Frequency

by C Scott Frank

  “Head trauma?” Lincoln asked, looking over the X-Rays of the man’s abdomen.

  “No, doesn’t look like it. No bruising or swelling anyway. I could run an X-Ray just to be sure.”

  “No, we’ll just let him wake up and we’ll see what he has to say.”

  “Okay, so this echo gets loose, kills one of the pilots, and the second pilot manages to barely escape with his life, after killing the clone? That’s the story we’re sticking with?” Gibbs paced with a dour expression and hands tucked into his pockets. “Are we willing to stake our lives on that?”

  “We’ll keep the pilot secure if that makes you feel better,” Lincoln said. Damien sensed his friend’s patience wearing thin. “Besides, we won’t be able to know more until he wakes up, anyway. In the meantime, we all have work to do. Keri, will you make sure and file a report? I know we may not have much to tell at the moment, but some guidance might be helpful here.”

  “You bet.” She headed out toward the control center.

  “Alright folks, the key to being a good team is not letting the unexpected get in the way of our progress. You’ve all had a chance to look over the doctor’s latest report, yes? I have to believe we’re closer than we’ve ever been. Let’s figure this thing out and we’ll all get to go home heroes.”

  Day 351 - 06:22

  Damien cursed as someone shook him violently. Adrenaline rushed through his veins as a hand gripped his shoulder. Someone was trying to wake him up.

  He’d never been a morning person.

  “Doctor, he’s waking up,” came an infuriatingly chipper voice. “You should probably be there for this.”

  “Alright now, don’t throw a paddy. I’m up, I’m up.” Damien rubbed his eyes and looked up at the girl. Her blonde hair fell in lazy strands over her young face. Emily Shepherd was a linguistic savant—in fact, she was a prodigy. That’s why Lincoln had recruited her. But for everything she excelled at when it came to speech recognition, she utterly lacked in social understanding. She also served as the station’s nurse and his own aide, which was why Damien found himself being woken up by the girl in the wee hours of the morning.

  Damien had taken the pilot off sedation the previous day, hoping to be able to speak to the man. The team was curious about what had transpired on the shuttle, and couldn’t wait to put the pieces together. In the four days since the event, as they had been calling it, their productivity had slowed to a near standstill. Lincoln had finally ordered Damien to wake the pilot up, but Damien had resisted. After more than a few heated discussions, they’d settled on weaning him off sedation and letting him wake naturally. Now, it seemed that time had come.

  “Dr. Harris is already waiting there for you,” Emily said in her bright voice. Damien tried not to grimace as she looked around his bunk room. Though he was something of a perfectionist in the lab, his room wallowed in an absolute mess.

  “Yea, yea. Give me a second, will ya?”

  The young nurse hurried out of the room as if it pained her to be among the rubbish. Damien absently wondered what it was like to be so uptight all the time, but dismissed the thought as he forced himself out of bed. He stalked over to the mirror in the corner of the cramped quarters and looked at himself. A weary face with a day-old beard looked back at him through heavy eyelids, confirming how he felt. Between his research and his patient, it had been a rough few days. He stroked the wild landscape of his unshaven chin and resigned himself. He wouldn’t be shaving today either.

  He donned his standard issue blue coveralls and mustered what energy he could. He left his room, ready as he’d ever be to start the day. He liked to keep something of a persona when he was around others, which is why he didn’t appreciate visitors to his bunk room. In public, he was together. Bloody well perfect, in his mind anyway. But behind closed doors, he could be careless. Just the way he liked it.

  As he rounded the final bulkhead before arriving at the lab, he transformed into Dr. Fuller. He straightened his spine, threw his shoulders back, and lifted his chin, striking a broad smile as he strode into the room where most of the team stood already assembled.

  “Well, well, how’s our patient?” He donned his best American Soap Opera doctor impersonation with a flashy smile. He grabbed a needle playfully and held it toward Gibbs who stood in the doorway.

  “Yeah, hilarious,” the larger man said, and shifted his weight.

