The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  She took a second to center herself with the reassurance that they’d prevented the worst-case scenario. At least they’re all still alive.

  One of the Division 9 agents fiddled with a little black device connected by wires to the electronic lock on the angry girl’s cage. Nina figured him for Sanchez, even from behind. He seemed frustrated and poked and slapped the component in his hands.

  The girl howled louder, pummeling her feet back and forth into the bars. She wheezed and gasped for air, as though she expected to drop dead if she didn’t escape in the next thirty seconds.

  “Sanchez.” Nina walked up to him, catching a whiff of sour awfulness from the box of clothes: sewer, vomit, and urine. She almost considered they’d been stripped to improve their comfort, but seeing them all still dirt-smeared made it clear the scientists thought of them only as animals―expendable creatures they could do whatever they wanted with.

  Taken by a spike of rage, Nina ripped the tranq cabinet off the wall and smashed it to the floor, sending green autoinjectors scattering across the smooth, shiny metal. The loud smash of thin plastisteel stunned the field team in their tracks. The children all went quiet and watched her. The little blonde girl stilled. After a few seconds more of staring, she lowered her feet from the bars and sat up.

  Nina’s presence, the raw fury wafting from her eyes, caused the kids all to shy away… except for the blonde girl. She scooted closer, grabbed the bars, and pressed her face to them. A boy on the opposite side whispered to his neighbor, speaking Russian. An echo of his words followed in English at the back of her mind.

  “Are they going to kill us now?”

  The black-haired, maybe eight-year-old boy didn’t reply, his gaze locked square on Nina.

  “Sorry, lieutenant. I’m trying to get this open as fast as I can, but they’ve got some serious crypto here. It’s separate from the network. Self-contained. You’d think they were teaching the monkeys how to hack security codes…”

  As if on cue, the chimpanzee snorted.

  The filthy, savage blonde girl kicked the bars again before slapping them a few times and grunting, out of breath. She locked terrified blue eyes with Nina’s. Droplets from her battered water bottle fell in trickles down her body, collecting dirt, and dripping black onto the lining pad below the cage floor. The girl looked as though she hadn’t had a decent meal in months: her ribs were prominent, her hips and legs bony and bruised. Red marks on her wrists and ankles suggested she hadn’t much cared for the plastic zip cuffs. Finger-shaped bruises on both her upper arms filled Nina with the need to hit someone, but those marks could’ve come from the Citizen Management officers who’d arrested her back in Russia.

  Growling, the girl grabbed the bars and tried to rattle the door, but couldn’t budge it. She seemed to sense Nina had come to help them, and her wild expression teased at a nervous smile. A whine escaped from her nose, the tone imploring, her expression asked how people could do this to her.

  “Pozhaluysta otkroyte.” The girl leaned her face between two bars, her voice fell to a pleading whisper. “Pozhaluysta.”

  The ghostly child voice in the back of her head echoed, “Please open… please.”

  “Get someone in here with some goddamned blankets, and a medical transport.” Nina pushed Sanchez aside, grasped the bars, and switched to Russian. “Back up, sweetie. We will not harm you. I’m going to get you out of there.” The language came courtesy of a neuronal chip, a cortical copy of someone else’s knowledge that, after so many months, functioned no different from having learned it.

  The girl startled, gawking at Nina as if shocked someone could speak. She scooted away, fingers and toes gripping the floor of the cage like a feral thing ready to pounce and sprint at the first chance. Waist-long hair, frizzed up into a lion’s mane, added to the effect. The transition in the eyes staring up at her from abject terror to hope made Nina sick, wondering what horrible things the girl had seen back home, and how terrifying it must be to not understand anything one’s captors said.

  Nina clenched her fingers around the bars. A quick tug snapped the plastisteel door from its hinges with a loud pank, and sent a blast of sparks spewing from the electronic lock panel. She rotated left and handed the door to Sanchez, who grabbed it before thinking and staggered to the side as the unexpected weight dragged him down to his knees.

  “How did you do that?” whispered the child, crawling up to the open edge. “What are you?”

