“Island?”
Tasha shrugged. “This is a very private facility.” She patted his hand like a babysitter comforting a two-year-old at bedtime, reassuring the child that there were no monsters under the bed. “Don’t worry yourself. You’re going to be treated like a star.” And with that, she did not so much walk out of the room as glide, as if the everyday weight of gravity had no effect on her physical grace.
“Yeah, she’s got a nice ass,” said a male voice that sounded as if its owner gargled with Wild Turkey five times a day, in between packs of filterless cigarettes.
Blaine looked up into the gaunt, weathered face of a man whose age could have been anywhere between a gee-you-don’t-look-it fifty and a raggedy-ass thirty-five. His bright green eyes were sunk into their sockets so deeply Blaine wondered if they’d fall into the man’s skull if he were punched hard enough.
“I’m Ted Copeland,” said Sunken Green Eyes. “And unlike our Ms. Tasha, I don’t give a flying fuck what kind of language you use, just so long as you do not interrupt me. Do you read my meaning?”
Blaine nodded. He really didn’t like this guy. Kind of a lot.
Copeland nodded. “Good. Now, pay attention. Before I explain to you what we’ve done to you and why, you’re going to get what I laughingly refer to as a mission statement. Limbus is big on the idea that its various departments and companies and organizations and what-nots all have individual mission statements. Me, I think it’s all a bunch of horseshit, but as long as I go along with the program, I get to see my family twice a month. That makes me happy. You can probably already tell that I am simply filled to the fucking brim with a joy for life and an overwhelming love of my fellow man, so—my whimsical wit and sparkling conversational skills aside, pay attention.
“There’s a tribe in Africa—well, what’s left of the tribe, anyway—called the Masai, and every so often they chose one of their elders, or a cripple, or some other useless member of the village, and they give them a huge party, then take them out into the jungle and leave them there for the hyenas to eat alive. It’s their way of not only controlling the population but of thinning out those elements that might taint the purity of their tribal genetics. This world, Blaine—may I call you Blaine? Doesn’t matter, that’s what I’m going to do. Now where was I? Ah, yes.
“This pitiful excuse for a world, Blaine, from pole to pole, is a jungle. Whether that jungle is composed of vines and swamps or boardrooms and contractual pen strokes, it’s all the same, no different from the one where the Masai feed the hyenas. It’s inhabited by various species of beasts, some which rut in caves and devour their young, others that wear tailored suits and dine on their business rivals’ broken stock speculations. All of these beasts have only one honest-to-God function, and that is to survive. There is no morality, no law, no imposed man-made dogma that will stand in the path of that survival. That humankind survives is the only morality there is. And for us to survive as a race, we must be superior, we must dominate all lesser creatures. And in order to ensure that, it is not only vital but necessary to destroy, to eliminate, to thin out and expunge any undesirable element that threatens to stop the march of progress. Don’t look at me like that, I’m not talking about genocide or anything that banal, no. I’m talking about expunging all the things that make us, on an individual basis, potential victims, be it to our surroundings, ourselves, our circumstances, or any of the myriad elements that we’re trained from birth to believe will crush us the moment the opportunity arises. The things that hold us back from real achievement, things like fear, like doubt, jealousy, resentment, shit like the lack of knowledge that is both applicable and useful on a day-to-day basis. In short, I’m talking about expunging all those niggling little…stop-gaps that make it so easy to justify hesitation or non-action. Do you read my meaning?”
“If I could move my hands, I’d applaud.”
Copeland glared at him. “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or merely stupid.”
“I get a lot of complaints about that.”
Copeland nodded. “So your wife told us. She’s really quite a brilliant woman, your ex-wife. If this program she’s designed works out as we all hope it will, it may very well change the, you should pardon the expression, course of human events. But I’m getting ahead of myself.” Copeland turned around, pulling something that looked like a small four-wheeled control panel toward him. Hitting a couple of buttons and typing in commands, he activated something beneath Blaine’s gurney—which Blaine now realized was not a gurney at all but some sort of hospital bed or table—and Blaine felt himself being tilted upward as his feet lowered. Within a few moments, he was in an all-but upright position, facing a large, round dais rising silently from an opening in the floor about five feet away.