  “The pilot started stirring about twenty minutes ago,” Lincoln said. “He hasn’t spoken yet.”

  “Yea, hard cheese there. His throat has to be absolutely killing him. He took quite a blow to the neck.”

  “Anything you can do to help him? I’d like to know what happened back there.”

  “I can try a cortisone shot to the affected area, see if I can’t bring down some of the swelling.” Damien searched through a cabinet and retrieved a small, clear vial. He withdrew some of the fluid with the syringe in his hand and tapped the air bubbles out. “This is something of a steroid as well, so it might help wake him up a bit.”

  From the corner of his eye, Damien could see Gibbs turn away as he injected the syringe directly into the injured man’s neck.

  “It’ll take half an hour or so before we see anything.” He eyed Gibbs with a sinister smirk. “Who’s hungry?”

  Day 351 - 06:58

  The team had a somber breakfast in the small dining hall. The gray walls and spartan accommodations of the nearly featureless room contributed to the gray mood of the occupants, including Lincoln. In lieu of windows, a single picture of a nebula graced the wall opposite the entrance, but this desultory touch of civilization did little to add warmth to the space. Lincoln didn’t mind spartan accommodations, but even he wished for a splash of color in the station after nearly a year.

  Besides the cold inhumanness of the room, the content of the meals served to, ironically, suck the life out of the team. Protein packs and nutrient shakes for about one thousand consecutive meals meant nobody was excited about mealtime anymore. Lincoln sat with Keri in one corner discussing some of the previous day’s briefs. Looking around the room, he couldn’t help but let a grin slip as Gibbs told an inappropriate joke to an unresponsive Emily and Edward. Damien studied a CT scan while lazily stirring his coffee.

  His friend looked rough. He decided he should probably check on him.

  He rose to speak to Damien and—

  A sickening scream tore down the hall. He jumped involuntarily and nearly lost his footing.

  “Oh bloody—” Damien threw his datapad on the table and ran from the room. By the time Lincoln met him in infirmary, Damien had injected the man with an anesthetic.

  “What is going on here?” Lincoln asked.

  “The man is still in shock,” Damien said soberly. “I’m going to keep him sedated until his body heals more. Even then, well, we’ll have to see.”

  “Nothing you can do then?” Lincoln prodded. Black Suit would want some answers. “I need to ask him some questions. We’ll have to send a follow up report soon.”

  “I think we should toss him out of the airlock and move on with our lives.” Gibbs cocked an eyebrow as he and the rest of the team filed in.

  “What?” Damien glared at Gibbs. “That’s murder, Zachary.”

  “I don’t see it that way. He’s probably a clone. He switched uniforms before we opened the airlock,” Gibbs said in open defiance. Lincoln knew he had let his team get away with a lot, but Gibbs was getting out of hand. Lincoln liked to maintain a hands-off leadership style, but that may have been his own undoing. “And even if he is a person,” Gibbs continued, “we’d probably be doing him a favor, saving him from PTSD and stuff.”

  “Unbelievable.” Damien turned to Lincoln. “Where’d you find this guy?”

  The team remained silent as Damien stormed out of the infirmary. Lincoln straightened his shoulders and addressed the rest of the scientists.

  “Keep it together. We still have—”

  “More clones to kill today, yea we
get it,” Gibbs cut him off and walked out of the room toward his workstation.

  Lincoln stood silently, watching the rest of the team slip from the room to their tasks for the day.

  “What are you going to do?” Keri stopped in the doorway and turned back to Lincoln. “He may have a point, you know.”

  “I’m not sure,” Lincoln replied. “I don’t see any way he could have switched uniforms in the time it took for the shuttle to dock.” He looked at the medical equipment around the lab. Damien was a perfectionist to be true. Every beaker, scope, tool, and solution had a place, organized with uncanny meticulousness. He envied that about his friend.

