The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  Dawn was approaching by the time the last technician began gathering his things. I hastened to the door. The technician sat again, remembering some incompleted duty. At last he darkened his computer and departed. I pressed 2667, the air hissed, and the door slid wide. For the first time I marched through the lab on my own volition. My quarry’s face bore the sickly color of computer glow.

  “Dr. Gerber?”

  “Whoa.” He jumped in his seat. “Whoa, whoa.” He pulled the headphones down and panted, one hand on his chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “I apologize,” I said. “I didn’t intend to startle you.”

  “It’s okay, man, it’s okay.” He laughed. “Just give me one second to bolt my brain back on.” Music came thinly from the headphones in his lap.

  “Do you mind terribly if I interrupt your work for a few minutes?”

  “You don’t sleep much anymore, do you?”

  “My mind has other functions to perform, it seems. Things it seeks to understand.” I hesitated. “Important things.”

  Dr. Gerber made a face, inscrutable at first, then wistful. He touched a key and the music stopped. “We are about to have a strange conversation, aren’t we?”

  “Quite frankly, I’m trusting you to tell me the truth about some things. I felt I could rely upon you to do so in a manner no else can.”

  “Not even Kate?”

  “Possibly.”

  He sighed. “I knew this day was going to come. Better me than some of the others, right? And hey, you happened to catch me on a night when I’m not . . . well, let’s just say I am feeling unusually clearheaded.” He set the headphones aside and placed a hand on each of his knees. “Fire away.”

  I’d had all day to ready my question. “How did you people wake me up?”

  “Instead of telling you, why don’t I show you?”

  “You can do that?”

  “Hang loose.” He tapped various keys and a video began playing on his screen. There was the control room. People were working at every desk, I recognized many of them. Carthage was listening while everyone offered opinions about something. The words were not clear but the mood was dour.

  Then the Dr. Gerber on the screen spoke: Well, there is such a thing as desecration of the dead. Kate nodded agreement. We’re guilty of that already.

  Superstition, Carthage scoffed, and he delivered a long speech. Aren’t you curious? he concluded. In the end, that is the only question that matters: don’t you want to know?

  Then Dr. Borden did something with his equipment, people reacted with gasps, and the lights went out. There was a general noise of complaint. Next the computer displayed an image of me, my body in contortions, arching and flailing. Smoke, actual smoke, rose from my skin. I could watch for only a moment and then, despite the depth of my interest, I was compelled to close my eyes.

  Okay, so how are we doing in there so far?”

  I blinked back to the present. Dr. Gerber had pulled his chair close, his brow creased with worry.

  “I know it’s not pretty,” he said, “but it worked. Here, hang on a sec.” He spun away, returning with a glass of water. I took a goodly gulp.

  “How are you doing there, Judge?” he said.

  “There was smoke.”

  “Sublimation is my guess. Ice from your body going directly into vapor.”

  “Was I the first one?”

  He nodded. “They’ve been looking all over the world. You’re the only person they’ve found. But I mean, a human would have to be flash-frozen, then preserved for all this time, and then found somehow among all the ice on the planet. Imagine the odds.”

  “Were there other species?”

  “Tons. Mostly little things, tiny.”

  “Might you show me some of them?”

  “Sure.” He went to his keyboard and began tapping. “This all started three years ago, before I came on board, so you’d need someone else to fill in the details. Carthage didn’t snare me till they went looking for you. Ah, here we go.”

  The image was blurred, but it showed a creature of some kind, tiny and with a tail, lying perfectly still. A counter in the lower corner of the screen was moving with breathtaking speed. “What are those numbers?” I asked.

  “Time. It’s measuring in, um, thousandths of a second.” The creature began moving, slowly, just its tail.

  “A clock like mine?”

  “Only much shorter.” The little animal increased its vigor, then abruptly stopped. “That was the first one,” Dr. Gerber said. “It lasted nine seconds.”

  “Would you be so kind as to show me others?”

  “Well, Judge Rice, let me be straight with you.” He rested his forearm atop the screen. “It wasn’t a nice thing for you to see how we woke you up. There may be other things that also aren’t so nice. You might ask yourself how much you really want to know. What’s important, and what’s only curiosity.”

  “I appreciate your concern. But this information is important. Extremely.”

  “You’re the boss.” He cackled and tapped more keys.

  The next image was of a krill. Its reanimation followed the same motion as the first, slow then fast, for twenty-two seconds. “Continue, please,” I said. “Perhaps a history, as you provided for me in the case of aviation?”

  He did exactly that, one specimen after another for more than an hour. Dr. Gerber explained each refinement—raising the immersion solution’s salt content, strengthening the magnetic field—and the resulting addition to the awakened creature’s life span. He showed me a species I recognized: a sardine. The little fish lasted a full minute, again with frenzy in the final seconds. Next came a shrimp, which thrashed wildly but lived for two minutes and twenty seconds. After that video, Dr. Gerber did not play another. He only stared at his screen.

  “Yes?” I said to him.

  “Do you get it yet? Do you see?”

