Anna stared out at it from behind webbed fingers.
“I am IVAN,” the robot said in a tinny voice, devoid of any hint of emotion. “Integrated Variable Android Node. Welcome to the future of robotics.”
“The future?” Gabby said, looking between Anna and Ivan. “Maybe in the 1950s. That hollow-voiced tin can makes Stephen Hawking sound like Dean Martin.”
“The future of combat robotics is probably what they mean,” Jack suggested, decidedly uneasy.
But Jack wasn’t the only one. Murmurs of concern rippled through the crowd as well. Admiral Stark returned a moment later to address them. “Rest assured, the effort to save the planet is well underway on all fronts. I’ve just received word from our friends at NASA. They are working hard to beam radio messages at the incoming ship. But the time to tread lightly is over. Even the folks who helped to put us on the moon recognize that. It’s why they’re working with the U.S. Air Force to develop a lethal option as a last resort. And yes, as many of you know, that option will involve launching nuclear warheads against the craft. But also know builders and engineers are busy outfitting bunkers deep underground designed to preserve a sample of humanity. Many of you here are convinced the answer lies on the other side of that portal. You may be right and with any luck, we will soon find out. We’re going back in and this time we want the beings on the other side to know we mean business.”
The room exploded with applause. Jack stood up and waited for it to die down. “Admiral, I won’t argue against the need to move forcefully to save the planet. And like you, I’m also hopeful the answer may lie somewhere over there. But for all we know, they’ve chosen to destroy us because of the savage way we act toward one another. What message will we send as ambassadors of the human race if we go in with robots designed to maim and kill? Will we not be proving them right?”
“You see those numbers above the door?” Stark said, pointing to a countdown clock with less than fifty-eight hours remaining. “I’ve had one installed in every module in Northern Star and every Quonset hut at Base Camp Zulu. When those numbers reach zero we die, plain and simple. We need to move with all due haste to figure out who’s in charge over there and incentivize them to turn that ship around before it’s too late. This time we go in hot. If you don’t have the stomach for it, then feel free to stay home.”
Jack gritted his teeth. “Fat chance.”
Chapter 14
Following the meeting, Mia returned to the science module and the ten-by-twenty-foot lab Alan had given her. Black research tables ran the length of both walls, each filled with microscopes, beakers and Petri dishes as well as a computer work station. At either end of the rectangular room was a glass booth equipped with cameras, microphones and computer monitors.
Her assistant, an older woman named Gail, gave off the rather clear impression that working on Mia’s research project was a distinct waste of time. Perhaps she thought it should be going in a different direction. Or perhaps Gail wanted a lab of her own. Either way, she wouldn’t say. But her acute disapproval became clear every time Mia asked her to perform even the most menial task. Gail had elevated the art of sighing to a whole new level.
“Have the girls been prepped?” Mia asked, peering through the glass partition. Inside one room was Sofia, sitting in a chair, wearing a helmet that would image her brain during the test. Gail nodded with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, as if to say, Of course I prepped the girls. Mia tapped on the glass and curled her fingers into an okay sign. Sofia did the same, her long black hair draped along the pale confines of her face. She didn’t look scared, which was a good thing.
At the other end of the lab was the other the other glass booth where Noemi was currently seated, attached to the same kind of equipment. Thankfully, her hair was short and wavy, which helped Mia tell them apart, although the more she got to know the twins, the easier the task was becoming. While Sofia was quiet and reserved, Noemi was exuberant and outgoing.
The plan was to image the region of the brain that surrounded the hippocampus while the girls attempted to speak to each other telepathically. A screen before one girl would show a randomly generated image while the girl in the other room tried to guess what her sister was seeing. After several attempts, they would switch tasks. What Mia hoped to see was which parts of the brain were active during the sending and receiving of thought waves. But more than that, during the experiment, the girls would be filmed in every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If brain waves were being sent out like radio signals, Mia hoped to see it in action.
The lights in the main lab dimmed, while those in the isolation chambers at either end stayed the same. An image of an orange appeared on the screen before Sofia.
“Orange,” Noemi said.
Mia nodded. Another hallmark of Salzburg. In only a matter of a few short days, these two young Italian girls had become almost completely fluent in English, albeit with the hint of an Italian accent.
The next picture was a slice of Hawaiian pizza.
Noemi’s face squished up. “Nasty pizza.”
The next image Sofia saw was of a chocolate bar. Noemi got that one immediately.
“This test is making me so hungry,” she complained with a faint smile.
A teddy bear flashed on Sofia’s screen.
“Uh, ice cream sundae,” Noemi replied incorrectly.
Mia bit her lip.
Sofia was then shown a house with a trail of smoke rising from the chimney.
“I see French fries with mayonnaise,” Noemi said, licking her lips.
