Shit, I’m in hibernation.
Laurel sucked in greedily with a deep motion of her stomach. Hyperventilate. I need to hyperventilate. I need to drag more air from the hose. But she came up empty until the machine delivered her next breath. She thrashed in panic. I need more air.
The sensation of weight increased. She was being hoisted from the tank.
The whirlwind of spinning details slowed to a stop. Laurel tried to relax as Shepherd’s voice echoed in her mind. By the numbers. You must go by the numbers. Remove your eye protectors.
The sensation on her skin had changed; her face tingled. In small stages, she hiked her right arm through the tangle of jellylike cords to stop at a thick lump wedged into her mouth. She explored the object. Higher up, the lump rounded and became a hose. I’m still intubated. She sucked greedily at the next delivery of air from the machine.
After you’re intubated, a machine will attach eye protectors. Remove them.
Laurel’s fingers reached behind her left ear and found a strip of elastic material. She hooked a finger around it and pulled it up. Light flooded her eyes. She closed them as a sharp stinging sensation flared. Then she blinked repeatedly to clear them as her irises adjusted.
Your body will produce heat by chemically induced thermogenesis. For a while, blood vessels close to your skin will dilate to promote irrigation, but it will wear off soon.
Laurel eyed her arm and flexed her fingers. Red like a boiled lobster. Fighting an insane urge to yank the coupler from her throat and breathe at a faster rhythm, she rolled her eyes sideways to get her bearings.
She was dangling in midair, in a forest of wires that disappeared into the gloom above her head. The wires attached to her harness shuddered, and her cocoon moved past scores of gleaming cables sinking in the fluid beneath her feet. Laurel knew it was a fluid, but it looked solid, its surface bright. A drop fell from her toes, and the surface distorted for an instant but didn’t ripple, like crude oil.
When her wires cleared the maze, unseen robotic arms veered her cocoon over a catwalk and slowed to a standstill above an empty platform clad in the institutional white polymer surrounding the tank. The robotic arms must have been in need of fine-tuning or the programmer hadn’t given a damn, because the wires slackened a tad too fast. Laurel dropped the last foot unceremoniously onto a mess of jelly net, but the solid surface beneath her butt felt good.
The wires snapped free and disappeared into the heights as she felt a tremor in her throat. Oh, shit!
Laurel’s stomach protested with involuntary contractions as the never-ending hose pulled from her throat. She tried to stand and follow the motion to arrest the overpowering movement, but she failed. With a wet slurp, the plug yanked free and vanished upward. At once, she rolled over, convulsing inside her slimy cocoon, and retched blobs of pink-tinged bile until her gag reflex calmed, leaving a thin thread of saliva dripping from her lip. Then she filled her lungs to capacity with air redolent of chemicals.
Her jaw ached. Give head? Never again. Never.
A few yards away and to her left, she eyed a square pool—an expanse of black glass, its unmoving surface pierced by pairs of wires and fat green tubes.
By the numbers, you must go by the numbers. Get out of the protective net and remove the plugs.
When she could control her greedy gasps for air, Laurel reached to the back of her neck, explored the thick ring surrounding it, found the quick-release catch, and pressed it. The doughnut sprang open. Pulling with fingers and toes, she disentangled herself from the slippery net. When she was free, she pulled out her nose and earplugs, ran a sticky hand over the smooth dome of her head, and huddled on the floor to enjoy her recovered senses and peer at the mass of green cords, slowly flattening over the hard floor like a beached jellyfish. Laurel eyed her knees, stretched her legs, and wiggled her toes. Like a boiled lobster.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shocked at the sudden euphoria shooting through her body. Laurel remembered hearing tales of how Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander had each spent a night in the funerary chamber of the great pyramid at Giza—a large room, perhaps thirty by fifteen feet. Half the size of Hypnos’s standard tanks, and with a large sarcophagus dead center on the floor. They had experienced an everlasting night, alone in complete darkness, where it soon became difficult to decide where fingers ended and air began. They claimed the pinnacle of the experience was not the entrance or even the stay but the exit. The return to the outside, walking along a narrow gallery in darkness and toward the light, was like a rebirth.
