Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  “Listen, Semi. This experiment is exciting. Exciting, do you hear? Say it.”

  “Exciting,” I whispered. I didn’t understand, but I was trusting her with my life.

  “We’re going to be made more than human, we’re going to have superpowers.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Well, you can’t go home. That’s over, that’s out. So concentrate on the adventure. Skinner’s right, you know. Sometimes, to move science forward, people have to take tremendous risks. Imagine going up in the first airplane. Imagine being in a space capsule, with nothing outside but a hard vacuum. Something goes wrong, and you have to deal with it, however terrified you are, because nobody back home can help. So, we’re going to imagine we’ve volunteered for this. The straitjackets are to . . . to keep our muscles rested, before the operation. We’ve volunteered, and now we have to be brave, really really brave and tough. That sounds good, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it sound good? I like the idea of being brave.”

  “We’re going to die.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a shake in her voice. “Probably. But we don’t have to die screaming. Let’s go for quality of life? For believing anything that makes us feel better? Come on, Semi. Try it.”

  “Quality of life,” I repeated. “Volunteers.” I remembered that plunge into the cold sea, and Miranda beside me yelling, “Swim the other way!”

  “So, which do you want to be?” she whispered. “Fish or bird? We’re supposed to choose. Do you want the freedom of the ocean? Or the sky?”

  I’d been afraid of the sea, since that horrible night. But I could remember too much about the things that would happen to change someone into a bird. Skeleton changes, growing new muscles, new blood. All I could remember about the fish was gills in the neck. That didn’t sound too bad. “I want to be the fish,” I said, feeling an awful coward. “I’d rather be the fish, if I have to be one or the other.”

  “Good,” said Miranda cheerfully. “Because I’ve always wanted to be able to fly.”

  I said, making a huge effort, “What kind of bird would you like to be?”

  “I think I fancy being a hyacinth macaw. They’re the rarest parrots in the world. I’ll be worth a lot of money. And I’ll be a beautiful color. Turquoise blue, my favorite.”

  “Macaws are clever as well. Supposed to be as clever as a three-year-old child—”

  “Yeah,” said Miranda. “That sounds like me.”

  And we giggled—I don’t know how, but she had us giggling.

  “I want to be a shark,” I said firmly. “A great big great white shark, and I’ll bite Skinner’s bum. I’ll bite his bum off. Hey, maybe you should be a golden eagle, or what about a condor? Something fierce and big.”

  “Maybe I’ll be a nightingale. Next to flying, I’ve always wanted to be able to sing. I can’t sing a note as a human being.”

  “I think being a fish will be like flying too. I’ll be flying in the ocean skies. Maybe I’ll be able to talk to dolphins. . . . How long d’you think we’ve got before they come for us?”

  “Not long. Let’s keep talking. Which ocean would you like to be a fish in? Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific? I read somewhere that Antarctic fish have antifreeze for blood, so you won’t feel the cold. You’ll be able to swim under icebergs, it’ll be so beautiful—”

  “No thanks. I’ll take the Caribbean. I’ll seek for pirate treasure.”

  “You can adorn yourself with it, you can be a great white shark with diamond earrings. . . .”

  We knew we weren’t going to get turned into a real fish and bird. We knew we wouldn’t end up looking like natural animals, even if the experiment didn’t kill us.

  I found out that as long as I didn’t move at all, I could keep the panic under control. I could pretend I was lying still because I wanted to lie still. I breathed a few times, practicing. Then I thought of myself inside my body. I imagined a little person, no bigger than a match, walking up inside my chest (as if I lived in my heart), up through my neck and into my head. There was space in there. My arms were free, there were no rubbery bands pressing me down. My little person had plenty of room, she could sit in an armchair and watch TV. . . .

  Terrible things happen every day. You read about them in the newspapers, you see them reported, you watch the movies. Serial killers murder people, children get tortured. Not all of it is fiction. The bad things have to happen to someone, in real life, sometimes. As bad luck would have it, it was my turn, and Miranda’s turn. And why not? Why should we be protected? We lay there talking quietly, and gradually I started to accept.

