Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

With that, she shoved out the door. Ishii stood, savoring her scent for a moment, knowing he’d never see her ever again. He stooped slowly and picked up the handkerchief, fingering the monogrammed Y and F at its embroidered corner. He turned to the box and pulled out the bottle of Scotch he’d packed from the shelves. Backing up with small steps, he lowered himself into the seat again, facing the sole window high in the wall, just above the ground outside. The bars blocked most of the sunlight.

  What do you need, what could you possibly need when the end is so near and there is nothing left to hope for? No great horizon ahead, just the abrupt edge of the abyss. The hole in his throat contracted, convulsing, the pain shot through his neck. He scratched harder at the ragged surgical hole. Being a doctor meant that there was no room for illusions, the hope for miracles.

  But then he looked at the refrigerator. It hummed there despite his silence, quietly preserving everything inside. The samples, the DNA, the instructions for when the technology would be advanced enough. Cloning wasn’t far off. It wouldn’t be long at all; a way of freezing time itself. Maybe in a decade, maybe twenty years.

  A smile spread over his face, the first of its kind in months, and the last in this lifetime for the man born Shiro Ishii, who would die as Yukio Fujimi. How did the Americans say it—wherever there was a will, there was a way? And there was always a will. Science provided the way.

  He would return.

  BENEATH, A WORLD

  U.S.A., 2087

  The police car cruised around the rear of the hospital. It neared the silver hatch in the wall with the bright Bureau of Wellness seal emblazoned on it and stopped. The engine died. The door opened, and Lanza stood there. I blinked up at him, the rain blinding me.

  “Why are we at the back?” I said.

  “Dispatch told me you wouldn’t have clearance anymore, so you have to go down the supply chute,” he said. “After that, I’m supposed to walk around the front and start the intake procedure for the psych ward.”

  I knew this was truly the end of the line. Cuffed hands grasping the edge of the door, I struggled to remain in the car. I pulled and I struggled. But Lanza yanked me out with minimal effort, placing me on my feet and then brushing me off like a wayward puppy heading to a dog show. I tried to pull away, but Lanza held me fast.

  “And you see nothing strange about this?” I said, giving up, out of breath. “The fact that they want you to take me to the hospital, push me down a chute, then walk around to the front to commit me to some psych ward. Which doesn’t even exist at Saint Almachius, by the way.”

  Lanza paused a second, his brow furrowed ever so slightly. He grunted. But then he shoved me forward, toward the silver chute, the Bureau seal that seemed to glint in the gloom. A camera overhead angled away from us, as if it didn’t want to make a record of this decisive moment.

  “I’ve got orders,” Lanza said, thrusting me with two hands. “Besides, it’s not like you’re the first. Last time was a couple of weeks ago. They had me deliver some teenage girl who started that big forest fire. She had a tattoo on her neck, some blob of ink. At least she was unconscious. Much easier to handle than you, bro.”

  Lanza was pushing me closer and closer to the hatch, which beeped, and yawned open automatically, a yawning metal mouth. My eyes widened in horror.

  “Zo, wait—” I said.

  But as I tried to dodge him, I tipped backward through the panel, hurtling downward, heels dragging overhead, faster and faster in that tight tunnel. A few seconds of falling, and then I shot out into a bright room onto a material that softly enveloped me. Rough hands grabbed me and dragged me across it and I flailed my elbows against them. But these were two orderlies—and they were even bigger than Stanislaw and Stash. Their hands were like vices at my joints, hauling me across the room and to the door. It slid open automatically, and I was in a dimmer corridor, the two grunts dragging my knees across the tiles. Terror closed in. I couldn’t breathe, like I was under water. Just like in my nightmare.

  To the right was a window. I twisted toward it, and I saw a line of people in a waiting room, seated, reading magazines. It was the charity-care wing in the basement. Wrenching myself, dropping my dead weight, I managed to fall to the floor and out of the orderlies’ grasp. I landed hard but lunged past them, slamming both cuffed wrists on the window, screaming until my chest would burst. But no one looked up, or even flinched. Two of the young teens were facing me, but their faces showed nothing—no recognition, no surprise. And I could see that the other side was lit differently—it was a two-way mirror. A thick one—a soundproof one.