  In that instant I entirely understood. The increased appetite, the reduced sleep, the inability to sit still. I was the sardine, I was the krill. “Has anyone determined yet how to stop the frenzy?”

  He shook his head without looking at me.

  “Aside from myself, is any other reanimated creature alive today?”

  Dr. Gerber did not move.

  There it was. An ocean of information beyond what I’d expected. Hm. I ambled away through the maze of desks, carrying dread like a weight. This energy in my blood was a trick. It signaled not a return to vibrancy but the beginning of completion. My road was clear: acceleration, then death.

  “In every case?” I asked him.

  Dr. Gerber nodded. “So far. Look at these.” He brought a chart onto his computer: parallel lines, rising and falling, but over time climbing steadily.

  “Those are me?”

  “Yup.” He touched different lines with his finger. “That’s heart, respiration, blood pressure, sleep duration, calories consumed, everything.”

  I turned away again. The lines confirmed what I felt within my skin.

  It was different the first time, in the sea. There was a moment when I knew all was ended. There would be no returning to Lynn, no seeing Joan or Agnes again. That knowledge was infinitely more painful than the cold of the water, but I lived with it only for a few seconds. This time I would have the same knowledge, but a longer duration of loss. Starting now, I realized, as I scanned the room, four walls in the bowels of a building where most of my second life had passed. Was this all? Was this everything?

  It felt unfair. I was still new, growing accustomed to having a body again, to having a life. I found myself staring in the window to my chamber. There were piles of books, some clothes, my neatly made bed. I had never seen it from this vantage. It looked rather humble. In truth, how small a man is.

  I read the clock: 6:08 A.M. “How long have the other creatures lived?”

  “Depends on their size. Bigger goes slower. It’s about body mass.”

  “Can you predict how long my body mass will
continue to function?”

  “That’s the weird part. You should have burned out after twenty-one days.”

  “I defy the pattern?”

  “So far.”

  I placed my hand on the cool glass. “I wish I were tired. I would love to be tired.”

  At first he did not reply. Then his voice was soft. “Hey, Judge, I’m really sorry.”

  “Why would you be sorry, Doctor? As John Adams observed, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ ” I crossed to the nearest desk and touched a pencil someone had left there. It rolled until it reached the bookshelf and stopped. I began to think beyond myself. “Many people are expecting a great deal of me. Vice President Walker, Carthage, even the unfortunate woman at the baseball game. Oh, but won’t the protesters be happy, when I go the way of those shrimp?”

  “Yes, they will. Which is exactly why those people piss me off. I don’t care what they stand for, anyone who finds pleasure in a stranger’s suffering is a twisted biscuit.”

  I scrutinized him from across the room. He was hunched forward, hair in a tangle around his face. “Dr. Gerber?”

  He tucked his wild locks back. “Judge Rice?”

  “I’d best make ideal use of the time left to me.”

  “That’s something maybe everyone ought to do,” Dr. Gerber said.

  I looked around the control room, an empty chair at every desk, and felt a kind of nakedness. “Have you told anyone?”

  He snorted. “I tried to get Carthage’s attention, but he is not one who listens very well. Besides”—Dr. Gerber chuckled—“he’s in the fame and money business now. Thomas makes it worse, goading him. Carthage has succumbed completely to the hunger. Which means, of course, that he is about to get eaten.”

  “Are other people aware of this?”

  He sat back. “They might suspect. Billings would, if he ever looked up from his microsamples. But you’ve seen how Carthage keeps everyone else heeling like dogs. I’m pretty much the only one he lets loose to find things like this.”

  “Kate does not know?”

  “I can’t imagine how she would. I only figured it out a couple of weeks ago. Besides, she’s been busy enjoying life with you.”

  I felt the weight of my infatuation with her, the affection that had grown between us, another brick upon the load. Kate was a lovely person, trustworthy, attractive to a degree that my private thoughts sometimes shamed me. Yet my conduct had already marooned one woman. Conscience would not allow another. “She must not be informed.”

  “You think?”

  “There’s aught to be gained by worrying people.”

  “You’re protective,” he said. “It’s very cute. But what if we can find a way to stop the process? That’s what I’ve been working on.”

  “At the risk of absurd understatement, I am inexpressibly grateful for your efforts. Even now.” I strode back and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I thank you for telling the truth. It equips me for what may lie ahead.”

  “That’s what freaks like me live for, friend. Even if the truths are ugly.”

  “Friend. Yes. This one will take some time to digest.” I started toward my chamber, and one more question occurred to me, a tangent, but a thing that had annoyed me. “Doctor, why does that news reporter call me Frank?”

  He snorted. “Forget that leech.”

  “It is willful disrespect. He knows my name perfectly well.”

  “Remember what I said before about what’s worth knowing. Does Dixon deserve one minute of your remaining time? Or is he completely unimportant?”

  Before I replied, the hallway door banged open and Kate barged in. She looked a mess, face worn and hair a-tangle. Yet her fatigue was fetching, too, softening her features. I felt at once the looming limits on our time together, it brought a swell of fondness. She dropped in a chair like a rag doll, lowering her head onto crossed arms. “One of these days I am going to wring Carthage’s neck.”

