by CG Blade
Bar piped up as he stood up looking at Emily “Let me get this straight you found a microchip in the brain of two people so far who spew various numbers at collider sites which we haven’t figured out what the hell they mean and are in the frontal lobe of the brain which controls thoughts and memories? They might or might not be the only ones on the planet who have this?” Bar was now out of breath. His tone was getting a little less confident.
“Yes that is right,” Emily stated. “I would suggest our best mathematicians work on that so-called number collider puzzle that’s being repeated before these people meet their untimely death. I am going to need a large imaging unit—preferably a Tesla—probably within the next day or so. We’ll also need the autopsy images of the deceased people from the Fairbanks incident and possibly your best NIB lab techs General,” Emily stressed looking at Cooper specifically. “We can start by doing an MRI of everyone in this room to rule them out first. This test will at least show a spec at that area and tell us if the microchips all are in the same location. Scanning us first and quickly is paramount.”
Cooper stared at Bar who stared at Tinker and shook his head in disbelief. Cooper was normally a rational doctor who thought he was starting to go insane. Was he? Did he have this ‘thing’ in his head too?
“Whatever you need you got it from us.” Bar said and Tinker agreed with nods to Emily and Cooper. Everyone pulled up their virtual notes and began writing and talking.
“Everyone please take a deep breath. I can help you out… listen up,” Cooper said raising his gravelly voice in the corner of the room but trying to calm the masses. “But you all have to keep everything quiet about what I am about to show to you here at this lab. No one—and I mean no one leaks any of this microchip info out to the masses but me. Is that understood?” Cooper stated again firmly. “The media is not our friend right now until I want them to be.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
“I’m about to show you things you never thought were possible and with all the brains in this room maybe I’m expecting too much too soon. I just hope we figure out the simplest theory quickly.” If we find these microchips in us we need to remove them as quickly as possible, Cooper thought. God willing involuntary brain functions such as heartbeat and breathing are not affected.
The meeting adjourned and lunch was on the menu before they started going their separate ways to the rooms inside the facility. The meeting attendees sat and talked for a while during lunch catered from inside the facility’s favorite burger spot ‘Perky Pats’. Emily, Bar, and Tinker threw ideas back and forth like sixth grade kids discussing the latest microscope project given out by the science teacher. Cooper thought it was quite humorous listening to them while he threw back a burger even though most of it had dire circumstances revolving around it. “I think we have the right team let’s hope it pays off he said under his breath, I’m getting too old for this shit.”
Chapter 8
CONCEPTION
Petra was training and downloading information in the facility’s Preservation Room. She began discussing Terprise’s’ programming options with the lab techs while Emily, Bar, and Tinker who had now been working for a day at the Meredith facility were getting good at knowing their way around. They were two separate teams but working towards a common goal. Emily had been set up with her own office, X-Ray, and imaging labs. Doctor Sanders had promised Emily a tour when she finally got settled in. Bar and Tinker just needed offices and computers so he and his team began working right away. Petra was to be Cooper’s eyes and ears trusting no one and no one could move as silently and as swiftly towards the desired outcome he had wanted.
The one-thousand foot high ten floor underground facility was a scientist's paradise. There were many places to relax and unwind here if the present consequences had not been so dire. There were racquetball courts tanning beds and workout rooms for all of the employees. Engineers designed the architectural plans with a swimming pool and a massive dining room with catered meals and staff quarters that made some apartments look small. The large atrium in the middle of the facility was five floors tall and had a view that was accessible from those floors. All types of species of birds and waterfowl flourished happily and sang their songs for food. Waterfalls and a stream bubbled and gurgled through the center of the acre wide circular sanctuary. An environmental system took care of convincing the wildlife that night had settled every day at 8:00 p.m. Employees spent a lot of lunches and down time here admiring the sounds of the birds and swaying foliage. A planetarium appeared at 9:00 p.m. for onlookers and enthusiasts who were stargazers. The labs in the facility had the latest equipment and there were massive cathedral-type auditoriums for lectures and meetings. Kept clean by air filtration systems that could rival the biggest factories the lab rooms had a ‘sterile’ feel to them. The facility had its own power generators water treatment facility and of course its own network.
Doctor Sanders kept abreast of all the comings and goings of the facility and in all other terms was its second in command behind Cooper. He had helped with almost every case that had anything to do with biology and the human body. He was in fact Cooper’s go-to guy in cases that involved the utmost secrecy and confidentiality. He liked to be trusted with these topics and it was a challenge to him when Cooper popped in and discussed these matters in detail. Up until now no matter had ever been as challenging as this one. Doctor Sanders was eagerly showing Emily the last floor in the facility, the Preservation Room while Bar and his team kept working on programming to try to crack the number collider puzzle. They started riding the main elevator eight floors down quickly after a facial scanner checked his face against a database.
“This is quite a facility you’ve got here, doc,” Emily said with a wide grin.