  The orderlies grabbed me again, one gave me a quick shot in the kidneys. Blinding pain crippled me, and I crumpled. They grabbed my limp body and hauled me to the end of the hallway. I had never seen these men before, their sweaty swollen faces. Their skin was pale, their black eyes deep-set like cave-dwellers. Their blows fell on me, quick and remorseless. The pain flared like an amphetamine rush through my body.

  “Remember, we can’t hurt him—could ruin the results,” said one of them.

  “This one keeps fighting,” said the other, giving me a shot in the gut. “Besides, we’ve got to have our fun now and then.”

  “Fine—just no bruises,” said the first orderly, kicking both my tibias with hard kicks.

  They dragged me through another door. A bright room with green walls, bare. An examination table stood like a cenotaph in the center of the floor. One of the orderlies ripped off my belt, tossed me on the table, then turned back. The door clicked shut behind them. I sat there bewildered, the antiseptic smell emanating from every surface. The room was one I’d never seen before. I had been down in the charity-care wing—the opposite side of the basement from Wetherspoon’s office—only a handful of times in my years at the hospital. But I had never seen any of this before: the chute, the intake room, the secret hallway, the waiting room behind the two-way glass, this pale-green patient room.

  This wasn’t simply a hospital basement, I realized suddenly. This was the Project’s facility—the dark hub of their insane machinations. A chill ran along my sweaty skin.

  Standing from the table, I went over and inspected the two doors. The one I’d come in was locked, and the one opposite it was, too. Between the locked exits, there were two recessed parts of the wall. I banged on them with my cuffed fists, but they sounded solid. I tried the doors again and kicked one of them hard. Nothing—no furniture, no pictures, no wall-mounted devices. No cameras, either. My eyes caught a series of vertical lines on the back wall at waist-height, behind the examination table. I walked over and discovered painted-over gouge marks the size and shape of human fingers, like someone had clawed away at the plaster. But that was all. After a few minutes searching for any sign of an escape route, I acceded to my aching legs, and I sat back down on the table.

  The door opened, the orderlies rushed inside in a blur of white. This time they wore surgical masks. I stood wobbily, trying to maneuver around them to the door, or at least defend myself, but they pounced on me and threw me down. They unlocked the cuff from my left wrist. I stopped struggling for a second—but they seized the unclasped cuff and locked it over a bar on the side of the examination table. I flailed at them. They released me and walked out, the one stepping over my wild kick at their knees. I yelled out after them, but my voice died in my throat when I saw my next visitor walk in: a short figure sashaying slowly forward in nurse’s scrubs.

  The figure pulled the straps of a surgical mask back behind the ears…and it was Betty Bathory.

  I gasped. She smiled, flashing sharp teeth, as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

  “Well, Joe,” she said, pulling the mask tight over her nose. “It’s been a while since your last checkup, hasn’t it?”

  Too dumbfounded to speak, I just stared.

  “Oh, come on, Joe. Don’t look at me with those puppy-dog eyes.”

  She pulled a hypodermic out of her pocket and flicked it with a fingernail, knocking th
e air bubbles out of the chamber filled with a tinted liquid. Fluid spurted from the needle’s tip. She walked over to the wall, where she pulled up her sleeve and tapped with her free hand into her Atman. My head swooned as I watched her nonchalant fingers move the same way I had seen every day for a decade—but this time for a very different purpose.

  “What is this place?” I said, voice dry. “I’ve never seen this part of the hospital.”

  “Oh, this is the basement—part of the charity-care wing. But it’s only for the special charity cases. The Project’s charity cases.”

  She turned to me, her eyes squinting in a smile over the sterile mask. I shook my head.

  “Betty?” he said. “You, of all people?”

  Her hands went to her hips, the attitude of the Jersey girl I’d always found so charming in her before that moment. It was not charming now—it was horrifying.

