The Body Electric - Special Edition (32 page)

“I’m definitely coming too,” Jack says immediately, grabbing the other cuff.

“It’s honestly more dangerous for you,” I say. “If I get caught, I’m valuable. They want to use me… for something. But if you get caught…”

The Prime Administrator has a way of making people she dislikes disappear.

“You’re right,” Jack says. “I think there’s more to the labs. Your father’s work was obviously important to the UC. You get your reverie; I’m going to try to access his data files. If we can figure out just what the government
wants
, then we have a chance of preventing them from getting it.”

“Tonight,” I say.

Jack nods. “Tonight.”

Jack gets us janitorial uniforms. He also has a pair of lab coats folded up into small squares and stuffed in the waistband of our pants, hidden by the too-large, button-up work shirts. The first goal is to get in without raising suspicion; the second is to blend into the labs so it looks like we belong.

The entrance to the lab is through the main tower—the one were the Prime Administrator works. We fall in line with a group of custodial workers, and a security guard by the door scrutinizes our ID badges. We have to tap our cuffs against a scanner before we can board the lift. Jack goes first. He keeps his sleeve pulled down over his arm as much as possible. My breath catches when the scanner processes his information, but then it beeps and flashes green. He gets on the lift.

A few more people go by, then I approach the scanner. I tap my cuff against it, and look up just as Jack’s lift doors close. He opens his mouth—but he can’t say anything. He can’t call attention to himself. The lift descends, taking Jack away from me.

“Go on,” one of the workers behind me after the scanner light flashes green. I file through the doors and rush into the waiting lift. Twelve more people scan in and get on the lift before the doors close. It’s an excruciatingly long time. Jack can’t just wait for me at the bottom. He’s probably already in the lab now.

Unless he’s already been caught.

The lift jerks to a start and begins to descend. There are no buttons—this lift is specific to the laboratories, and works automatically. The lift jerks to a start and begins to descend. My ears pop, and I start to count the seconds it takes for us to fall. Ten seconds… fifteen… twenty… thirty… a full minute passes, and we’re still falling. Just how far beneath the Earth are the labs?

Far enough for an explosion to happen, one big enough to kill my father and four other people, and not disrupt the daily operations of Triumph Towers.

But the lift couldn’t possibly descend so far—New Venice is built on a bridge. There’s nowhere for the lift to go. And then I realize where the labs
really
are. This lift must go through one of the pillars that supports the bridge. We’re not just below Triumph Towers—we’re below New Venice. We’re below the
sea
. This lab was built so far underground that it’s beneath the waters of the Mediterranean.

The doors slide open with a soft whoosh, and the workers in front of me file off the lift. A guard stands by the doors, examining every badge. I look down, making sure my badge shows, and try not to make eye contact or call attention to myself.

Giant steel doors stand opposite the lifts. Everyone must go in one at a time, after scanning the cuffLINK and fingerprint scanner. I shove my hand in my pocket, working the fingerprint pads on my fingers as I try to will myself invisible in the crowd of workers, hoping and praying the guard doesn’t notice me.

One-by-one, the workers tap the scanner and press their finger against the touchpad. The doors beep, the person enters, the next moves forward and taps and touches.

The guard shifts behind me, cocking his head, listening to the earclip in his left ear. His eyes scan the remaining workers in front of me. I shuffle forward. The guard’s eyes rest on me. The person in front of me steps through the giant steel doors. The guard’s gaze intensifies, and he steps toward.

Tap-touch
. I move quickly. The doors whisk open and I step through.

fifty-six

I blink in the blindingly white lab. Bright solar glass lights illuminate the wide hallway, with frosted glass doors on either side.

Jack is nowhere to be seen.

I’d been relying on him and his knowledge of the lab—and we’d both been hoping that the lab hadn’t changed too much since he left it. Of course I memorized a map, but it feels strange here, without Jack. I take a few tentative steps forward, and one of the other workers stares at me. I can’t hesitate. If I look like I don’t belong, they’ll realize that I really shouldn’t be here. I have to move forward. I have to pretend like I know where I’m going.

