Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  He runs another systems-diagnostic. He knows everything is good to go. Everything has been triple-, maybe quadruple-checked. It’s no more than a nervous fidget; no purpose to it beyond finding something to keep his mind occupied, keep his fingers busy. Glancing at what’s cradled in those sweat-streaked arms, he hopes the soldiers don’t have the same problem. What’s making the systems-diagnostic more redundant is that he won’t even be permitted to use half of this stuff, and of what remains, much of it might be unable to tell him anything anyway. On a trolley next to the table, for instance, there is a Swan-Ganz catheter for measuring pulmonary arterial pressure and an arterial line for invasive blood pressure monitoring, while next to those is an oesophageal Doppler for monitoring cardiac output. What he doesn’t have - for they have thus far allowed him insufficient opportunity to determine - is any guarantee that there will be a heart, lungs, oesophagus or arterial system present to be monitored.

  Steinmeyer checks his watch, and to Merrick’s relief (but, he’d have to admit, slight disappointment) moves from the vicinity of the table and thus outwith the range of sedition and sabotage. He turns his gaze instead towards the door; not the main door, opposite Merrick’s console, upon either side of which stand the two soldiers his mikes picked up, but the other one, the one at the south corner. The circular steel one. The blast-proof one. The mag-locked one, upon either side of which is posted a phalanx of six more soldiers.

  All eight of them, as well as all six of the science and medical personnel, stiffen to varying degrees in response to the main door lock-warning alarm as it reverberates off the white walls. A blue glow emanates from the digital read-out topside of the double-width sliding main door, the LED panel’s border flashing red in time to the first five pulses of the alarm. After that there’s only the countdown: twenty seconds until the chamber is sealed.

  At ten seconds, the two halves of the door slide together, but this happens any time someone comes in or goes out, so nobody’s fazed by that. It’s ten seconds later, when the tumblers drop into place on the other side, that always draws an anxious glance. Nobody likes to know they’re locked into anywhere, but knowing what they’re all about to be locked in with takes it to a whole other level.

  One of the soldiers guarding the entrance slides a card through the swipe-reader inset in the wall to the right of the now deadlocked door, then lifts the telephone handset next to it. He’s confirming the lockdown and submitting the auth code for the second stage. Merrick can’t stop himself looking towards Steinmeyer. He’s got one hand on his chin, his thoughts unreadable. He’s still staring at the circular door, and as soon as the second warning alarm sounds, so is everybody else. It’s another twenty-second countdown, but this time to opening.

  ‘Okay, places everybody,’ Merrick hears a voice say. ‘Game time.’

  It’s the second phrase before he’s fully aware that the voice is his own. He’s functioning, putting himself into operational mode like any other piece of military-owned equipment he has deployed here, and even as he does he can feel his deeper self disengage, retreat into merely spectating from above like in some out-of-body experience.

  He already knows that later he will review the myriad video files, and will see himself in the images, but he won’t feel any of this, and there will be no footage saved of the view from inside his head.

  The countdown hits five. The phalanx step into an altered formation, forming a V widening away from the door. Their weapons are no longer merely cradled, but levelled at shoulder-height, six little blue LED ammunition readouts describing the V shape, like a constellation, or the floor-level emergency lights on a commercial airliner. And at the apex, one big blue LED reaches zero.

  There’s a second of silence, or as close to silence as the sound of the machine can permit in this place. One last very pregnant pause. Then there comes the percussive chimes of the mag-locks disengaging, followed by a belly-shuddering thunk as eight impermeable steel cylinders retract into their housing within the giant disc. The final herald’s trumpet blast is an indignant hiss from the pressure seals, before the big circular door swings smoothly and slowly open on its hydraulic servo-assisted hinges.

  Merrick knows this door cost more than his house; maybe more than half his street. Given what’s kept behind it, he also knows it’s money well spent.

  But right now it’s open, wide to the wall.

