Страница 51 из 90
The room we were in was mostly full of recording equipment. Old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorders, bulky videotape recorders, and a single large television set to play them back on. It all looked very neat and organised, as though nothing had been disturbed for years. And again, not a speck of dust anywhere. Someone, or something, was preserving this room just as it had been, before . . . whatever had happened here, happened. Honey bent over a pile of videotapes, her lips moving slowly as she worked her way through the handwritten Cyrillic labels.
“Anything?” I said, trying hard to sound calm and casual.
“Mostly just dates and names. Nothing to indicate what they were up to.”
“That chair does not inspire confidence,” said Peter. “What did they do in that room . . . that they needed bulletproof one-way glass to protect the observers from what they were observing?”
We all looked at him. “How did you know that was bulletproof glass, Peter?” said Walker.
“I just . . . felt it,” Peter said, frowning. “Ever since I came in here, it’s been like . . . remembering someone else’s memories. Creepy . . .”
In the end, we just took a video from the pile at random and stuck it in the nearest machine. The old television set took a while to warm up, and when the picture finally arrived it was only black-and-white. The recording showed exactly what the scientists had been doing in the other room. Experimenting on unwilling human subjects, and testing them to destruction. We watched as the subjects yelled and screamed and shouted obscenities, straining desperately against the heavy restraining straps while blank-faced men and women in grubby lab coats stuck them with needles, or exposed them to radiation, or just cut them open, to see what was happening inside.
It was bad enough in black-and-white. In colour, it would have been unbearable.
We ran quickly through the tapes, just checking a few minutes from each. A few minutes was all we could stand. They were all pretty much the same. Cold-blooded glimpses of Hell.
One man’s head exploded, quite suddenly, blood and brains showering wetly over the attending scientists. Another man melted right out of the chair, his body losing all shape and cohesion, his flesh ru
A middle-aged woman sat on the floor, wearing nothing but a stained oversized nappy. She had a huge bulging forehead held together with heavy black stitches and crude metal staples. She was assembling a strange machine, whose shape and function made no sense at all. When the scientists expressed displeasure at what she’d built and gestured at the chair, the woman calmly picked up a sharp piece of metal and stuck it repeatedly into her left eye, until she died.
And one man, with a Y-shaped autopsy scar still vivid on his chest and rows of steel nozzles protruding from his abdomen from implanted technology, burst all the straps holding him to the chair and killed three scientists and seven of the soldiers sent in to restrain him before one of them got close enough to shoot him repeatedly in the head.
We watched as much of it as we could stand, and then I told Honey to check the dates and find us the tape from the last experiment. The very last thing the scientists were working on before it all went wrong.
“Whatever happened here,” said Walker, “they deserved it. This isn’t a scientific laboratory; it’s a torture chamber.”
“What did they think they were doing?” said Peter. “What were they trying to achieve?”
“I think they were all quite mad,” said Honey. “If they weren’t when they started out, what they did here drove them mad.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they had that excuse. I think . . . they just did what they were told. Perhaps because if they didn’t, they’d end up in the chair themselves.”
“We should burn this city to the ground,” said Walker. “And seed the earth with salt.”
“Play the tape,” said Peter. “The sooner we’re out of here the better.”
We stood before the television screen, standing shoulder to shoulder for mutual comfort and support. For a long time there was just static, as though an attempt had been made to wipe the tape, and then the picture cleared to show a man sitting in the chair. He was naked, the leather straps cutting deeply into his flesh. He sat stiffly upright, unable to move a muscle. He looked tired, and hard used, and severely undernourished, but there was nothing visibly unusual about him. Except for what they’d done to his head.
Two scientists, a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman, watched the man in the chair from a safe distance. They looked tired too, and from the way they kept glancing at the one-way mirror, I sensed they were under pressure to get results. The woman had a clipboard and a pen and ugly heavy-framed glasses. The man was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous puffs and dictating something to the woman. He didn’t even look at the man in the chair. They had a job to do, and they were getting on with it. The man in the chair was of no importance to them except as the subject of their current experiment.
I wondered who he was, what he did, what his life had been like before they brought him here and took away his name in favour of an experiment number. I wondered if they tattooed the number on his forearm.
The man’s head had been shaved, and there were signs of recent surgical scars. Holes had been drilled through his skull at regular intervals so electrical cables could be plugged directly into his brain. Recently clotted blood showed darkly around the holes. The cables, carefully colour-coded, trailed away to a bunch of machines on the far side of the room. I didn’t recognise any of them.
Without quite knowing how or why, I began to understand what was happening. I just . . . seemed to know. The scientists were sweating, nervous, under intense pressure to produce results, to justify all the money that had been spent so far. Practical results that the military overseers could present to the Party to ensure further funding and preserve their own precious skins. So . . . certain shortcuts had been taken.
X37’s scientists had been studying the mysteries of human DNA for eleven years now and had nothing useful to show for it. Just a hell of a lot of dead ends and almost as many dead experimental subjects. Not that that mattered; they could always get more. Still, everyone was getting just a bit desperate. This particular experiment involved exposing selected genetic material to certain radioactive elements, and then grafting the new material directly onto the brain of the test subject. So far, so good. The subject had survived the operation. Now the scientists were electrically stimulating certain areas of the brain to see if they could make something happen.
The two scientists, the man and the woman, talked nervously together; sometimes clearly for the record, and sometimes talking across each other as they studied the monitor displays and argued over what was happening. I seemed to understand what they were saying, even though I knew only a handful of words in Russian.
(What was going on? Where was all this information coming from? Was the past sunk so deeply into its surroundings that just playing the tape was enough to evoke it all again, in all its details? Was the laboratory . . . waking up?)
The male scientist spoke of those parts of human DNA that resisted explanation. Whole areas whose purpose and function remained a mystery. Both scientists were convinced hidden talents lay buried in human DNA, just waiting to be forced to the surface. Old talents, long forgotten by civilised man. The male scientist’s name was Sergei. He spoke of old DNA, ancient genetic material, from before man was really human. He talked about the earliest civilisations, where men talked directly with their gods. They saw this as an ordinary, everyday thing: quite commonplace and not remarkable at all. Gods and devils, monsters and angels walked openly among mankind, their conversations described in great detail in all the oldest written records. Gods walked and talked with men. No big deal at all; just the way things were, back then. If you believed the written records, said the female scientist, whose name was Ludmilla. If these records were accurate, said Sergei, as accurate as everything else they described, who or what were these early humans talking to? Not gods, obviously; both scientists were good Party members and did not believe in such things. But . . . something powerful, certainly. Could it be that these gods and devils still walked among us, but we had lost the ability to see them?