by Nick Thacker
But there was nothing out there. He had checked. They all had. For years, they’d checked and re-checked. They had done the research, the tests, analyzed the results. None of it lined up with what they were seeing here. Dr. Lin was the best in the world at this very thing, and he had been stumped for going on three years. It was a professional slight, and he intended to fix it. He would find the answer, and he would publish it. He would prevail, as he had with every other challenge throughout his distinguished career.
He finished administering the dosage of medication and looked back down to the syringe. He extracted it from the man’s upper arm slowly and carefully, just as he had a thousand times with a thousand patients, back when he was merely a practicing physician. It was a learned habit, one he could do in his sleep. But he didn’t approach the task lightly. Something simple like this, the extraction of an empty syringe following the medicating procedure, seemed like such an easy, simple thing.
But that was how mistakes were made. By assuming one was better than the task they were performing. By taking their expertise for granted. That had happened to his assistant, and now she was no longer with him. So he did not take the task lightly. He extracted the syringe purposefully, rolling it slightly between his thumb and forefinger to ensure none of the serum would drip. It would also prevent any blood from pooling around the tiny wound.
He focused on the syringe, taking his time. Ensuring there were no mistakes.
That was why he didn’t see the man’s face. Dr. Lin was focusing on the wrong thing, looking at the wrong area behind the glass. He was gazing intently at the man’s shoulder and the syringe he was carefully extracting from it, so he didn’t notice at first.
Then something in his subconscious called his attention to it. Screamed at him, as if begging him to look up and take note of the man’s face once again. He felt the syringe shake in his grip, faltering a bit. He blinked. Once, twice. Then he looked up and saw the man.
31-3. Thirty-one dash three was how they said it. The thirty-first group of subjects they’d been testing, and the first male in the group. Related to all of the other subjects in some way.
Dr. Lin took a step backward, then another. Steady at first, then nearly stumbling. He felt the rolling cart behind him as he backed into it, still unable to take his eyes off the man behind the glass. He stared, knowing the man was staring back at him and within seconds the cameras mounted around the room would analyze the situation and automatically send in an alert. They would see Lin staring, record the infraction, and log it in the security manifest.
But he didn’t care.
How could he? What he was seeing right now was simply… unexplainable.
And yet his entire job here was to find just this very thing, and then explain it. It had always been a tall order, but then again no one seemed to believe that this was even possible.
He continued to stare, even as he heard the beeping warning sound alerting him to his mistake. Dr. Lin held his pose, staring straight into the eyes of the man on the other side of the glass, his mouth opening and shutting slowly as he tried to comprehend.
Why? Why now? And how?
The man stared back, his eyes as expressionless and as stoic as ever, but it wasn’t his eyes Dr. Lin was focusing on.
It was the man’s mouth, upturned slightly at the sides.
The man behind the glass was smiling.
2
“ANY IDEA WHERE IT’S FROM?” Reggie asked. He was standing near the television, where Mr. E and his wife were onscreen, staring back at him.
Mrs. E shook her head. ‘Unfortunately, no. We will get the lab scans back next week, if not sooner. But — and we are no scientists — our initial investigation leads us to believe that the skull is from Central or South America.’
Mr. E leaned in, his characteristically stoic expression tightening just a bit. He moved as though he had no neck, no ability to shift his head from its fixed spot on his upper body. ‘My wife is correct,’ he said, ‘but she downplays her knowledge of anthropology.’
“Well, I’ll take her word for it then,” Reggie said. “Somewhere in Central or South America. How can you tell?”
Mrs. E looked at something offscreen for a moment. ‘Human anatomy, and differences in cranial structure among known regions of the world. I just ran a simple search, really. The results are promising, but, as I said, we are not scientists.’
Reggie nodded. He was sitting in the makeshift office space he’d added to the corner of a small apartment living room in Anchorage, Alaska. The organization he worked for — Civilian Special Operations — had furnished a one-bedroom apartment in the nearby city while they finished their additions to the full-time operations headquarters. He was excited to see what the cabin-turned-headquarters would look like, and he was even more excited to see the reaction of the cabin’s owner.
Harvey Bennett was a close friend of his, but he couldn’t imagine a person more resistant to the massive renovation taking place at his home. He’d purchased the cabin a couple years ago, but the CSO had recruited Ben and Reggie, offered Ben enough money that it was stupid to refuse them, and began turning his beloved two-room log home into a modern communications oasis. There would be an entire wing added, with a second story, and enough square footage inside to fit three more of Ben’s cabins.
Reggie smiled as he thought about it. Ben would pretend to be upset, complain to him and his fiancee, Julie, about it, but secretly love the new, upgraded space. He would enjoy working there with his friends, and he would enjoy the company.
“So if the lab comes back with the same results, will we be able to narrow it down from there?”
Mr. E nodded. ‘Yes, but the lab should be able to do that for us. They have the ability to isolate the specific ancestral geography of the specimen, assuming they have matching samples in their database.’
“I see,” Reggie said. “So it’s a waiting game.”