  At first, all he can make out are shadows and silhouettes, the shapes of several figures moving slowly in concert, like a procession. First to emerge fully into the chamber are two men in identical yellow radiation suits, covering them from head to toe. They move backwards, their gait a cautious, tentative shuffle, resultant of having no option to look at where they’re putting their feet, of looking behind, or indeed of looking anywhere but at the subject. Two more follow, flanking the centre, this pair facing inwards, shuffling sideways. Their movement might be crab-like, but Merrick finds himself thinking of a tortoise: not the plodding creature itself but the name given by the Romans to a specific formation of their legionaries. This particular formation is completed at the rear by two forward-facing Romans, and it is in their visors that Merrick catches his first glimpse of what is being escorted at their centre.

  The visors are one-way transparent, something to do with the light and radiation filtering, meaning in practice that they can see out but you can’t see in. When you speak to them, this has the disorientating and inhibiting effect that you see only the reflection of your own face. And mostly they don’t speak back much either. Not to Merrick anyway, nor Steinmeyer, nor anyone outside their own rarefied constituency. Down here, it’s all about who you’re answerable to, and the command chain has become rather tangled since they and their boss showed up.

  Once all of them have emerged fully into the chamber, the structure of the formation becomes more apparent. It has a frame; maybe you could even call it a skeleton. One member each of the vanguard and rearguard has hold of a metal shaft, terminating either side of a stainless-steel restraining collar. A second, wider such hoop is thus tethered a couple of feet lower down by the Romans on the flanks. The remainder in fore and aft also grip metal shafts, but these will only connect to the subject if the other restraints become insufficient. They are five-feet-long electrified pikes, their business ends crackling like Space Dust on the tongue as blue static dances restlessly around the grey steel.

  Merrick hears a low, breathy gurgle: not a growl, but bassy enough to be felt in his own diaphragm, and loud enough to convey that the noise would be fearsome were it to give voice to anger. He strongly suspects that driving a bolt through the skull in order to facilitate intra-cranial Doppler pressure-monitoring might just elicit that response, and that the subject, not having been formally consented, might wish to later register a complaint.

  For now, the procession remains calm.

  Merrick catches only flashes of movement in the shifting gaps between the yellow suits. He sees skin reflected in the visors. It looks flayed, livid, even steaming, like it’s reacting to a drastic change in the ambient temperature or humidity. The first time he caught such a glimpse, he reasoned that it was down to a distortion of the reflection caused by the visor’s curvature and by light flaring on the glass. This time, he’s got infrared cameras and humidity sensors waiting in place to filter fear and hysteria from hard data. Unfortunately, he’s confident that the hard data will merely provide ample justification for more of the first two. The idea that anything organic could be hotter than the air in here is a truly unsettling one.

  The yellow tortoise continues its palpably tense but necessarily unhurried procession, headed towards the table, flanked now by four of the armed phalanx. Two soldiers remain at each door; securing chamber access is their paramount objective, one understood by everyone now locked inside it to override their personal safety. If anything goes wrong here, then here and here alone it stays.

  The procession stops a few feet short of the table, which at this stage remains conceal
ed from the subject. At most, all that is likely to be visible between the radiation suits is the odd flash of stainless steel. There is no means of deducing how much the subject knows about what will take place next, no way of anticipating reaction and response.

  A million white mice go meekly and unsuspectingly towards certain death, then one of them seems spooked and desperate, and you ask yourself: how did it know to be afraid? When it’s a white mouse, chances are it detected some smell or sight it didn’t like, or perhaps was simply anxious anyway. This, however, is no white mouse. The subject has no inkling what will take place in this chamber, but a specimen such as this goes nowhere meekly; and as for unsuspectingly, well, the steel braces kind of render that one moot.

  With some alarm, Merrick notices that around knee height there is something unsecured and in motion, though it looks too thin and too flexible to be an arm. He is not comforted to realise that it is a tail.

  From the centre of the formation Merrick hears a guttural, throaty rumbling, like a very large motorbike: idling, but the slightest throttle-twist away from unleashing far more power. He felt the last emission in his stomach; reckons this one is vibrating his chest until the sound falls away and he realises the palpitation hasn’t ceased.

