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Alan blinked, assimilating the new information. He seemed calm enough. Then he looked down at the IV going into his wrist. He held his arm out to Chal.
“Will you take this out?” he asked.
Chal swallowed. “Why do you want it out?” she asked.
“I don’t want it in me,” Alan said. “I don’t want it in my body. I want to leave.” He stood up from the chair, letting the sheet fall from his naked body. His arm was still extended toward Chal. “Help me.”
Chal’s lips parted. His voice sounded so trusting, and she didn’t know what to say.
“It’s important that you get the rest you need, Alan. Your development is still just beginning.”
“No,” he said. “I would like to stay awake now.”
The IV began the slow drip of the sedative just then, and he noticed the change out of the corner of his eye. Leaning over, he snapped the IV line shut. The machine sounded an alarm, a soft but insistent beeping. She was amazed at how in control he was compared with his previous sessions. He had grown already, she thought. Her work was done. He was a man, with all of the emotions and sentience of a man.
He reached down and pulled off the bandage, exposing the IV needle.
“I’ll pull it out myself if I have to,” he said.
“No, I’ll do it,” Chal said, making the decision quickly. Visions of the first prototype bleeding and writhing on the floor raced across her mind. She twisted the IV out expertly, pressing on the skin to stop the bleeding after she had it removed.
“Thank you,” Alan said. He didn’t seem to care that he was naked and vulnerable. He stood like a warrior, ready for whatever came next. Chal wondered if they had made him that way. Of course they had. They had made him exactly the way he was.
Leaving Chal to sit in indecision, Alan walked around the perimeter of the room, stopping at the door. He eyed the keypad warily.
“You can’t leave,” Chal said.
“You could open this,” Alan said. It wasn’t a question.
“They’ll stop you,” Chal said. She was terrified that the assistants were waiting outside with their syringes. “Please don’t.”
Alan paused. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Tears leapt to Chal’s eyes. “I’m not.”
Alan came over to her.
“I know you’re not lying, Chal,” he said. He reached out and touched her cheek, and she was embarrassed to have to blink away the tears in her eyes.
“Why am I here?” he repeated. “Why did they create me?”
Chal shook her head, willing herself to be steady. “You’re a prototype.”
“A prototype for what?”
“For the military. For war.” There, she had said it. Lieutenant Johnner be damned. If he was going to send these creations to fight in some remote country against their own kind, they deserved to know about it.
“War?” he said. He moved his hand down, resting it on her shoulder. She looked at his eyes and saw that he was lost in thought, brain signals racing from synapse to synapse. He opened his mouth to speak, but he was trembling.
“Alan?” Chal asked.
“I feel dizzy,” Alan said. He cleared his throat. “I think I do need some rest.” He went to take a step toward the chair, and stumbled. Chal caught him by the arm and eased him down into a sitting position. It was too much, it had been too much for him. Physically, at least, he was fine. But mentally, he was fatigued.
Chal had seen this before, in her rats. When placed in a maze that was too difficult for them, they would start out quick, chasing through dead end after dead end. After just a few minutes without progress, though, they would slow down and fall into a state that was near-comatose. It was part of the neuronal accelerated development. Humans needed sleep to develop, and so did biological substrates.
Alan leaned back in the chair, his eyes half-closed.
“Help me,” he said to Chal, but he was already falling asleep. “Please.”
Chal held his hand as he fought sleep, his limbs moving in slight jerks. It took longer than it had with the sedative, but finally his chest was rising and falling smoothly. She sat there a while longer, watching him rest. She wondered if he was going to be able to process so much new information at once, especially the self-knowledge that he was, in fact, not quite human.
She wondered if he was dreaming.
***
Chal went to the substrate lab. She had come to find this room calming, with the animals scurrying about in their cages, the octopi coming out of the coral and waving their tentacles in hopes of food. It was a marked change from the rest of the lab with its sterile surfaces, everything dead or digitized.
