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He floated now in
the tank, attached only with one IV to the green liquid that would
wake him from his unconscious rest. It was remarkable how much he
looked like a normal human. Chal knew that, physically at least, he
was as human as she was. It was just a matter of making sure his mind
could weather the transition into consciousness. His dark hair waved
in slow motion in the water. She watched him, for the first time
taking in his appearance.

Alan
.

He was handsome, and
this was something that she had not prepared herself for. His body
was perfect, chiseled and lean, and his facial features were
decidedly masculine, dark eyebrows slanting across his brow, an
aquiline nose. He looked to be in his late twenties or so, in peak
physical condition. This was important, she knew. The body would need
to be strong enough to deal with the chemical adjustments the brain
made as it developed rapidly into maturity.

His naked body
bobbed slightly in the saltwater, and Chal adjusted the padding
around the sides, not wanting him to bump his head on the tank walls.
She moved slowly, carefully, but her hand accidentally touched the
prototype’s limb. She let her fingers move on his skin. He felt
warm to the touch, and Chal let his wet skin glide under the pads of
her fingers.

Smooth. Like a baby.
Yet full-grown, a man already on the outside. It was strange, and as
Chal examined him she felt a mixture of emotions surge forward under
her skin. Curiosity surpassed all of the rest, but it wasn’t a
clinical curiosity as it had been in the past. Every animal she had
worked with had been on the very low end of the Freitas consciousness
spectrum. The difference between a baby rat and a full-grown rat had
more to do with size and mobility than with intelligence. But a human
man is so different from a human baby that Chal trembled at the
thought of waking the prototype up.

Her hand traced the
line of his shoulder, his neck. She was curious who he would be once
he woke up. Would he be a conscious person? Really? His mind would be
an infant’s, although not for long. She would have to remember
that, to make a point of remembering.

His face was calm as
her hand made its way up to his cheek and rested there. Chal’s
fingers stroked the skin at his temple absentmindedly.

What will you
think when you wake up?
she thought.

“Are we
ready?” Dr. Fielding asked, startling Chal out of her thoughts.
The water rippled with drops as she removed her hand from the tank.

“Yes,”
Chal said. She sat back, the clipboard resting next to her on the
table. She was ready.

White noise came on
over the speaker system, a static humming that blanketed the room and
filled Chal’s ears. The IV began to drip emerald fluid, and
Chal eyed the one-way-mirrored wall nervously. Having an audience
made her a bit unsteady. She breathed in deeply, relaxing herself the
way she did before any lecture. She would not have to do anything,
she hoped. She was there just in case.

Just in case.

The red glow of the
light shone softly over the prototype, his body gleaming. Chal
focused her attention on his eyes. The dark lashes still lay
motionless on his cheeks, but as the IV fluid dripped she thought she
saw his eyes move underneath the lids. She moved forward on her
chair, watching intently. The whisper of static filled the air and
dampened any noise she made, but she was still careful not to make a
sound.

His eyes opened.

Chal’s lips
parted in a sharp inhale as she saw the prototype awaken. His eyes
were dark, gleaming red under the laboratory lights. His pupils
dilated, then refocused. His fingers twitched, sending ripples
through the tank. The static humming covered the sounds of the small
splashes as his feet, too, twitched and began to kick softly in the
water. Then his limbs stopped moving. Chal looked up at his face.

He was looking at
her.

She knew that with
the dim lights she must only be a fuzzy shape to him. The red bulbs
that illumined the inside of the tank would make anything outside
blurred and dark. Still, his eyes met hers and she thought for an
instant that not only was he awake, not only was he conscious, he
knew what she was thinking.

Then he turned his
gaze down and the connection was broken. Raising one hand, he looked
at his fingers. Chal was astonished to see emotion already in his
eyes. It looked like wonder, or awe, and maybe confusion. All of
these subtleties were written on his face as clear as day. She
wondered if this was how mothers felt when they looked at their
newborns. There was a
person
there.