I stride forward purposefully. My eyes flick back and forth—there are small black-and-gold placards by each door. Some have names on them—Dr. Adams, Dr. Martin, Dr. Ashby. Most are labeled with the type of research that happens behind the door. Biological weaponry. Virus manufacturing. Solar energy. Solar weaponry.

A door behind me bursts open, and I turn, surprised, just as an arm grabs me and yanks me into a lab. I open my mouth, a gasp already rising in my throat, and a hand clamps over my face.

“It’s me,” Jack growls. He spins me around, and I gape at him. He’s discarded his custodial uniform and wears the lab coat he snuck inside. “Damn, I was worried,” he continues. “When we got separated…”

I swallow down my racing heart. “Where are we?”

I’d expected another research room, but this door has opened into a hallway. “Android sciences,” Jack says. “So far, it looks like nothing much has changed since I worked here.”

“Good,” I say. I shimmy out of the uniform shirt—my black tank top underneath is disgustingly dirty—and slip on my own lab coat. Jack examines my appearance, and it seems to satisfy his critical eye.

“This way,” he says.

Even though we’re here at night, there are still plenty of people around. We walk down the hallway as if we own the place. Jack nods at people we pass, although we’re careful not to make real eye contact and invite conversation. When we reach a door labeled “Nanorobotics & Artificial Intelligence,” Jack puts his hand on the door.

It doesn’t open.

“Shit,” he mumbles. I knock his hand aside, pointing to the tap-touch lock. An extra layer of security for this lab. For Dad’s lab.

We both scan in, and the door opens. The lights automatically cut on in front of us—at least no one is already inside. I feel Jack start to relax. I think he expected trouble.

This lab has several more frosted glass doors in the far wall, each one neatly labeled. We’re clearly at the hub of the android and nanorobotic research. One door—also with a tap-touch lock—is labeled
CYBORG-CLONE DEVELOPMENT
.

Another is
ANDROID ENGINEERING
, then
AI RESEARCH
and
NANOROBOTICS
. The door to the far left is
REVERIE TRANSFER
. Beside it is a door—the only one without a window—labeled
KTENOLOGY
.

Jack stares, open-mouthed. “This is so different,” he says in a low voice. “I mean, not these—” he indicates the android, AI, and nanobot doors, “—but these other ones. They’re all brand new. What even is ktenology?”

I don’t answer him. I’m distracted by the first door, the way the words barely fit on the label. I approach it slowly. Jack reaches for me, but I’m just a step away.

“We should go here,” he starts, heading toward the door marked REVERIE TRANSFER.

I raise my hand, examining the CYBORG-CLONE DEVELOPMENT door. I cover up the “borg” part of the label.

CY
BORG
-CLONE

“Cyclone,” I whisper.

“What?” Jack asks.

I put my hand on the lock.

“Wait!” Jack hisses at me, but it’s too late. I’ve opened the door.

In the center of the room is a giant tube, tall, but narrow. If I were to try to swim in it—for it’s filled with a blue liquid that glitters—then I could touch the sides of the glass tube with my arms, even though the liquid would go over my head. I lean in close, peering into the sparkling blue inside the tube, but there’s nothing in there but the liquid.

When I turn around, I jump in surprise. A perfect skeleton lies on an examination table near the tube. It’s definitely human, and, judging from the size, not yet an adult. But it’s also not real. The bones are made of some sort of metal that is so shiny it’s nearly white, held together with medical-grade flex-alloy strips for tendons.

“Ella,” Jack whispers.

I ignore him, fascinated by the skeleton. One arm dangles off the table, and I pick it up, slipping my fingers through the cold, metal bony fingers of the hand of this strange creation.

“Ella,” Jack says.

I turn.