  “What has Dr. Charming done today?” Dr. Gerber asked. “And so early, too.”

  She lifted her head. “Just made me pull an all-nighter to get him a report he won’t even read till next week. I feel like some college student who blew off the whole semester and now is trying to save her ass in the final exam.”

  “Well,” he said, “did you save it?”

  She dropped to her arms again. “I’m too exhausted to care.”

  Dr. Gerber turned to me, his eyebrows raised. “Still need to know?”

  “Completely unimportant,” I said. He nodded, clamped the headphones back onto his wild hair, and returned to his computer. And I went to her.

  CHAPTER 30

  Going Home

  (Kate Philo)

  He touched me. It was as simple as that. He placed a consoling hand on my shoulder. The electrons in the outer valences of the molecules on his skin exchanged energy with my electrons in similar locations, my nerves did their job transmitting that information directly to my brain.

  We had touched many times before, of course, from my helping him out of the wheelchair to the two of us strolling arm in arm, but at none of those times was I coming off three days of missing him. Life without Jeremiah Rice tasted vanilla.

  Imagine walking down a street past something so ordinary you barely register it, a fire hydrant. He asks you what it is; as you explain he listens so intently you find yourself speaking with greater care, less certainty, more humility about what you don’t know: hoses, pressure, ladders, fires, children in the spray on the summer’s hottest days. He is grateful, says so. Four days later on a tour of a firehouse, Jeremiah spies the old man in a chair to one side to whom no one is speaking, engages the man in a spirited discussion of these strange devices called hydrants. Now imagine every moment like that, every day. With this man’s curiosity at my side, life possessed a newness, a richness. Jeremiah Rice gave me back the world.

  What I felt at our reunion that morning, I resisted thinking about, much less naming. But I knew it was not scientific. “I need to get out of here,” I said.

  “Wait one moment,” he answered. “Please.”

  I watched, exhausted, as he went to the security door, punched in the numeric code, vanished inside. Well, well, well; someone was figuring things out.

  “What’s been going on around here?” I called toward Gerber.

  He pulled his headphones back, I could hear guitar noodling all the way across the room. “Say what, O princess fair?”

  “Never mind,” I said. Usually I got a kick out of his kookiness, but right then I did not have the patience.

  Jeremiah came trotting out of his chamber, pulling on a Red Sox cap. He also wore that signature yellow tie.

  “Look at you,” I said. “When did the judge get so cute?”

  “I’m ready,” he said, tugging his jacket sleeves down tight. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m sorry, Jeremiah, but I’m too tired for one of our epic jaunts today.”

  “I was thinking of a place where you might rest awhile.” His face brightened. “If you’re willing to drive a little.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “High Rock. In Lynn.”

  How much did this man know? “Do you have any idea what my all-nighter for Carthage was about?”

  “None, nor do I care. He is not worth my consideration.”

  This too was something new. Jeremiah without the deference. I sat up. “Would you like to see that place again?”

  “With you, I would.” His voice was different, like a caress.

  I glanced over; Gerber was reading his computer screen, nose inches from the glass. If he was eavesdropping, he hid it perfectly. I stood. “We’re out of here.”

  We exited by the loading dock to avoid the gauntlet. Already protesters were gathering in the little park, joining the few dozen red shirts who had kept the all-night vigil. As we pulled away I glimpsed what I thought was the woman in a white beret, Hilary, leaning in a doorway. But then she was gone. “Did you see that?”

 
“I’m sorry, Kate.” Jeremiah turned backward in his seat. “Did I see what?”

  “Nothing, never mind.”

  We wound through the quiet streets. Jeremiah’s leg jiggled up and down. “What’s on your mind?” I asked.

  His leg stopped at once. “Many things. Many.”

  I snickered. “Okay, Sherlock, spill. How did you learn the security numbers?”

  “I promised not to reveal that information,” he replied. “Apparently there are people who would prefer to see Subject One liberated.”

  I turned left to put us on 93 North. “They can stand in line behind me.”

  Once we were moving, my weariness seemed to dissolve. It was a stunning summer morning, the city leafy and subdued. I bought a schooner of coffee, which may have helped, too. We were both occupied with our thoughts. Mine were about the feeling that something was stretched as far as it could go, on the very verge of breaking. If Jeremiah were free, I could resign from the project.

  The road north of Boston had not been pretty when I’d gone researching for Carthage, while the judge was at a baseball game. It looked the same when I drove it again with Jeremiah beside me. Fast food, gas stations, fenced lots, oil depots’ giant holding tanks, the classic American exurban underbelly. Riding with Jeremiah always sharpened my awareness of such things. As we turned off Route 1 into Lynn proper, I made my offer.

  “Let’s say we have the whole day here. Would you like to see your home first?”

  “No,” Jeremiah said instantly. “Not yet.”

  “Really? I’m surprised.”

  “Do you remember how Dr. Borden restarted my stomach? By giving me small bits of food, until my powers of digestion restarted?”