  Three of the boys behind Nina, on the opposite wall, thrust their arms out between the bars of their enclosures, all hollering to be let out next. From what they yelled, some of which consisted of slang her chip missed, they all understood they were to be used for medical tests, and expected to die in their cages, never having been let out again.

  Nina reached in and grasped the girl by the armpits, lifting her into a delicate embrace. The child clamped on, trembling. “I was hurt very badly, and they had to give me a new body so I didn’t die.” She looked around at the other children, struggling to keep her mood out of her voice. “Please stay calm. We are here to help. I know you’ve all grown up scared of the police, but you are not in Europe anymore. You are safe now.”

  “I’m not a lab monkey, I’m Elizaveta,” murmured the girl. The former ball of rage sniffled. “They were going to be mean to us, yes? To make us sick and see if their medicines work? To test the doctor machines. Treat us like mice in boxes.” Her grip tightened. “Thank you for saving us. I don’t want to die.”

  “Don’t be frightened, Elizaveta.” Nina patted the girl’s back in an attempt to be comforting.

  A woman in Division 1 armor holding a grey blanket open to receive approached.

  Nina found it oddly difficult to want to let go of the girl, and the child’s death grip didn’t make it easier. “Can you speak any English?”

  “No. What will happen to us?”

  “It’s okay. This woman will keep you safe.”

  Elizaveta clung tighter and whined. Nina held her for a moment more while the shouting from the boys grew louder and more insistent. The somewhat older girl in the next space kept quiet, staring ashamedly at the floor of her cage.

  “Come on, sweetie. I have to get the others out, and I can’t do that with you hanging on me.”

  Elizaveta trembled. After a bit of coaxing, Nina managed to hand her into the blanket-grip of the patrol officer. Burritoed in the warm fabric except for her head, the child peered at her, again seeming fearful. “What will they do to us now?”

  “You’ll be taken to a real doctor who will make sure you are healthy, then given to proper families here. We are not going to send you back to Europe.”

  Elizaveta bit her lip and rested her head against the armored shoulder of the woman holding her. She stared into Nina’s soul as the officer carried her toward the corridor leading to the elevators. A second before they disappeared past the archway, the child raised a hand to wave.

  I’m going to be seeing that poor kid in my dreams for the rest of my life.

  Nina turned back to the next cage and grabbed the bars. The dark-haired girl continued to try to become part of the inner wall. She whimpered, fidgeting and trying to keep herself covered with her arms. At the pank of the bolts failing, the child looked over her shoulder, her face bright red with shame. Nina hurled the cage door like a Frisbee, embedding it into a cabinet of electronic equipment.

  The second girl remained quiet and still.

  “Come on, sweetie,” said Nina in Russian. “You don’t belong in a cage.”

  She whimpered and made eye contact, but still didn’t move.

  “What’s your name? I’m Nina. It’s all right… you don’t have anything to be afraid of anymore.”

  The perhaps eight-year-old kept staring at her, ignoring Nina’s continued attempts to be comforting and coax her out, until a man in blue Division 1 armor brought over a waiting blanket. She inched backward a little and hid her face against her knees, remaining curled in a tight ball a
s Nina reached in, lifted her out, and handed her to the officer. Her hair reeked with a mixture of mossy earth and sewer.

  “You’re safe now,” whispered Nina in Russian. “No one is going to hurt you.”

  As soon as the officer closed the blanket around her, the girl seemed to relax a little. She gathered the cloth tight at her chin and whispered, “Polina,” before she burst into tears. The man carried the bawling girl out to the elevator lobby.

  One by one, Nina tore the doors away from the cages, getting angrier and angrier. The field team scurried to find a place to stand clear of fifty-pound square shuriken flying about. By the fifth broken cage, the boys practically came out clinging to the doors, jumping to freedom as soon as they could fit. Sanchez had disappeared down an interior hallway, muttering something about not being needed here anymore. Nina freed Dimitri, Fedor, Ivan, Josef, and a five-year-old who seemed too terrified to speak. Pavel, the oldest, waited for Nina to clear the door and hopped down from his second-story perch to stand in front of his former prison, fists on his hips in the pose of a conquering hero.

