Chapter 3:
Grimmel walked around the transparent cylinder while his trained eyes wandered across Albert Manstein's, or Astrid's frozen body, running his fingers along his jaw.
"Successfully connected with one of the microrobots!" an engineer called Amir reported. His fingers danced on the keyboard of a laptop, which was connected to a computer server the size of a fridge next to him by a cord.
"Can you move it around?" Grimmel asked.
"No, the blood is frozen, so it can't move, but the robot and the controlling system it carries seemed to be functioning well under extremely low temperature," he replied.
"Connect to all robots, and rewrite all of their commanding codes so that they will block all outer communications except your computer," Grimmel ordered.
"It's… it's kind of hard," Amir replied. "There are about three thousand microrobots in her, and each one has around thirty thousand to two million lines of codes. All scrambled up and some codes are just random words, not even computer codes, but still works for some reason."
"It's the defense mechanism," a nearby engineer called Ivar the Witless said. He was working with a gigantic hyperspectral camera pointing at Astrid's head that could only be moved by wheels.
"Focus on your scanning," Grimmel said. "I want a full report on her brain by the end of the day!"
"Listen, I think the robot identifies the accessing computer, and if it doesn't match up with the computer that controls it, it automatically scrambles the codes. It's the defense mechanism its creator programmed," Ivar said.
"Could be like that." Amir nodded gently. "Sometimes you are not that witless."
"I should be called Ivar the Witful!" Ivar boasted. "Which one of you can operate this baby?" He patted the metal protecting plate on the camera.
"I don't know how to use that, but I can feed you to my Deathgrippers." Grimmel shrugged. "It's not like there is only one HLP-N3 camera operator in DARPA."
Engineers in "The Ark" weren't like those old-fashioned engineers who had a square and serious face all the time and did nothing each day besides looking at random things through a microscope. The twenty-four engineers constantly joked and laughed as if they were a family, or at a bar drinking with friends.
"Your Deathgrippers will be gripping on their own deaths if you let me into their cage," Ivar laughed. "They eat me, and they'll be hearing me talking shit to them all the time in their stomachs until their heads explode."
Meanwhile, in a dark room on the third floor of Asgard, five of Helga's best computer operators sat before five 20-inch screens.
"According to the flight record, the transport plane landed in an abandoned airfield in West Virginia," one of them said.
"Can we narrow down even more? We just need to connect with the microrobots and we can get the exact location," Helga said behind him.
"We can't receive any signals. It's either the robots got shut down, or she is in a place where signals are blocked."
"Who was using that transport plane?"
"That C-130 belongs to the US Air Force, but two months ago DARPA requested temporary usage."
"Find all DARPA laboratories in West Virginia," Helga ordered before she exited the room.
Just a floor beneath, Hiccup's upper body was lying lazily on his computer table. He was sleeping, using his elbow as a pillow. On the counter behind him, Fishlegs was opening up a computer with a screwdriver and tried to add another chip into the circuit.
He let Hiccup to get some sleep. It has been four days since they received the project instruction from Sam, and Hiccup only returned home at night once. It turned out trying to connect two computers wirelessly without using the internet or satellite was harder than they thought. Using ultra-high frequency radio could solve the distance. NASA uses ultra-high frequency antennas to talk with rovers on Mars. But it turned out the antenna was easy to do, but a radio physically implanted in the computer's hardware wasn't.
Hiccup finally decided to get some sleep after working 50 hours straight. They consulted this problem with Gobber, which didn't turn out to be helpful because Gobber believed that by changing the transmitting capacity, they could transmit large amounts of data through radio.
Fishlegs's big hand the size of a dictionary didn't seem like the best person to do works that needed high accuracy like taking a laptop apart, but his thick fingers turned out to be as precise and gentle as a mom holding her baby.
He looked up from the green system board and saw Hiccup's right hand was still holding his phone. Fishlegs got down from the chair and walked over, seeing the picture of Astrid smiling at him on the phone screen.
Fishlegs sighed.
Then his vision traveled to Hiccup's messy auburn hair, and at the spot right above his neck, there were two simple braids. They didn't seem to be Hiccup's handiwork. He didn't have time for all that hair-styling and "try to look good" nonsense.
It had been roughly half a year after Astrid was thawed by Project Bifrost, and during Hiccup's free time, he was unstoppingly doing research of defrosting a human body without harming the organs, Nobody had done that before, at least not successfully.
But Hiccup turned out to be a much more talented engineer than they had expected. If he could be the first one in the world to weaponize Bose-Einstein Condensate, why couldn't he be the first one to reanimate a thawed human being? Reviving a frozen animal wasn't that hard, and it had already been done before, but just not on humans.
