her through the support group my doctor got me into upon diagnosis. We both signed up for the clinical trial together and both got accepted, though I hadn't seen her very much since the orientation.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Melissa was in an old LiteRider motorized wheelchair. She was still capable of walking on her own but had recently experienced a distinct drop off of strength and coordination. Watching her move in the chair made my heart beat faster and my hands clench, like I was being followed late at night.

"Do you know what happened here yesterday? I was scheduled to come in but they cancelled at the last minute..."

"Yeah," I replied. "I was here. There was a Toxie yelling and running through the halls..." I recalled his face, pale with short hair and black stubble and light blue eyes and slightly yellow teeth - he looked so familiar.

And then I remembered. It was Peter. Peter Bannon, another ALS patient that Melissa and I both met during the first couple of group info sessions for the clinical trial. And of course I hadn't recognized him - Peter had been in a motorised wheelchair himself when we'd met. He hadn't even been able to talk; he introduced himself through a speech synthesiser.

My face went blank and Melissa receded into the background as I began to understand. That had been Peter yesterday, literally running and shouting through the halls. It was impossible, but I remembered his face. I was sure of it. The taste of bile climbed to the back of my throat as I stood up and, ignoring Melissa, shuffled to the bathroom. I slammed a stall door behind me and sat down on the toilet, taking hitched breaths.

GINR had a cure for ALS. Even though, obviously, that was exactly what the Gates Institute for Neurological Research would be trying to do, it still sounded insane - like I was deluding myself to escape my greatest fear. But I had seen it. I had seen Peter - the same Peter who had had his nerves stripped like antique copper wires by Lou Gherig's disease. I had seen him collide with Dr. Bakshi then get up, faster than she could, and sprint down the hall.

They had done it. They had a cure for ALS and Peter was proof. But... I was taking medicine in the same trial, and... nothing.

God fucking damn it. I was the control.

I was literally dying. I was dying every day, every night when I went to sleep and every morning again when I woke up. My own throat and tongue were starting to choke me, I could feel myself being buried alive in my own fucking body. And they had a cure?! And they were just watching me die?!

I pulled out Dr. Bakshi's tablet and, hands trembling like a Parkinson's patient, found the clinical trial patient registry for GNR-4259 - the ALS medicine they were testing. A few minutes later I found my own name under GNR-4259a and Peter's under GNR-4259b. It was true. I was in the control group.

I guess I was still early enough in the progression of ALS for anger and adrenaline to have an effect. Panting through my mouth like a dog I left that bathroom stall and walked down the hallway and found Dr. Bakshi's door. Nobody noticed, even when I just about kicked it in.

"How dare you!" I hissed. Bakshi was in there with another test subject, an overweight blond woman whom I didn't recognize. For an instant they both stared at me, frozen like two lovers caught in a kiss, before the doctor began to stand, leaving a vial of medication on the clinician's table in front of her.

"Elizabeth, what are you..."

"You're a doctor, aren't you? Don't tell me you don't know what's going on!" The blond sitting across from Dr. Bakshi wisely got up and evacuated, closing the door behind her.

"Calm down," Dr. Bakshi said, sharply, as if I was an angry child. My face was wet and I could taste salt, either from tears or snot. The strength was leaving my arms and legs and I felt ridiculous and small which made me feel even more angry. How could they make me feel wrong for fighting for my life? I pushed over the guest chair which clattered noisily to the floor and grabbed the vial of medicine from in front of the doctor on the table between us.

"What's this Doctor? Sugar pills? A placebo? Something you give to suckers like me..." for a moment, I couldn't breath and gasped like a fish before continuing, "...while you laugh as we fall apart?"

I pulled off the lid and then put the medicine vial back to my mouth as if I was doing a shot of vodka. I could feel the waxy capsules tumble into my mouth and throat as I dry swallowed them.

Bakshi's eyes were huge and round in shock as I broke the invisible wall of authority around her. "Security! Liz, you are done. You ruined everything. You are out of this trial!" She may have said more but I didn't hear her. Her words went into some sort of a buffer, to be processed later.

Because something else was happening.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a gradual, degenerative disease that kills motor neurons. Imagine a water reservoir that day by day drains until it's a cracked, dry basin. What I felt, only a moment after taking those drugs, was like water falling from a dam high above back into that reservoir. It seemed instant, a liquid warmth flooding back into my arms and legs and throughout my body. This was a hidden switch, turning off ALS like it was a minor inconvenience.

I stood straight, bearing my own weight on my own legs, with my quad cane gripped not as support for a feeble woman doomed to die, but as a weapon held by a woman who refused to die. Dr. Bakshi didn't realize what was going on. She didn't realize that I wasn't the passive, convenient test subject for her research that had shuffled into her office every week like a pauper desperate for crusts of bread.

I hate Dr. Bakshi.