He clenched his
fingers shut, then opened them again, turning his hand this way and
then that. His fingers wiggled, and he formed a fist. The water
dripped down his wrist and he tracked the movement of the drops with
his eyes. Chal realized that he was really like an infant, albeit one
with more sensory apparatus than normal. She thought that maybe they
should have turned off all the lights.

Then the static
noise stopped. The sudden silence shocked Chal, and her elbow knocked
the clipboard, making a loud sound. The prototype immediately looked
over to her, his nostrils slightly flaring.

“Ahhh,”
he said, then closed his mouth, as though surprised to be speaking.
His voice was very loud in the silent room. He looked frightened, and
Chal cursed Dr. Fielding and every technician on the other side of
the glass. Where was the static hum? Without white noise –

The prototype let
his hand fall into the water, and the splash surprised him again. His
body twisted in the water, and Chal could see that he was scared. Her
own heart was racing, and she was trying not to stand up and scream
at the technicians in the other room.
Where the fuck was the
static?

“AHHHHH,”
he wailed, louder, and the room despite its padding echoed with the
noise. “AHHHHHHHHHHH!”

It was an infant’s
cry, and Chal heard the frustration and fear in it. She took a
breath.

“SHHHHHHHHH,”
she said. The prototype swiveled his head toward her, his mouth still
open. He stopped wailing.

“SHHHHHHHHH,”
she repeated, trying to shush him, to recreate the white noise. She
didn’t know what to do, but the sedative should be kicking in
soon. Damn it all, this would have gone perfectly if the noise hadn’t
shut off. Now she might overwhelm his system with language. She hoped
not. He turned his head away from her and began to move his hand
towards the IV.

“Alan,”
she said, and now the prototype frowned and opened his mouth to wail
again.

Without knowing
what she was doing, Chal leaned forward and began to sing in a soft
voice.

“
En Joan
petit quan balla

Balla, balla,
balla

En Joan petit
quan balla

Balla amb so dit

Amb so dit, dit,
dit

Així balla
en Joan petit.”

It was a song her
mother had sung to her when she was a child, an old Catalan nursery
rhyme. The prototype stopped crying immediately to listen to it.

She brought up her
index finger and danced it around in front of her as she sang. Alan’s
eyes tracked the movement, his lips parting every so often but then
closing again. He was paying attention. Out of the corner of her eye,
Chal saw the red IV begin to drip. The sedative would kick in soon,
and she could stop. She wiggled her hand above the tank and continued
singing.

“
En Joan
petit quan balla

Balla, balla,
balla

En Joan petit
quan balla

Balla amb sa mà

Amb sa mà,
mà, mà

Amb so dit, dit
dit,”

The prototype’s
eyes were slowly shutting, but he kept his gaze on Chal’s
fingers the entire time. Then with one hand, he reached up and
touched her hand.

Chal stopped
singing, her mouth still open. His fingers were warm against hers,
and they clutched at her hand with a soft longing that made her
breath stop. The fingers slid down her wrist, then down against the
side of the tank, letting go of her. As the sedative took hold, his
eyelids came down and his muscles relaxed. His head rocked back into
the water.

“
Així
balla en Joan petit
,” Chal whispered, her hand still
hovering above the tank. Her arm was marked with wet streaks where he
had touched her skin. The prototype’s lips turned up slightly
into a peaceful smile. Then he was asleep.

***

Chal waited until
the observation room door had hissed shut. Then she turned to Dr.
Fielding and the technicians.

“What the
fuck
was that?” she asked. “Where did the noise go?”

“I’m so
sorry,” Evan said, looking aghast at his team of technicians.
He was so upset that he could only stammer out apologies. “I’m
so sorry, Dr. Fielding.”

“The speaker
broke,” the dark-haired technician said. From the look on his
face, he had been the one who had been in charge of that particular
aspect of the experiment. “I think it was the adaptor
connection.”

