Lab 6

by Peter Lerangis

“You need them.”

  Grab them. Now.

  Before you have a chance to think.

  Sam took the cards and continued toward the building. Jamie followed close behind.

  He braced himself for the headache to come back. But it didn’t. He felt fine.

  The rear door was still ajar. Sam pushed it open and stepped into the harsh light of the basement corridor.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Jamie whispered.

  “Ssshhh.” Sam tiptoed down the hallway, reading the signs on the doors.

  LAB 6.

  His hands shook. He fumbled the cards.

  Jamie took them from him and studied the fine print. She inserted one of them in the slot.

  The little red indicator light turned to green. Jamie pushed.

  The door swung open.

  Blackness stared back at them, punctuated by tiny lights on the walls and on a console in the center of the room.

  Sam stepped inside. A low thrumming sound came from the console. He could see small backlit graphs, all trailing symmetrical sine waves. Squinting to adjust to the darkness, he felt along the door for a light switch.

  Click.

  Behind them, the door slammed shut.

  “Jamie?” he whispered.

  “Sorry,” she whispered back. “There’s so much stuff here. Where’s the — ”

  “Da-a-ad?”

  The voice made them both jump.

  It was small. Muffled.

  Sam’s voice.

  OUR MISSION IS …

  Uh … to — to increase our ranks. To find those minds have not yet closed to the possibilities —

  BECAUSE …

  All are capable, but few are qualified.

  OUR GREATEST OBSTACLE IS …

  Ignorance.

  AND …

  Please. I’m forbidden to say.

  SPEAK ITS NAME …

  You must answer all the questions!

  12

  “OH MY GOD, SAM. You didn’t tell me your dad’s here,” Jamie blurted out.

  “Jamie, that wasn’t me!” Sam whispered.

  “What do mean, it wasn’t you?”

  “Someone else is in here!”

  “Your dad’s in here?”

  “Not my dad! Someone else!”

  Sam was pawing the wall for a switch, but it was crammed with shelves covered with equipment.

  A glass beaker fell to the floor with a crash.

  “Sam, if you’re playing a joke on me, I will never forgive you — ”

  “Please … respond,” the voice said in an odd monotone. “Dad, is that you?”

  “Oh my god—it isn’t you. It’s different, isn’t it?”

  “Be cool, Jamie.” Sam was shaking. “F-find the light switch.”

  “The … green light … at knee level … by the door,” the voice said.

  Sam saw it, but his arm froze.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted light.

  What am I going to see?

  Do I want to see it?

  He backed toward the door. “Jamie? I think I changed my mind …”

  “Here it is!”

  Zzzzt.

  The overhead fluorescent flickered on.

  Sam’s eyes shut. He braced himself, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

  Then, slowly, he peeked.

  A table came into focus — large and round, made of solid black marble, with a dark wood cabinet underneath and a clear glass dome on top, a little larger than a basketball.

  Inside the dome was what looked like an electronic honeycomb — four layers of motherboards, each crammed with cards of varying sizes. In front of the dome was an ordinary-looking keyboard and screen.

  The table and the domed apparatus trailed nests of tangled wires. They snaked through the room, attached to various instruments along the wall.

  And that was it.

  No person at all.

  “Where is he?” Jamie asked.

  “HELP … ME!”

  The voice was louder. It came from the center of the room.

  And Sam noticed the screen for the first time:

  They were the words that the computer had just spoken.

  “I don’t believe this …” Sam murmured.

  Jamie looked from the dome to the screen. “This is Kevin?”

  “HELLL — ”

  Sam ran his thumb along a thumbpad and double-clicked on DISABLE. The voice abruptly stopped.

  “An alarm,” Sam said.

  “Kevin is an alarm system?”

  “With my voice sampled into it.”

  “This is your twin?” Jamie hooted with laughter. “This was what you were afraid of?”

  “I didn’t know — ”

  “ ‘MAYbe a PART of him surVIVED,’ ” Jamie said, deepening her voice to a nerdy approximation of Sam’s.