Fishlegs tried his best to not bring up Project Bifrost or Astrid during their daily conversation. After handing over the post-project continuous research to other teams, Hiccup moved all files on his computer about Project Bifrost into a flash drive and locked it in Niflheim, the underground storage space 250 meters below Asgard.
He continued fiddling with the wires. Not a lot of people tried to connect computers through radio. The large quantity of data that computers processed would crash most radio transmitters Fishlegs could find. And that problem seemed to be dwarfed when thinking they had to find a way to establish a two-way communication with an actual human brain and a computer.
That sounded like a fantasy to Fishlegs. And even if Thor knows how that worked, how the human body was going to react to a non-organic object was still a mystery.
While Fishlegs's fingers brushed through the cords, someone pushed open the door of their lab and walked in.
"Everything going alright there?" Gobber cried out. "What happened to that lad over there?"
"He is stressing out too much," Fishlegs replied without looking up at his superior, Main Engineer Gobber.
"I read your project instructions. We all know we can't turn ourselves from Muspelheim into Svartalfheim," Gobber grinned as he walked around in their lab.
"I don't want to be dwarfs, but they made the Gungnir. I want one of those," Fishlegs chuckled, gently cutting open the rubber protection layer of a wire and connecting the exposed copper threads with a converter.
"We might create our own Gungnir after you finish that project," Gobber said as he looked out through the window. "An extremely powerful weapon that doesn't miss its target."
Fishlegs's fingers stopped. He looked up from the mess on his lab counter. Because his back was facing Fishlegs, so Fishlegs couldn't see Gobber's facial expression. He looked as if he would smack himself.
"What does that mean?"
"I was just talking, really."
"No no. We can create a modern version of Gungnir. Maybe we can make it into a small missile or something. Use infrared camera and satellite as its eyes…" Fishlegs paused to think. "But in mythology, Odin's Gungnir never misses its target and that's what makes it so powerful. Not sure whether we can make that."
Gobber let out a long sigh in relief. Fishlegs was too nerdy to interpret the meaning behind Gobber's slipped words. Thank Thor Hiccup was still sleeping, otherwise, he would've caught Gobber's mistake right away.
"It's somewhere in West Virginia, sir," Helga reported as she strode through Sam's office and stood beside his desk.
Even though Sam told Helga that she didn't have to call him "sir", it was kind of hard for her to change his habit she formed in the military.
"Can we have a more precise location?" Sam asked with enthusiasm. He was just about to fall asleep after working all night, but his Chief Security Officer's words woke him as if someone poured a bucket of cold water on his head.
"No, DARPA used a C-130 from the Air Force. We could track the airplane through Air Force's radar, but we couldn't bypass DARPA's system firewall to access their detailed transportation report."
"Check for electricity usage for all buildings in West Virginia, usually a research center needs a lot of power, and then we can narrow it down," Sam ordered after a few seconds of pensiveness.
"Yes, sir," Helga said as she exited his office.
The next day, Ragnar, the director of DARPA, was trying to enjoy his sunny afternoon while sitting under a large parasol in the garden of his house, sipping a cup of black coffee. A pea tunnel stood in the corner, and the dense green leaves completely covered the metal frame. A roll of clematis climbed up the wooden fence with a few buttercups nestling near their roots. The middle of the garden is a large piece of rectangular lawn. The grass was neatly-cut, each one with the same height as all the other. No one would believe a six-foot-seven man like Ragnar who had leg muscles so huge that they even seemed to have muscles of their own would have the patience to tend a garden and make it turn into a kaleidoscope in spring.
The only object that didn't fit into this pristine peacefulness was the military-level laptop resting on the coffee stand. The screen showed a 3-D model of a human body, and the name tag at the bottom read "Albert Manstein."
Ragnar put his hand into his pocket and took out a pair of wireless headphones and put it on. Then his huge fingers punched the keyboard so hard that it sounded like a series of faint gunshots.
"Come in, Grimmel," he said into the speaker.
"We just finished the whole body scan, both through X-ray and molecular reader, and the data should be updated to the model by now," Grimmel's voice came out from the speaker. "All microbots are located. They can't move right now because the blood is frozen, but they are still functioning. We blackout all unverified communication inside the storage tank just in case whoever made her can locate her, but we can still access the microbots through The Ark's computers."
"Did you decipher the microbot's program codes?"
"No, they were all scrambled when we accessed their individual controlling software." Grimmel's voice was accompanied by loud statics. Not only because The Ark was underground, but because The Ark was one of DARPA's top secrets, it also jammed all unauthorized radio frequencies. Even though they were using DARPA's own communication system, the quality of the communication was somewhere around talking to each other with radio from the Vietnam war. "Did you check Muspelheim?"