  The bogeyman had got us. We’d fallen out of the space capsule of normal life, into the cold, cold dark that surrounds it, where only death is waiting. Nothing could save us: but we didn’t have to die screaming.

  But it was better to talk about sharks and nightingales. Imagining ourselves as strange monstrosities, human-sized mutant-things, was not going to help.

  “I’m pretending I’m lying still because I want to lie still,” I said.

  “That’s a good idea,” said Miranda. “I’ll try it.”

  “I’m pretending I’ve walked out of my body and gone to live in my head for the moment. I’m going to sit inside my head, relaxed, watching imaginary TV.”

  “Brilliant. Thanks, Semi. Tell me if you find a good program.”

  Time passed. The morning light got brighter. At last we heard footsteps, and Dr. Skinner came into the room. We watched him coming up to our cages. He looked sick and horrified, I was pleased to see. He needed a shave, too. We lay quiet and watched him. When he came up close, Miranda said softly, “I’d rather be me. I may be going to die by torture, but I’d rather be me than you.”

  He behaved as if he hadn’t heard her speak. One at a time, first me and then Miranda, he injected us with something, in our necks (which was the only part of us he could easily reach). When the needle went into me, and I knew there was no hope left at all, I nearly, nearly lost it. I whimpered, on the edge of screaming—

  Miranda whispered, urgently, “Semi, hey, there’s something I forgot. Arnie’s here.”

  Dr. Skinner was wheeling a stretcher trolley in from the corridor.

  “Yes,” I whispered back. “I think he did get here—”

  “You found the machete in the cave . . . and Dr. Franklin knew our names. It went out of my head, because there was so much else going on, but of course this is what happened to him, he was caught the same way we were. That’s why he vanished. He has to be around, somewhere.”

  “No, Miranda. Arnie’s dead. I’ve thought about it too. That’s why he never came back. They’ve experimented on him and he’s dead—”

  “No he isn’t. Believe it! He’s alive and he’s going to rescue us.”

  I knew she was talking nonsense, deliberately, to help me. But it still helped.

  “He’d better hurry, he’s got about three seconds to come bursting in.”

  No time for more.

  I was going first. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye in front of Dr. Skinner, so I tried to smile everything I felt. I was beginning to feel woozy. Skinner rolled me onto the trolley. The ceiling started to go by.

  I thought about the pilot who’d pulled out of that nosedive. I thought about everyone who had died in the plane crash. I thought about other teenagers in the world, and children, lots of them younger than me, who’d had to lie on a trolley with the ceiling going by, on their way to have terrible things done to them. Children in real hospitals where the doctors were good and kind, but sometimes that made no difference. Sometimes terrible things happened anyway. The children had to be brave. I could be brave too.

  But most of all I thought about Miranda.

  Then I was in another room, with green walls and bright lights. I was onstage again. A plastic mask was put over my face. I heard Dr. Franklin’s calm, smooth voice telling me to count backward from ten. A great adventure, I thought. Exciting. Here I go.

  chapter seven

 
Day Forty-two

  I was not dead. I was in a room with no bars. There were two beds and two bedside cabinets with an electric lamp standing on each of them. The walls were brightly painted, with pictures in frames. (I couldn’t make out what was in the pictures much.) On the floor between the beds there was a pink-and-green rug.

  I had muzzy memories of coming around from the anesthetic, in some kind of hospital place, of Skinner’s voice and Dr. Franklin’s voice, and being handled and answering questions . . . but everything was different now. This was like a normal hotel room.

  Except that there were no windows.

  We must have woken at almost the same moment. “Hey,” said Miranda, sitting up. “Am I dreaming?”

  “We’re both dreaming. Let’s hope it lasts. My head aches horribly, does yours?”

  “Yeah. That’ll be from the general anesthetic.”