  “Why not me—just because I’m a nurse? Let me tell you something, Doc-tor-Bar-nnn-essss,” she said, dragging out impossible syllables. “Nurses are everything. We’re the ones changing bedpans, talking to patients, drawing blood, calming fears. Why wouldn’t we be as important in research? Especially something as important as the Project?”

  “No, I mean—how…could you?”

  “Oh, you mean ethically.” She laughed, capping the syringe and tucking it back in her pocket. “But what you’re really asking is, why haven’t we continued doing medicine in the same way for the last hundred years? Why haven’t we been content to repeat the same mistakes, instead of taking the risks that make us better?”

  Tapping into her Atman, something beeped. Two recessed parts of the wall started to rise, panels lifting slowly. Slowly I saw two brighter rooms, in each a patient lay on a table with feet raised in stirrups. I could not see who they were yet, but my skin crawled at the sight. I had a good idea what would happen next.

  “The Purge strengthened our resolve,” she continued. “Made us remember we need to progress as a society, and not just as a collection of individuals. We realized the importance of the greater good.”

  Her eyes narrowed, she smiled behind the mask.

  “You know, I believe if we’d told you about the Project, you would have appreciated its importance, its scope and ambition,” she said, still tapping into her device. “There’s national security to think about, sure, but there’s also the research. If we hadn’t made mistakes in the past, where would we be today? If the doctors in the ancient world hadn’t had the foresight to cut open a woman’s womb, would we have ever succeeded in saving millions of children and mothers with caesarians?”

  The panels had risen to the gowned shoulders of the patients. One was a wraith, the other a woman with knees up, nude underneath. But I couldn’t see faces yet. I yanked at the handcuffs, trying to free myself, heart hammering, panic rising.

  “I told you to read the fine print, Joe,” Betty continued, glancing at the rooms on the other side, nodding. “And I don’t think you listened.”

  The panel vanished upward into the ceiling. I squinted, and I could finally see. The seated patient in the left room, strapped into a papoose, was the emaciated form of Cornelius Wetherspoon. He wiggled in the straps, his crown of white hair disheveled, protruding in every direction.

  And in the adjoining room lay Mary, passed out, face limp, her black hair falling over one shoulder, knees bent and legs spread, ankles cuffed high. A stream of drool ran down the side of the headrest.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” I said, tears of rage welling in my eyes.

  “Yes, Joe, we’ve all got to make sacrifices,” Betty said. Her steps neared me, and when she got close enough, I swung at her with my free fist. But she ducked back with a giggle, grabbed my arm, and stuck in the syringe. I tried to swing with the other hand, but the cuffs tugged back, staggering me. Swooning, I collapsed back against the examination table.

  “Now just relax, this is painless…” Betty said, patting my head.

  But then everything went black again.

  Awaking to a bright light, I found my limbs restrained on the table. Thick straps held my wrists, thighs and ankles fast. One even ran across my forehead. But I was upright, and a blurry form came into focus under the lights. Betty was staring down at me. Her eyebrows bounced when she saw I was awake.

  “Wakey-wakey,” she said, scolding me like she had thousands of patients in the past. “You really should get more sleep, Joe. Patients don’t normally conk out like that, even with the double dosage.”

  She came over and tugged on my straps, making sure they were still dug into my limbs. I struggled against them, but she grabbed my face with a viselike hand and squeezed.

  “Now, listen,” she said, through gritted teeth. “We’ve all got to make sacrifices. When I lost my husband, I was strapped in this very chair, Joe. There was no divorce. That was a lie. The Project took him away.”

  She picked at the corner of her eye with a gloved finger, like she was about to cry. She almost looked human in that moment.

  “He was one of the Maruta, you see. A log to be chopped up. I was angry, as angry as you are right now. But I realized there was no use fighting any of it. This thing is bigger than you and me, or Mary, or Wetherspoon. We might as well accept it, take it for what it is. Hell, you might even get lucky—Mary might survive. You should be thankful for that chance.”

  “You have to be kidding about all this, Betty. Just loosen these straps and let me out.”

  She stood, straightening her scrubs.

  “I’m deadly serious, Joe. You can deny what happened that time in the past. But a hand has been dealt here. We’re about to flip the final card, to determine our future.”

