“How could anything that happened in a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere have any possible bearing on what’s going on out there?” Ramsey made a sweeping gesture meant to encompass the entire region.
“It’s our belief that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is covering up something so horrible that Kim Jong-un would sooner risk wading into a war that would lead to the total annihilation of his country than allow that secret to come out.” Rockwell lifted both cases, shoved the smaller of the two at Ramsey, and shouldered him into the camp toward the nearest corpse. “Look at the wounds, doctor.”
Ramsey took a deep breath and stared down at the body of a young woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Her right arm was extended, her fingers curled into the soil, her left arm pinned under her chest. Her face was buried in the ground under a tangle of her dark hair, which fluttered on the breeze. An amoeba of blood had soaked into the ground around her and hardened to a cracked black crust. Her tattered clothes revealed her bruised and discolored flesh, bloated with putrefaction and crawling with black flies. There were numerous parallel lacerations so deep that the muscle and connective tissue had retracted to expose the rust-colored bone. There was a savage wound at the side of her neck, from which the meat had been ripped away. The arterial spurt from her severed carotid had painted the grass in a ten-foot crimson arc.
“Christ,” Ramsey whispered. “It looks like she was attacked by an animal.”
“They all do, doctor.”
Ramsey glanced across the camp and saw a dozen more bodies nearby, all of which showed similar gashes. Chunks of flesh had been hacked from their bodies as if by shovels. A sensation of numbness washed over him, lending the feeling that while he was physically present, his body had somehow distanced itself from the massacre. He looked back at Rockwell to see the man’s façade of patience begin to crumble.
“We need to do this now, Dr. Ramsey.” He spoke through bared teeth. “How can I be of assistance to you?”
Ramsey stared into his eyes for a long moment, steeled his nerve, then set down his case and popped the latches.
“Help me roll her over, would you?”
IV
Ramsey had both cases open flat on the ground beside him, his equipment set up on the foam inserts so as not to get any blood or dirt on or in the expensive electronic components. He turned on the thousand-watt Yamaha portable compact gas-powered generator from the larger case and repeated the process for the three units plugged into it. Under ideal circumstances and normal power usage, the generator would provide roughly twelve hours of electricity before they would need to track down more fuel, which was more than enough time to do everything he needed to do many times over.
He felt a surge of excitement. This was what he had been waiting for. After all of the hours of research and experimentation, all of the years of planning and designing and building, he was finally about to find out if they had been worth it. His pulse pounded in his temples and his hands trembled. His breathing raced in anticipation. He was finally going to do it. At long last, his dreams were about to come—
And then he looked into the woman’s lifeless face and the excitement was gone. He felt like the acids in his stomach were trying to eat right through him and wished he could throw up.
“We’re burning daylight,” Rockwell said. The black paint on his face glistened with sweat. His fatigues were blotched with blood and chunks of flesh to which strands of black hair clung. He had selected five of the most violently mutilated corpses and dragged them over to where Ramsey had set up his field lab, beside which they rested shoulder-to-shoulder on the grass, staring up into the sky as the pink dawn faded to a deep blue to the east, the stars winking out of being to the west.
The other three soldiers patrolled the perimeter, rifles seated against their shoulders, ducking in and out of the dense forest and the shadows that lurked within.
Ramsey arranged the primary electronic components beside him and withdrew a stainless steel tool of his own design. It looked like a pair of salad tongs, only shorter, sturdier, and with curved ends reminiscent of spoons. He gripped them by the handles, focused on steadying his hands, and made every conceivable effort not to look at the woman’s face until the last possible second.
“All right,” he said to himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, he looked directly into the woman’s opaque eyes. “Here we go.”
He aligned the tongs with the woman’s right eye and used one end to pry back her upper lid and the other to retract her lower lid. Carefully, he eased the implements deeper into her socket, the curved edges following the contours of her eyeball, which bulged outward ever so slightly. Here was the most delicate part of the procedure. He needed to be exceedingly gentle so as not to clip or impinge upon the optic nerve as he gripped the eye and slowly teased it out of the orbit.
A drop of sweat rolled into his own eye, but he refused to even blink for fear of botching the job now.
In one smooth motion, he guided the eyeball out of her skull. The lids folded inward into the hollow as the nerve unspooled between them.
Rockwell groaned.
Ramsey quickly grabbed a four-by-four square of gauze and used it to hold the eyeball while he set aside the tongs. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Could you turn her face to her left, please?”
Rockwell did as he was instructed and Ramsey rested the eye and the gauze on the now-flat surface of her right temple.
“Walk me through this as you’re doing it,” Rockwell said.
Ramsey gave him a curious glance.
“In case something happens to me?”
“Look around you, Dr. Ramsey.”
Despite the respirator, Ramsey could still smell the remains ripening, much to the delight of the buzzing flies.