  We were wearing green hospital-type gowns tied at the back with tapes. Oh, it was an amazing relief to have my arms free again. To be still me! I sat there gazing at these knobbly-elbowed, knobby-wristed skinny arms of mine with great admiration, greeting the scratches and scabs from my castaway’s life like old friends. My hands too, how wonderful!

  “I’ve never realized,” I said, waving my arms about and wriggling my hands in front of my face, “how much I love my hands.”

  Then we looked at each other, and remembered—

  We had not escaped. This “hotel room” was a fake and a sham. We were still the prisoners of a cruel madman, and he’d already started doing horrible things to us.

  Our chests hurt. We undid each other’s tapes so we could see what had been done. We each had a square dressing on our chest, below the collarbone. The place was very sore and there were bruises showing around the edges of the dressing.

  Nothing else seemed to have happened.

  “We won’t talk about it,” said Miranda. “Not yet. We’ll give ourselves a break.”

  So we put the horror out of our minds, as best we could. We got up and padded around, exploring our new territory together. There were three doors. The first one we tried led to a bathroom, with a shower, a basin and a toilet. There were big fluffy white towels on a heated rack, shower gel, nice soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste and toothbrushes, hairbrushes, combs, everything.

  Except no windows.

  The second door led to a living room. There were two armchairs, covered in a pretty, blue-green patterned fabric, a coffee table, more pictures on the walls, and a very fancy brand-new combination TV and video player. The shelf under the TV held a PlayStation and a library of video discs and games. There was a normal-looking kitchen fridge, which was humming very gently. There were no windows in there, either. There was a door that must have led to the outside world, but it was locked, of course.

  We went back into our bedroom, opened the third door in there and found a walk-in closet full of clothes on hangers and shelves. They were in teenage sizes— shorts and T-shirts, jeans and dresses, underwear. American labels, all clean and new and good quality.

  “Oh, yuck,” I said. “Do you think he sent for these when he knew we were on the beach?” The thought of wearing clothes bought for me by Dr. Franklin was hateful, and I said so. “I don’t want to wear these. I’d feel like an animal dressed up.”

  “No,” said Miranda firmly. “These aren’t specially for us. Think about it. Dr. Franklin’s staff, the orderlies and technicians, have to have everything provided for them. They all live here, and they have families, Skinner said so. That’ll be where the clothes come from. Dr. Franklin’s Island General Stores. Don’t let little things get to you, Semi. Remember, quality of life.”

  “Quality of life.”

  So we dressed. We even laughed about it, as we sorted through our collection, looking for things that fitted. It had been so long since we’d had a choice of clothes, we tried on practically everything in the closet before we were finished. We were extremely thin, and it seemed as if the island’s resident teenagers were inclined to be on the large side of big, but with cinched-in belts and going for the sloppy, off-the-shoulder, beach-gypsy look, we managed to kit ourselves out to our satisfaction. When we’d picked out our clothes, we showered extravagantly with lots of scented foam, and washed our hair and dressed. Then we looked in the fridge and found a big platter of beautifully prepared tropical fruit, a tray of cold pastries, a pitcher of pinky-orange juice, and lots of bottled water.

  “Okay,” said Miranda, when we’d carried this feast to our coffee table and sat looking at it, too thrilled to start eating. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s start the count again. Let’s call this Day Forty-two. We can’t tell what time it is, but that meal looks like breakfast, so we’ll call this the morning of Day Forty-two.”

  “Skinner said we’d been on the beach forty-five days.”

  “I know he did, but this is our count.”

  “But what are we going to do for notches? Scratch on the wall with our fingernails?”

  There was nothing to write with, no paper, no books, and no knives or forks either.

  “No, let’s not do that. Let’s keep the count in our heads, the way we did on the expeditions to the headlands. Then no one can take it away from us.” She looked up at the ceiling, significantly. I could not see any camera eyes peering down, but I knew at once what she meant. For a moment then, we sobered up. We thought about how everything we did was watched, everything we said was heard, and how our one chance of escape had failed. This time Miranda didn’t order me to stay cheerful. She reached out her hand. I took it. We held hands tightly, staring at the empty screen of the TV.