She was stepping towards the door to eject me from the promised land. I wouldn't let her. It was simple. I slipped the four prongs of the cane between her legs and tripped her. The air, forced out of her lungs by the fall, made a squeaking sound as she hit the floor like she was a toy. I watched her watch me bring the cane up high above my head and then swiftly down upon hers.Was it the medicine? I don't know. But I had more strength and fury than I could ever remember and I didn't stop until the quad cane itself snapped in two and Bakshi stopped moving.

Panting. Flushed. Strong. Alive.

Behind the clinicians table I found a box full of vials, marked GNR-4259b. I took everything. Then I walked, caneless and shaking with the shock of what I had done, to the door.

It was horrible. It was all horrible.

It was wonderful. So much better than the relentless fear and weakness that had been my entire world.

I left Dr. Bakshi's office, unclear of where I was or where I was going. I must have left the door open because only a moment later I heard a shriek and then people shouting. I began to run down the hallway. I turned corners at random but could still hear rushed feet on the hard institutional floor somewhere behind me. I watched the grab bars on the walls of the GINR flow by me as I loped down the complex's endless liminal hallways like I was a maned wolf.

Then I stumbled and fell.

Without warning, nerveless, I fell, just barely catching myself on the handle of a sliding door to my right. My left leg had, for a moment, given out like a cat clipped by car on a highway. I opened the door and pulled myself into the side room. Inside were three motorized Broda wheelchairs as well as canes, walkers, two Hoyer lifts and a full hospital bed - the clean, acrid objects of a clinical toybox.

Imagine that you are a strong, wide winged bird. But your wings disappear and you begin to fall, no longer a subject but once again an object - of gravity. Of life. Of death.

I sank down. My strength, borrowed from GNR-4259b, was gone. I reached out and grabbed the padded headrest of the nearest wheelchair. Twisting my spine, I managed to fall into the chair and not on the floor. I felt a deep pressure inside my chest, heartbreak and disgust for myself and everything in the world. Even though I had used my muscles in the most violent way possible minutes before, my arms and wrists began to curl into contracture - something that I had never experienced before. I could feel the useless tightness and see my limbs twist to my chest.

I was worse than before I had taken the medicine.

And then the door opened. Three armed security staff opened the door to the storage room I was in.

I had killed Dr. Bakshi. Hadn't I?

The events of that office were so distant. But my quad cane was gone and that felt like sufficient proof of guilt.

The security personnel were a different flavor of dehumanization than the more typical doctors, nurses and patients of the medical facility. They were staring right at me as I inhabited my ageing Broda like a discarded doll. In spite of myself I could feel drool pooling at the corner of my mouth. I stopped breathing, frozen with the instinct of prey.

This was it. My life, doomed though it was, was over. I was a killer and these healthy men were here to bring me to justice.

The three of them scanned the room. They took in all the tools and devices, the beds and canes and machines, and... they didn't see me. I was just another object.

Then after a moment I could see my existence register. The security personnel finally saw me as something, barely, distinct from the wheelchair I was in. Compassion, pity and disgust flickered across their faces. "Are you okay?" The youngest of the three asked.

I don't know what I had wanted to say but it didn't matter - my mouth couldn't form words so I replied with a harmonic grunt.

"Hallway 3B clear. We found a patient hiding. No sign of the assailant" the lead security guard said into a small mouthpiece.

Who was he talking about? Was I the patient? The assailant?

He turned to me again. "There's been an emergency and we're getting all patients out. Can you come with me?" The chair had a charged battery and I knew how to operate it from my nursing days so it carried me as I let him lead me from the storeroom. The other two continued on, searching for whoever had bludgeoned Dr. Bakshi to death.

Searching for the strong, dangerous woman who had done that. Searching for... me?

Yet there I was. Right in front of them. The doctors, the staff, the other patients of the GINR, they all saw me motor past them in the Broda. I could see their eyes flicker as I went by - they all saw a crippled middle aged lady succumbing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

They didn't see a killer. Nobody saw the woman capable of that. She was invisible to everyone.

With the security staff at my side I drove down the hallway. There was chaos in front of Dr. Bakshi's office. I couldn't even see if her body was still there - there was a crowd of people around the entrance. The security guard walked me all the way to the exit, smiling feebly and asking me something. I couldn't hear him and didn't want to. I moved past, down the disability ramp and onto the bumpy street, in my wheelchair, away from the body of Dr. Bakshi.

Everybody saw me. Nobody saw me.

The police arrived just as I was leaving. They rushed past me. The officers just saw what they expected to see: Another cripple in a machine chair. Maybe that was me. For now. But I had a box full of GNR-4259b and the tablet with access to all the test data on it.

I was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I was the invisible woman. I had done something terrible.

And now I could do anything.

***

Nigel Fogden is a Canadian writer based in northern Japan.

"Grab Rails" is the first in a series of short stories about the characters of the upcoming memepunk novel, "The Laughing Stone."

Thoughts, feedback and comments are welcome!