Everyone who had undergone such an experience was changed. Fear of death was forever lost. Laurel felt similarly reborn.
When she heard a high-pitched whine, she glanced upward but couldn’t find the source of the noise. Suddenly she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye. At the edge of the tank, the surface broke and another cocoon started to emerge. Raul or Bastien. She narrowed her eyes and smiled at the glossy ebony skin inside the net. Bastien. Let’s see how you fare when they yank the plug from your mouth, buster.
chapter 5
17:41
Nineteen minutes to computer shutdown.
Lukas held his breath as the wire harness pulled the woman clear from tank 913, dreading an explosion of blaring alarms, but nothing happened. The subroutine he’d slipped into the station’s computer when he started his shift had worked like a charm. Donald Duck had said it would and, so far, the quacking man had been true to his word. Obviously, only someone familiar with Hypnos’s internal procedures could have written the code. During the daily backup routine, when the machine connected with the mainframe at the corporation’s headquarters, engineers would probably detect the rogue program. Then all hell would break loose. But by then he hoped to be out of the reach of the DHS’s long arm.
With another ten inmates left, processing the new arrivals was only halfway done. At three minutes each, he and his team couldn’t deal with all the new guests before the computer would start its backup. After a moment’s hesitation, Lukas turned to a squat gray cordless box on his desk and blinked to bring it online. The box turned dull red.
“Instruction to all controllers,” Lukas said.
The chameleonic box changed to green.
“Please continue processing for twelve minutes, until seventeen fifty-three, then prepare to shut down until backup is complete. Secure all unprocessed inmates.” He paused. “Lukas Hurley, supervisor.”
The box seemed to shrink as it returned to its gray standby status.
He could have scheduled another inmate, or two, but he didn’t want to tempt fate. If any of the inmates struggling through the admission freaked out—and a few did—it would add minutes to the schedule. They would have to seal the room where the wretch happened to be at the time, then, after sedating the prisoner with gases, a security crew would have to carry him physically to the intubation bed. The procedure would add a good three minutes to the schedule. No. There was no need to risk cutting it too close.
A man’s image filled the center screen. Lukas frowned. The guy must be pushing seventy. Thin as a rake, he shook like a tree caught in the crosswinds. The nose plugs had slipped twice through his fingers. If he carried on, they would have to use the gas. Damn!
Again he blinked toward his communications console. “Audio.”
“Relax. Bend over, let your arms hang loose, and breathe deeply. Relax. Breathe deeply once more. Good. Relax. Again, breathe deeply. Relax.” Lukas listened to Sandra Garcia’s soft voice issuing from the yellow box and nodded. She had overridden the computer and was coaxing the old man through the plugging. Come on, Granddad. Stick the plugs up your nose. Piece of cake.
The inmate straightened, reached for a plug, and rammed it up his nose.
“Attaboy! Now the other.”
After a short delay, the thin man staggered toward the intubation bed, both green balls dangling over his upper lip.
“Control Room.”
A pause.
/>
“Line to controller Garcia.”
Lukas straightened his back and looked over his screens to a station where a young woman swiveled in her seat to look in his direction.
“Excellent job, Sandra.”
She gave him a thumbs-up.
The screen on his right zoomed in on the old man as he swallowed the coupling plug. Douglas Stern, 72, 5’ 2”. Caucasian, Retired executive. 50 years, 761. Lukas scrolled down his pad to Douglas’s holograph. He remembered the face from the news. The little old man had drowned four cats, a Labrador dog, and his three grandchildren—aged six, three, and eighteen months—in the family’s bathtub.
He turned to the left screen. No wonder the man was nervous. Fifty years was a death sentence. Although Congress had abolished capital punishment in 2046, prisoners served their terms in full. With sentences often running to hundreds of years, the abolition was a farce. Many inmates entered hibernation knowing they would never walk again. At least not in this valley of woe.
Down by tank 913, the woman had discarded the protective net and, after a stint of heaves, was on all fours watching the black man pop up from the tank. Lukas zoomed in on the crawling figure. Red as a beetroot. Nice ass.
He darted a look at the clock: seventeen fifty.