"I couldn't get legal authorization to physically and electronically check their history products, so I tried some dark ways." Ragnar paused. "I tried to hack into their central computer."
"How did it go?"
"Not so well. Their network security uses infinite loops and irrational numbers... it is a cheap trick, I'll give them that, but quite unbreakable."
"Ask the CIA. They are the best hackers in the world," Grimmel joked. A few metallic clunking echoed in the background as other engineers worked on something else around him.
"CIA is too focused on listening to people's phone calls instead of doing what they are supposed to do," Ragnar sneered. He had absolutely no problem with verbally attacking the CIA since they had been taking funds that were intended to give to DARPA for themselves to, in Ragnar's words, "watching people having phone sex."
"I'm not really into computers. I'm a life scientist and chemist, and I only know enough about computers to do some basic works…"
Someone shouted loudly in the background.
"Amir what's going on?" Grimmel asked, forgetting he was still wearing his headset.
"Sudden brain activity!" Amir shouted back.
"Brain activity!? How the hell can someone's brain function in liquid nitrogen!" Grimmel bellowed as he ran toward the cylinder. His footsteps echoed in the corridor. It wasn't Grimmel's thing to shout or scream. He was always a calm engineer who had everything under his control. Watching Grimmel doing research was more like watching a cat playing with a mouse. And, of course, Grimmel was the cat. No matter how hard the mouse resisted, maybe even doing some fancy moves and luring the cat into a maze, but in the end, the mouse would always find a paw pinning him down.
"Grim what happened?" Ragnar asked horridly, sitting straight up in his chair instead of leaning back lazily like how he was just a second ago.
"I'll get back to you later," Grimmel replied and ended the communication without waiting for Ragnar's response.
Ragnar slowly reclined back into the chair. He looked around, finding out that the garden of his house looked still peaceful. But his mind wasn't peaceful.
About a hundred miles away, the inside of The Ark wasn't peaceful as well. Hearing about a brain still in function while the body temperature was lower than minus 200 degrees Celsius was a big enough news to even make the best engineers in this nation panic like little kids going into a haunted house for the first time.
Red lights flashed like the eyes of devils watching them. The deafening alarm was accompanied by the rapid thudding sound of armed guards and engineers running down the hallway.
An active brain in liquid nitrogen wouldn't actually do any harm to The Ark, since even this brain wasn't in liquid nitrogen, a brain itself couldn't do anything, but as the Lieutenant Engineer of The Ark, Grimmel still sounded the alarm. He wasn't taking any chances. Biological research wasn't the only one being conducted in The Ark. The nuclear research team who worked in the lab just three rooms away from them could cause an explosion wiping out entire West Virginia, or more, if something went out of control.
The brain getting back in function might turn out to have no harm... or a lot of harm, especially when this brain was connected to an all-time terrorist.
"How strong is the brain activity?" Grimmel asked as he strode into the room.
"The curve is not very large, just a bit flatter than a normal living person," Amir reported, staring at his computer screen. The keyboard crackled as his fingers pressed down on them.
At least half a dozen engineers gathered around the cylinder, and three armed guards stood in the corner with their M416 loaded. The guards weren't scientists, but their job was to make sure the big-brains here could still use their brains.
"Is the entrance secured?" Grimmel turned toward a guard.
"Yes, sir. This place is under temporary lockdown."
"Good," Grimmel patted his shoulder as he turned back to Amir. "Anything else happening in her body? Muscle movement?"
"Zero."
"Heartbeat?"
"Zero," Ivar replied.
"Pulse?"
"None."
"As expected… show me the EEG," Grimmel commanded.
Another engineer quickly hopped over piles of wires and handed an iPad to him. The EEG, or electroencephalography, the graph looked similar to those heartbeat lines. The curved line looked very alike to someone trying to draw a straight line but failed miserably and ended up being a wiggly line as if he traced along the edge of a rough stone found in the wildness.
"Very similar to REM…" Grimmel concluded.
He looked up at the girl in the cylinder, and through the glass wall, her eyes were still lifeless like an abandoned marionette. No matter what was going on in her brain, it wasn't showing on the outside.
"So she is in Rapid-Eye Movement sleep, but EMG and EOG have no response because her body is physically frozen solid," Amir said from behind. He wasn't a biologist, but all engineers in The Ark knew a bit of everything else.
Grimmel walked to the door and pressed his thumb against a fingerprint reader implanted in the concrete wall. As the green laser scanned across his thumb, the alarm and red lights were shut off.