  This was in stark contrast to Gibbs, whose workstation Lincoln all but refused to visit. The floor in Gibbs’ area had disappeared under a layer of filth within a few weeks of his arrival. Scraps from ration packs and half-filled coffee mugs provided a bed of refuse that Gibbs seemed to enjoy living atop. But, the man’s code was impeccable. Lincoln had observed that more than once. Life was full of strange contradictions.

  “Even still, it is odd,” Lincoln mused, trying with difficulty to wrap his head around, well, all of it.

  “Gibbs or this whole event with the shuttle?”

  “Everything, I guess. It’s all been pretty routine for a whole year, and now this. Maybe someone upstairs is getting bored.” Lincoln smirked at the cheap humor.

  “Are you talking about God or the people who hired us?”

  “Maybe they’re all playing on the same team. Maybe we’re the butt of some cosmic joke.” Lincoln’s mouth creased in a half smile, half resignation sort of gesture.

  “Then why is Gibbs the only one laughing?” Keri raised an eyebrow. Lincoln looked at her with a dark expression, but when he met her eyes, she simply laughed. “Don’t be so serious, Lincoln. It’s all going to be fine, don’t worry. Teams have friction, and that’s okay. Gibbs and Damien will get over it.”

  “Let’s hope so. I would very much like to go home.”

  Day 359 - 18:04

  “This is Doctor Damien Fuller, day 359 of the Frequency program. The time is eighteen hundred hours, four minutes. Subject number ninety-one. We are preparing for the test.” Damien placed the audio recorder on the lab table and positioned the antenna around the subject’s head.

  Lincoln and Edward had spent the first few months of the program developing the device. Supposedly, it could communicate with the receiver implanted in every clone’s head. They all had them, and the going theory pointed to the device as a means of communication for the Sardaan to relay orders to the clones. The mission of Frequency’s team was simple: tap into that device and deliver new orders. Orders that didn’t involve wiping out the human race.

  So far, no luck. Each clone had died on the operating table as soon as Lincoln’s antenna was fired up. Damien wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, but he was losing confidence that it ever would. And it killed him inside.

  Once the antenna was secure and in place, Damien couldn’t help but study the clone’s face. He was a young man with short, brown hair. Eyes closed in a medically induced slumber, oblivious to the world around him. When Damien had signed on with the Frequency team, he had never imagined he would find himself here. Treating these clones—these people—like lab rats. For the greater good, he supposed.

  He flipped the switch on his comms to always-on and settled himself into his role. “Zachary? Edward? Are we ready to begin?”

  “Yeah, everything looks good here. Just ready to let this little white rabbit down the hole,” Gibbs replied, his playful smile almost palpable in Damien’s ear.

  Damien felt Lincoln and Keri watching from an overhead observation deck. Emily entered the lab and placed electrodes and sensors all around the young clone’s head and chest. She plugged them into the machines one by one, and a steady beep filled the air.

  “I’m trying something new with the syntax,” she told Damien. “I was thinking, what if their communication is based on some kind of neural network? What if their minds are networked in a very passive state? That would make transmitting communication easier, because they could simply branch off of nearby neural points. So I’ve been working on a stochastic grammar pattern, applying a Markov technique.”

  “That explains why you needed so much of the computer’s resources last night.” Lincoln’s voice chimed over the speaker in the room. “Modeling the syntax that way is a hefty processing job.”

  “Okay, am I the only one who’s not following here?” Damien responded, looking up at Lincoln through the window.

  “You’re the only one who cares,” Gibbs scoffed through his comm.

  Emily didn’t miss a beat. “Basically, the way humans communicate is generally linear, at least in modern language. Our sentence structures have a preferred pattern and order, but that wasn’t always the case.”

  “Look what you’ve done,” Gibbs sighed.

  Emily ignored him. “In the earliest forms of Latin, word order didn’t matter. Sure, there were some common patterns in use, but essentially, sentences could mean the same exact thing, no matter what order the words were in. As a doctor, you must be quite familiar with Latin, I assume?”

  “Right, but we weren’t taught the language as a study in linguistics.”