Walking through the door, she passed by the mice. They were chattering to each other and stopped as she went past them. She paused, looking down. Were these mice already intelligent? Were they possessed of consciousness as she was, or was it something altogether different? She put her fingers on the cage and bent down. The mice scuttled over each other, scraping over the wood shavings and twitching their whiskers. She realized as she bent over that she was utterly exhausted.
It had been hours since she last slept, and the excitement of the sessions had kept her going for longer than her body should have been able to accept. This was always how she had done it – her success in large part due to her unwavering focus and determination to finish a project once it had begun. When she had been in school, it had been her friends and roommates who had to tear her away from her work to eat, to rest.
Here there was nobody to give her that respite, and she had not taken the care necessary to give it to herself. She leaned forward, her forehead pressing against the glass, and every nerve of hers seemed to sigh with cool relief. Sleep. She needed to sleep.
“...almost ready.”
She heard a muttering from the corner of the lab and realized with a start that there was somebody else there. The metal door in the back corner of the lab was ajar. The room with the bodies.
Chal stood up and walked slowly toward the door, then stopped in her tracks as she heard whose voice it was. Curiosity propelled her forward.
“She’s done fine,” Dr. Fielding said from inside the room. Chal strained to hear him, vaguely uneasy that she was listening to something she ought not to listen to. They must have been talking about her. There was no other woman underground, anyway.
“The prototype seems stable enough,” Fielding said. His voice was louder, and Chal stayed where she was, breathing shallowly. Perhaps he was talking with Lieutenant Johnner.
“He’s displayed a remarkable degree of emotional connection. There’s definitely value here.” Dr. Fielding coughed, then waited.
“No, she won’t be a problem. Have you got someone waiting for us on the outside?”
Chal’s eyes widened. It couldn’t be.
“The earlier the better. It needs to be woken up at regular intervals. If it takes too long to extricate, there could be problems.”
Chal backed away, trying to be silent. What she had heard wasn’t possible. It was downright treason. Dr. Fielding wanted to take Alan. Her heart was pounding, and she bumped into a shelf, knocking down an empty box. She gasped.
Dr. Fielding’s voice stopped, and she cast about in her mind for an idea as she heard the footsteps come closer to the doorway.
“Hello?” she said. “Dr. Fielding, are you in here? Dr.–”
She forced herself to walk bravely around the corner of the shelves, meeting Dr. Fielding at the opening. He was frowning.
“Dr. Fielding, I’ve been looking for you,” she said, not bothering to let him speak. Her heart was racing and she was trying hard not to let her true emotions show. If she stopped talking, she was sure that her lips would begin to tremble with fear. “We need to talk about the last session. I think it’s necessary to let Alan rest for longer before the next questioning, because of his self-awareness, but I wanted to check with you first.” She paused, waiting to see if he would believe her.
>
Dr. Fielding’s eyes narrowed, and Chal put her hand in her pocket. The serum was there, a comfort in the small glass vial, and she breathed a bit more easily. She met Dr. Fielding’s gaze head on, and did not waver.
“If you think it’s alright, I’d like to keep him sedated for an extra two hours,” she said, blinking calmly. God, her eyelids felt like they were made of lead.
“That’s fine,” Dr. Fielding said, sweeping her concerns away along with his. “If you don’t mind, I’m busy at the moment.” He motioned impatiently into the room with the bodies.
“Do you need any help?” Chal asked.
Dr. Fielding shook his head. “You’ve been a great help already,” he said, and smiled coldly at her.
“It’s impressive, isn’t it?” Chal asked. She might have been pressing her luck, but didn’t want to give the impression that she was in a hurry to leave. She fought the urge to yawn. “How far he’s come.”
“Quite impressive,” Dr. Fielding said, but his mind was elsewhere.
“Well, I’ll be in my quarters if you need me,” Chal said, and turned on her heel. Her fingers cradled the vial of serum as she walked through the door and down the hall.
Dr. Fielding was going to steal Alan.
Chal sat down on the edge of her bed. Her mind was fuzzy. She felt helpless to do anything. Lieutenant Johnner was gone, and she didn’t know how to get a hold of him. What would she tell him if she did? That there was some vague plot to take Alan from the laboratory?
She leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes to think.
Think, Chal, think.
Her exhaustion was too much, and the adrenaline of her sudden discovery was soon wearing off. The thoughts in her mind began to sliver off into tangents and run in circles around each other, and her chin nodded down to her chest. Her mind fought to stay awake, to think of a solution, but her body was completely spent. She was like a rat caught in a maze, and she had no idea where she was running, just that she needed to get out. Just before she lost consciousness and sank into sleep, one thought ran through her mind.
I must save him.
***
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When Chal woke up, the world was moving. A rumbling noise, like the shaking of windows before a space shuttle takeoff, permeated the air. At first she thought the laboratory was under attack, but it was only a half-second before she realized what was happening.
It was an earthquake.
Alan.
He was the first thing that came to her mind, and as she pushed herself upright in bed her thoughts raced a million miles an hour. Was he in danger? Then she remembered what she had learned in the past few hours, and she was at her feet instantly, her body flooded with adrenaline.
She stumbled to the doorway, feeling the floor tremble and shake underneath her. It would be over soon, she thought. Looking out into the hallway, she saw Dr. Fielding running down toward Alan’s room. The ground stopped moving, and she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. Alan.
Without hesitation, she took out the syringe, quickly filling it with the interferon serum. It was the only weapon she had, and she hoped she would not have to use it. She held it tightly, her hand stuck in her pocket, and walked out into the hallway.
There was another loud rumble that began and kept on going. The hallway leapt sideways, and Chal felt her legs being knocked out from under her. She stumbled, catching herself against the wall. If she ended up stabbing herself with the syringe, she thought, it would be the most idiotic death imaginable.
The previous earthquakes had been small, over in only a few seconds, but this one didn’t stop. As she held herself from falling, she heard a loud crack from another part of the lab. An alarm began to sound. The impossibly loud rumbling was eclipsed by the buzzing of the alarm. The lights went out overhead as the hall shook again, and Chal decided that walking was too dangerous. Emergency lights came on, the red arrows pointing toward the emergency exit behind her. The floor was shaking under her feet, and she crawled on her hands and knees toward Alan’s room, in the opposite direction of the arrows.
Technicians ran past her and she ignored them, finally reaching Alan’s room. Clutching at the keypad, she swiped her ID and pulled herself into the room.
Dr. Fielding was standing over Alan’s bed and green liquid was dripping into his IV. The handcuffs were already off of Alan’s feet, and Dr. Fielding was in the process of unlocking the cuffs on his wrists. Another tremor rolled through the structure, and Chal was almost knocked down again.
“Get out!” Dr. Fielding cried. He waved toward the door, and she saw irritation in his face.
“I won’t leave him,” Chal said. The ground was steadier now, but the alarm was still wailing, the lights flashing red. She stood at the foot of the bed. She thought that perhaps playing dumb would work. “We need to get him somewhere safe–”
“I’m waking him now,” Dr. Fielding said. “He will evacuate with me.” His eyes narrowed at her in suspicion, and she tried to keep an expression of earnestness.
“I’ll help,” Chal said. “I can – ”
Dr. Fielding took a gun out of his pocket and leveled it at Chal’s face. She blanched. So much for that ruse.
“You’ve become quite unnecessary, Dr. Davidson,” he said. “If I were you I would leave right now. Evacuate upstairs with the others.” A small tremor shook the room, and Chal saw the ceiling crack above Alan. Alan. His eyelids fluttered as specks of plaster rained down from the ceiling.
“Did you do this?” Chal asked. She focused her gaze at the barrel of the gun. Her hand hovered just over her pocket where the syringe waited. It was little defense, but it was all she had.
“An earthquake?” Dr. Fielding laughed. “You overestimate me. No, I’m just seizing an opportunity.” Behind him, Alan was starting to shift, waking up. The alarm continued to buzz loudly through the room. She glanced toward the door. Where were the guards?
“Everybody has already gone,” Dr. Fielding said, as though reading her thoughts. “Protocol. You should have left too. You should have never come.”