Several other images appeared with Noemi only getting a very small percentage of them right. Dispirited, Mia stopped the experiment and let the girls out.
“Gail, can you see that the girls get something to eat right away?” she told her assistant, trying not to let her disappointment show.
Gail stood, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Come along, girls.”
As soon as they had left Mia smacked the table with the flat of her hand. The beakers nearby rattled and jumped. How could it be that they had displayed such impressive results in Rome and yet now they were barely above chance? They were young. Could it be weak powers of concentration were making it harder for them to focus? Noemi had described being hungry. It wasn’t unreasonable to suppose the incoming signal—assuming there was one at all and that Gail hadn’t been right about Mia wasting her time—had been altered or distorted by the girl’s grumbling stomach.
She went to the MRI data and played it back from the beginning, watching the overview of Noemi’s brain as she made each guess. With the first two, the sections around the parahippocampal gyrus glowed deep red. On the ones she got wrong, another part of her brain had also been lit up, the hypothalamus. The one associated with hunger.
“Interesting,” she said, switching to Sofia’s reading.
On the first two, Sofia’s parahippocampal gyrus demonstrated the same intense level of activity while on most of the others, Sofia’s hypothalamus also showed some movement.
“What the hell is going on?” Mia wondered, out loud, her brow scrunched.
They had clearly failed the test, right? Unless, of course, Sofia hadn’t actually been transmitting the images she was being shown. Maybe Noemi wasn’t the only one who had skipped breakfast. Maybe both of them had been hungry. Could Sofia have really been sending her sister images of ice cream and French fries instead of teddy bears and houses?
Next she went to the footage she’d taken in each of the isolation chambers. She ran both of them several times in a multispectral mode, looking for anything out of the ordinary that might present itself, from infrared light to gamma rays. All she saw were two poor girls who thought wearing silly helmets and running tests sure beat the hell out of the asylum.
The infrared and gamma ray proved about as useless as she’d predicted. When she switched to the X-ray spectrum, however, she saw something strange. At one point a blur of soft light appeared around Sofia’s head, along with
a conical streak that led out of frame. Her heart began beating faster. Mia rolled it back and played it from Noemi’s point of view. She saw the same thing. In both instances, the blurry streak of light or whatever it was led from the isolation chamber and straight across the lab. She backed Noemi’s video up and played it again, second by second. One moment the streak was absent, and then suddenly it appeared. It looked to Mia like a blemish on an old dog-eared photograph. She backed it up one final time, playing it millisecond by millisecond, and that was when she found frame 4622. On it, the smoky substance had crossed the room, but it was far lighter than in frame 4623 and beyond. Whatever Mia was seeing, it seemed to be traveling from one girl to the other and doing so faster than the speed of light.
In her initial hypothesis, she had imagined the brain as a kind of radio, able to cast off and receive signals out of the air. Anyone with a ham radio was able to pick up chatter between NASA and the International Space Station. The signals were out there for anyone to grab hold of. But frame 4622 appeared to demonstrate that this was not the way telepathy worked. The smear of light across the image appeared to be an actual extension of Sofia’s mind, reaching across space and time to connect with her sister. If this were true, it represented perhaps one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in the history of science. From the materialist point of view, the mind was merely an extension of the brain. If that were true, then what had Mia seen in the X-ray spectrum video streaking across the lab?
“Anyone ever tell you how beautiful you look when you’re focused?”
Mia looked up to find Alan leaning against the doorframe. For a moment she’d hoped it was Jack. Heck, she would have even taken Gail. Anyone with whom she could share this startling discovery.
“Mind if I come in?” he asked, already stepping into the lab.
“Actually, I’m kind of busy,” she replied, minimizing the video she’d been watching.
Alan walked like a 70s gigolo. He was only missing the unbuttoned shirt and a hairy chest full of gold necklaces. Her eyes fell to the Super Bowl-sized rings on his fingers. Those had to count for something.
“You’re still upset about Ollie. I can see it written all over your face. Listen, it was the heat of the moment. You know I would never do anything to hurt the guy.”
Mia swiveled in her chair. “That’s close enough.”
Alan planted his feet and braced himself against a nearby table. “I’ve never killed anyone in my life, I swear.”
“What about Greg Abbott? The police found his dead body in the trunk of your car. I don’t even know how you got involved with those Sentinel people, anyway. They’re terrorists, Alan. You’ve always been a misogynistic asshole, I’ll give you that, but I thought even you had limits.”
He smiled, flashing a pearly set of veneers. “I meant what I said in my letter. Can’t we just let what happened in the past stay there? I mean, geez, Louise, it was five years ago.”
“You like to play games, Alan,” Mia said, feeling her blood pressure begin to climb. “I get that. But I’m done playing. Do you even care whether or not we save the planet? Because seeing you stand there like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel, I’m not getting that impression.”
