Johnson considered his younger counterpart as they made their way to the elevators.
“You seem on edge,” Johnson said. “If what you say is true then you have achieved a great thing.”
“Just this thing with the police, sir.”
“They’ll get their security footage and it will tell them nothing,” Johnson said. “We look after our own, doctor. You should know that by now.”
With his body sagging with some degree of relief, O'Neal punched the call button. As the elevator car hummed behind the steel slabs O'Neal began whispering excitedly, his words coming as an incessant hiss.
“We have achieved symbiosis, sir,” he said. “The seamless integration of human consciousness and machine. The applications are boundless. The rules of longevity and mortality no longer apply.”
“Indeed,” Johnson said. “But the applications are not for us to decide.”
The elevator doors slid open and the two stepped into the car. O'Neal sought a button than was embossed with the word 'Project Lab' and pressed it. The car began its ascent.
“This is a new frontier,” O'Neal said. “As a species we are about to become immortal.”
“Let's not get carried away, doctor,” Johnson said. “An objective and rigorous assessment of data is required before we can draw a conclusion.”
O'Neal's mouth pulled into a thoughtful smile.
“What?” Johnson said.
“Don't you just love science?” O'Neal said.
“Indeed,” Johnson said as he added his own smirk.
***
Wright and Pearson stood in reception. Behind the desk, Reeve was on the phone, her voice rising and falling like the tide.
As they waited patiently for Reeve to arrange the security footage, Pearson and his partner spoke in low voices.
“What you think of Johnson?” he said.
“He's pretty vague. He either knows nothing or he's being deliberately evasive; he's pretty difficult to read.”
“I have my doubts,” Pearson said.
“You always do,” she said. “You're a natural cynic.”
“Paid off before though, right?” he said.
“Yeah. This is a controversial company that isn’t one for airing its dirty linen. Maybe we’re seeing things that aren’t there.”
“He came to greet us personally,” Pearson said. “Smacks of trying to keep a lid on things.”
“Well this is currently a missing person investigation,” Wright said. “It'll be a different if we get one hint from this footage that it's anything more.”
“You mean the bitch will out?” he laughed.
“Don't you know it,” she winked.
***
The laboratory was in room that was over a hundred yards square. There were isolation suites and an operating theatre; places where the equipment bristled with bright lights and thick plastic piping.
Smaller labs with work surfaces laden with multicoloured glass phials, microscopes and glimmering steel centrifuges could be seen on the periphery and the rooms were joined by transparent corridors and partitions made of glass and Perspex, each pane or panel with a frosted silhouette of a Phoenix rising from three broad-leafed flames.
And what wasn’t glass or Perspex was fashioned from stainless steel or white plastic; this extended to the bleached doors of a service elevator at the back of the room.
In this space there was a pervading sense of peace, the walls blunting any sounds from the machines or equipment. As Johnson and O'Neal walked through the lab, the techs and interns looked over at them and gave them a cursory nod of acknowledgement. For everyone in this place the work - the science - came first.
As they navigated the opaque corridors configured by each room, Johnson saw a grey shape looming through the glass. By the time they stepped into one of the labs at the centre of the structure the professor could see that this shape was in fact a thermal sheet draped over an unseen object.
Next to this image was a small, free-standing lectern which supported a console where several thick red and black tubes trailed from the power bank and onto the white floor before disappearing under the sheeting.
Two more staff - men also in white lab coats - were preoccupied with several sheets of paper and did not realise they had company until O'Neal gave a small, polite cough.
“O'Neal,” a man with a thick dark beard said as he held some of the sheets of paper to his colleague, “You have to look at...”
The man with the beard stopped as he saw Johnson.
“Sorry, professor,” he said. “Didn't realise.”
“Dr Croft, how about you tell me what is under the sheet?” Johnson said.
“Of course,” Croft said and indicated for his second colleague, a man with a bald pate. “Let's see our girl, Hughes.”
Hughes stooped and took hold of the hem and gently pulled the sheet away to reveal its secret.
It was a humanoid, but a machine of sorts; an ungainly thing of metal plates and rivets, crudely knitted together with electrical wiring and pipes. On mechanised shoulders was a crude head with silver lamp-like eyes that glowed orange.
“What the hell is this monstrosity?” Johnson said.
“The body is just something we put just threw together with the robo-techs, professor,” Croft said. “Just a rough sketch. The good stuff is here.”
Croft gently turned the makeshift skull to one side and Johnson could see what was housed inside.
In a transparent bowl was a cloudy solution that gave off small bubbles, and floating in this skein, the grey matter of a brain pulsated like a sea urchin on the bed of the ocean. On the brain itself electrodes were strategically placed on the dark valleys traversing its surface, and from these, thin wires disappeared into the base of the sphere where they went to work uniting organ to instrument.
“The girl was bleeding out. She'd have been dead by the time the paramedics had got here,” Hughes said. “We made a call. We saved her.”
“Well that remains to be seen,” Johnson sniffed. “Where is your evidence of awareness?”
“Here, professor,” Croft said holding out a sheet of paper. “We asked her a simple question. We asked if she knew who she was. We gave her a pencil and she was able to connect to the endoskeleton. She was able to write.”
