Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  “Please raise your arms above your head--”

  “Okay, okay,” Chal muttered, following the order.

  “Thank you.”

  Chal wondered if she was imagining the note of annoyance in the automated voice. She felt like kicking the wall with the embedded screen, and immediately chastised herself for being silly.

  “While irradiation is occurring, we will conduct a brief medical history. Please keep the glasses on until a chime has sounded to signal that the irradiation has concluded.”

  Before Chal could prepare herself for the irradiation, a purple light flashed brightly on all sides of her, illuminating the room in a harsh glare. She blinked behind the glasses, temporarily blinded. The room hummed with a high buzzing sound.

  After ten seconds passed, the chime sounded.

  “You may lower your arms. Please keep the glasses on.” Chal shook her arms out; they were half numb from being raised for so long. The purple light continued shining on all sides, and she looked down at her naked body. It seemed alien and pale to her in the glare, her veins standing out and bluish under the irradiation. Her nipples were hard from the cold and the areola gleamed a dark purple against her skin, which was almost white.

  “Please use the touch screen to indicate your answers or speak them aloud.” Chal looked back up, black spots swimming in front of her eyes. “We will begin with basic history. Please note if any of the following need correction.”

  A list of medical facts popped up on the screen. Sex: female; height: 170cm, weight: 57kg, blood pressure: 124/70, normal... Most of the facts she was able to confirm immediately, although she was uncertain how the program had already gained so much information. Sensors in the floor, perhaps, and in the walls. It wasn’t as though she knew her own blood pressure, so she simply assumed they had gotten it right.

  “Thank you. Have you contracted any viral or bacterial infections within the last three weeks?”

  Chal pressed the box on the screen that said “no.” She wasn’t going to talk to this program aloud. It was entirely too annoying. The buzzing stopped, and the light began to shine more dimly.

  “Thank you. Please indicate if you have ever contracted any of the following illnesses.” The list that came up on the screen was long, and some of the diseases were strange to Chal. Dengue fever? There hadn’t been a case of that in decades, she thought. Dutifully she pressed “no” on all of the boxes, and the screen dissolved into new questions.

  “Thank you. Please indicate if you have ever been diagnosed with any of the following conditions.” The list here was predictable: heart problems, cancer, epilepsy. Chal hesitated when she came to the line marked “mental illness/depression,” her hand hovering above both boxes. Finally she pressed “no.”

  “Thank you. Please wait until irradiation has finished.” A minute passed before another chime sounded, and the purple light faded completely. “You may remove the glasses.” Chal did so, and a drawer slid out from the wall. In it were clothes, a white technician’s suit. She pulled on the underwear, which were tight and slightly chafing, and finished dressing as quickly as she could.

  The exit door slid open when she approached it, and she met back up with Lieutenant Johnner and Dr. Fielding in a different hallway. They looked like triplets in their white lab suits, and Chal noticed Dr. Fielding checking out her body under the outfit. Typical. She crossed her arms in front of her chest.

  “Why is everything underground?” she asked, as they walked through the hall. “Is it to hide it from outside detection?” With everything built so deep into the earth, the structural costs must have been enormous.

  “In part,” Johnner said, “though satellite espionage would be able to track us simply by the heat signatures. We put out a lot of exhaust. It’s a safe bet that most of the big powers already know where we are here, even if they’re not exactly sure what it is we do.” They crossed under an arch manned by two military men, where Johnner showed his ID for the third time. There were more steps leading down. The second circle of hell, Chal thought.

  “Really, though, it’s for security’s sake. This laboratory was constructed to be able to withstand the consequences of nuclear war.” Dr. Fielding said nothing, but Chal noticed that he looked anxious as they began to descend the staircase.

  “Nuclear war? Why is that?”

  “This facility is the third most important military structure in the United States today, right after the Pentagon and the nuclear navy base in San Diego. If there is war, we need to be prepared to be targeted.”

  “You said that nobody knew what happens here.”

  “They don’t. It’s not an issue and there is no real threat of a nuclear strike. Just a safety precaution.”

  “A safety precaution.”

  “That’s right,” Lieutenant Johnner said, opening the door for her and Dr. Fielding with his ID card. “Just in case.”

  ***

  The holding room they were in had only a couple of metal benches, chairs, and a medical cabinet. On the far wall the first frame of the video was paused. Dr. Fielding handed them both pills and bottles of water.

  “Is everything set up?” Johnner asked, tossing his pill back and swallowing it without need of water.

  “It’s all ready to go once she’s briefed,” Dr. Fielding said, scratching his lip again in what Chal realized must be a tic. He wouldn’t stop touching his face, and it was beginning to irritate her.

  “What is this?” Chal asked, looking at the large blue pill. She did not trust Dr. Fielding, didn’t trust anyone anymore in this sterile place. It had only been a few hours since they arrived, and already she felt ill at the thought of staying underground for any longer, no matter how intense her curiosity about the experiment.

  “Just another series of antibiotics,” Dr. Fielding said. “You’ll need about an hour before we can ensure they are effective. With all of the expensive biological substrates down here . . .” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness, and Chal realized why she found him so creepy. His pupils were so large that you couldn’t see even the faintest ring of his irises, and it gave him a reptilian look. Like a snake waiting to strike its prey.