  He’s not here though, he reminds himself. He’s only looking down, and looking down he hears his voice order Avedon to ‘present the table’. There is a keening hum of gears as the table begins to rotate on its vertical axis. It tips eighty-five degrees until almost perpendicular to the floor, its shape distinct in grey steel against the white panelling, a horizontal brace bisecting the trunk at around two thirds of its height.

  The subject sees it now: a cross, risen, elevated to dominate the room. The subject doesn’t like this. There is a ripple through the formation, suggesting that the four Romans gripping the restraining shafts are not so much tethering the subject as merely hanging on like sailors in a storm. The other two respond. The pikes are applied. The storm gets worse for a while, then abates amidst a flurry of fizzes, crackles and winded-sounding groans (though no roars and no screams). The subject goes limp, the four escorts now supporting its weight. The air smells of ozone, and a sweet odour that reminds Merrick pleasantly of childhood for the few seconds it takes to remember that its source was a bacon-curing factory close to his school.

  With the subject stunned, the escorts move swiftly to open the loops attaching its wrists to the metal band around its middle, then place them instead into the waiting clamps welded to either side of the table. A metal neckpiece is similarly bolted into place, then the feet are locked in position also.

  ‘Subject secured,’ reports one of the yellow suits. With his face concealed, it’s impossible to be sure precisely who he is reporting this to, but Merrick knows he could narrow it down at least to being one of the soldiers. It sure as shit isn’t him, or Steinmeyer, or anyone else on the scientific staff.

  ‘Subject secure,’ one of the soldiers in the phalanx acknowledges, then gives a signal to his colleague manning the swipe dock at the main door. Another countdown begins, but now it’s not just the door that’s on a clock. Whatever he’s going to do, Merrick is going to have to commence now, and he’s going to have to work fast.

  ‘Restore the table,’ he tells Avedon.

  The subject writhes in languid disorientation as the table returns to the horizontal: not quite conscious, not quite oblivious either. He’ll know when it’s fully come round, because that’s also when he’ll discover how sound those welds are. Right now, though, it merely looks like it’s in the last pre-waking throes of unquiet dreams.

  Merrick first takes hold of the modified plastic clip that is the sensor end of the pulse-oximeter, and delicately levers it around one of the subject’s ear lobes. This particular piece of kit was checked on one of the soldiers an hour back so that hardware error could be ruled out if there is a repeat of the reading Merrick got on a previous subject. The device measures oxygen saturation in red blood cells by passing two different wavelengths of red and infrared light (normally through a finger, but that requires a willing patient) from an LED and comparing the different light absorptions demonstrated by oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin. When Merrick first tried measuring this on a test subject, the results were so low as to be inconsistent with human survival. Ruling out knackered kit would open up other explanations. One was denser tissue make-up leading to a greater overall opacity, resulting in little of either wavelength getting through to the sensor. More dramatically, a second interpretation was that there was genuinely very little oxygen in the blood, and that it was therefore nitrogen or even carbon dioxide that was being conveyed instead. Thus instead of a standard human or even mammalian respiratory system, they could be looking at something closer to photosynthesis. Hence the expired gas analysers, though Merrick isn’t much looking forward to fitting the mouthpiece.

  He reaches to a tray and picks up an electroencephalographic sensor, placing it gently to the subject’s temple, then applying a little pressure to make it fast. His little finger brushes the base of the protuberance just above, and he dares to indulge his curiosity by pinching gently with his thumb and forefinger also. It’s hard, ungiving, solid. Tougher than bone.

  Merrick places another electrode on the opposite temple, then reaches to a second tray and lifts the sensors he will attach to the chest. As he sticks the first of the little pads in place, he stares at the hairless, lightly crenulated plateau beneath his fingers, insulated from his touch by a layer of latex. Merrick finds himself taking off a glove in order to feel the skin directly against his own. It’s tougher, like soft leather, a surface that feels as though it would be easily scuffed and scraped, but nonetheless hard to penetrate. He lets his arched palm collapse until it is lightly pressed, feeling for a heartbeat. At this, the subject opens its eyes and sharply turns its head to look into his.