“Yes a lot of this was started years ago and never was completely finished. The funding came slow and a lot of it had been thought to be dead until General Cooper revived it and appropriated some monies from other 'areas' of the government.” His fingers were up in the air with air quotes. The elevator stopped. “I’m not sure any of the research we do down here could have been finished without him. Now if you will come this way Emily I think you will see that we have a great Preservation Room.”
They walked down a shiny steel blue-lit hallway until they came upon double doors. Doctor Sanders walked towards an electronic beam that picked up his facial features again. The door clicked and a female voice said “Welcome Doctor Sanders.” A waif of air formed a vacuum as he pushed his way through the huge steel doors. They entered a lab room as big and as magnificent as Emily had ever seen. There were huge horizontal tanks filled with different variations of blue gel everywhere. Computers, monitors, and lab equipment were all present and all of their liquid cooling equipment was humming in a harmonious binary language. Programs and code were running across and down all of the monitor screens. Her mouth dropped open at the sight and Doctor Sanders chuckled to himself while enjoying her reaction.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” he asked her excitedly.
“No! How did you get all this down here? I have so many questions!” Emily was like a child in a toy store amazed at the selection.
“In due time Emily. Let me show you around first.”
The lab techs were busy monitoring equipment and discussing the day’s events while Doctor Sanders gave Emily the in-depth tour.
“So there is a progression here I see of cases that eventually would work?” she asked.
“Yes,” Sanders said firmly pounding his right fist into his left hand. “Only now could we control it. In the past a lot of the subjects you see here didn’t respond well to the treatment.” He got excited talking about this work and it showed in his face. The lines on his forehead would animate quickly. “There has been only one case in which the body and the mind have worked together with this treatment so well. Emily what I am about to show you has only been dreamed about and written about in science fiction novels and has actually c
ome true. These are the first human beings synthesized from their existing DNA and restructured to adapt to their own memory cells within the DNA. That began ten years ago and now with a strain of self-replicating synthesized DNA we call 'Cobalt' they will be able to lead a life outside of their tanks.”
Emily was speechless. All of the subjects in this room were in stages of development. Some of them did not look so good or had looked dead. Some of them looked like they were maybe sleeping. She had many questions. “Okay—okay. So you’re telling me that you’ve got a way to synthesize a human’s DNA and then 'grow' another 'part' of them?” Emily asked quizzically growing increasingly nervous and anxious at the same time.
“Yes, yes,” Sanders told her in an eager tone, “some of them have not been out of their tanks yet but their brain trials have all but exceeded the limits of where we thought they would be at this point. When they came to us here at the facility, they were wounded soldiers and police officers with missing appendages and other horrific traumas. One was a First Lieutenant in the Army at the last half of the UMES wars. She was Cooper’s friend and his best friend’s daughter. If we had not done something to maintain her cerebrum tissue immediately, most of her brain cells would have perished within hours of her death. We keep their brains active in their bodies in a mineral solution in these tanks and run specific programming that keeps their minds healthy and busy while we replicate their DNA structure. We force their limbs to ‘regrow’ from their own DNA memory in the cells. These soldiers are not dead. They are in a state of cryogenics that begins the sequence for Cobalt programming. Cobalt is what we now call it due to the dark blue hue the minerals we use give off when the sequence is complete. Now of course there were some added options that we give them that may or may not exist yet,” He concluded stepping off the subject quickly. Sanders stepped over to a Vidscreen and voice activated some instructions. The screen replayed the cabin scene and the combat and the drone kills that Petra experienced earlier in her mind. It showed her armor sequence and it showed her climbing up the wind generator, ripping off the back of the turbine, destroying the rotor shaft and talking to someone aloud.
“Who is she talking to?”
“Ah, that Emily is Terprise. We are actually running a safe algorithm training program in her head and we have come to the part which I think you will find most interesting because it has to do with your little 'microchip' problem you’ve found in the cadaver brains. Let me introduce you to someone who engineered this part of the project.” Sanders quickly walked Emily over to an adjacent room where there were monitors and machines talking and humming everywhere. In the background, she could see through a clear window a person in a horizontal tank immersed in some kind of gel. It had a beautiful dark blue glow to it and it was mesmerizing. She could not take her eyes off it.
“Is that…?” Emily stopped cold. Emily was oblivious to her surroundings and everyone else in the room focusing on the cobalt colored tank that mesmerized and hypnotized her thoughts.
“Yes that’s Project Cobalt and I’m Doctor Jackie Siebert PhD head of Neurosciences here at the facility and you can call me Jackie. Doctor Judson, I presume?” Jackie spoke concisely and intelligently, wearing her reading glasses over the tip of her freckling nose and a blue lab smock. Doctor Jackie M. Siebert was a forty-one-year-old, well respected Neurologist third in line behind Doctor Sanders and General Cooper. She fit in perfectly with everyone when Sanders hired her personally five years ago.
“Hi you can call me Emily.” Emily had not realized that there were several scientists watching her every move including Petra who was in the corner of the room uploading and synchronizing information through the network. She was watching Emily carefully through a window in her quarters. Jackie and Emily shook hands. All the while, Emily was still transfixed on the tank.