  “Sure. So, thus far we’ve been operating under the assumption that these clones are thinking in modern languages. But that may well be a dangerous assumption. So, I’m trying a random model, or a stochastic pattern. Maybe the aliens communicate in a nonlinear fashion, so I’m hoping that by randomizing our impulses, we can see better results.”

  “That’s really quite clever.” Damien nodded his approval. He still wasn’t sure if he understood everything going on under the hood, but he had to respect her ingenuity.

  “Thank you. I feel good about this,” Emily responded with a curt nod.

  “Alright, let’s see it,” Lincoln said from the observation deck.

  Damien reached forward to power on the antenna. He hesitated when his finger found the small, metal switch. He had grown weary of sentencing these people to their death. The tests never worked. Lincoln was an optimist, that much was clear. Damien had once been an optimist in his own right, but that ship had sailed months ago. Now, he looked at the young face in front of him: peaceful, serene, ignorant. Ignorant of the fate that would likely befall him in a few short moments.

  “Is there a problem, doc?” Lincoln’s voice broke Damien from his thoughts.

  “No, it’s just—no, we’re all good.” Like he had learned to do so well over the last months, Damien filed away the part of his mind—the part of his soul—that harbored his conscious and told himself he was doing good works. He flipped the switch on the array and the device thrummed to life, the sound of electricity echoing in Damien’s ears.

  “Ed, fire up the transmitter array,” Damien called. A gentle whine from the transistors was the reply. “Okay, Zachary, pull up the most recent script. Execute on my mark.”

  “Waiting on baited breath, dear,” Gibbs said in an awkward falsetto.

  “Sicko. Okay, three. Two. And one. Execute.” Damien’s hand shook as it hovered over a keyboard. Data would need to be recorded, especially in the event of a termination. His heart shuddered at the term. Words like that only served to distance people from the acts they were taking part in. Was it termination or senseless killing?

  Four long minutes passed in near total silence.

  “Readings look good.” Emily stood near one of the screens, analyzing the feedback from the sensors and electrodes she had attached. “Wait. Oh no.”

  What had started as a steady beep began to increase in tempo. The digital EEG readout began to look more like a seismometer than a measurement of brainwaves. Lincoln cursed in the comms as the clone on the table began to seize violently. Damien grabbed the defibrillator and wheeled the cart over to the bed.

  “Emily, get the helmet!” Damien pounded the button to prime the paddles.

  “Forget it, Dami
en,” Lincoln came over the comm, “We’ve lost another. Terminate the subject.”

  Damien applied the electrolyte gel to the ends of the paddles, rubbing them together in a fever. “What? No, the EEG—”

  “I said terminate, doc. There’s nothing more we can do for him.”

  “Unbelievable,” Damien threw the paddles back onto the cart and stormed to the IV tree. He switched one of the baggies and toggled the drip. Within a few seconds, the convulsions stopped. A few moments later and the room fell silent, except for the hum of the air handlers.

  One by one, Damien felt the team retreat to their own duties. He stood, unmoving, looking at the young clone. Hardly more than a child. What a waste. What was the team doing? He had to figure out a way to break through. He knew there must be a way. But then, would that be better? If someone doesn’t behave the way they ought, should it be okay to reprogram them? Perhaps death was the easier way out.

  Damien jumped when the intercom sounded in his ear. He looked up to find Lincoln still in the observation deck, watching. His stoic friend keyed the intercom and told him to call the code. Damien grabbed the audio recorder as he pointed the bed toward the cold storage room for later disposal.

  “Test number ninety-one: failed. Subject number ninety-one time of death: eighteen hundred hours, thirteen minutes.” The doctor paused for a long moment in the doorway, eyes locked with Lincoln’s before continuing. “Subject returned to cold storage for processing.”

  Day 360 - 06:03

  Breakfast in the dining hall was quiet the next morning. Emily sipped coffee while flipping through a book. Gibbs and Edward played a lazy game of chess. Lincoln held his datapad, working on his report from the day before, while Keri compiled all of her notes to add to his report. Damien fixed himself a protein pack and a coffee at the counter. No one spoke.