  “I am glad I do not have to kill you all.” His bravado lasted all of three more seconds before another officer wrapped him in a plain grey police-issue blanket, and the tears came. “The police always lie. A-are you lying again? Are we really free?”

  Nina grasped his shoulder and gave him a comforting squeeze. “You’re really free.”

  He reached up and put his hand atop hers. “Thank you.”

  Operative Padilla approached after the officer carried Pavel out of the room. The chimpanzee screeched and slapped the bars, tilting its head at Nina with an expectant look. She seethed at the box of dingy clothes, a few small moldy sneakers, and one teddy bear that looked as though it had spent months in a sewer. She found herself transfixed on the pathetic stuffed animal.

  “What happened to the staff?” asked Nina.

  “Lieutenant.” Padilla greeted her with a nod, then gestured at one of two hallways going deeper into the facility. “We’ve detained five individuals. We have two others in a separate conference room who had apparently suffered an attack of conscience. The woman’s story is that as soon as they saw their new test subjects were human children and not actual primates, they attempted to stop it. When persuasion failed, it got violent. The woman suffered a non-fatal gunshot wound; the man is still unconscious from being hit over the head with a fire suppression unit.”

  Nina picked up the bear, staring into its plastic eyes. An air of moldy must exuded from its matted, crusty fur. Every goddamned day I see something worse than the last. Maybe Shinigami was right… we are all just circling the drain. 「Hardin… are you getting this?」

  Her immediate superior appeared in a virtual holo-panel courtesy of her electronic eyes. Pasty, but military-hardened face, brown hair of tight curls looking like a dead beaver draped over his head. 「I am. Unbelievable. Are you okay?」

  「I want Osiris Biotechnic shut down. If this doesn’t warrant a dissolution order, I don’t know what would. Fucking cages, sir. Like goddamned chimps.」

  「That’ll be a month of inquest hearings, but, you’re right.」 Virtual-Hardin sighed at the mountain of paperwork waiting for him, his expression grim. Brown caterpillar eyebrows rose together. 「Oh, there’s someone from Zero trying to contact you.」

  Operative Padilla, unable to hear the back-channel communication, cleared her throat. “Lieutenant? Is everything okay?”

  “If you have to ask that, you haven’t been looking at what’s going on here.” Nina tossed the desiccated stuffed animal atop the pile of foul-smelling clothes.

  Before Nina could think ‘who is it?’ back over the head-comm to Hardin, a commotion got her attention from the rear hallway.

  Additional field team agents, all clad head to toe in black operator suits, their faces covered, escorted five handcuffed scientists in sky blue lab coats over business casual. A frightened woman in her mid-twenties with tan skin and dark hair kept her head down, mumbling repetitively. In front of her, a somewhat older woman with pale skin and brown hair maintained a haughty look of detachment, as though she expected the company lawyers to sort it all out within the hour. Ahead of the women walked three men, the farthest thirtyish and Chinese, the next a pale, gaunt, dweebish man who couldn’t stop trembling. An annoyed fifty-something with a perfect neat coif of white-grey hair led the group in single file. She recognized him from the vid call.

  “You’re overstepping!” yelled Doctor Rice. “You’re interrupting vital research! This is going to harm all of humanity. It is exceedingly unlikely that any of the subjects would have suffered any lasting detriment to their health. I’d be happy to show you the testing documentation if you don’t believe me. They will merely be exposed to various pathogens and cured, or used to evaluate surgical techniques that will save countless lives once we perfect them. At worst, they’ll have some mild scar tissue and perhaps some light nerve damage.”

  Nina stormed around the large central table and got in the way of the prisoner escort. “You put children in cages. Children who’d probably watched the ACC kill everyone they’d known.”