  “I thought — ”

  “ ‘His BRAIN circuitry is incomPLETE!’ ”

  “Knock it off, okay?” Sam slumped against a wall. He closed his eyes, half hoping he was in yet another nightmare.

  It can’t be just an alarm.

  The system was too big. Too complex. It had to be something more important.

  But what?

  Jamie was clattering away at the keyboard. “This is so cool. I can disable the alarm … put it on ‘Communication with Operator’ … ‘Voice Recognition’ … guess that means I can talk to it, huh?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Hello!” Jamie shouted. “What is your name?”

  “Kevin,” the bubble responded.

  KEVIN appeared on the monitor.

  “Well, we were right about his name!” Jamie said to Sam, then turned back to the dome. “Yo, Kevin, what’s up?”

  “An adverb, as in ‘stand up.’ An adjective, as in ‘the tent is up.’ A preposition, as in ‘she lives up the street.’ A verb — ”

  Jamie laughed. “No, I mean, how are you feeling, my man?”

  “Just fine, thank you. It is cold outside. The cold is seasonable. The humidity level is low. This combination fosters a feeling of comfort.”

  Sam cringed.

  After all the years of late nights without Mom and Dad — after all the technotalk, the switches and neurotransmitters and circuits

  — this is what they’d created? This was their life’s work, the state of artificial intelligence?

  This is what kept them away from me?

  A talking computer that doubles as an alarm. And a machine that collects emotions but doesn’t do anything with them.

  These were impressive, in their own ways. But they weren’t close to real brains.

  Somehow Sam had expected more.

  “So, Kev, what’s the square root of one hundred fifty-seven?” Jamie asked.

  “Twelve point five two nine nine six four,” the monotonous voice replied.

  My voice.

  Sam could picture his parents deciding to make the machine sound like him. Then secretly taping him around the house to create voice samples. It would be their way of staying close to Sam while they were away from him. Creating a reminder.

  That’s what they wanted. A reminder of the son. Without any of the emotions and mess. Without the hassles of parenting.

  So very, very Hughes.

  They don’t mean any harm, Sam.

  That’s just the way they are.

  “… And who was the seventh president of the United States?” Jamie asked.

  “Andrew Jackson.”

  “Sam, this is amazing!” Jamie said with a grin. “It’s a homework machine. Bart would love this. You could get him to pay you to come here.”

  Sam turned and opened the lab door. The hallway was empty. “Jamie, we have to go.”

  “Is someone here?”

  “No, but what if this thing is connected to a central station? The police could be coming here right now!”

  Jamie shot away from the machine, heading for the door. “See ya, Kevin. Thanks for the chat.”

&n
bsp; As she left, Sam glanced at the screen.

  The voice had stopped, but words were scrolling across it anyway:

  ITS NAME?

  The … the Eleventh Force …

  It’s time. You must prepare.

  I said the name.

  It is all right. Soon you will not be here.

  What if this doesn’t work?

  It may not.

  Will I never return?

  Perhaps.

  13

  SAM LEAPED BACK INSIDE and pressed the POWER button.

  The screen blinked off.

  “What’d you do that for?” Jamie said.

  “My dad’s talking to it from his own computer.”

  “I thought you said he was sleeping!”

  “He was, when I left. He must have gotten up!”

  “So why’d you cut off the machine? What’s your dad going to think when he gets no answer?”

  With a loud beep, the bubble suddenly burst to life again.

  “HELP! THIS SPACE HAS BEEN VIOLATED!” the machine blared out.

  Sam jumped. “What the — ”

  “Great, Sam. Just great — ”

  WOOOP! WOOOOP! WOOOOP!

  The alarm echoed through the hallway, sharp and deafening. A flash of light caught Sam square in the eye.

  Emergency lights. Glaring on and off from auxiliary spotlights along the wall.

  Jamie and Sam bolted toward the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

  But before the stairwell was an intersection — and someone was in it.