Suddenly a white line at the bottom of the screen started to flash. Lukas jerked. “Holy mother—” He felt his gut clench. The line froze and changed to an angry red.
chapter 6
17:50
The cocoon with Bastien inside maneuvered through a swarm of wires almost to the far edge of the room before turning and heading in Laurel’s direction, like a strange hive at the end of a sagging branch. The ceiling over the tank was a grid of metal rails and guides holding square plates, each fitted with two suspension wires and a greenish tube. Laurel watched the moving plate shunting past other squares, guided by a thick cylinder, probably a hydraulic arm. After more clicks and whines, the mess of jelly cords with Bastien inside traveled overhead along the platform surrounding the tank, leaking steady dribbles of clear fluid.
She waited—as one waits for the last strain of an organ note to die out before leaving church. A few paces beyond the heap of her discarded netting, the bundle slowed to arc in sluggish swings, as if buffeted by unseen winds. Glistening threads stretched to pool on the floor below. Then it lowered. Laurel gathered her legs and tried to stand, her eyes intent on Bastien’s upturned face, distorted by thick lips stretched around the green tube. Why doesn’t he yank his goggles off? Her toes gripped the textured floor.
With a loud click, clasps fastening the wires to Bastien’s harness snapped and his body sagged onto the floor. Rather than standing, Laurel edged toward Bastien on all fours, her arms and knees wobbly.
The green hose tightened, lifting Bastien’s head a few inches from the floor before sliding from his throat. As the tube contorted toward the machinery above, Bastien’s head thumped back onto the polymer floor.
Laurel lunged over to him, reaching behind his head for the fastener holding together his jelly net and tugging at his protective goggles. His eyes stared, fixed, unfocused, to a point somewhere over their heads.
Oh, no, you don’t. She yanked his neck ring and tore at the net, but she couldn’t remove it without lifting his slick body. “You bastard!” she screamed. He was too heavy to maneuver out of the jelly mess. With quick movements, she removed his nose plugs and lowered her ear to his gaping mouth. He wasn’t breathing. She rammed her fingers into his neck to check his carotid pulse; nothing. She pulled back one of Bastien’s eyelids, but his pupil didn’t react.
“You bastard,” she insisted. Chest compression is more important than ventilation. Laurel strained to remember the precise details from a first-aid course she’d attended several years before. Swinging a leg over his body, she straddled Bastien. One, two, three … She lowered her weight and rammed her stacked hands on his sternum. At least one hundred a minute. Ten, eleven, twelve … Laurel jerked her head, scanning the bare walls for a defibrillation station. Nothing. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three … At thirty, she stopped. He needed a shock to restart his heart.
Again, she glanced quickly around the room for anything electric, a service outlet she knew wouldn’t be there. Still nothing. One, two three … A whine and two sharp clicks. Something moved overhead. Seven, eight, nine … Time for Raul. Laurel pushed and counted, her stomach twisted into a painful knot. Stopping again at thirty, she peered into Bastien’s unseeing eyes and started over.
Either Bastien had suffered a cardiac arrest or something had malfunctioned in the life-support equipment. She knew there was someone helping them out from the inside, though she didn’t know his identity. But their plan hinged on the helper’s ability to bypass a high-level program and insert a subroutine to slip in a few lines of code. Perhaps the rogue program had conflicted with other computer instructions. It was a miracle she was alive. She darted a glance to the center of the tank—the limbo of forgotten souls—and to the twin wires separated from the others. Their goal. Laurel shuddered, her mind torn with conflicting emotions. For more than eight years, Eliot Russo had floated under those wires, kept in the perfect form of bondage by a sadist. Eliot Russo, a man she’d never met but had learned to hate the moment she discovered his existence. A man probably insane after his ordeal. Yet, insane or not, he was proof of the system’s criminal abuse by the government. Laurel had sworn to expose the corruption in the Federal Bureau of Hibernation, but doing so by springing out the man she knew only as Eliot Russo was the ultimate paradox. Resentment burned her stomach.