  Doctor Rice struggled at his handcuffs while trying to stick out his chin, searching for some modicum of dignity. “Yes, yes. Resistance. They should consider themselves fortunate not to have been killed over there. I’m afraid the whole thing came together on short notice and this was the best solution in the interim.”

  She glared at him, fists tightening.

  He offered a shocked blink. “What? Thanks to those bleeding-heart activists, primates have more legal protection than foreign children. Besides, they’re a closer analog for the cures we’re trying to find. They’re about the same size as chimpanzees, so the enclosures have plenty of space. If we tried to use monkeys, we’d have a thousand university students outside at all hours singing and waving little signs at us.”

  Nina tried to melt one of the empty cages with a stare.

  He sighed. “Security is a factor―we can’t have them carrying pathogens out into the world―and these conditions are better than what they had been living in.” He tried to gesture, but the binders clicked. “Think about all we could have done for the advancement of medicine. Our schedule had seventy-four pathogens and fourteen experimental surgical procedures. Is ‘ethics’ worth tens of thousands of lives? These test subjects would’ve been shot in the street if not for our purchasing them. Osiris money saved them. Surely, you see the benefits far outweigh the negatives? Is it that distasteful for a handful of throwaways no one will miss to suffer a few years of discomfort for unimaginable advancements in―”

  The man’s voice needled Nina’s brain beyond rational thought. She grabbed Doctor Rice by the shoulder and jerked him over sideways, slamming him downward with every ounce of anger and strength she could force out of her Myofiber muscles. The edge of the table met him at the neck, causing his skull to stop while the rest of his body continued to the floor. His head liquefied on impact with a dull whump that left a crimpled dent in the metal. The decapitated body’s arms continued twitching for several seconds, rattling the binders around his wrists.

  Operative Padilla, on the other side of the table, wound up covered in a spray of gore. One eyeball with a squiggle of nerve clung to her chest, which she flicked to the side.

  “Holy shit,” whispered Sergeant Cooper.

  “Damn.” Sergeant Romero whistled. “I don’t think a Narcoderm’s gonna dent that headache.”

  Nina glared at the remaining four scientists. “Would anyone else like to attempt to justify what you people were doing?”

  The nerdy man and the younger of the two women urinated. The fortyish woman passed out, draping limp in the arms of the field agent escorting her.

  “Y-You c-can’t do that,” stammered the Chinese man. “You k-killed him.”

  Nina fixated on the dark crimson depression in the mirror-like table. Blood pooled in the indentation, gooping over the side drop by drop. “The o
nly reason I’m not performing a summary execution on all of you is so you can provide testimony about what was going on here during a dissolution inquest. Osiris Biotechnic has forfeited its right to exist.” She snapped her gaze to the scientists. “All of you will provide complete and true disclosure of everything that happened and everything that was going to happen to those children.” A long blank stare came back at her from the Chinese man. “Or I’ll just save everyone the circle jerk and wasted time right now.”

  He babbled. “But… But…”

  “This is a Division 9 investigation. You don’t have rights. You don’t even count as a human fucking being anymore.” She grabbed him by the lab coat.

  After a half-second of serious consideration to cramming him into a monkey cage, she flung him at the hallway out with enough force to launch him off his feet. He sailed through the air, landed on his chest, and slid for a little farther before his legs hit the ground.

  “Get him out of here.”

  The field team picked him up and hurried away with the other detainees.

  Operative Padilla looked down at her dripping suit and back up at Nina. “What about the other two?”

  “The dissenters?” Nina clenched a trembling fist for a few seconds until her rage ebbed. “Consider them cooperating witnesses instead of suspects unless they give you a reason to do otherwise.” She turned away from Padilla, scowling at the cages before shifting her gaze to Hardin’s floating image. 「Sorry… you said something about Zero?」

  The chimpanzee slapped the bars and howled. It pointed at her, pointed at the bars, and… smiled.

  Four medtechs entered, trailing a pair of hover-gurneys behind them. Pale yellow light spots followed the floating stretchers down the back hallway amid the clatter of boots.

  “Heh. He almost seems smart.” Nina chuckled to herself.