Johnson took the sheet. And written on the paper were seven words:
My name is Gemma Lorne. Help me.
“Intriguing,” Johnson said coolly although his heart was beating a tattoo against his sternum. “I want to communicate with her. Why is she offline?”
“We've rigged up a Speech Generating Device,” O'Neal said. “She might sound like Stephen Hawking with his balls in a vice but it'll beat pencil and paper.”
“And her body? Her real body?” Johnson asked.
“Incinerator,” O'Neal said. “Gone. Without trace.”
Johnson took a few moments to contemplate. He walked over to the machine and studied it. His eyes were drawn to the long, articulated rods that made up its fingers.
“What happened to her?” he said.
“It was an accident, sir,” Croft said cautiously. “O’Neal had hooked up a rodent brain to a remote controlled Monster Truck and the cortex was driving that fucker round the lab like Lewis Hamilton. We saw the potential, the possibilities, and we decided to celebrate. We were drunk. She was drunk. She slipped - went down. The ring stand went straight through her, a total freak accident. We thought about operating here but...” he stopped and found it difficult to get started again.
“But you were presented with an opportunity,” Johnson said by way of help. “And you took it.”
“Yes,” O'Neal said with a degree of pride. “Her brain was removed whilst she was still alive, sir.”
“As fresh as you can get,” Croft chuckled.
“Good,” Johnson said. “Turn her on.”
“You got it, boss,” Hughes said and tapped several k
eys on the console. At this the chassis hummed and the click of metal slowly coming to life filled the lab.
“She's alive, sir,” Hughes said.
“Can you hear me, Gemma?” Johnson said softly.
“Yes.” The monotone voice was harsh and echoed about them.
“Gemma,” Johnson continued, “how do you feel? Are you able to tell me that, how you feel?”
“I feel...” there was a significant pause as Gemma's disembodied brain searched for words that her money-box lips would never be able to pronounce. “I feel lonely.”
Her hand clicked together in her lap.
“Lonely?” Johnson said. “How can you feel lonely when you are not alone?”
“What have you done to me?” Gemma said.
“We saved you,” O'Neal said. “You were dying.”
“I am still dying.”
“No, Gemma,” Croft said brightly. “You are very much alive. And you are a miracle of science. You are the first of your kind - symbiotic; part human and part machine. You will be the proof to the world that humans will finally be able to live forever.”
“Not all humans.”
Gemma's long, metallic fingers reached and scooped out Croft's left eye and let it drop to the floor. The assault was so fast Croft stood with blood oozing from his vacant socket for a few seconds before he started screaming. He went down do his knees as Gemma climbed to her misshapen, metallic feet. Her hands were upon Croft again in seconds. This time she clamped his face between her hands and didn't stop squeezing until a slit opened in his cranium and a squeal escaped the cavity just before his brain come through like a writhing grey worm. His right eye slopped onto the floor as though desperate to be with its counterpart.
Hughes vomited onto the console and as he emptied his guts, Gemma helped him along by plunging her bloodied metal hands into his abdomen and tore him open. Gravity dragged his innards to the floor and the blood was shocking against the white tile.
Gemma hoisted Hughes’s convulsing body above her head and hurled him against the glass wall. The sound of breaking bones and glass fused to create a sickening symphony that tore through the inertia of those in the lab.
Everyone, Johnson and O'Neal included, moved as one. Gemma stepped forwards, her gait unsteady; a mechanised toddler finding her feet. Her lamp-like eyes watched the panic she had orchestrated and, inside her mind, the rage that was as much a driver as the gears and circuit boards of her car-part body was burning bright.
She hefted the console and launched it through the air. The machinery flew and punched through the glass partition. It smashed into a female lab tech who had risked a turn of her head to see if she was being pursued. Plastic met flesh and death came swiftly; both body and machinery blending together in a symbolic parody of the thing Gemma Lorne had now become.
Gemma's metal body may have been clumsy but it was also unyielding as it crashed its way through the lab; partitions frosted before falling like the curtains of some steam-punk freak-show. As she walked over them the tiny glass cubes crunched like crisp, overnight snow.
Johnson and O'Neal ran down the fragmenting glass corridor. The cries of panic and alarm added to the sense of horror sweeping through the lab. The scientists and lab techs ended up in a bottle-neck; pummelling the elevators as their ghostly reflected images of panic mocked them from the metal doors.
Johnson and O’Neal backed away towards the frantic crowd, their eyes never leaving their oncoming assailant. Both men were in awe of the thing that was now Gemma Lorne; its metallic shape moved with determination. Whenever it appeared unsteady, the crude hands would slap against the panes of glass leaving a spider-web of cracks.
“She is a thing of terrible beauty,” O’Neal whispered.
“Get a grip of yourself man!” Johnson said. “This is what happens when you fail to follow process! Now, get to a Com-link and call security up here. Tell them to bring hardware.”
O'Neal was hesitant.
“We can't damage her, professor,” he said. “She's the key to immortality.”
“You're a hair’s breadth away from being fired, O'Neal - so just fucking do it!”