“See there?” said Copeland. “We give you a wardrobe, a comfy bed, wonderful drugs—and now, a floor show, all for you. Are you feeling special? You should be feeling special. We only do this for special guests. Are you reading my meaning?”
“I get it. I’m special.”
Copeland glowered. “Sarcasm?”
“Just agreeing with you.”
Copeland almost smiled as he entered more commands. “You were injected with a nannite, Blaine. A nannite, in case you aren’t familiar with the term, is a microscopic-sized robot. The one in your system looks something like a mechanical spider. Nannites are programmed to build anything—organic or inorganic—from the base up. The one injected into your system can also self-replicate. If all my calculations are accurate—and there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be—within a few hours there will be thousands, millions, theoretically trillions, of them swimming inside you along with your cells. They’re beginning the process of breaking down and rebuilding your molecular structure, but at a rate at which your system can safely adjust to the changes.”
Blaine’s only recourse to completely flipping out from panic was to focus on the situation from as detached a point of view as possible. Clearing his throat, he asked, “Rebuilding my molecular structure how? I mean, are you specifically targeting certain areas, certain organs, what?”
Copeland smiled. “Watch the dais. Nothing up my sleeve…” Activating a holographic imager constructed into the center of the dais, Copeland rolled himself and the control panel back a few feet, allowing Blaine an unobstructed view. The lower portion of the imager rose from its circular chamber while its sister component lowered from the ceiling, each stopping with four feet of space remaining between them. Adjusting a few controls, Copeland pressed a key, and a life-sized, three-dimensional image of a human brain appeared, hovering at a comfortable viewing level twenty-five inches above the surface of the table. The image was crowned with bright and vivid patterns of red, orange, and yellow; below them was a band of broken green; and scattered throughout the back-brain area were violet-and-blue streams.
“What you’re looking at,” said Copeland as the brain began slowly rotating, “are the positron emissions tomography readings of a normal-functioning brain. The brightly-colored areas—red, orange, yellow—indicate where maximum brain activity occurs. The green areas delineate mid-range activity, and the blue-and-violet areas signify minimum activity. Now remember—this is what a normal, everyday-functioning brain looks like.”
He entered another series of commands, and the brain split horizontally, opening up like a book to its middle chapter; the frontal, temporal, and occipital lobes were also colored accordingly, as was the cerebellum. “I want you to look here”—he magnified the image—“at the mid-brain area. Can you make out the pituitary gland? Right there? Good.” He magnified the area once again, this time focusing on a tiny cave just behind and above the pituitary gland, housing a cone-shaped organ that, minus the magnification, would have been roughly the size of a pea.
“What you’re looking at now is the pineal gland. You’ll note that its particular shade is a bit softer than the other green-colored areas. That’s normal, trust me.”
&nbs
p; “What’s its purpose?” asked Blaine.
Copeland smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Here is what, after centuries of study, testing, and theorizing, we know about the pineal gland: it is attached to the third ventricle of the brain, it processes light from the suprachiasmatic nucleus via the retinohypothalamic tract—in layman’s terms, the passageway between the optic nerve and the hypothalamus—and it produces melatonin which is secreted throughout the night with the absence of light.
“And that’s it. Believe it or not, that’s all we know about its function—which is why, when this PET scan was taken, it was in a mid-range activity state. Mid-range is all the higher function the pineal gland achieves under everyday, known circumstances, even in the most healthy and active of brains. When light reaches the pineal gland during the day, it inhibits the production of melatonin, which is then produced and secreted as we sleep. Whenever in-depth study of human behavioral disorders is conducted, one of the standard results is almost always an unusually high level of melatonin in the system, such as those found in people who suffer from chronic insomnia or night workers who have to sleep during the day in places where light cannot be filtered out.” He cropped the magnified portion of the brain and moved it away from the rest, then deleted the three-dimensional PET scan of this brain and replaced it with that of another.