When he looked at the EEG graph, he somehow believed Albert Manstein was asleep in the tank instead of frozen, and he thought the loud alarm outside would interrupt her. He knew that couldn't be more wrong but the side of him being a human being instead of a scientist made him somewhat… felt sorry for her.
Her facial expression was preserved by the low temperature, so they could all see how she looked the moment she was frozen. Her lips weren't completely closed and her neck was slightly turned toward her left as if she was just having a friendly conversation with someone at that moment. She wore a black combat uniform when Ragnar brought her to The Ark. It seemed like she was frozen during a battle, and whoever froze her clearly didn't mind freezing her clothes as well. It would be easier for that person, but it was not easy for Grimmel and his team to research her. Considering she was also wearing combat gloves and boots, there wasn't a lot of exposed skin for them to attach enough rods on her. Grimmel spent two days setting up the electrodes against her scalp without pressuring the skin too much. He had to use a robotic arm to set the electrodes in the right place because he was afraid that if engineers did it manually, sometimes people would miss-judge how much strength they had.
Now, Albert Manstein was almost naked. They couldn't just peel the clothes off, so Grimmel used ultrasound vibration to shatter the clothes' molecular structure. The clothes were also as fragile as her skin already, so he just had to put a little bit of pressure and the clothes would turn into ash.
"Grimmel, the EEG graph hasn't changed yet. She is still in REM," Amir said softly. When the alarm was turned off, the room became as quiet as the inside of a library. Even though the engineers were also stunned or even terrified with what was taking place before them, they still looked confident on the outside and focused on their work, only exchanging conversation when necessary.
"But we can't really do anything, right? We can't inject anything into her. Now her clothes are off but we still can't risk putting on too many biological sensors. If we want to do more research we need to connect more sensors physically onto her body. But if we put too much pressure on any part of her body, the body structure would collapse." Grimmel sighed after a few minutes.
After realizing they couldn't interpret whatever was going on in Albert Mansteins' head, the excitement quickly left the engineers, and they seemed to forget the fact that Albert Manstein was in temperature of less than minus 200 Celsius.
An ocean. She could see an ocean, with half of the sun above the horizon and turning the clouds bright red and the waves glimmered under the fading halo.
She could feel her bare feet pressing against the soft sand as if she was walking on a fluffy carpet. The ticklish feeling of sand running through the gap between her toes sent shivers down her spine.
She found herself laughing, laughing at a boy who was holding her hand and walking in front of her. The boy constantly turned around and said something but she couldn't hear a sound. She could only hear his lips moving up and down.
"Astrid c'mon!"
That voice echoed in the deepest part of her brain. She didn't hear it. It just appeared in her mind.
Who was Astrid? She said to herself. Who is that weird boy and why am I holding his hand?
"I thought you were in the cross-country team!"
The voice echoed again.
Was that from the boy?
"Astrid you always wanted to spend your birthday there!"
Birthday? She couldn't remember anyone's birthday happening now.
She suddenly felt a billow of tiredness consuming her. Her legs felt as if they were made out of lead.
"Astrid? Astrid are you okay?"
She felt her eyelids being dragged down and the world seemed to be drifting away from her. She couldn't feel her arms, legs, or even just herself.
"It's okay. It's okay."
But despite everything, she could still feel a pair of arms wrapping around her, like a mother taking her injured child into her arms and hugging them until they felt safe.
"We'll figure out a way."
She felt her consciousness slowly fading away and her mind going into sleep. The boy's touch sent warmths into her cold body. After a few minutes of struggle, her legs finally gave in and she collapsed down on the beach.
"I'll bring you back, Astrid."
The boy lied down beside her, pulling her into his embrace as she fell asleep. She couldn't remember who the boy was, but he looked strangely familiar. It was like after waking up from a dream she couldn't remember what exactly happened in her dream.
She let the boy hug her and brush her bang away from her face. She didn't know why but she felt a strong sense of intimacy toward him.
Before the last sense of consciousness disappeared, she could feel the boy gently laying a kiss on her forehead.
Amir looked up from his computer. The curve on the EEG graph flattened.
"Grimmel, I think the REM is over," he said after a few moments of silence.
Grimmel didn't reply. He still stared at the girl's lifeless eyes, as if he wanted to talk to her through eye contact.
"Sir?"
"Sorry," Grimmel blinked and apologized while rubbing his eyes and walking away from the cylinder. "Record this incident. I want every part of the EEG graph fully analyzed."
To be continued.
A big thank you to all of you taking your time and reading this. I really appreciate it :) Hope to see you again shortly.