  Merrick would not care to describe what he sees in there in that moment, but he knows the results of one test, at least: that test an unlucky few must face. He couldn’t say which action constitutes passing or failing, wonders whether any man could, but he knows this for sure: he will make do with the ECG, the EEG, the pulsox and at most the expired-gas analysers. He will not be attempting any invasive monitoring procedures without anaesthetising or analgising this thing, neither of which he has any idea how to accomplish anyway.

  This inability is, of course, irrelevant, because even if he did know how, he would not be allowed to make an attempt. Monitoring and observation, as has been made unambiguously clear to him and his team, are the absolute extent of his parameters, the demarcation of which will be enforced, if necessary, by the twitchy-looking muscle-bound fuckers carrying the very big guns.

  He checks the monitors. He’s getting readings above the baseline from the ECG and the EEG. There is cardiac output and there is intracerebral electrical activity. What that’s going to tell him, beyond that the subject has a heart and a brain, he’s not sure.

  Merrick looks up from the table and finds himself locked in Steinmeyer’s gaze. It is only marginally more comfortable than the last pair of eyes he just stared into, but Christ, what does Lucius want him to do? Steinmeyer looks to the main door, then back to the table.

  ‘This is insane,’ Steinmeyer says. ‘This is completely fucking insane.’

  ‘Lucius,’ Merrick appeals, though he can see it’s futile. His face is stone-set in a coolly resolute anger: no sudden, precipitate fury. Steinmeyer shakes his head. Something here has broken, something inside of him. He hauls off his headset and slaps it down on to a nearby tray, upending scalpels, lines and canulae on to the concrete floor.

  Steinmeyer then strides towards the exit, but finds his way barred. The main door is no longer in lockdown, but there is a soldier between him and the swipe dock for his security card.

  ‘I’m sorry, Professor Steinmeyer,’ the soldier states. ‘I’m not authorised to let anyone leave this chamber until I have full clearance that the procedure is complet
e.’

  He doesn’t look quite so coolly resolute any more. Merrick can see the sinews tense in the back of Steinmeyer’s neck, and fears for a moment that he is about to do something rash. Just then, however, he hears the susurrus of the pressure release as the main doors glide apart. The soldier looks around quizzically, then snaps to attention and gives a salute as he sees Colonel Bud Havelock stopped in the entryway, arms folded as he waits for the two halves of the door to slide fully home. The seven other soldiers also salute as he steps into the chamber.

  The men in the radiation suits react not at all, their collective attention remaining intent upon the subject on the table.

  With the door now open, Steinmeyer attempts to walk towards the passage but the soldier manning it steps across his path.

  ‘Colonel Havelock,’ Steinmeyer appeals.

  ‘Sir,’ the soldier barks, looking past the physicist, ‘my orders are to secure the chamber until I have full clearance, sir.’

  ‘Stand easy, Corporal,’ orders Havelock. ‘You have my clearance to let Professor Steinmeyer pass.’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir.’

  The soldier moves out of Steinmeyer’s way with an exaggerated step, his eyes front and away from the professor the second the order is given. This leaves Steinmeyer with only Havelock to get past.

  ‘Where you off to?’ the colonel asks. ‘Forget something?’

  ‘I have no role here,’ Steinmeyer replies. ‘You have no role here,’ he insists, inviting Havelock’s agreement like he’s sure he knows how the army man feels about the issue. Turns out he’s wrong.

  ‘I would strongly dispute that, Professor. We both have a role here because we may be dealing with a threat to national and international security. This is the US Army. This is what we do. Now this ain’t a war, not yet, but if it becomes one, it’s men like me, men like Corporal Clark and the other soldiers you see right here, who’ll be in the shit, fighting it. So if this helps us learn more about what we’re up against, if this in any way helps save my men, if this helps us win, then goddamn right we’ve got a role here, and goddamn right so have you.’