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  She wanted to ask Johnner to stop the tape so that she could ask him whether it was a memory implant or an actual language network they had developed, but she was too excited to see what came next.

  "I am Dr. Fielding." The doctor looked over to a clipboard on the table next to him, and Chal realized that he was reading off of a script.

  "You are Dr. Fielding."

  "That is correct." Dr. Fielding shifted nervously in his chair, and Chal watched as the man's eyes tracked his movement. It was awe-inspiring.

  “Who are you?” Dr. Fielding continued.

  “I–” the man in the bed began to say, but then stopped. He looked down at the IV going into his left arm, reached down, and pulled it out. Blood began to flow from the opening and Dr. Fielding stood up immediately, reaching over to stanch the flow of blood. He had just put his hand on the prototype’s arm when all hell broke loose.

  The prototype screamed and began to kick his legs in violent circles, moaning loudly. Thrashing in his bed, he ripped out three other IV tubes and knocked over the monitor, which crashed to the floor and began to emit a high-pitched squeal.

  “I am malfunctioning!” the prototype yelled, the words echoing off of the laboratory walls. He kicked out and knocked Dr. Fielding to the ground beside him.

  “I am malfunctioning!”

  Immediately Dr. Fielding looked to the wall behind him and gestured frantically. Watching the video, Chal was confused until she realized it must have been one-way glass, with the spectators just behind the wall. Indeed, after just a few seconds, two assistants rushed in and restrained the prototype, while another doctor came in front of the camera, obscuring the view again. Chal could see that the doctor was holding a syringe. The prototype’s shouting degenerated into incoherent screams, staccato yells that punctuated the bedlam.

  “AH! AH! AH! AH!–”

  The noise died down almost instantly as the doctor injected the prototype with the syringe. The doctor moved out of view and the camera took a half-second to refocus. When it did, Chal could clearly see the man lying in the hospital bed. His eyes were glazed over, but his face was twisted with emotion. Blood trickled down his arm and dripped off of his elbow, splashing on the white vinyl flooring of the lab.

  Johnner reached over and stopped the recording.

  “What happened?” Chal asked.

  “There’s nothing more than this,” Johnner said. “Later attempts to reawaken the prototype were unsuccessful.”

  “I mean,” Chal said, “what happened to him? Why did he malfunction?”

  “That,” Lieutenant Johnner said, “is what we were hoping you could tell us.”

  Dr. Fielding knocked at the glass door, and Lieutenant Johnner went to open it for him. As he walked in and sat down in one of the chairs, Chal noticed that he averted his gaze from hers. She was about to ask him something about the first prototype interview when she felt the floor move under her feet. The metal bench rattled against the wall.

  Chal stood up in fright, certain that the lab station was under attack, that the entire building was about to crumble, that she would die– that they would all die here, hundreds of feet under the ground. Somewhat amusingly, she thought about the book signing in Boston she had missed because of this. She would never get to do another book signing.

  And then, just like that, it was over. Dr. Fielding and Lieutenant Johnner were still sitting in their seats, as calm as anything.

  “What the hell was that?” Chal said, still standing.

  “Earthquake,” Dr. Fielding said, and now he met her eyes with his, dark empty pools. His cool tone annoyed her, as though she should have been expecting such an occurrence.

  “We get them here all the time,” Johnner said. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you. This part of Arizona is very close to the Big Chino fault line.”

  “Great idea to build an underground facility here, wasn’t it?” Chal said.

  “It’s only small quakes,” Dr. Fielding said, and again Chal was irritated by the condescending quality of his voice.

  “This building is built to withstand earthquakes up to 6-7 on the Richter scale,” Johnner continued. “And there have never been any quakes around here that are more than a 3. It’s safe.”

  Chal didn’t think that any kind of earthquake was safe, but she was clearly outnumbered. Turning back to the matter at hand, she tried to remember her question for Dr. Fielding. It wasn’t coming to her.

  “The prototype said it was malfunctioning,” Chal said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Fielding said. “This is a standard error message that was, for lack of a better word, programmed into the organisms’ mental structure. When their mental structure is in peril, this is the phrase that indicates that they need help.”

  “Programmed?”

  “Language turns out to be a fairly simple structure to grow in neuronal substrates,” Dr. Fielding said, with not a small hint of pride in his voice. “Of course, they have the grammar/content structures, but there is also a set of built-in responses.”

  “Using language memory chips?” Chal asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Fielding confirmed. “But we’ve also been able to graft in language structures that function much as a baby’s do. They are pre-equipped with certain syntactical structures. In other words, they are able to expand vocabulary, make connections, and learn how to speak almost instantly upon awakening.”

  “If they don’t die immediately,” Chal said.

  Dr. Fielding flushed. “Of course we are working out the issues with the awakening process, but I see no reason to think that the language structure is part of the problem.”

  “No,” Chal said, her mind wandering elsewhere. She didn’t think that language was the issue, either. Something else, something more fundamental.

  Lieutenant Johnner coughed slightly, and Chal realized she had been staring at the blank wall.

  “You said there were two other prototypes,” Chal said, gesturing toward the screen.

