The Aegis Solution (26 page)

Before she could communicate the girl's comment to Kreitzmann, Elias swung, clipping
Kreitzmann on the jaw and sending him to the floor with one punch. Bonillas, seeing what had
happened, immediately pulled the young girl back and slammed the door to the lab in the same motion.

Pivoting, Elias turned and ran in the direction of the reception area, hoping his weapons were still
there and not stored away. There was no attempt by the workers he dashed past to restrain him, his
actions only causing curious stares and the hasty withdrawal of a few of the technicians into the nearest
doorway.

The final hallway, which would lead him to the receptionist, was coming up next. Elias made a snap
decision to maintain his pace, rather than stop before the intersection to peer around the corner,
counting on the fact that only a minute or two had passed since he had made his move. He hoped that
the time it would take Bonillas to sound any sort of an alarm and the security staff to respond would
be more than long enough to allow his escape.

Rounding the last corner, he noticed nothing but the forty yards of empty hallway between him and
his goal. Putting on an extra burst of speed, Elias sprinted to the finish line, running into the room
where he saw the same young woman still seated at the desk. Her eyes swung in his direction as he
abruptly entered.

Skittering to a stop, nearly losing his balance as the rug under his feet slid, Elias looked at the side
table where she had placed his Beretta and AK-47 earlier. It was bare.

"Where's my…?"

Before he could finish, something slammed into him from behind, knocking him to the ground.
Elias tried to push himself over, while twisting his head around to see who his assailant was, when he
suddenly felt a flash of pain at the back of his head, followed by an instant blurring of his vision, which
dissolved into blackness.

CHAPTER TEN

Despite the pain, the experience of years of working in the field caused Elias to keep his eyes closed
as he returned to consciousness. A person's first impulse if hurt and rendered unconscious would be
to stir, groan, or make any number of other forms of attention-gaining gestures upon awakening. He
remained still and silent, listening.

As he waited patiently, the throbbing in his head subsided a bit as he forced his racing metabolism,
a normal bodily reaction after emerging from the darkness of being knocked out, to calm.

He began taking inventory of all that his senses observed. From his position, which was horizontal,
and the feeling that he was lying on a mattress, he could not determine whether he was restrained in any
way, without either looking or moving, neither of which was advisable at the moment. His nose detected
a panoply of scents. There was a faint hint of ozone, accompanied by a stronger level of machine oil.
His ears heard a steady thrumming/whooshing sound, mechanical in nature. They also perceived the
faint rustling of movement that seemed to be approximately a dozen feet away. It sounded as if there
was a single person walking about, handling or rearranging some items unseen by Elias. With the
absence of input from his eyes, his mind automatically conjured an image that matched the sounds. It
was an image from his past: a peaceful, pleasant moment when he had awakened from a nap on the
couch to find Leah hard at work dusting her knick-knack shelf in the den.

The rap to his skull had not diminished his recollection of where he was and what he had been
doing. Elias knew that if he opened his eyes, he would not find his wife carefully lifting and dusting the
beautiful items she had collected from their travels, and placing them back on the display shelf. He knew
that he was in a hostile environment, occupied by uncongenial people, and that these moments, while
his captors waited for him to regain consciousness, were more than likely his last moments of peace.

He had deduced that since he felt no physical restraints on his wrists or ankles and was on what
seemed to be a mattress or padded cot, he was probably in some sort of cell, and that the sounds he
heard were coming from his jailer.

Satisfied that he had gathered all of the information he could about his surroundings from the
available input, he slightly opened his eyes, immediately directing his gaze toward the sounds of
movement. He saw…a woman, standing with her back to him, holding what appeared to be a carved
wooden bookend with her right hand and dusting it with her left.

Elias was momentarily shaken. He involuntarily opened his eyes wider. She was about ten feet away
and was wearing dark green cargo pants, a camouflage T-shirt, and white athletic shoes. Her red hair was
cut short, very short. As he silently watched her clean, he noticed that she was in excellent shape. The
musculature on her arms was defined without being bulky, the T-shirt snug enough to show the ripples
of toned muscle beneath.

Tearing his eyes away from her, Elias saw that they were in a mechanical room, filled with sheet
metal ductwork and an array of process piping. They were not the type in the electrical raceways where
his base camp was established, but color-coded pipes of larger diameters, obviously designed to carry
water, steam, and high-pressure coolant loads. Mixed in with the jumble of ducts and pipes were an
assortment of chairs and tables, a bookcase, and a sofa. He determined that he was indeed occupying
a small bed. The area appeared to be the woman's living quarters.

The juxtaposition of mechanical gear and an apartment's worth of furniture was unusual enough,
but the effect was hyperbolized by the abundance of decorative objects carefully arranged on nearly all
of the available horizontal and vertical surfaces. There were ornate vases on the floor with peacock
feathers arcing upward, lacy and jeweled fans mounted to the walls, small brass castings of wild animals
such as lions and panthers, a shadow box mounted on the side of a support column and filled with
miniature wedding accessories, including a tiny wedding gown pinned to the back panel. The most
unusual area was a large section of sheet metal, clearly a main trunk line for the air conditioning system.
It was essentially covered with hundreds of small refrigerator magnets: candy bars, kitchen appliances,
all kinds of fake food like cheeseburgers and slices of pie, and a large assortment of other colorful and
delicate items.

