Chapter 1: Disconnected
The familiar, melodious ring of the phone sounded a lot like the coming of Ragnarok for the wakened Christian Mendez. Cold wind coming in from the window made it twice as hard to get up and pickup the handset from his bed at three in the morning. He was wishing the call away from his half-sleep.
But the ringing wouldn't go away.
"Who the hell calls up people at three in the morning?" he grumbled to himself in a familiar grump he used to confront almost everything else. He gave his pillow a frustrated squeeze and finally rose from the bed.
Morning clothes marked the man's well-build frame as he bent down put on his box-type glasses and combed his ebon shoulder-length hair with his fingers once.
"This better be good," he said.
Christian picked up the phone on top of his dresser. After a few seconds, let it slip from his hands, making it swing towards the closet cabinet and hit its side with a bang.
In his face was a reaction of disbelief, as though something had happened that shouldn't have, or something that should have happened didn't.
He knew which one it was.
Christian listlessly glided from the side of his bed to the window of his seventeenth floor condominium unit overlooking the rain-soaked university grounds - face distraught and breathing heavily.
"Lord, have mercy on us all."
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The Science and Technology Research Center was the pride of the University when it came to advanced academic research. From within its halls, only the best minds and the most modern equipment coming from university, government, and philanthropic funding – constantly producing research thrusts that could rival those of much more modern facilities. Agriculture, civil works, bacteriology, and alternative medicine - the studies were as varied as the people who worked there.
Most of the research findings found themselves posted in various journals that were sent out to academic archives all over the world for the betterment of mankind.
Well most of it, anyway.
Of the many projects housed in that complex, there was one hardly notable project located in a nondescript room in basement of the facility labeled as "maintenance room". It belonged the very few research projects will never get published.
And that night, that project was about to hit climax.
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Christian sprang the final four steps that led to the basement of the complex and landed his leathers with a solid thud. He weaved through the steamy piping and damp, cracked flooring to get through the western end of the place. He panted a bit and checked the drab plate sign of unpolished bronze that graced the sidewall of a metal door that resembled a fire exit more than a maintenance room.
Maintenance Room, it says. Heh, Christian chuckled for a second. He dipped his thumb on the last letter of the signed the same way one would when imprinting a thumb mark on some medical record. A motorized whir came from within the wall. In an instant, his finger was bathed in green light.
A pleasant elevatorish ding and an unlocking sound gave him the signal to proceed.
Inside the room was anything but a janitorial maintenance complex. It was what you would normally see in a highly sterilized scientific environment where everything is white. The computers cascaded in a descending stepped terrace setup with glass panes overlooking an observation area for a holding chamber were still on - most of them screen-savered.
Christian briskly walked towards the holding area. Halfway through the aisles of computers, a perturbed-looking young man in a lab gown with hair that looked uncombed for weeks blocked his path. The silvery folder he handed over to Christian reflected glint into his thick eyeglasses and pearly-white grin.
"The logs of the last run we did fifteen minutes ago, sir."
Christian grabbed the folder and squinted at its contents without trying to understand everything. "I came here with the knowledge that somebody in the phone told me that LAZARUS has started up, Jeeves."
The young man referred to as Jeeves almost jumped back, startled. He swallowed his saliva and replied in a half-shaking voice, "Well sir, we followed all standard procedures for this run and everything had been approved by you yesterday evening and..."
Christian closed the folder and shoved it back to Jeeves, effectively cutting the young man's attempt at a formal oral report. The irritated Christian forced his way to the observation deck where he could see the core of the whole Project as Jeeves apparently tried to stall him.
"Just tell me what happened, damn it!"
Jeeves took one deep breath and looked at Christian who looked hurriedly dressed in jeans and plain white shirt.
"She got activated for a few seconds, Sir. But at the last possible moment the Sentience Generation Code failed to interface with her neural structures. Against the standard protocol, I had to reroute the processing unit to the nearest possible source of SeGenCo."
"You should have notified me then," Christian replied while pushing the nosepiece of his eyeglasses and once again going through the printout logs from the folder.
Jeeves went back to his workstation a few steps away from the glass window where a much more relieved Christian was still reviewing the papers with the misty holding area as background.
"Her synaptic rate was dropping quickly, sir. I felt compelled to act outside authorization but within the limit of my jurisdiction. We want her alive but we also want her to be capable of intelligence."
Christian sighed and felt more relaxed this time. LAZARUS wasn't working as he had expected after all. And the snag of a critical program not working almost sounded like a good thing. And though he didn't know why, he felt that there was some justice in not giving life to something that wasn't made the same way men should be.
Project LAZARUS, as the name would suggest, was a project directly sponsored by the Government and the University to create the first human being completely in vitro, meaning, a living thing that would never enter or exit a human womb. The technology that went into the project had come from various sources from all over the world, some of them directly from US Government archives. The moral aspect of the LAZARUS project made the whole thing strictly confidential. That is, among a great many other secretive things.
Raising an artificial human from a basement room was a far-fetched idea that was being crushed by the pressure coming from the benefactors of the project. Christian, as tech lead of the project had already decided that the project should fail for a lot of reasons. Deep inside, he wanted LAZARUS to work out but he also wished it would never.
"Is she dead then?" Christian stared at the gleaming metallic human-containment capsule located of a tiled holding pen another story below the observation area, still swamped with white smoke. He remembered the first time he saw the damn thing coming in from Korea, it was still like a large metallic thermos as much as it was to him then.
"No, sir. It doesn't look like it," Jeeves replied with a deadliner baritone as he pressed switch for the vents of the holding area.
Christian watched eagerly as the white smoke cleared and the containment capsule's door swung open. The lucid blue liquid that used to fill its insides was all over the normally sterile floor. The visorless helmet connecting the subject to the encephalon programming devices hung lazily inside the capsule. A bit further around the metal container were footsteps from dainty feet and at the end of the trail, a circular mark on the tiles - darkened as though something had burnt it. The young man couldn't believe his eyes.
"She's gone," followed up Jeeves in a calm tone. Christian's mouth, still agape.
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Behind the two was Jeeve's workstation. A makeshift wired network connection could be seen from his desk to the capsule's support system boxes below the observation deck. On it's screen, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Ragnarok Online was still running.
At the center of the screen was a message around a white window. It read:
-Disconnected from Server-