He stands in front of a low vat covered in a clear glass top. The vat is filled with a clear liquid that might be water, but it’s what’s inside that stops me in my tracks.

At first I think they’re jellyfish. Even though the bodies are too bulbous and defined to be jellyfish, there are long tentacles come off each spherical, floating object, drifting down to the bottom of the tank. But then I see the single heavy, long tentacle coming out from the center of each of the things, and I realize what they are.

Brains.

They’re beige and pink, with tiny lines of blue veins. I always imagined brains as gray and mushy, but these are firm, bobbing along in their vats. The spinal cords—which I’d mistaken for tentacles—reach straight down to the bottom, where they’re plugged into metal tubes and clamped in place. All along the spinal cords are tiny tufts, almost like sea anemones. As I watch, I see little white sparks of electricity flickering between the nerves, traveling up the spinal cord and flashing in the brains like lighting. When I lean down closer, I notice small microchips embedded into the wrinkles of the brains. I wonder, if I put the brains under a microscope, if there would be nanobots connecting the synapses. It’s an eerie, creepily beautiful image of the biological blending with the mechanical.

“This is impossible,” Jack says. “Your dad—Dr. Philip tried for years to clone or manufacture a human brain, but he said it was impossible.”

I turn around slowly, drinking in everything. The metal skeleton, the vat of brains. Beyond them, a wall with tiny refrigerator doors, each one labeled with a different organ. A smaller vat in the corner filled with long strips of beige material and labeled simply, “syn-skin.” A cabinet with a sign on it that says, “flesh stimulator.” Pipes run along the ceiling, leading to the giant tube in the center of the room. They’re labeled with different versions of nanobots: NB-126, NB-252, NB-378.

“All of this… It’s all the pieces of a human,” I say in a hollow voice. Bones of metal, fake skin, cloned organs. Piece them together, and you have a Frankensteinian monster.

I touch the glass of the tube, wondering at the android that’s stuck inside it. No—not an android. A cyborg-clone, according to the label on the door. A cy-clone. Representative Belles learned about cy-clones, and his mind was troubled by what he learned. Maybe that was the real reason why he came in for a reverie, to forget about whatever cy-clones really are, and how they’re made.

A terrible thought floods my own thoughts: did
Dad
have something to do with this?

“Hey, Ella,” Jack says from across the room. I walk over to him—he’s scanning the information in the interface system, documents and images flashing on the monitor screen as he selects information to copy and send to the Zunzana computers.

“They’re working on a rush order,” he says. “Yesterday, there was an order for a ‘new one.’”

“A new what?” I ask.

Jack shrugs. “‘A new one,’ that’s all it says. And this model needs a remote kill switch, and some other features, like an increased amount of some sort of chemical compound called PHY-DU5.”

I voice the thing we’re both afraid of saying. “Is this what Akilah is?” I ask. “Some sort of man-made monster? And my mom?”

Jack whirls around. He looks me right in the eyes. “No way,” he says. “You said it yourself—you can’t make a brain think. Look at those.” He points to the vats of brains. “Do you think you could just pick one of those up and stick it in that skeleton and make it think for itself? Science has come far, Ella, but you can’t just manufacture
this
.”

I stare down at the vat. Despite the flickers of electricity, there’s no evidence that these brains can think, even with the microchips.

As we leave the room, I’m filled with an unexplainable sense of dread. I glance back behind me. Even though the skeleton is made of nothing but metal, it feels as if it’s watching me, mocking me.

Jack slides the door shut, and the last image I have of this strange room is the flickering sparks of electricity pulsing through brains that cannot—
cannot
—think for themselves.

Jack latches on to my arm and drags me to the lab marked “Reverie Transfer.” I think he’s afraid I’m going to wander into the other labs, but he shouldn’t worry about that. I can’t shake this feeling, a sort of ominous déjà vu, from my shoulders. I’m definitely going to be glad when we can escape this lab, but I’m getting my answers first.