  More than one person. A cavalcade of footsteps. Running toward them.

  Where’d THEY come from?

  Sam pulled Jamie back the way they’d come. They zoomed past Lab 6 again and darted into an empty hallway at the opposite end.

  This path was clear. They headed toward an archway framed with garish red and white stripes. Around the stripes, a black-painted message warned DANGER: HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!

  “WE CAN’T GO THERE!” Jamie shouted.

  “Trust me,” Sam said.

  He remembered that the signs meant nothing. They scared away nosy visitors. Or spies.

  The archway led to another corridor of small offices, which dead-ended at a metal door with even more warnings: DO NOT OPEN — FIRE ALARM WILL SOUND — NO ADMITTANCE.

  The subbasement.

  Mom and Dad called it “the catacombs.”

  Sam rammed his shoulder against the door.

  “The alarm!” Jamie cried out.

  “IT’S ALREADY SOUNDING!” Sam exclaimed.

  The door smacked open. Just beyond it was a dark set of cement stairs lit by a single hanging lightbulb. The steps were littered with paint chips and plaster, the walls pocked and flaky.

  “This is down!” Jamie shouted. “We need to go out!”

  “Mom and Dad used to go down here all the time. For supplies. I think there’s an exit on the other side.”

  “You think?”

  Sam was already descending.

  At the bottom, he swept away a dusty cobweb and looked into a long, low-ceilinged corridor. Tangled knots of plastic pipes crisscrossed overhead, some dropping to eye level. A narrow, rubble-strewn path lay between electronic equipment that had been shoved against the walls.

  Sam jogged forward, hunched over. Down here, the alarm sounded muffled and distant. A mouse moved along a floor molding, quickly disappearing behind a pile of discarded monitors.

  “Ow!” Jamie’s voice sounded from behind him.

  “Duck,” Sam said.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Sam tried to envision where they were in relation to the floor above, but he had no idea.

  They crossed a hallway, wider and less crowded than theirs. It sloped downward, ending at a large glass-paned door.

  The faded lettering on the door read GENERATOR.

  “There!” Sam shouted. “That’s where the other exit is!”

  He yanked the door open and ran in.

  The room was cavernous. A walkway led around a large sunken area. In the middle was a gargantuan steel monster, droning steadily, its bottom covered by the darkness of a seemingly endless abyss.

  At the other end of the walkway was the exit. Through the door, Sam hoped, was a stairway leading upward and eventually out of the building.

  “You’re a genius,” said Jamie.

  Sam sprinted across the walkway. The rickety wooden planks sagged beneath him.

  He kept his eye on the frosted glass pane of the exit door. It was changing. He noticed a slight swelling of light. As if another door had opened, beyond and above it, at the top of the stairs.

  Sam stopped. Now shadows were coming down the stairs toward him.

  Trapped.

  He and Jamie wouldn’t make it to the other side. Not enough time.

  “Now what?” Jamie whispered.

  Sam spun around. Just behind them was a custodial closet, blocked by a broken brown table on wheels.

  He pushed aside the table. His hand grazed a jagged shard of broken metal trim. It opened a deep scrape, but Sam ignored the pain and yanked open the door. Darting inside, he pulled Jamie in and shut the door behind them.

  “I’m claustrophobic,” Jamie whispered.

  “I’m bleeding,” Sam replied, pressing his hand against his shirt to stanch the flow.

  SMMMACK!

  The exit door slammed open against the inner wall of the generator room.

  Sam tried to stay silent. But his and Jamie’s breathing sounded like ungreased hacksaws.

  Boots thudded on the walkway, just outside the closet.

  “They’re not here!” a voice called out.

  “Keep going,” cried another. “They’re down here somewhere.”

  Yes. Keep going.

  Yes.

  “Someone check the closets,” a third voice yelled.

  “I will!”

  Sam’s breath caught in his throat.

  “Bart,” Jamie whispered.

  “What’s he doing here?” Sam whispered back.

  “He must have seen me leave!”