“I can’t let you take him,” Chal said.
Dr. Fielding cocked the gun. “Then I’m sorry I have to do this.” Chal’s heart dropped in her chest. But before he could shoot, Alan’s foot kicked out from under the blanket, hitting Dr. Fielding directly in the stomach. He doubled over and another earthquake tremor, this one bigger, shook the lab. The gun clattered to the floor.
Chal dove for it, but Dr. Fielding got there faster, picking up the gun in one hand and whirling around. Chal gripped his wrist, struggling with him for control. Alan was halfway out of the bed, one wrist still handcuffed to the railing, as the doctor aimed the gun upwards toward him.
Chal did not hesitate. She thrust her free hand into her pocket and pulled out the syringe in one swift motion, swinging her arm around to stab Dr. Fielding in the neck.
He clutched his neck, dropping the gun to pull out the syringe lightning-quick. It was empty. Dr. Fielding reached out toward his weapon but his hand jerked back in a spasm as his eyes rolled back in his head.
Chal kicked the gun away from him. Dr. Fielding’s limbs splayed over the tile floor, twitching as his body began to seize up. He groaned, the noise coming from the bottom of his throat, deep and rumbling under the high buzzing of the alarm. For a moment he froze, his eyes locked on Chal’s, and she saw the fear in his eyes.
Relatively painless.
A thought raced through Chal’s brain.
“The code,” she said. She knelt next to Dr. Fielding, her mind focused on the missing piece. “Where’s the code?”
He did not speak, could not speak. His eyes darted from one corner of the room to the other.
“The code! I need the code!” If she couldn’t get it now, she might never get it. She would never know how Alan’s brain was structured. Chal clutched Dr. Fielding’s lab coat, shaking him as the earth shook her. “Where is it?”
Chal watched his
eyes go blank and he crumpled up into himself, his limbs curling tightly against his body. Spit leaked from the corner of his mouth, his groans turned into whimpers. He kicked once again and then stopped moving.
Chal’s fingers were already scrabbling on the floor tile for the handcuff key, and she was at Alan’s side already, releasing him from the bed. He stared at Dr. Fielding, his mouth agape.
“Come on,” she said, wresting him out of the bed and into a standing position. The bedsheet fell down, exposing his naked body. Chal pulled at his arm, but Alan seemed to be made out of lead.
“Not supposed to harm anyone,” he said, his eyes fixed on the body crumpled on the floor.
“You didn’t,” Chal said. “It was me.” She tugged again, hard, and he took a reluctant step, looking dizzily around.
“Where are we going?” he asked. The alarm rang in Chal’s ears and the red flashing lights cast an eerie glow on the metal and white tile. She was surprised that Alan had not gone into a seizure upon being woken up. She was surprised Dr. Fielding had taken that chance.
“This way,” she said, pulling him past Dr. Fielding’s body and through the door. She looked down each hallway, but there were no guards. They must have already evacuated, she thought. Protocol.
There was another rumbling and Chal saw the movement of the hallway before she felt herself being thrown to the side. She smashed into Alan’s shoulder and fell forward only to be caught by his arm. They stumbled together toward the emergency exit, the floor rolling underneath them like a ship in a storm.
In all of her life, Chal had never experienced an earthquake like this. It had already lasted more than a minute, and the shudders didn’t seem to be abating.
This is it, she thought. The big one they always predicted. The walls of the laboratory were cracking with the strain, and although Lieutenant Johnner had assured her that it was safe, she thought that this earthquake might be the exception to the rule.
As they passed her room, a sudden tremor shattered the door, spraying them with glass. Chal covered her eyes and continued walking, aware that she had been cut in several places but not caring overmuch. She glanced over at Alan, who was continuing forward slowly with a glazed look in his eyes. The overstimulus had burned out his senses, she thought. There was blood running down a cut on his cheek, but it was not a serious wound and there was no time to stop, anyway. She hoped he would not cut his feet; they were bare, as was everything else. She looked at him.