They were waiting on the results of laboratory testing on a human skull they discovered two months ago in the Rocky Mountains, near Glacier National Park in Montana. The skull had been found with a map, silver and gold coins, and had been stored in a chest inside a cave. All of it had been very exciting, and Reggie’s interest in history and longing for adventure had immediately been piqued.
But from the moment they’d brought the skull in to the lab, Reggie knew it was going to be a ‘waiting game.’ Wait for the skull to be admitted, wait for a team to begin the analysis, wait for results. He would have been surprised with the slow pace of work if he hadn’t been in the Army for years. Government work always took forever. The lab itself wasn’t a government lab, but it was funded with government money.
He had been anxiously awaiting an update for over a month, and his weekly check-ins with Mr. E hadn’t been enough to keep him sated. Now, to hear that they were so close to an answer, yet still without a definitive direction to explore, he was growing more impatient.
‘Unfortunately yes,’ Mr. E said. ‘But we are optimistic the laboratory will be able to point us in the right direction.’
Reggie pushed the chair away from the glass desk. It was a corner desk, two simple slabs of tempered glass on a cheap aluminum frame that he’d picked up used, but he liked the simplicity of it. It didn’t interfere with the rest of the room, gently falling into the background of the space unless he wanted to see it. Aside from the desk, the chair, and a couch, there wasn’t much else in the room for decor. He had a television, but it was currently being used as his computer monitor, so the couch sat in the center of the living room and stared at the blank off-white wall.
He stood up and stretched. He felt cooped up in here, in his temporary home. He had nowhere to go, and he wasn’t one for walking around aimlessly in search of something to do. He hated boredom, feared it like the plague, and sitting in an Anchorage apartment with no one but a computer screen to talk to was starting to wear him down. He had books, but he’d already read them. He had food, and while he liked to
cook, he didn’t like the temptation — anything he cooked he would eat.
So he was frustrated. He wanted out, wanted something to do. He wanted a mission.
“Come on, E,” he said, talking to the opposite wall, knowing the microphone was more than capable of picking up his voice in the otherwise quiet room. “I need to do something. Can’t I at least get a jump on it? Take a flight to Mexico City or somewhere south of the border?”
There was no response. He waited. Still nothing. He whirled around, expecting to see that the video had temporarily seized. The internet connectivity in the apartment was fast, technically within the realm of what the marketers at the telecommunications companies called ‘high-speed,’ but compared to what he was used to it was no better than dialup.
Mr. E owned a telecommunications company, a small one in terms of market cap, but through a brilliant career of networking and hobnobbing with the DC crowd, he had built an empire with very little overhead and the cash flow to rival the slickest of Silicon Valley startups.
He looked again at the screen, pulling the two-dimensional people on it into focus. Mr. and Mrs. E stared back at him in stark contrast to one another. Mr. E was thin, graying, almost frail in build and leaning into the camera. Mrs. E. was wider in the shoulders, taller, built like a Russian tank, and smiling a wide, unnatural grin.
He almost laughed. He had seen the woman smile — they had spent some time together in Antarctica and shared pleasantries on numerous occasions after that, but the wide, sheepish grin was his trademark, not hers. She didn’t wear it well, either — it came across as an odd, forced rhythm, like something she knew she needed to do but not something she really knew how to do.
“Wh — why are you smiling?” Reggie asked. He was genuinely confused.
‘We are sending you somewhere,’ Mrs. E said. ‘So pack your bags.’
“I never got a chance to unpack,” he replied.
‘Perfect. Your flight leaves tomorrow morning, first thing. Can you get a ride to the airport?’
He nodded, pulling out his cellphone and holding it up to the camera. “Kids are using these little computer thingies for all sorts of things, including scheduling rides to the airport and calling people.”
If Mr. E got the joke, it wasn’t apparent on his face. He sat, motionless, onscreen. Mrs. E somehow found a way to widen her smile. It stretched her cheeks out, making her face look gaunt, like a skeleton that had been forced through the business end of a steamroller.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s the ruse? Where are you sending me?”
Mrs. E flashed a glance at her husband, who revealed nothing. Man, that guy can act, he thought. Mrs. E, gleaning nothing from the man sitting next to her, turned back to the camera and faced Reggie.
‘Cozumel, Mexico,’ she said.
“Cozumel? That’s an island, right?”
‘It is. And you need to be there by 3:30pm, local time, tomorrow.’
He frowned. “Why? I thought we didn’t have conclusive data from the lab yet?”
‘We do not,’ she said. ‘There has been a development elsewhere, and we would like you to follow up on it.’
“A development?”
‘A situation, if you will.’
He walked back to the television screen and computer monitor, pushing the chair out of the way. “What kind of situation? And what am I supposed to do in Cozumel?”
Mrs. E told him, all while her husband sat silent next to her.
No way, he thought. There’s no way I can do that.
He’ll kill me.
3
“DR. LIN,” THE MAN SAID again, calling his attention back. “Would you please explain to us your infraction?”