  Her eyes were blank. She moved around to the other side of the chair, so that she was behind me. Her hand crept over my shoulder and down onto my chest, feeling the wild beat of my heart. I stared ahead at the two panels with the two-way mirrors. It was a nightmare vision—Wetherspoon struggling every few moments against his bonds in the left window, Mary drugged and unconscious on the right, the stream of her drool oozing down the side of the chair, glimmering in the fluorescent light.

  But now I noticed two screens on the wall over the patients’ heads. Both had EKG and vitals readings, like scoreboards for a big game. Mary’s was calm and still, a steady heartbeat and breathing rate. The Old Man’s fluctuated wildly every time he flailed in a vain attempt to free himself.

  Betty leaned in close to my ear and spoke in a voice that mimicked Saxas as she patted my chest.

  “What we’re going to see now,” she said, “is the final experiment in this round of testing. Both of these Maruta have been part of the Project for a few months. The 105-year-old male on the left had an early exposure to a particular nerve agent some time ago during his time with the Bureau. We’ve been monitoring the ambient toxicity in the bloodstream for years. He’s been put into contact with trace levels of the chemical hidden in his drinks over the last few weeks. We’re going to test whether the feedback is enough to kill him with a dose just a—teensy-weensy—bit bigger.”

  A small haze wafting from a darkened vent in the far corner. Gas started to fill the room. Wetherspoon strained harder against his bonds.

  “Neal!” I shouted.

  But Betty covered my mouth with her latexed hand, the nauseating rubber odor making me gag.

  “Joe, this is not the time for hysterics—you might ruin the data,” she said. “He can’t hear you anyway. But he knows what’s coming. I mean, he led the experiments for so many years, he has to know the smell of the gas. He knows he’s only got a minute at most before his heart stops.”

  The white fog drifted in, curled once around the ceiling, and fell to the floor. Wetherspoon cringed as it blanketed him. His heart rate spiked—the cosine wave whipped across the display at 200 beats a minute. The Old Man held his breath for a minute or more, his chest still and unmoving even as his head whipped from side to side, as his body cried out for oxygen. But he was losing the fight agai
nst his own burning lungs, I could see. My mentor’s mouth moved—and though I could not hear him, I understood his words clearly.

  Joe, he said. Stop. Them.

  Wetherspoon exhaled, then reflexively sucked in the fog of death around him. A second’s pause, then he shook. His limbs flailed against the restraints, his head jerked against the skull strap, his eyes bulged in their sockets. His skin went red, then purple, and the veins in his neck swelled. Blood gushed out his nose. His head fell back, his body collapsed, deflated.

  The EKG on the monitor plummeted, then evened out.

  Zero heartbeats.

  “No!” I screamed.

  Betty stood, went around to the front of the examination room table toward the window panel. She pushed a button on her Atman.

  “Maruta Number 2087-11203 has flatlined,” she said. “Activate ventilation in test room one, and ready forensic team to retrieve the body for further tests,” she said. “Prepare room two for further readings—and inform Doctor Abbud that Marutas M616754 and M616755 are prepped and waiting.”

  I stared at the corpse of the Old Man through the observation window. I strained against my bonds. Betty shook her head at me and clucked her tongue disapprovingly.

  “Joe, haven’t we talked about this?” she said, lowering the Atman. “The experiment is nearly done. Mary might pull through. After all, it’s not like we’re pumping toxic gas into a closed room with her.” She laughed, a twinkle to her eyes.

  “What are you doing to her?” I said, teeth clenched.

  “I really don’t know, Joe. Abbud is very secretive—he only shares his data with Dr. Fujimi.”

  She leaned in close, a whiff of her perfume stinging my nostrils.

  “Now don’t quote me but… He’s been trying different inputs for the Atmans, seeing what would happen with birth rates with different frequencies.”

  “Oh my God—Mary—the morning sickness…”

  “Yes, that’s probably a symptom,” the nurse said, nodding. “But by and large, it’s not fatal. This is the final appointment with her for the second trimester—though obviously trimesters don’t really mean anything at this point.”