  “The next one was similar,” said Dr. Fielding. “We tried all we could, but it didn’t work. After only a half a minute of questioning and it ran into the same kind of malfunction. Now we have a limited amount of time before we awaken the third prototype–”

  “Why?” Chal interrupted.

  Johnner and Fielding looked at each other, and Chal got the idea that Fielding was embarrassed by the question. He frowned, coughed, and frowned again before speaking.

  “For the past few months, we’ve been pressed by the government for results,” Fielding said.

  “You’ve been promising results since before then,” Johnner interrupted. Fielding shook his head, visibly annoyed, and went on.

  “The third prototype has reached the stage where it is ready to be awakened,” he said. “We know we can’t keep a nascent brain in stasis forever, and every minute that passes sees the mental structure grow further in directions we can’t predict. We need to awaken the prototype as soon as possible in order to ease it into the world while its brain is still malleable.”

  “As soon as possible,” Chal repeated, disbelieving. “You’ve already started another one? Is there any reason to think it won’t just fail again?”

  “Well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, “This time we have you.”

  There was a brief pause while Chal took in all this information.

  “We only need to awaken the prototype for a few minutes before re-sedating it,” Fielding said. “The problem is that the prototypes so far haven’t survived their first awakening.”

  “Wait,” Chal said, confused. “Back up. I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?” Fielding asked, his voice sliding into condescension. His confidence – or lack thereof – in Chal’s abilities was clear on his face.

  “This – ” and here she pointed to the screen, “ – this was the first time you awakened the prototype?” She had to make sure. It was impossible that they had done something so wrong.

  “Yes,” Field
ing said. “As was mentioned in the recording.”

  “I thought that was the first time the prototype had been questioned.” Chal’s eyebrows knitted together in the middle of her forehead. “You’re telling me that was the FIRST time he was woken up? Ever?”

  Johnner and Fielding looked at each other again, and this time Chal could see that both of them were more confused than she was. Could they really have made such a huge mistake?

  “Yes,” Dr. Fielding said, a bit less confidently.

  Chal’s mouth was open, and she didn’t even try to hide the contempt that oozed into her voice when she asked him her next question.

  “Did you read any of my papers?”

  ***

  CHAPTER SIX

  One of Chal’s earliest experiments in biological-substrate intelligence had been her work with the same rats that she eventually was forced to abandon as failures. Initially, she had needed to create a system to ease them into the most basic forms of consciousness.

  She, too, had had problems with her organisms “malfunctioning.”

  At first, when the lab had applied anti-anesthetics, they had run into a series of issues. Many of the rats, upon being awakened, would freeze as though paralyzed, their eyes darting around wildly. When touched, they would go into spasms, squeaking horribly.

  The EEG sensors on the rat brains were made to be as precise as possible, and for that reason were grafted directly onto the brains of the rats. But the readings made no sense at first. The sensors picked up nothing until the anti-anesthetics were applied. Then the sensors went wild. Every part of the rats’ brains lit up like a Christmas tree, the erratic spikes of electrical output shooting way past their normal ranges. It was as though there was a surge of electrical activity that sent the rats into brain seizures.

  Chal still remembered the sound one of them made after an assistant had tried to poke it to see if it was responsive to stimuli. It had kicked its legs, spinning in circles and squealing until it spun itself right off of the edge of the table and onto the floor, ripping out the EEG sensors as it fell. Legs kicking, the rat’s squeaks grew fainter and fainter and then ended.

  Chal had been frustrated, but only for a short while. None of her assistants could make sense of the EEG readings, but Chal continued analyzing them after everyone else had given them up as random electrical output. Working backwards, she was able to untangle the spikes of electrical activity and realize that the rat brains were, in fact, being overloaded too quickly upon awakening. Chal thought she could come up with a solution.

  If it was a surge that was killing them, they needed a surge protector.

  The problem with the rats wasn’t that their brains weren’t able to handle being awakened, it was that they were overwhelmed with the stimuli that the world provided them right away. Chal had been trying to wake the rats up into immediate adulthood, with a full memory center and physical sensor capabilities. There’s a reason that babies are born with underdeveloped eyes and ears, Chal decided: it was to prevent information overload. And that would be her surge protector.

  Easing the rats into awakening was not as hard as it seemed at first. Rather than having to rework the rats’ brains, Chal found that they could simply rework the environment, making it less stimulating. After some experimentation and a lot of dead rodents, they found that awakening the rats in a soundproof tank with only dim red light was optimal. Rather than have a normal rat cage with lots of objects around and cardboard bedding, they put in a soft sponge floor. The direct EEG sensors had to be replaced with remote ones so that the rats would have no contact with wires, or, for that matter, with anything.

  The assistants started to call the tanks wombs, and Chal thought the comparison was apt. Once the rats had adapted to the womb, the scientists could add in external stimuli one by one. The rats did much better, and eventually were able to be taken out and placed into the mazes which they promptly failed to solve. That was when the funding ran out and Chal gave up on the project, believing it unworkable.