Another object took out a wall to their left; a stainless steel table that had somehow lost its legs was now lying in a pile of powdered glass. A lab tech, a man in his twenties, was staggering around blindly with his hands to his face. Blood escaped through his fingers and his forehead was peppered with shards.
He stumbled past Johnson and O'Neal, his passing bringing with it splatters of gore, his white lab coat now sporting a crimson bib. Johnson watched the guy veer off, and into the path of Gemma and her terrible metal claws. She went to work on him, her makeshift fingers reshaping his flesh, changing him from living human being into churned carrion in mere seconds. His ruined carcass collapsed at her feet and she kicked him aside like a crazed sculptor frustrated with their work.
“I am not saved!” she said in her harsh metallic voice. “I am cursed. Even as a whore I had more to live for – at least I had my...”
Her tirade was cut off as though someone had found the ‘off’ switch; the subsequent pause became protracted. Johnson watched in amazement as Gemma lifted her bloodied hands to her faceplate in realisation.
“I'll never see them again. My children! My babies.” The hands fell away and her lamp-eyes glowed like the fires of a furnace. “You will pay. You will all pay.”
“Get that team up here!” Johnson yelled.
O’Neal saw the intercom on a nearby wall and went to it. He punched the plastic button and yelled into the vented grill.
“This is O’Neal at the project lab. Security team required, stat! Suppression protocol 291264! This is not a drill. Repeat: Suppression protocol 291264!”
And throughout his fervent call into the intercom O’Neal was painfully aware of the dull thud of oncoming metal feet getting closer and closer.
***
Pearson yawned and looked at his wrist watch. He paced to and fro. The lobby was still sedate and Reeve was busy taking calls several feet away at the reception desk. Wright stretched out on one of the small sofas as she read a science magazine.
“It’s got to be time for lunch, right?” he asked hopefully.
“We can stop on the way back to the station,” Wright sighed as she turned another page and pretended to understand the text.
“You said that last time and I ended up having to eat from that fucking vending machine back at the office.”
“Better than starving.”
“That’s up for debate,” he said sourly.
Across from them the elevator doors pinged open and suddenly the lobby was alive with cries and sobs as people in lab coats spilled out; some of their own volition, others helped by their equally distraught comrades.
“What the hell?” Wright said jumping up.
Pearson was already moving towards the group.
“What happened?” he said to the first person he came to; a woman with dishevelled hair. Pearson could see that she had fine crimson spots on her otherwise unblemished white tunic.
“Project lab,” she said, her face was made expressionless by shock.
“Come on!” Pearson said to Wright and they both ran to the elevator. The doors were closing as Pearson shoved his hand between them. The detectives jumped into the car and Wright hit the button marked Project Lab.
Wright looked down at her phone and frowned at the ‘no signal’ icon on the screen.
“You?” she said to Pearson as he checked his cell. He shook his head.
They both exchanged uneasy looks as the elevator took them up and towards the unknown.
***
Gemma had picked up another corpse. It was bloody and ravaged; the gender now a mystery due to the ruin she had brought to it. She saw O’Neal standing next to the man who they had called ‘professor’. The man who had made it clear that what had been done to her was not a terrible thing at all but a goo
d thing, the right thing and in such words condoned the actions of those all about her. She hurled the body at the two men as they backed towards the elevators.
Johnson tried to duck but the body hit him squarely and a dead hand caught him in the face with such force he felt teeth loosening in his gums. He went down, pinned beneath the corpse, as the machine came forwards, the determination to get to him making its gait even more precarious on a floor pooled with blood.
There was another sound in the lab: the click of heavy boots. Several security staff who arrived via the service elevator at the far end of the room, weapons drawn, and given bulk by their black Kevlar vests.
“Orders, sir?” One of the security officers said. He had silver trim on his Kevlar indicating his rank of Team Leader.
Johnson spat out a wad of blood.
“Kill it,” he said.
The guns opened up, staccato blasts that sent tracers streaking through the room. Partitions that were yet to shatter did so with delicate chimes; a stark contrast to the cacophony from the security staff. Gemma's body was punched with small detonations generating multiple starbursts against the metal shell. A bullet took out one of her arms at the elbow, severing the gyro and leaving wires hanging like vines.
The Team Leader dropped to one knee and took aim with his machine pistol. He concentrated his fire upon Gemma’s unsteady legs, taking out her knees in twin, tiny explosions that had her toppling over like a drunk who finally succumbs to his liquor. She fought to stand but it was a pathetic display which had Johnson laughing; the sound ambiguous with the carnage about them.
He shoved the body off of him and stood.
“Give me your side arm,” he said.
“Sir?” the Team Leader said.
“Your gun,” Johnson said. “Give it to me.”
The Team Leader pulled a Glock 17 from his utility belt and handed it over to Johnson who took and primed it like a professional.
***
The remaining lab techs – eight in all - were trying to ram themselves into the lift as soon as the doors opened. Wright and Pearson had to battle their way through them; Pearson using his baton when it appeared as though Wright was going to be trampled. The detectives stumbled from the car as the doors slid shut and the two of them looked at the devastation in front of them.
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