  “He followed us?”

  “I don’t know! Sam, what do we do n — ”

  “Ssshhh.”

  The corner. Crouch. Pull a bucket over your head.

  Risky.

  Stand still and hope they don’t see you in the darkness.

  Stupid.

  Hit him with something.

  Sam groped around for anything — a mop, a paint roller …

  “Ow!” Jamie yelped, “that’s my foot — ”

  Sam lost his balance. He fell against the back wall of the closet.

  And the wall moved.

  Farewell.

  But the rest of the questions — are there no more questions?

  This will have to do. You are fading.

  14

  SAM PUSHED AGAIN. A corner of the wall was swiveling on some kind of fulcrum. “Come on. There must be a room back here.”

  “I’m not going in there!” Jamie whispered.

  TWHOCK-TWHOCK-TWHOCK-TWHOCK the approaching footsteps sounded.

  Jamie leaned against the wall, hard.

  It swung open, leaving a space just big enough for them to slip through. They entered a room of some kind, pitch-black and cold.

  Sam and Jamie pushed the wall back. It returned to its old position with a soft thump.

  “There’s blood on the knob!” Bart shouted. “They’re in here.”

  Sam cringed. Couldn’t you have SEEN that metal edge, Hughes?

  Light entered through the thin crack where the swinging wall was hinged.

  “HEY!” shouted Bart through the wall, inches away from them.

  “Did you find them?” a more distant voice called.

  Sam and Jamie heard Bart poking around, crashing against the wall, pulling things away.

  THUMP.

  The wall moved.

  Jamie and Sam backed away.

  “
Ow,” Bart exclaimed. “Nope. But one of them’s bleeding. So keep an eye out for stains.”

  The closet door slammed shut, suddenly muffling the voices beyond it.

  The footsteps receded into silence.

  Gone.

  “That fat, pinheaded tub of pork sushi — ” Jamie muttered.

  Sam let out a breath and slumped against the wall.

  EEEP … EEEP … EEEP … EEEP …

  Until that moment, Sam hadn’t noticed the soft beeping noise behind him.

  “Uh, let’s get out of here,” he said, feeling around for a handle.

  Jamie joined him. “How do you pull this thing open?”

  Sam’s fingers brushed against a light switch.

  He flicked it upward. Two overhead strips lit up.

  The door handle was right in front of him. He clasped with his good hand and pulled.

  The door was heavy. “Jamie, can you — ”

  But Jamie was standing rock-still, her back to the wall. Staring into the room.

  Sam turned.

  They were in a lab. Bigger than Lab 6 and windowless. Except for the area of the swivel door, the walls were covered floor to ceiling with electronic equipment. It felt like the inside of some high-tech submarine.

  At the center was a table nearly obscured by three rolling carts. On the table, under a black blanket, was a body.

  “Oh my god …” Sam murmured.

  “I … don’t think we belong here,” Jamie squeaked.

  Sam moved close. “Is it alive?”

  “ARE YOU CRAZY, SAM? GET AWAY FROM THAT!” She grabbed him by the arm, but Sam pulled away.

  He couldn’t take his eyes away from the inert silhouette.

  Something about it was familiar.

  “Sam?” Jamie’s voice was tense, sharp. “It’s a dead body. If you touch it —if you get your fingerprints on it and someone finds it — I will say I never met you.”

  Its chest was not moving. But it didn’t smell like a dead body. Dead bodies were supposed to smell, weren’t they?

  Sam stood over the figure and pulled back the black cloth.

  He gagged.

  Jamie screamed.

  A face stared back at Sam. A face he knew well.

  His own.

  15

  HE DID EXIST.

  He was here, all this time. In some kind of coma. Just the way Jamie said. BUT FOR FOURTEEN YEARS? How?

  How could it have happened? How could he have survived? How could I not have found out? WHY DIDN’T THEY TELL ME? Sam felt detached, dizzy. He grabbed the side of the table. His fingers brushed against Kevin’s cheek.