  As she watched him, his tongue darted out to the corner of his lip, then back in, completing the image. She hid her shudder and placed the pill on her tongue, tasting its bitterness before washing it back with the water.

  Dr. Fielding turned and left through the glass door, a soft hiss of air blowing around the doorframe as it closed. Johnner went to the wall screen and turned up the brightness. Onscreen was a frozen image of a man lying naked in a hospital bed, an assortment of medical recording devices displayed behind him. Chal recognized the wired board over his head as an EEG reader. At the bottom right of the screen the timer was marked at 00:00.

  “Since we don’t have much time, I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you the recordings now while we’re waiting,” Johnner said.

  “What is this?” Chal asked, but her pulse was beating faster. Could it be?

  Lieutenant Johnner nodded, as if reading her mind. “This is the initial questioning of the first full human-substrate biological organism developed here. What you’re about to see is highly classified. Most members of Congress don’t have access to the results of these experiments.”

  “Yes, of course,” Chal said, impatient.

  Johnner hesitated, as if he wanted to say something else, but decided against it. He pressed the play button and sat back down next to Chal. The timer began to run.

  The voice that they heard first on the recording was Dr. Fielding’s.

  “Prototype One consciousness trial. Aluminium core and memory stats all checked and normal. Vital signs within expected parameters.”

  The camera blurred and refocused as Dr. Fielding came into view. He was sitting next to the man who was asleep, it seemed. IV drips ran into both of the man’s arms. His chest rose and fell regularly, the silence broken only by th
e soft beeping of the monitoring equipment. He had dark hair, almost black. Then Dr. Fielding spoke.

  “We will now awaken the prototype.”

  ***

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” - Genesis 2:7

  ***

  Chal had seen this done before with rats grown in her lab. The consciousness and intelligence experiments that she had attempted had all tried to achieve the same results. They had all been rated miserable failures in the end.

  She had grown rats from single cells, adjusting the development of their brains with chemical and electrical alterations as they grew into maturity. At first they stayed comatose in the grow tanks designed specifically for this purpose, never interacting with the world until their brains were already developed in a specific way.

  The rats, when awakened with anti-anesthetics, seemed normal enough at first. They ran around, sniffed at things, ate without overfeeding. The interesting part came when they were placed into maze tests.

  At first Chal’s lab believed that they had somehow messed up the memory centers of the brains. For when the rats were placed into mazes they had run before, they sometimes did well but sometimes sat motionless at the entrance of the mazes or at the first turns, seeming to indicate that they had no recollection of the paths they had run. Further tests of intelligence also pointed to the same memory impairments.

  It was an almost-serendipitous moment when one of Chal’s interns decided to run EEG trials with the rats, doing test after test with single-digit numbers of electrodes wired into different parts of their brains. He was looking for confirmation of memory impairment to see if the kinds of brain malfunctions matched with human Alzheimer patient malfunctions.

  To his surprise, the rats all had fully functional memory centers, at least according to the EEG readouts. The problem lay with the consciousness development process. There were new efforts made to study the rats, but the results were inconclusive. As their development continued, many of the rats began to perform erratically, running the mazes into dead ends again and again, almost as if they were intentionally avoiding the correct path. Some of the rats self-mutilated, chewing at their limbs. Others starved themselves to death despite available food.

  Funding for the project ran out, and since there were no practical applications to be seen, Chal’s lab accepted the failure and moved on.

  It was perhaps Chal’s biggest mistake as a scientist, for if she had spent more time studying the rats she might have realized that her attempts to induce conscious development had been successful. Indeed, the experiment had been too successful in that regard. The rats were not just conscious, they were conscious to a very high degree.

  Moreover, they were emotionally conscious.

  The connection between over-developed consciousness and depression would not be made until much later, at a neuropsychology lab in Singapore. But by then Chal had already forgotten about the rats.

  ***

  The timer was at 01:13 when Dr. Fielding reached over and adjusted the IV drip into the prototype’s arm. The liquid dripped green through the clear plastic tubing. Chal leaned forward, her eyes glued to the screen.

  The man's eyelids fluttered open. The recording was high-definition but Chal wanted to get closer, to see the expression in his eyes. Dr. Fielding reached over to turn the dial on one of the EEG readers, blocking the view of the screen, and Chal felt like reaching through the screen and swatting his arm away.

  "Hello," Dr. Fielding said softly, sitting back into his chair.

  "Hello," the prototype said, almost automatically. Chal inhaled sharply at the voice. She knew that language memory chips were good, especially at installing preferred adjacency pairs such as responding to phrases like "Hello" or "How are you?" Still, this was not a human with an already-functioning language network in his brain. This was a new person entirely, or a new brain, at the very least.

  She wanted to ask Johnner to stop the tape so that she could ask him whether it was a memory implant or an actual language network they had developed, but she was too excited to see what came next.

  "I am Dr. Fielding." The doctor looked over to a clipboard on the table next to him, and Chal realized that he was reading off of a script.