Elias saw his Beretta and AK-47 perched on the edge of a coffee table, the rest of which was filled
with decorative objects. Quietly lifting his head slightly, he found that he was not restrained in any way.
The back of his head ached from the blow that had knocked him out earlier, but otherwise he was fine,
as far as he could discern.

"You're awake," she said, the tone of her voice friendly and casual.

Elias noticed that she had finished dusting the bookend and was holding a mirror set into a
gold-leaf frame. She had obviously seen him in the mirror when he raised his head.

"I am. Where am I?"

She carefully placed the mirror onto its resting place in the filigreed plate-holder on the shelf and
turned to Elias. "You're in my place."

Attempting to sit up, Elias paused as a wave of dizziness coursed through him, and he fell back
onto a supporting elbow. "Your place? This looks like a mechanical room."

She walked gracefully across to him and reached out, offering a hand of support. "It is. I like it here.
It's a much better spot than the area you picked out for your camp."

Startled by her knowledge, Elias said, "You've seen my digs?"

A sudden smile wrinkled the corners of her mouth. "Digs? I like that. Nineteen-fifties beatnik
jargon. Cool, man!"

He took her hand and slowly sat up, triggering a new flash of pain from his head. She must have
seen the effect of that pain, because the smile left her face, replaced by an expression of concern.
"Aspirin or ibuprofen?"

"Got anything stronger?"

"No, I don't."

"I do. There's some Percocet with my things, but they're back at my place."

"You're in no shape to go there now, so you'll just have to make do with what's in my medicine
cabinet."

"Ibuprofen. Four of them. And thanks."

She was still holding his arm to steady him. Reluctantly, she released her grip and walked across the
area to a small cabinet, which was trimmed with an elaborate silver design around the face, opened it
and removed a small bottle. Compressing the cap to defeat the childproofing, she shook out four tablets
and returned to Elias, grabbing a bottled water from the refrigerator on her way back.

Gratefully, Elias took the pills and washed them down, wishing them Godspeed on their circuitous
journey to his skull.

"Thank you very much. If I may ask, who are you and how did I get here?"

She was still standing in front of him. Sitting gently on the bed beside him, she extended her hand
and introduced herself. "I'm Tillie."

They shook hands.

"I'm Elias."

"I know."

"You know?"

She nodded. "Uh-huh. Wilson told me."

"You know Wilson?"

"Everybody knows everyone here. But, yes, Wilson is probably my best friend in this place."

"So, he told you about me?"

"Actually, Mr. Death," she replied with an impish grin, "I was inside his shack during your visit with
him."

"Another one with the ‘Mr. Death' thing," Elias said with mock exasperation. "How did I get here?
The last thing I remember was that I was escaping Kreitzmann's lab and someone knocked me out."

Her smile turned into a good-natured laugh. "You were anything but escaping. If I hadn't gotten
you out of there, you'd be one of his lab rats right now."

Elias' mind flashed back to the scene. He remembered making it all the way to the receptionist,
when he was suddenly hit from behind.

"What happened? I didn't see what hit me."

"You were taken out by one of the Zippers."

"Zippers?"

"That's what Wilson and I call them. I think you call them the blurs."

"Why Zippers?"

"You're kidding, right? Because they zip around."

He looked closely at her for a moment. She was in her early thirties, had bright green eyes and a
full crop of freckles, all accentuated by the shaggy, close-cropped red hair. But her most prominent
feature was the, for lack of a better term, aliveness of her face, which displayed each passing emotion
with clarity. Her eyes shined with an intelligence and wit rarely seen, and they fixed upon Elias' eyes with
a directness and firmness which was almost disconcerting. At that moment she was watching his face,
her innate curiosity seeming to pull his thoughts from him before he was ready to let them out. She
leaned toward him slightly, in anticipation.

"Tillie, what are they? The Zippers, I mean."

With a dismissive shrug she responded, "I wasn't able to track you completely inside
Kreitzmannstein's lab, but I'm assuming you got the tour."

"I did, until I ran into someone who blew my cover." Elias was not sure why he was being so
forthcoming in his information, other than the disarming nature of the woman, not to mention the fact
that she had more than likely saved his life.

"Then you already know what he does."

"Yes. He takes people from birth and immerses them, as he calls it, in a different reality to enhance
their skills."

"Right. Did he show you the Auctioneers?"

Elias chuckled. "I'm guessing you mean the fast-talking subjects. Yes, he did."

"That was his first experiment, right?"

"So he said."

"His second experiment, motivated by his early success on the first, was with the Zippers. He's
been doing this one for years, way before he came to Aegis. He took babies…little tiny infants…and
put them in a special room, basically from the day they were born. The room had screens for walls and
even the ceiling."

"He told me that Phase One was a virtual reality."

"Virtual unreality is more like it."

"What did he do with them?"

"These infants, every waking minute of every day, saw normal life on the screens all around them
– people talking, people performing tasks, everything – except it was…."

"Speeded up!"

"Exactly. All those little babies knew was life at a pace way faster than our regular pace."

"How were they cared for? Certainly the people who came into the room to do that moved at a
normal pace."

"They did. I didn't get the benefit of the full tour, like you almost did, but I talked to a man who
used to work with Kreitzmannstein. He told me that they would change the babies' clothes, bathe them,
and do everything else while the babies slept so that they never saw people moving at a slower pace.
And they would blindfold the babies during this, in case they woke up while someone was still in the
room."

"But what about feeding? You can't feed a baby while it sleeps."

Her face took on a more serious expression. "You can't? Ever heard of a feeding tube?"

"You're kidding!"