Dr. Lin swallowed. He wasn’t good with confrontation. He was a scientist, a doctor, ready to analyze and prescribe and confident in his abilities, but he had never been comfortable with this sort of thing. The board sat around him, three of them in person and four of them digitally filling the screens that curved around one edge of the room.
He watched their expressions, tried to read them. The people on the screens — all calling in from their locations around the world — were most difficult. They seemed to feel his scrutiny, and were working to mask their emotion by staring straight into their cameras. He looked at the man who had spoken, then swallowed again. This man was incapable of hiding his emotion.
And right now, the man’s emotion was especially easy to read: he was livid.
“Dr. Lin,” he said a third time. “Do I need to remind you of the gravity of this —“
“N — no,” Dr. Lin stammered. “I apologize, I — I was just collecting my thoughts.”
The man’s eyebrow rose, but he still looked as though he were frowning. “Well I do hope you’ve collected them all.” He made a point of checking his watch, a large flourish of spinning it out and around his wrist while bringing his forearm out in front of his torso. If Dr. Lin hadn’t been so terrified, he would have been annoyed.
“Yes,” he said. “I have. Again, I am sorry. My deviation was remedied, and it is one that will not be repeated, under any circum —“
“There were to be no deviations under any circumstances in the first place, Dr. Lin,” the man said. The woman on the screen behind him was nodding.
“Yes, I — that was clear, yes. I apologize.”
The man stared.
“It was a surprise to me as well. I was unaware of the applied effect of patient 31-3’s latest dosage, and —“
One of the board members listening in on one of the screens, a man Dr. Lin had never met in person, interrupted. “Dr. Lin, would you kindly speak as though you are addressing a group of non-medical professionals?” the man’s voice was thick with a southern American accent, and he smiled a bit as he said it. Dr. Lin didn’t for a moment believe the smile.
“Sorry. Yes, I only meant that I was not aware that the dosage had an immediate effect.”
“Is it your job to be aware of these things?”
Lin swallowed again. “Yes.”
“And why were you not aware?”
“I — I was attempting to ensure…” he stopped, looked at the southern gentleman, then continued. “I was trying to make sure there were no mistakes with the medication.”
“So you weren’t looking at the subject.”
“I was not, no. But the reaction would have taken me by surprise nonetheless, whether or not I was watching the patient’s face.”
“Subject,” the man said, correcting him.
“Yes.”
“So you were surprised by the subject’s reaction? Why?”
Dr. Lin frowned. Do I really need to spell it out for them? These were the men and women who had built this company. Surely they didn’t have time for this.
“It will all be detailed in my report, which I will prepare and —“
“I’m most certain it will,” the man said. “But since we were already having a board meeting, and I’m sure we are all most interested in what you discovered, I would ask that you indulge us.”
Dr. Lin nodded. “Very well. I was administering a dosage of the medication we have designed specifically for 31-3. It was the fifty-third dosage in a nearly two-year timespan, and it was a routine operation.”
“For ‘routine operations’ such as these, do we not have laboratory assistants?”
“We do,” Lin responded. “The woman on duty was recently removed.”
The man watched Lin’s face. He knew everything already, so this was a game. Cat and mouse, and Lin felt the trap closing around him. “And for what reason was she removed?”
He felt the tension in the room shift, tightening up. The woman and man on the screen to his left leaned in toward their computers. The man to his right, sitting next to Dr. Lin’s boss, the man conducting the interrogation, looked up at him anxiously. They didn’t know the full story, and Dr. Lin was hoping they would have found out some other way than this.
Any other way than this.
“Also involving 31-3?”
“Also involving 31-3.”
“And what was the outcome of that incident?”
“She was relieved of her duty.”
“She was removed,” the man corrected.
“Yes.”
The man looked down. There was a manila folder on the tabletop in front of him, but it was closed. He placed his hands on it, felt its surface, then jerked his head back up and stared at Dr. Lin. His bright, large eyes bored into Lin’s, and he could almost feel the pressure, pushing him backwards. This man got high from encounters such as this. He longed for them. The dimple on his cheek grew, punctuating the man’s thoughts.
“So, Dr. Lin, there was an infraction involving your laboratory assistant, and she was removed. A day later you were administering a dosage of the subject’s medication and you were found to have instigated a infraction. What, may I ask, was the nature of this deviation?”
Dr. Lin sighed. He knew there was no sense hiding behind it now. They would all find out, so he might as well attempt to control what was said. He shifted on his feet.
“The man smiled.”
“The subject smiled?”
Dr. Lin nodded. “He did. Just after I had finished. He smiled, directly at me.”
“You provoked him.”
“I did no such thing,” Dr. Lin said. “I administered the dosage, extracted the needle, and I saw him smiling.”
The woman onscreen sniffed, moving around in her chair to vie for attention without coming across as rude. The man addressing Dr. Lin stopped and turned, waiting. “Dr. Lin,” the woman said. “Is it not impossible for these subjects to be able to experience what you are describing?”
“We believed that to be the case, yes,” Dr. Lin said. “The dosage has always had the unintended side effect of removing the ability for our subjects to respond to emotional stimuli. Smiling, waving, arching of eyebrows — these are all impossible tasks.”