“This is a PET scan I performed on you after you arrived at this facility. The nannite had been in your system for a little under thirty minutes. Notice anything about the color scheme?”
Blaine studied it for a moment as it rotated. He said nothing after the first rotation, but as the second one began, he spoke up. “The blue-and-violet streaks—those are…what’d you call them…the ‘minimum-activity’ areas, right?”
“Correct,” said Copeland.
“They’re hardly there.”
“Right,” said Copeland, splitting this brain and magnifying the lateral view. “Your brain was functioning almost solely at mid-and high-range levels, which is nearly unheard of. Now, take a look at the pineal.” He magnified the area. “A Kewpie doll for the first correct answer.”
Blaine felt as if ice had been injected into his veins. “It looks cracked.”
“Close. Look again.” Copeland doubled the magnification.
Blaine leaned forward. “What the—? It looks…deformed.”
What he had described as looking like a crack was, as now clearly shown, a growth along the length of the pineal gland’s surface; it look to Blaine like a raised vein—albeit one with no blood to give it color—or the outline of a too-smooth spinal column.
“What is that?” he asked.
“One more thing first. Hang on.” Copeland cropped the pineal, moved it, then replaced the second PET scan with a third. “Just so you can put this in perspective, this was taken while you were still unconscious.”
The 3-D PET scan rotating before them now would have been almost laughably psychedelic in its impossibility, but coupled with Copeland’s grim expression, there was no denying its reality; its entire surface was covered in nothing but red, orange, and yellow, the colors so bright the brain appeared to be shimmering.
Copeland looked at Blaine. “The strength of the sedative in your system at the time should have lowered your brain’s overall functionality into the green and violet-and-blue. Yet here it is, a virtual rainbow of activity.” Once more he halved the brain and magnified the pineal gland until it alone was the size of a normal human brain.
Blaine shook his head, not looking away. “That’s…just…not possible.” He remembered the line from Sherlock Holmes that was among his favorites, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
And the truth, however improbable, was that he was looking at a pineal gland that branched into two separate cones while still connected at the tip.
“Is that…is that what my pineal gland looks like now?” said Blaine, almost numbed from the shock and near-terror. These people had gone inside his head and fucked around with his brain.
“Have you ever heard of Rene Descartes?” asked Copeland.
Blaine nodded. “The French scientist and philosopher—‘I think, therefore I am’—yes, I’ve heard of him.”
“Descartes has been rumored to have called the pineal gland ‘The Third Eye’ but it was, in actuality, Nils Holmgrenin, a Swedish anatomist, who gave it that name, in 1918. He called it ‘The Third Eye’ because medical dissection had shown that the front section of the gland is equipped with the complete structure of the human eye. Since it exists inside the skull, it was dubbed ‘the vestigial eye’ by the scientific community of the time, but Holmgrenin, like Descartes, was something of a classical Romantic, so ‘The Third Eye’ it became. ‘In man,’” said Copeland, quoting, “‘soul and body touch each other only at a single point, the pineal gland in the head.’ That’s what Descartes said about it. He believed that it was the nexus between the mind and the body, the…what did he call it?…the ‘…seat of the human soul.’”
“So you’ve done all of this to me to…what? Find physical proof of the existence of the soul? Goddammit, you messed with my brain!”
