Extensis Vitae (9 page)

***

“Will you tell me how I got here?” Reznik asked. It was later in the day, after they had grabbed a snack at the dining hall and returned to Myrna’s lab.

“I don’t know all the details, but I’ll tell you what I know. You’ll have to ask my father about the rest,” she said. Reznik nodded.

“My father was a businessman as well as a doctor prior to the Cataclysm. He had done pretty well for our family and was one of the partners in a firm that specialized in bio-mechanical devices—artificial organs, pacemakers, implanted injection systems, and the like. He received some information that
Extensis Vitae
had planned to unearth an old military base in the desert and use the location to build one of the Colonies. Through his connections, he had heard rumors of the secret facility and the cutting-edge biomechanics research that had been performed there. Cutting edge for its time, anyway. An old colleague of his was an executive with
Extensis Vitae
, and Father reached out to him and requested access to the facility. The request was granted, as the corporation’s only interest was in using an already hardened site to build the Colony—they cared little for what research the military had performed there.”

“So eventually, my father went to the site, and, according to him, he found an area that was sealed off behind a vault door. He talked the foreman into having his men use a plasma cutter to get through the vault door, and inside was a laboratory where the military had conducted their research on cloning, cryonics, nanoaugmentation, and even more radical stuff. The place had been abandoned for years, but everything was just as they had left it—as though they had just left for the weekend. He said it appeared that the scientists would have been able to get right back to work again as soon as they returned. He must have greased a few palms, because he managed to recover a couple of the cryogenic vats, some storage drives containing research data, and other miscellaneous equipment. Somehow, he managed to get it all trucked out of there and stored in the basement of his office building. I’m not sure how much he played around with the equipment back then, but it sat down there until our admission to Colony 12 was approved.”

“As a physician, he was allowed a lot of latitude to bring what equipment he needed, so he had some of the old military equipment brought down here. Over the years, he had tinkered with the idea of continuing the military research and even experimenting with a neural transfer, but he was called away on the expedition to Colony 13. I was fortunate that he left detailed enough notes so that after he was gone, I was able to perform the procedure he had set up. And
voilà
—here you sit!”

Reznik was trying to process all the information. The part about the underground research facility and cryogenics seemed to ring a bell, but the details were foggy.

“So how did I get from my old body into this one? Where did it come from? And what happened to my old body?”

“I’m sorry. Your old body was damaged beyond repair. The military had you cryogenically frozen. I don’t know if the intent was to repair your old body when medical tech had caught up or not, but they suddenly started making some huge breakthroughs in cloning technology. It was all Special Access stuff—super secret, since cloning was officially banned by the United Nations.”

There was a long silence as Reznik combed through the fragments of the past that he could remember. His memory was getting much better, but he still could not recall anything more than bits and pieces of the details of his participation in the DARPA project. She was watching him intently, and he shook his head in frustration. “It isn’t coming back to me yet… It’s still a jumbled blur. I remember getting put into one of those cryo-vats and then seeing a face through the window, but that’s about it.”

“Give it some more time,” she said. “Most of your memory has been filling in, right?” At his nod she reached over and squeezed his hand. Their eyes met and she smiled that sad smile of hers again. “I saw you, you know—the real you. I was just a little girl at the time.”

Reznik’s eyes went wide. “You saw me in the cryochamber?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t supposed to. Father had taken me to the office one day and he got called out to a meeting or something, so I was left behind with Nancy—his secretary—to watch me. She went down to the basement to get supplies and I snuck down after her. Not knowing that I had followed her down there, she went back up while I poked around like the curious little girl I was. I remember seeing a mouse run under a large tarp in the back of the room. I went to follow it and pulled up the tarp. When I did, it slid down and I saw a large metal and glass tube with a frozen man inside it. I screamed and ran. Nancy tried to calm me down, and when Father returned, I thought he would yell at me, but he didn’t. He explained that the man had gone to sleep because he was hurt badly and he was waiting for a smart doctor to come along who could make him as good as new when he came back out.”

“Well, I definitely feel as good as new, that’s for sure.” Realizing she still held his hand—not that he was complaining—he squeezed hers. “Where did this body come from?”

“That, I’m not too sure about. My father doesn’t share all of his secrets. I would assume he either recovered it from the same site where he found you, or he got it through his connections in the medical field. Black market, maybe. All I know is that high-quality genetically engineered clones are VERY expensive, and your body had all the military tech already built in.”

“Why did they abandon us in that lab? I think I remember others that were frozen, as well—what happened to them?”

“I’m not sure about that part—you’d have to ask my father about the rest. It’s likely that the military ran out of funding and the program was shut down sometime prior to the bankrupting of the central government. From the state that he found the facility in, I think it’s pretty clear that they had shuttered it with the hope and expectation that they were going to get funding restored in the near future. As for the rest of your question, Father told me that the life support backup power systems had failed on the other cryochambers, and yours was close to failing when he found you. When they announced the impending impact event and Father made arrangements for us to join the Colony, he knew he wouldn’t be able to smuggle in the cryochamber with your body inside. You were in pretty bad shape, and there weren’t enough time or resources to try to fix you up, so he was forced to make a hasty neural transfer.”