“Fair enough.” He selected the first of the three components, a long cable that was already plugged into one of the USB ports on his laptop. The opposite end was equipped with what looked like a suture needle, but broader and composed of silicon. He held it up for Rockwell to see, then set about his task. “You angle this special needle like so…and insert it into the optic nerve about a quarter of an inch distal to the point where the nerve meets the eyeball. You’ll feel the pressure abate as the needle passes through the outer meningeal membrane, which serves as a kind of insulation and helps accelerate the electrical impulses from the eye to the brain. Once you enter the optic nerve itself, you need to be careful not to pierce the central artery as you slide it in until the entire needle is inside the nerve and the tip is seated at the point where the nerve terminates at the optic disc.” He positioned the needle and draped the length of the cord over the woman’s forehead so as not to place undue tension on the needle or the nerve. “What we’ve essentially just done here is rerouted the visual signal from the brain to the laptop, which is running a special program I designed to interpret the incoming electrical impulses and convert them into a series of pixels, almost like the LCD monitor itself.”
“And that will show us the last thing she saw before she died?”
“Not by itself. Once her heart stopped beating, all electrical activity in her body ceased.”
“So how is this of any use to us? We don’t know who slaughtered these people. If we’re going to stop a war before it starts, then we need to know what the hell—”
“Listen. It’s just like they believed in ancient times. Only this is real science, not superstition. The eyes capture the last image the subject sees before his death, only it’s not a picture in an ordinary sense that you can just peer through the pupil and see, like the reflection of the killer’s face. Vision is a complex process that involves photostimulation and the biological conversion of light photons into an electrical signal through the process of isomerization—”
“In English.”
“You’re familiar with rods and cones, right?” Ramsey waited for Rockwell to nod. “The rods are desi
gned to perceive low light levels, but have absolutely nothing to do with color vision. That’s accomplished by three different types of cones that are specialized for different wavelengths of light. Short, medium, and long. Blue, green, and red, respectively. The retina is composed of millions of these cells, collectively known as photoreceptors. When light passes through the pupil, it’s focused and inverted by the lens, then projected onto these cells like a movie theater screen. They become stimulated, or ‘charged,’ by the various wavelengths of light. Photostimulation. Think of these rods and cones as sponges, but instead of absorbing fluid, they absorb individual units of light, or photons. Through a complex chemical process, these metaphorical sponges are essentially squeezed, and the light that pours out of them is translated into an electrical impulse that flows along the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the occipital lobe, where the brain interprets these signals as a single coherent image. It’s an instantaneous process, and one obviously outside of our conscious control. The photo cells are under a constant state of stimulation as long as there’s life within the body. At the moment of death, however, all electrical activity ceases. There’s no more current to wring the light from the rods and cones and carry the impulses to the brain, right?” Rockwell nodded. “But death is instantaneous, and not accomplished as a series of steps. So at the point when this happens, the rods and cones are still stimulated by photons that can’t be converted to electrical impulses without outside intervention. All we’re doing is providing that intervention. We’re converting that stored light, that potential, into one final electrical signal that we’ll be able to see.”
“And it’s photographic quality? I mean, would there be enough detail to identify a face?”
“The image won’t be perfect. Significant degradation occurs as time passes after death. It’s part of the process of decomposition. In a nutshell, the stored light starts to seep out. So we need to not only amplify the light in those cells, but fill in the gaps created by dead cells, which is another function of my program. It creates a gray-scale gradient between pixels that approximates the missing shade between them.”
“So the image won’t be in color?”
“Oh, there will definitely be color. See this piece here?” Ramsey held up the second component, which looked like a jeweler’s loupe with a suction cup for a base. An electrical cord trailed from a square box on its side. “Inside of this eyepiece is a tiny laser, which moves back and forth extremely quickly, like you would scribble with a pen, only its horizontal orientation changes slightly with each pass. This laser reenergizes the rods and cones, and essentially ‘tops them off’ with light, while simultaneously stimulating the conversion of the photons to negatively charged electrons, and accelerating them along their natural pathway, or, in this case, our artificial optic nerve.
“This third piece…” He showed Rockwell what looked like a solar cell the size of a playing card, then attached it to the top of the laser loupe. “…functions like an artificial retina. When the laser charges the photo cells in the subject’s eye, each of them releases a small, nearly undetectable amount of visible light that this phosphor-enhanced photodetector absorbs and transmits to the laptop via this other USB cable. This image is hazy and ill-defined, but serves as an overlay for the one from the nerve itself. The two separate layers are then combined, merged, and run through a gamut of filters to produce a reasonably sharp two-dimensional snapshot of the last thing the subject would have seen at the exact moment of his death.”
“You’re confident that it will work?”
Ramsey hesitated.
“Like I said, I’ve never tested it on a human being, but we used a similar setup to produce the desired results with mice and rats. The only problem is their eyes aren’t nearly as complex as ours. It’s like comparing a primitive drawing on the wall of a cave to a plasma-screen television.”
