"Next stage of evolution?" I repeated.
"Yes yes!" Dr. Clados said, flashing an excited grin as she led me and Rebecca down the hall. "Very exciting to behold!"
"So we'll be able to see how much smarter we'd get in the far future," Rebecca clarified to herself. "Neato."
"Not just mental! You wait and see!"
Doing just that, I shared a curious glance with Rebecca as we followed the alien scientist, who led us up to a strange looking hexagonal box in a darkened corner of the lab area. It was almost certainly alien, between the weird dashes and dots that made up an unfamiliar language along the edge and the shimmering material it was made of, but it had of all things a perfectly normal keypad grafted onto it, which Dr. Clados began inputting a long, complicated string of numbers into.
"I will say, this is not going to be...walk of cake!" Dr. Clados pondered and decided on saying. "This is intense experiment, highly dangerous though. I understand if you are unwilling to assist..."
"If you chicken out, I'm going to punch you," Rebecca teased, so excited that her usual shy self had vanished into the ether at this point.
"I wasn't planning to!" I insisted as the strange case hissed, the sides shifting into arcane patterns as the center opened up. A long pole extended from the opening, holding a small cluster of glass vials. Dr. Clados delicately extracted two of the vials and handed one to each of us. On closer inspection, they seemed to be filled with a light blue liquid that shifted colors slightly if I held it a certain way. Not quite as alien as I would have expected.
"What's this stuff do?" Rebecca asked.
"Ah, well you see, many many years ago, we were a lot like your kind, physical and mental equals in fact. And we would have stayed in our own solar system had we not discovered the Nectar."
"This is the Nectar, I guess?" I asked.
"Yes! It was the compound that truly expanded our physical and mental acuity, made us capable of all that we have accomplished. And this awakening is something we wish to share with your kind as well, hence our need for test subjects like yourselves."
"So we pop this stuff and we become even better humans then? Sounds pretty cool."
Dr. Clados clapped her hands excitedly. "Then don't let me talking stop you, drink the whole thing down and lets get to testing! Fair warning, the taste is quite repulsive."
Rebecca and I took off the caps of the tubes in perfect time and, with one look towards one another for support, each drank it down. Immediately I could see that Clados was right, this stuff was utterly wretched. It tasted like dead animal and cough syrup mixed into a cold soup, and it burned the whole way down my throat. I immediately started gagging, and Rebecca even dropped to her knees in a cold sweat, trying not to dry heave. After a moment, Clados handed each of us a water bottle to wash the taste out of our mouths.
"Yeech, I hope this ascending humanity thing was worth whatever THAT was," Rebecca said with a sour expression.
"Oddly enough, making the Nectar have a decent taste is the one thing that we haven't been able to figure out," Clados said with a shrug. "Stop figure."
"Go figure," I corrected her.
"Go? But I need to do the tests!"
"Right, sorry," I said quickly.
"So, first off, how do you two feel?" Dr. Clados asked us, snapping her fingers to summon a tiny floating drone, spherical and shiny, that started letting off flashes of light, presumably taking photographs. "Any odd feelings or sensations?"
Taking stock of myself in a brief examination, I told the doctor...
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