“Neural transfer? What is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know a whole lot about the field, but a very simplistic explanation is that your brain activity essentially boils down to electrical impulses firing through neurons. The goal was to translate brain activity into ones and zeros—basically in order to copy the essence of a unique person into computer code. There was a very advanced area of neurology research that experimented with translating that into applications such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and cloning. The military and corporations performed extensive research in the field for a decade or two prior to the Cataclysm.”

“How is that even possible?” he wondered aloud. When she was about to reply, he waved her off. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since, like you said, here I sit. I
am
glad that your father has such a brilliant daughter to be able to pick up all the pieces and put me together again, or else I would have still been on ice—literally.” She blushed prettily at the compliment.

“I’m happy that everything seems to have worked out pretty well in that regard,” she replied.

They were both quiet for a while as Reznik reflected on everything that she had told him. “It’s just weird not really being me,” he finally said. He studied his left hand—the one that had been amputated from his real body—and slowly flexed it.

“Are you not happy with this body? I’m sorry that the choice was taken away from you by us putting you in this one…” She trailed off.

“No, it’s fine,” Reznik said with a quick smile. “That was kind of the point of joining the DARPA program—I had pretty much given up on my old body. I didn’t know if I would come out of there looking like the bionic man, or if I would even come out of there at all.”

Chapter 7

T
hey spent the rest of the day together, waiting for Reznik’s late afternoon appointment with the administrator. Myrna showed him blueprints and schematics of Colony 13, which she said mirrored those of Colony 12. They ate in the dining hall again, and this time Reznik noticed the looks he drew from the colonists were friendlier than before.

As they were finishing their soup and sandwiches, a man and woman approached them. They looked to be in their mid forties and looked apprehensive, but hopeful.

Myrna greeted them. “Hello, Joan, Fred. How are you doing?”

The woman spoke. “Hello, Myrna. We heard about what’s going to happen.” Joan turned to Reznik. “Sir, we wish you the best of luck down there, and we will say our prayers for you. If you would be so kind as to put a mother’s fears to rest, would you please look for our daughter, June? She is a security officer and was with the group that went down there with Dr. Kane.” She glanced at Myrna for a second and then back at Reznik, nervous but optimistic.

The man spoke up. “My little girl—I told her not to go. It could be dangerous, I told her. But she went anyway—said it was her job to go and help the people at the other Colony. She always had such a strong sense of duty and made us so proud—” The last words were choked off, and he looked on the verge of breaking down.

Reznik’s heart went out to them. “I’ll do whatever I can to find your daughter and bring her back safely if it is at all possible,” he promised. The couple thanked him gratefully and departed.

“I didn’t know there was a female officer with them,” Reznik mused. “How many women are on the force?”

“I think just a couple… June is fairly new, and I think there is one other,” Myrna replied.

After lunch, Reznik and Myrna walked and talked for a while. A couple more people hesitantly approached them and asked if Reznik would look for their loved ones who had been part of the group of missing security officers. Reznik told them he would.

***

That night Reznik tossed and turned, restless and unable to sleep with everything on his mind. In the morning, he would enter the tunnels and set off for Colony 13.

The brief meeting with Swanson had ended more pleasantly than the previous time they had met. The administrator had basically reiterated the deal from before and thanked him for agreeing to take on such a “heroic endeavor,” as if Reznik had had much choice in the matter. Beneath the politician-speak, it had been pretty clear that he would be on his own, regardless of whether he was killed, wounded, or taken hostage down there or not. Returning without successfully dealing with the problem would be frowned upon, and Reznik doubted they would even let him back inside the complex. Not interested in extending the meeting any longer than necessary, Reznik had made the necessary replies in order to satisfy Swanson and be on his way.

As he lay in bed, his mind raced as he reflected on everything he had learned over the past couple of days and thought about what he would encounter in the morning. He pondered what would happen if he returned successful—whether Swanson would honor their deal or not. He also wondered if anyone would care if he died from lead poisoning, on the blade of a machete, or any number of other unpleasant possibilities. Realistically, the colonists would probably be merely disappointed that their best chance at dealing with the problem had failed.
That would most likely be the extent of their grief for me, I’d imagine.

His thoughts then turned to a certain lovely scientist who he had become quite fond of in the last several days. He realized that Myrna was the only one that might shed a tear for him if he didn’t return from his mission.

Just prior to his meeting with Swanson, he and Myrna had argued when she had told him she wanted to come with him to help. He had told her it was much too dangerous, and that she was more badly needed in Colony 12 to keep looking after the colonists in her father’s absence. She had argued that it was more important to find her father, and that she could be of more use with Reznik since she knew a great deal more about the colonies than he did. She had made a valid point—having a navigator would help to mitigate his tactical disadvantage. However much she might be able to help though, Myrna had not seen the video, so she didn’t know what he would be dealing with out there. There was no way he could let her put herself in such danger, especially with the vicious killers he would be going up against.

With a sigh, he decided to call Myrna.
This might be the last time I ever see her
, he thought. He activated his Datalink and called her.