  Then we let go, and started eating our delicious breakfast, without another word.

  We drank the juice out of the pitcher, because we hadn’t found any cups.

  Later that “day” Dr. Franklin came to see us, and explained how things would work. Now that our treatment had begun (that’s what he called it), we would be free, in these rooms, as long as we behaved ourselves. No one but he and Dr. Skinner would be involved in our treatment, but we would have to prove that we could be trusted with the people who provided our day-to-day care. When an orderly was bringing our meals, a red light would go on over the door. We were to go into our bedroom and stay there until another red light over the door in there went off. There’d be some “unavoidable contact” with the staff, when the rooms had to be cleaned, or our laundry taken away and delivered back. We had to agree not to speak to them, or leave them messages, or make any attempt to communicate.

  If there was any trouble, we’d be back in the straitjackets.

  It went without saying, he’d have us under video surveillance all the time.

  We said we’d cooperate.

  I think this was the time when he made us say that I wanted to be a fish, and Miranda wanted to be a bird. But I’m not sure whether we’d already done that.

  When he’d gone, I went into the bedroom and sat on my bed, my head in my hands. I didn’t cry, I didn’t feel like screaming. I felt as if I never wanted to move again. I wished I could simply stop breathing. Miranda came and sat down next to me.

  “We’re volunteers. So if it happens, we’re glad we’re having the treatment.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “But it still might not happen. Semi, listen. We are not done yet. Until the last, last chance, the next thing we try might work. Say it?”

  “The next thing we try might work,” I whispered. “But it won’t, Miranda.”

  “We don’t know that. We’ll work on the guards, could be we’ll get through to one of them. We’ll look for the air-conditioning vents, maybe we can escape through them. We may have a chance to get at Skinner again—”

  “He’s watching us now. He’s hearing you say all this.”

  “Maybe. Okay, probably. But he isn’t finding out any secrets. He knows we want to escape. And he doesn’t know, not for absolutely certain, that we won’t find a way. Hey, look at us so far. We were in straitjackets, w
e thought we were done for. Next thing we know, we’re here in this nice room. With TV and a fridge and everything. So, things can get better as well as worse. Come on, Semi. Cheer up.”

  So we hugged, and I smiled, and I was better. I knew from the beach that it was no use trying to resist. Miranda wouldn’t let you give up. Eventually the lights dimmed and the rooms went dark. We realized that this was our “night”; and we went to bed.

  On the second day, we had another operation.

  For two days after that we kept trying to speak to the orderlies, and we chipped and poked at every corner of our rooms. Then Dr. Franklin told us that if we didn’t stop this he’d put us back in straitjackets, keep us each under permanent restraint in solitary confinement, and feed us by tubes into our stomachs.

  We knew he meant it, so we stopped.

  He told us that there was no longer any sense in our trying to escape. We’d had our first infusion of artificial DNA. The thing was done. We were transgenics. When the changes in our cells reached critical levels, we were going to be completely helpless. We’d die if we weren’t in his care. Of course we didn’t believe him. We believed in the straitjackets all right, but not the rest. Not deep down. We felt normal, we weren’t visibly growing fins and wings. I was the one who panicked and Miranda was the one who kept calm, but we could neither of us really believe the truth. How could we?

  When a human embyro begins to develop, it’s a little tight cluster of cells, and each one of those cells has the potential to grow into any part of the human body. This power to change gets switched off when the baby starts growing, but in your bone marrow there are cells called stem cells, which are like the cells in that early state. Dr. Franklin and Dr. Skinner had removed samples of our bone marrow, and doctored some of the cells so they worked as much like our original embryonic stem cells (that’s their full official name) as possible. Then he’d given us each an “infusion” of the doctored cells, with the artificial DNA added. This “rebuilt” DNA had been cut and spliced with new “bird” genes for Miranda, and “fish” genes for me. We’d have to have several of these infusions, he couldn’t tell how many, depending on how well we responded.