  "You are Dr. Fielding."

  "That is correct." Dr. Fielding shifted nervously in his chair, and Chal watched as the man's eyes tracked his movement. It was awe-inspiring.

  “Who are you?” Dr. Fielding continued.

  “I--” the man in the bed began to say, but then stopped. He looked down at the IV going into his left arm, reached down, and pulled it out. Blood began to flow from the opening and Dr. Fielding stood up immediately, reaching over to stanch the flow of blood. He had just put his hand on the prototype’s arm when all hell broke loose.

  The prototype screamed and began to kick his legs in violent circles, moaning loudly. Thrashing in his bed, he ripped out three other IV tubes and knocked over the monitor, which crashed to the floor and began to emit a high-pitched squeal.

  “I am malfunctioning!” the prototype yelled, the words echoing off of the laboratory walls. He kicked out and knocked Dr. Fielding to the ground beside him.

  “I am malfunctioning!”

  Immediately Dr. Fielding looked to the wall behind him and gestured frantically. Watching the video, Chal was confused until she realized it must have been one-way glass, with the spectators just behind the wall. Indeed, after just a few seconds, two assistants rushed in and restrained the prototype, while another doctor came in front of the camera, obscuring the view again. Chal could see that the doctor was holding a syringe. The prototype’s shouting degenerated into incoherent screams, staccato yells that punctuated the bedlam.

  “AH! AH! AH! AH!--”

  The noise died down almost instantly as the doctor injected the prototype with the syringe. The doctor moved out of view and the camera took a half-second to refocus. When it did, Chal could clearly see the man lying in the hospital bed. His eyes were glazed over, but his face was twisted with emotion. Blood trickled down his arm and dripped off of his elbow, splashing on the white vinyl flooring of the lab.

  Johnner reached over and stopped the recording.

  “What happened?” Chal asked.

  “There’s nothing more than this,” Johnner said. “Later attempts to reawaken the prototype were unsuccessful.”

  “I mean,” Chal said, “what happened to him? Why did he malfunction?”

  “That,” Lieutenant Johnner said, “is what we were hoping you could tell us.”

  Dr. Fielding knocked at the glass door, and Lieutenant Johnner went to open it for him. As he walked in and sat down in one of the chairs, Chal noticed that he averted his gaze from hers. She was about to ask him something about the first prototype interview when she felt the floor move under her feet. The metal bench rattled against the wall.

  Chal stood up in fright, certain that the lab station was under attack, that the entire building was about to crumble, that she would die-- that they would all die here, hundreds of feet under the ground. Somewhat amusingly, she thought about the book signing in Boston she had missed because of this. She would never get to do another book signing.

  And then, just like that, it was over. Dr. Fielding and Lieutenant Johnner were still sitting in their seats, as calm as anything.

  “What the hell was that?” Chal said, still standing.

  “Earthquake,” Dr. Fielding said, and now he met her eyes with his, dark empty pools. His cool tone annoyed her, as though she should have been expecting such an occurrence.

  “We get them here all the time,” Johnner said. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you. This part of Arizona is very close to the Big Chino fault line.”

  “Great idea to build an underground facility here, wasn’t it?” Chal said.

  “It’s only s
mall quakes,” Dr. Fielding said, and again Chal was irritated by the condescending quality of his voice.

  “This building is built to withstand earthquakes up to 6-7 on the Richter scale,” Johnner continued. “And there have never been any quakes around here that are more than a 3. It’s safe.”

  Chal didn’t think that any kind of earthquake was safe, but she was clearly outnumbered. Turning back to the matter at hand, she tried to remember her question for Dr. Fielding. It wasn’t coming to her.

  “The prototype said it was malfunctioning,” Chal said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Fielding said. “This is a standard error message that was, for lack of a better word, programmed into the organisms’ mental structure. When their mental structure is in peril, this is the phrase that indicates that they need help.”

  “Programmed?”

  “Language turns out to be a fairly simple structure to grow in neuronal substrates,” Dr. Fielding said, with not a small hint of pride in his voice. “Of course, they have the grammar/content structures, but there is also a set of built-in responses.”

  “Using language memory chips?” Chal asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Fielding confirmed. “But we’ve also been able to graft in language structures that function much as a baby’s do. They are pre-equipped with certain syntactical structures. In other words, they are able to expand vocabulary, make connections, and learn how to speak almost instantly upon awakening.”

  “If they don’t die immediately,” Chal said.

  Dr. Fielding flushed. “Of course we are working out the issues with the awakening process, but I see no reason to think that the language structure is part of the problem.”

  “No,” Chal said, her mind wandering elsewhere. She didn’t think that language was the issue, either. Something else, something more fundamental.

  Lieutenant Johnner coughed slightly, and Chal realized she had been staring at the blank wall.

  “You said there were two other prototypes,” Chal said, gesturing toward the screen.

  “The next one was similar,” said Dr. Fielding. “We tried all we could, but it didn’t work. After only a half a minute of questioning and it ran into the same kind of malfunction. Now we have a limited amount of time before we awaken the third prototype--”