  One laboratory in Germany had asked Chal for help with awakening chimpanzees in the same fashion. She had been thrilled to fly over to assist them, but it turned out that they were still in the beginning phases of the program and didn’t have any new insight. The only thing she got out of her visit there was that chimpanzees were much harder to deal with than rats, especially when being awakened.

  Passing through childhood into adulthood was difficult enough over an extended time period. To grow up instantly was a challenge, but with rats the transition was solved through the womb tanks. The German scientists, working with apes, had also to deal with the subject’s transition into sexuality. For the first few days after the chimps were awakened, they spent all of their time touching their own bodies, licking themselves, and masturbating.

  Chal remembered going into the viewing room for one of the full-sized tanks, which closely resembled her rat setup. Red light, soft floors, but in this case there was a monkey stroking its erection. She had blushed, then scolded herself for blushing.

  “Zis is how zey act for the first few days,” the German scientist had told her.

  “I see,” she had said, and pressed her lips together. “And afterwards?”

  “Afterwards zey are not so aggressive,” he told her. “But we are just beginning testing for levels of consciousness.”

  That was what she was interested in, but the Germans were not prepared to divulge their results, and Chal returned to the United States disappointed. Her disappointment was tempered by her belief that the Germans had not succeeded, and that was why they had been reluctant to speak about their results. Or so she thought.

  ***

  Now, as she watched Dr. Fielding twitch nervously in his chair, these memories sprung back into her mind and she realized that the military, for all their resources, had not done their homework before beginning this project.

  “Which paper was that, exactly?” Dr. Fielding asked.

  “There were several,” Chal said, directing her attention to Lieutenant Johnner. She was sick of watching Dr. Fielding’s weaselly face. “You’ve wasted quite a bit of time if you’ve been trying to wake up prototypes in a room while attached to a bunch of machines.”

  “I think we’ve been wasting time listening to you,” Fielding said. He stood up. “Telling us we’ve done everything wrong–”

  Chal interrupted him, her attention still on Johnner. She had dealt with bullies before and found that ignoring them worked wonders.

  “You’ll have to set up a new room. No bright lights, no machines. A sensory deprivation tank would be best.” She ticked off the requirements on her fingers.

  “Anything else?” Lieutenant Johnner asked.

  “I can’t believe you’re listening to this!” Fielding cried. He made no attempt to leave the room, but the tic jumped wildly at his lip.

  “Make sure that the floors in the lab are padded,” Chal continued. “The walls too. We don’t want any loud noises.”

  Johnner turned to Dr. Fielding. “How long will it take before you can get this set up?”

  Fielding stood silently. His body was nearly trembling with anger that he had to answer to Chal. Finally he turned his hateful gaze away from Chal. “A couple of hours, maximum.”

  “Do it,” Lieutenant Johnner said.

  Dr. Fielding swiped his ID across the keypad and strode out of the room. Chal felt the tension in the air ease.

  “Well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, “I guess we can both grab a couple hours of sleep then.”

  ***

  Johnner walked with Chal down the hallway to her quarters. Right next to her bedroom, at the end of the hallway, was a large metal door with a wheel attached to it.

  “Where does that lead?” Chal asked. It didn’t seem right to have another sealed lab so close to the living quarters.

  “That’s one of the escape exits,” Lieutenant Johnner said.

  “Escape exits?”

  “There is one on every
level on the south side of the structure,” Johnner said. “Even during an emergency, the elevators should still work off of generated power. Just in case.”

  “A backup for a backup.” Chal noticed something. “There’s no keypad for that door.”

  “Wouldn’t be a great backup if you couldn’t open it during a power outage, would it?” Johnner said. “In case even the generators fail.”

  “But,” Chal said, “isn’t that dangerous? I mean, couldn’t anyone just pass through without going through decontamination?”

  “The doors don’t open from the outside,” Johnner said. He seemed unworried about it. “The wheel locking mechanism seals it from here.”

  “But someone could open it from the inside,” Chal said. “Or they could steal equipment and then leave.”

  Lieutenant Johnner seemed amused at her insistence. “An alarm is set to go off if anyone so much as cracked one of these doors open,” he said. “All of the labs and living quarters lock down–from the outside, not the inside – and security is alerted at the entrance.”

  “Someone could still escape,” Chal said.

  “Sure,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “But where would they go?”

  Chal shrugged. Anywhere, she supposed. Again, Johnner answered as if he were reading her mind.

  “To get here, you have to drive for hours through the desert. Anyone who escaped from here would have a hard time finding their way back to civilization. There isn’t anything except for the airstrip for miles and miles,” Johnner said.

  “Oh,” Chal said. All of a sudden she felt more tired than she had in the past two days. The adrenaline from seeing the first experiment on a bio-substrate human was beginning to wear off.

  “I’ll have someone wake you up when we’re ready to start,” Johnner said, opening her door. Chal nodded and went inside. The door hissed shut and she could hear Johnner’s footsteps echoing faintly down the hall.

  At first Chal thought she would not be able to sleep, her excitement was so strong. She looked around her room, which was little more than a storage area with a couple of cots attached to the wall. The sheets were folded crisply at the corners, military-style, and she had the sensation of being stuck in a hospital. Or a prison.