“But it worked, right?”
“We immobilized them in such a way that they could see a clock when they were euthanized. On the images we obtained, I could see the precise moment that each individual died. To the second.”
“So get on with it already.” Rockwell smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “And if it doesn’t work, I’m sure you’ll be able to find your own way home again, won’t you?”
Ramsey pushed that thought aside and fired up the initialization sequence. The laser optics produced a high-pitched whine like a swarm of mosquitoes. He oriented the woman’s brown iris to align with the center of the loupe, then affixed the suction cup to her eyeball, careful not to jostle the needle or the cord. The program on the laptop screen displayed three separate ready beacons. When all of them turned green, he glanced up at Rockwell, held his breath, and pressed the launch key.
* * *
The faintest hint of red glowed through the sclera and darkened the lightning-bolt vessels that riddled the eyeball. The laser housing vibrated in his hand. The generator rumbled in the grass.
Ramsey gnawed on his lip while he watched the laptop monitor for any sign success.
It wasn’t going to work.
Every second passed as an eternity. He could feel the weight of Rockwell’s stare upon him, a burden compounded by his own dawning sense of failure. After everything he had endured to place himself in this position…After all of the travails…Here he knelt, thousands of miles from home with the opportunity of a lifetime sprawled before him, only to watch his creation fail when he needed it to work the most. When people were counting on him. When the entire world was counting on him.
His eyes dampened and he batted his eyelids to stall the tears of frustration and desperation and utter crushing heartbreak. There would be no shot at redemption. No renewal of his funding. No hope for the future. He would return to his lab to find all of his possessions crammed into a box with a pink slip taped to the lid and a pair of MPs waiting to escort him from the premises. His career was over. His life was over. To come so far and ultimately fall short—
The blank screen filled with dots, like stars being birthed into the night sky.
Ramsey nearly sobbed out loud when he released the stale breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
Everything happened quickly from there. The sporadic dots became many, until they filled the monitor. A ghostly gray image materialized—spectral, haunting—with no apparent pattern. It was like trying to decode the hidden message in a bank of clouds. And then the first wave of filters kicked in, one after another after another, each vertical comb sharpening the image until contrast started to emerge.
The laser stilled in his hand.
“It’s working,” he said.
“The picture’s for shit,” Rockwell said. “I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be seeing.”
A download bar appeared on the screen. Thirty percent complete. Sixty. Ninety. Ninety-five.
The bar vanished and the color overlay appeared as if by magic: blotches of green and blue and red, like spatters of paint flung from a brush onto the gray background. The hard drive whirred as the final wave of filters launched. One hot on the heels of the last.
“This was a total waste of our time,” Rockwell said. “I told them this was a stupid plan, that my team should just press on and take matters into our own hands, not wait for some goddamn scientist with his fool computer—”
His words trailed into a silence scarred by the echoing sounds of their breathing through the masks.
“Holy Mother of God…” Rockwell whispered.
Ramsey felt the warmth of tears on his cheeks, but couldn’t summon the strength to raise his arms to wipe them away. All he could do was stare at the monitor, millions of thoughts racing and colliding inside his head. He managed to grasp one that seemed to encompass every emotional and rational reaction in two little words.
“It worked.”
And as he appraised the image on the screen, swelling with a sense of pride, the reality of the situation came crashing down on him.
This was the last thing the wo
man saw when her heart stopped beating, an image that she would never see because the part of her that had lived inside this now-lifeless vessel had already departed. This was a part of her life she would never know. And for that Ramsey was grateful. It was one small mercy bestowed upon her by an otherwise uncaring God, one split-second of terror and misery that wouldn’t follow her into the afterlife. He prayed that, wherever she was, she remembered none of those immediately preceding it either, for what he saw chilled him to the marrow.
“What the fuck is that?” Rockwell said.
Ramsey could only shake his head.
In the upper right corner of the screen, the treetops were silhouetted against the night sky, the horizon slanted, the stars blurred by motion. There was a dark shape in the foreground, too close to the woman to clearly see. A wild mane of dark hair, highlighted by the glow of what Ramsey could only assume was one of the campfires that still smoldered behind him even now. The merest hint of those flames were reflected from the corner of an eye and shimmered on the scarlet fluid that coated the cheek and forehead. A burst of fluid was trapped in midair beside the face, like the first bite from an overripe orange, forever frozen in time. And in the center of the face was a clearly delineated black hole.
Rockwell tapped the monitor.
“Get me some definition right there. I need to see that face.”
“I can’t,” Ramsey whispered.
“Hit some keys. Type some commands. Use whatever filters or masks you have. I don’t care how you do it. Just get me that face!”
“I can’t.”
Rockwell grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and jerked him across the woman’s body until their noses were scant inches apart, their respirators touching. The soldier’s eyes were wide and wild.
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