“I don’t
give a shit what it was,” Chal said. “As long as it
doesn’t happen again.” She looked away from Evan, not
wanting to make him feel worse but unable to conceal her displeasure.
That was something she had never been good at – hiding her
anger when something went wrong.

“That went
well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, coming into the room. Chal
rolled her eyes but said nothing.

“As well as it
could have,” Dr. Fielding said. He looked relieved, if a little
pissed, and Chal realized that he had half-wanted her to fail just as
he had done twice before. “Sensors show that his neuronal
growth has quieted down into a normal structural growth. We should be
able to let him sleep for ten hours or so.”

“Make it
eight,” Johnner said. “We don’t want his mind to
start branching out too far.”

“Eight, then,”
Fielding huffed, unhappy that Johnner had taken over his decisions.
Chal was impressed by how quickly Johnner had come to a conclusion.
Maybe it was just protocol. But she sensed that he knew more than he
let on. He caught her looking at him, and she turned away, cognizant
of the ill effects giving men attention could have.

“You did well,
Dr. Davidson,” he said.

“It would have
been better to avoid language at all to begin,” Chal said.
“It’s too much to start with. It might have
overstimulated him.”

“Still, you
did well,” Johnner said. “Quick thinking.”

Chal nodded,
irritated that he didn’t seem more disturbed by the broken
speakers. It was a big deal, and he just brushed it off like it was
nothing.

“He could have
died,” Chal said. “Next time–”

“Next time
we’ll be sure to have a backup system, Dr. Davidson.”
Now that they had successfully awakened the prototype, Johnner seemed
distracted from the experiment. She wondered, not for the first time,
what the military might want with emotionally conscious life forms.

“It’s
important,” she said lamely.

“Of course,”
Johnner said, his attention snapping back to her. “Don’t
think I underestimate the difficulty you face with this. I’m on
the hook for this project, too, and I don’t want to see
millions of dollars of research down the drain.”

He continued
talking, but Chal was too angry to listen. She felt just like she had
back in the days when she was the only woman in her computer science
classes, dismissed out of hand by the men around her. After a quick
rundown of the data, convinced that everything would go better on the
next run, she left the laboratory to grab a longer nap. She was on
the prototype’s clock now, and the experiments would determine
her sleep schedule. Every eight hours or so, he would have to be
awakened, the stimuli slowly increasing.

“Sleep when
you can,” Evan had told her. “This is underground time
now, and you’ll never remember to sleep when the lights are
always on. Any nap is a good nap.”

Another nap. Another
nightmare. That was all she needed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After an hour of
restless tossing on her cot, Chal found that there was another bodily
need that she had been sorely neglecting. Her stomach was growling
loudly as she stood up from the stiff mattress.

“Shush, you,”
she told her stomach. “Come on, let’s go find something
to eat.”

Now she was talking
to her organs. Chal wondered if she would be okay living down here
for another day or two, let alone a week. Hell, she didn’t even
know what day it was right now. For a moment, she remembered the
outside world, realizing that everyone out there would have continued
on like normal without her.

Nothing seemed
normal now, not after her experience with the prototype. Everything
would change, she realized. Most of the major world religions, or
what was left of them, depended on the concept of a soul gifted to
humanity alone. What would they say when Alan was unveiled to them: a
creation of man, made intelligent and emotional, able to react just
as a human would?

Chal felt relieved
to be away from the world, although she never would have guessed it.
The past few years had been spent pushing, pushing herself, and now
that she had been yanked away from all of her commitments she
realized how unnecessary most of her work was. Nothing she had done
in the past ten years had excited her as much as this one interaction
with the android prototype.

These were the
thoughts on her mind as Chal made her way down to the kitchen where
Johnner had told her she could find her meals. The cook there gave
her a soup that tasted like a broth of nutrients, which was probably
what it was. For dessert, a protein bar coated in chocolate, the
chocolate flaking off like chalk.