“You wanna know the truth? I’m not worried about that ship. Let’s just say the human race has an ace up our sleeve.”
Mia nodded. “Then why chase me halfway around the world, only to bring me here?”
“I want you to finish your research,” he said, his voice losing a touch of that casual tone it had been laced with earlier. “We need to understand how Salzburg syndrome was mutated remotely. More than that, we need to know how it was transmitted from person to person in the first place.”
“Biophotons,” she explained, hoping that might satisfy and encourage him to leave. She was suddenly starkly aware they were alone in the lab together and part of her flashed back to that hotel room, him standing over her as he buttoned his shirt. Mia gritted her teeth and did her best to power through. “The blast waves of light from the ships―”
“Ships?” he asked.
“The ship in the Gulf,” she amended. “And whatever was coming through that portal. Frankly, we’re not sure of the source in the second instance. Gabby and Eugene are working on that. But either way, those flashes were sending genetic instructions to our cells, ordering them to cobble together new genes from the junk DNA in our genome.”
He tapped a finger on the table. “A brilliant and rather elegant solution, don’t you think?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It makes our modern medicine look like voodoo by comparison.”
“Yes, it does.” Alan clasped his arms over his chest. The lab’s neon lights made him look old, almost frail. “But the question remains. How does it spread? Why does your daughter Zoey have it while you don’t?”
“Don’t bring her into this,” Mia snapped, her body suddenly a live wire of protective rage.
Alan raised his hands. “Easy, baby, I come in peace.”
“I’m not your baby!”
He waited until she’d calmed down before rephrasing the question in a less antagonistic way.
“You’re talking about the HISR gene,” she told him, starting to lose her patience. “Your people already asked me all these questions during the flight over here. It’s an assembler gene that only exists within thirty percent of the population. The ingestion of GMO foods must have awoken the gene and instructed it to begin building a 24th chromosome in humans as well as species of animals close to us. Initially, folks affected experienced few symptoms. It’s likely why when your lab first discovered the extra chromosome, it was only populated by a single gene. The other seventy percent of the population without HISR were spared.”
The edges of Alan’s lips rose into a grin. “Looks like we dodged a bullet.”
“Much of that will depend on how all of this shakes out. I mean, some of the genes in the second half of the chromosome have some pretty strange properties.”
His eyebrow perked up. “That so?”
“It’s still unclear how it’s being done, but we’re getting closer.”
“That may be so, but I don’t want you losing focus on your main task.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want to be perfectly clear about something,” he said, in a low voice. “I didn’t bring you here to play with children. That you can do in your own time. I brought you to Northern Star to complete our understanding on how a photon can be encoded with genetic information and used to affect change within the body. You’ve discovered how it works in principle and I congratulate you. But it won’t do the medical profession any good if it isn’t something we can use on a daily basis.” Alan paused, watching what was surely a long string of emotions play out over Mia’s face. Finally he said, “I’m glad we had this chat.” He was about to leave and paused. “Oh, and Mia. Don’t ever let me discover you’ve been holding anything back.”
The look on Alan’s face made the skin at the top of her head tighten with fear. She shook her head and watched him turn and saunter out.
Mia buried her head in her hands. Here she was unlocking the mysteries of the universe and all Alan could think about was winning himself another award—and, of all things, off of her hard work. It was enough to make a girl scream.
A knock came at the door and she bolted to her feet, ready to let loose. Instead, the sight before her left her stunned.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Mia said, recalling in vivid detail the day not long ago when Jansson had left Italy and all the research they had been doing to be with her family.
Dr. Jansson smiled and moved in for a hug. “The minute I got home, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. I guess I’m not as delicate as I thought.” She laughed. “Would you believe, the slender gentleman I just passed in the hallway whistled as I walked by?”
Mia shook her head. “Would you believe me if I told you it didn’t surprise me one b
it?”
“Who is he?”
“Only a time-travelling douchebag from the 70’s who’s here for the sole purpose of making my life a living hell.”
They let out a wild bout of laughter. It was exactly what Mia needed.
She clapped her hands on Jansson’s shoulders. “All right, let’s get to work.”
Chapter 15
After getting nowhere with the local police Kay made a quick trip to fire station #29 on Crystal Rock Drive. The local chief there was an athletic man with silver hair and a matching mustache. He opened the door a crack, as though she was looking to rob the place.
“Lady, if you got an emergency, pick up the phone and dial it in.” He went to shut the door, but was stopped when Kay blocked it with her foot. “Hey, I thought I made myself clear now―”
“Listen… Chief Fulwood,” she said, eyeing his name tag. “I called and keep getting a busy signal.”
“Yeah, well, that don’t surprise me, ’cause most of my crew’s out chasing one false call after another. People short on food been calling us to bring them supplies from the supermarket, like we’re a bunch of deliverymen.”
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