There were more whines and clicks as the hydraulic arm moved to raise another sac of sinew and bone from hibernation. What if Raul was dead or unconscious? She might as well dive into the icy fluid and breathe deep—anything but hibernation for life. Thirty. Again, she leaned to peer into Bastien’s eyes and, grinding her teeth with rage, resumed the cardiac massage with renewed vigor.
The clicks stopped and the fluid rippled before Raul’s head surfaced. Underneath, the liquid boiled and lazy wavelets radiated from Raul’s torso. His enmeshed arms thrashed at the net, and a hand snaked through to reach for his goggles.
Laurel closed her eyes as a wave of relief washed over her. She paused and drew in a deep breath, looked once more at Raul’s writhing shape, then resumed the compressions.
Even before the wires supporting Raul had snapped free, he was already releasing the neck ring and tugging at his ear and nose plugs. When the hydraulic arm removed the mouth plug, Raul rolled on the floor as he tore out of the gelatinous mess, lurching heavily from side to side, then crawled toward her.
“Move,” he croaked. “Let’s get this mess off him.”
Good old Raul; no questions. In the short flight over the tank, he’d pressed through his horror and assessed the problem.
Raul pushed both hands under Bastien’s head and jerked the unconscious man to a sitting position to free the net so Laurel could slide it down.
“Take over chest compression. I’ll do the mouth-to-mouth,” Laurel said.
“How long has he been like this?” Raul started pounding away at a good rhythm.
Laurel had lost count of the maneuvers. “Six or seven minutes.” Keeping his airway free, she breathed hard into his mouth. It tasted of hibernation fluid—metallic with a hint of sweetness.
Still no reaction. Laurel blew into his lungs again. The window for successful bridging until defibrillation was ten to eighteen minutes. They were running out of time.
Raul compressed Bastien’s chest with vigor, eyes darting around.
“Don’t bother. I checked. No defibrillator,” Laurel said.
“Bastards!”
“It would be needless overkill. The machines hoist the meat straight up to revival labs above us. Why should they have emergency equipment around the tanks? This is a clean room, sterile. To handle emergency life support outside the tank, you’d need real people with real germs.”
“Wh
at about maintenance?”
“Automatic. Only a major breakdown would bring anybody here through the personnel corridors and service galleries.”
“Which way is the entrance?”
She cocked her head. “Behind me, but you can forget it. Shepherd’s notes were clear; it opens from the other side and won’t work until Russo surfaces and our contact joins us.”
When Raul paused, Laurel lowered her head and tried to breathe life into Bastien’s inert body. Raul continued pushing and heaving. Her mind raced. The machine would pluck Eliot Russo from the tank any minute now. Then they would have ten minutes to grab him and run before the alarms went off. They would never make it.
“What went wrong?”
“The program or his heart. Does it matter?”
She scowled at his bleak look, and his eyes lowered, disappearing into shadow.
Bastien’s muscled body rippled under Raul’s onslaught. She’d read of people reviving after lengthy revival maneuvers, but not under such conditions. Laurel eyed Raul, his face grim, determined, slamming down onto Bastien’s chest like a battering ram, twenty-nine, and thirty. She leaned over, fastened her lips to Bastien’s cold mouth, and blew. Pause. Another breath and Raul resumed his pounding. She ran a hand over Bastien’s shaved head, following the ridges of his left temporal bone, cold and slimy.
Throughout her life, Laurel had attached herself only to cherished scenes, hoarding them like amulets against disaster. An image flashed through her mind now: Trees burned in the autumn sunlight, ablaze in a riot of red leaves, and the three of them—Bastien, Raul, and her—lounged on the grass, drinking Sonoma Riesling straight from the bottle. Bastien had a serious expression. “At a monastery, the prior asks a novice to replace an almost exhausted candle in the chapel. The young man forgets. After prayers, the prior sends for the novice and confronts him with a spluttering wick in a pool of molten wax. ‘Where’s the candle?’ he demands, and the young monk replies, ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’” Raul had shot a confused look at Bastien. Then the penny dropped—“Wears the candle?”—and they all roared with laughter. Thirty. She leaned over one more time and blew anger into Bastien’s lungs. Breathe, my friend, breathe. Laurel peered into Bastien’s face. His eyes had dulled. She closed his eyelids.
The Prisoner Page 3