“We are all familiar with your work Emily. Your endeavors that delve into Psychology, Cryogenics, and Bioengineering have helped us immensely here at the facility. A lot of this work is based on some of your theories and you should be proud of what we’ve attained here.”
The other lab techs briskly walked over to her and shook her hand as if she were a legend in history getting an award. Jackie briskly told Emily about the features at the facility and invited her to play racquetball or work out on one of the many treadmills available at the facilities workout rooms.
“It looks…. beautiful and so serene. I mean, the body that’s lying in that tank,” Emily said with amazement.
“Yes,” Jackie continued quickly straightening out the front of her smock and pushing her glasses back up on her nose “Their programming is unlike that of any other creature on earth. The first time a microchip packet module and a human have interacted so gracefully and with a mannerism that is not unlike the two of us here having a conversation. Terprise, their female counterpart program is actually a lot of memory stuffed into a yottabyte processor. Her memory allocation is bordering on a brontobyte package but we keep most of it compressed.”
“You call it 'her'?” Emily asked “is it—Terprise—female?”
“Oh yes I’m sorry. She is a forward-thinking female microchip module that we developed here in the lab and was aptly named for the ship General Cooper’s Grandfather commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise before he and the ship passed long ago. We dropped the 'En' as a tribute for a programmer who had died earlier working on this project. Her voice module is a combination of all of the female scientists that worked on her programming over the course of her development.” The men in the room were shaking their heads, laughing, making jokes, and scoffing in jest about feminism and its role in society. “Terprise is linked to all of the subject’s body functions—voluntary and involuntary. She provides 'suggestions' of thought but she can be shut down by the user and is always in the background monitoring their vitals and external environment.”
This was all just too much for Emily. However, as a scientist she had to keep her wits about her. There was a massive amount of information here that she didn’t know existed and she was starting to feel small and obscure. “I am just overwhelmed by all this and I can’t imagine how they are going to feel coming out of those tanks. This is way out there past anything I could have imagined.”
“That is exactly why we run these 'safe algorithm' training programs in the subjects' heads before we can confirm there is a link to the real world.” The screen in front of them was showing a male subject in armor running around shooting at targets and drones in a grassy field. “They need to feel as if they are in control by the end of their simulation not Terprise. Once they grab control, we can start the process of reintroducing their bodies back into our atmosphere. There’s no atrophy in their skeletal structure and limbs because the subjects' synthesized DNA is constantly replicating their existing muscle strands and bones. Their muscles, limbs, and organs are all lab grown but their brains are still their own with some minor programming adjustments and wiring. If this works as we think then police officers and soldiers will not have to die. Crash victims and burn victims will not have to die. This is as far as mankind can go without God’s help.” Doctor Sanders nodded in agreement at Jackie’s mini lecture and explanation of the project.
Emily was astounded, amazed, and somewhat sickened by everything she had just seen and heard. It was all too much for her to take in at once. She thought about the pros and the cons. Had this all just transpired like some sick twisted play? She wanted to run away from this. Could this project Cobalt be joined at the hip to some killer collider conspiracy? Now she was a part of this and there was no escape. Could she ever talk about this place to anyone—ever? She was beginning to perspire.
“Let me show you something” Jackie told Emily smiling proudly.
Jackie walked over to another room as Doctor Sanders followed and opened a steel door slowly at the far end of the Preservation Room, stepping into her world. The room was very basic but still had all the amenities that everyone else had. A bed and the usual pillows and blanke
ts were missing. Emily could see six yellow sponge cakes stacked in a neat pyramid on a plate lying on the wood-grained desk. Petra was sitting upright in a chair staring at the stainless steel wall four feet in front of her. The only light in the room was shining down on top of her head. Her facial features darkened and her irises lit up by a slight blue hue that pulsed when she was receiving information. Emily’s eyes followed a blue network cable jack plugged into the back of Petra’s neck connected to a port in the wall. Petra could upload faster than the wireless network this way.
“Hello Jackie.”
“Hello Petra. I’d like you to meet Doctor Emily Judson.”
“Hello Doctor Emily Judson PhD. How are you doing today?”
“I’m—good. How are—you doing Petra?”
“I am fine doctor. I will be finished synchronizing here in 1,289 seconds. Do you find our facility to your liking?”
“Yes—it's great thanks.” Emily was stunned and shocked that there was a woman sitting here with glowing eyes and a cable plugged into her head. Her mouth was wide open.
Jackie continued to explain some more functions of Petra’s programming as Petra listened carefully to the conversation. She had been studying the new visitors since they first stepped foot into the Meredith facility and the surrounding area. Petra was becoming Coopers intense investigator now armed with information none of them knew about. She had free will to roam the facility and was his most trusted employee now. She could gather vast amounts of information and hold it in storage. A memory capability only dreamt about by wise men since the world was young.