Copeland gave out a short, soft laugh. “Descartes was approaching it at that point in his life from a more philosophical vantage. He theorized that the pineal was the direct doorway to the subconscious mind—God knows that Wilhelm Wundt, Freud, Jung, Skinner, Weiner, and dozens of others referenced him enough in their studies. Descartes was also fond of pointing out that the ancient Egyptians believed the same thing—the headdress with the cobra protruding from the forehead exemplifying the symbology. It’s been said that everything from the Eye of Horus to the Masonic Capstone on top of the pyramid on the Great Seal of the dollar bill represents this belief, as well.
“But Descartes also cited scientific evidence of the time to back up his belief that, when fully activated, the pineal gland opens not only the subconscious but enabled our dormant Psi abilities—what used to be called ‘the sixth sense,’ allowing us to perceive higher planes and alternate dimensions of existence—but not before both physically and physiologically altering our cells until we became what George Bernard Shaw referred to as the ‘superman’—a being possessed of both immeasurable physical power and near godlike intellectual superiority.
“That’s what we’re going to do to you, Blaine. We’re going to take this living wreck of a psyche and body you’re walking around in and turn you into something just shy of a god.” With the simple press of a button, the show was over. Copeland removed a hypodermic from his the pocket of his lab coat, rolled closer to Blaine, and uncapped the needle. “In ever-increasing gradations, naturally.” And with that, he slipped the needle into Blaine’s neck and sank the plunger.
*
The guard, from the corner of his eye, saw something black move out of the water and seize his ankle: Evans’s suited arm and mitt. Before the guard could fire, Evans pulled him across the slick ice and into the hole.
To Evans, inverted, it was as if he had pulled the man, upside down into a cloud of air bubbles that lived in his world. The guard fought like a great fish hauled on a line from the depths but he weighed nothing. Evans held on to him and tottered away from the hole, carrying him at arm’s length. Even under water the guard’s gun fired twice, but he couldn’t aim. The thousands of bubbles this manfish had brought with him moved upward to the ice and rolled about, trapped against the frozen surface of the lake. The guard gasped and struggled exactly like a fish in air, except that he kept seeming to want to fly upwards out of Evans’s hands. His boot kicked Evans in the face, and Evans’s mouthpiece wrenched out but Evans held his breath, keeping the guard above him like a weight lifter pressing a barbell over his head, going for a world record—until he saw the guard take heavy gasps of water and go inert. The gun finally slipped from the man’s grip. Evans let him go and got his mouthpiece back in. He was so cold he was dizzy—his stomach and chest felt like frozen lead. The guard
’s body, like a slow balloon, floated up in space and hung among the starfish.
Beneath his feet Evans saw, in flashes, the bootprints of the other guard appearing and disappearing on the ice. Evans pulled desperately on the scraps of air in his regulator, but the pillow was pressing tighter and tighter across his face. He tried to prepare, but the cold was reaching his brain and slowing it down.
This guard must have seen the first go under, perhaps seen where all the bubbles the first one brought in coagulated, because suddenly there was a terrible noise inside Evans’s head, inside it, all around it, and from the center of the bubble mass he saw a streak of bubbles fly through the ice fast as a tracer bullet in wartime night.
The guard, panicked, was shooting at the ice.
Evans moved away from the bubbles as shot after shot punched through, each bullet marked by a brilliant silver bubble trail that bent in the water after a few yards and arced in all directions.
Evans pushed himself away from the eruptions.
The bullets followed.
This guard had quickly learned to distinguish where Evans’s bubbles were beneath the ice.
Evans held his breath and moved. The bubble he had breathed a second ago bounced down his side and reached the ice. A second later a bullet burst up through it, angled in the water, and almost caught him. He saw the trail of bubbles it made go past his eyes.
Evans made a sharp right. Inadvertently some air left the regulator and reached the ice. A bullet came up through it instantly.
Evans guessed, and made a quick dodge backward: he was right—four bullets pulled up through the ice in the direction he had been going. The guard had seen the track of the bubbles and was leading him. He was a better hunter than the one Evans had just killed. Evans’s air was nearly gone and he was freezing. He couldn’t keep this up much longer.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 22