The prisoner transport had arrived ahead of schedule ("Apparently, there's a cyclone heading toward the island, so the flight had to take off early," Alfred had told him over coffee. "My luck. Do you know how bloody rare cyclones are in that part of the world"), and Alfred had flown back to Rockfort to make sure the new prisoners arrived, that the old prisoners were still securely locked up and under-heel, and that his island—and his mansion—wouldn't be doggerlanded by the storm.
Grayson met with Don in the bar. The place was packed, but that was usually the case on Fridays. A couple of warehouse guys had gathered around the pool-table, the green baize duct-taped and cigarette-burned in several places, sinking balls into pockets and taunting the researchers they were playing against. On the stereo system, "Uptown Girl" ended, and "Separate Ways" began, and the guys assembled around the pool-table started drunkenly belting out the lyrics, lilting them whenever they couldn't remember the words, which was most of the time.
"You get the temp card?" Grayson asked Don, and sipped his beer.
Don sat across from him at the fold-out table. He dug his fingers into the pocket on his coveralls, came up with a slab of hard gray plastic and laid it on the table. "Aye," he said. "It's a copy of Peter's card." From that same pocket, Don produced a cigarette and stuck it into his mouth. He offered a smoke to Grayson.
"Thanks," he said, and let Don light it. Grayson blew a cloud of smoke, and it was subsumed into the permanent cigarette-smoke fug that hung over the bar. "Didn't know you smoked."
"I dinnae usually smoke," said Don, "but this shite you've got me doin' has my nerves wracked."
"If it makes you feel better," said Grayson, collecting the card and pocketing it, "Alfred's gone back to Rockfort."
Don leaned on his elbows, peering at him. "Really?"
Grayson nodded. "Apparently, cyclones are rare around Rockfort, and one's about to smash right into the island. He had to go back."
"So we dinnae have to worry 'bout Alfred findin' us out?"
"Exactly."
Don looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. "That makes me feel a lot better," said the Scotsman, and knocked back his beer. He rubbed his flushed, freckled face, and said, "I dinnae fancy bein' on the business-end of Alfred's gun." Don grimaced, then said, "I'd ask if you ken what it's like to see a man's brains on the outside of his head, but you were in Raccoon City."
"Kinda looks like scrambled eggs," agreed Grayson. "Also," he said, reaching into his blazer and slipping out a piece of folded paper, "I wanted your opinion on this." He unfolded it and laid it on the table. "Found this. No idea what the fuck it's supposed to be."
Don slid the paper closer and studied it, his forehead creasing with concentration. He was silently mouthing the words to himself, his finger running along the notes crammed into the margins of the sketch. He raised his eyebrows, and said, "These numbers are equations of state."
"English, please," said Grayson.
"Essentially, math problems relatin' to state variables. Describin' the state of matter under certain physical conditions. Some of these other equations are chemistry equations—maybe for dosage and chemical ratios—but chemistry ain't really my area of expertise." Don skimmed over the paper again, then said, "Seems whoever wrote this was tryin' to work out the numbers for some kind of"— The Scotsman stopped himself, choosing his words carefully—" torpor liquid."
"What the fuck does that mean?"
"You know how animals hibernate?" Grayson said that he did, and Don said, "That's what I mean. Some kinda liquid induces torpor in humans by suppressin' their metabolism. Goes on to describe an oxygen system, catheters for flushin' the literal shite out of you, feed-lines, thermoregulator, electrical stimulation to keep muscles from atrophyin'—this is a fuckin' stasis tank, literal sci-fi shit." Don looked at him, incredulous. "And the scary part? The math seems fuckin' sound. Where the hell did you find this?"
"Alexia's room."
The Scotsman leaned across the table, tapping the paper with his forefinger. The nail was battered and chipped, and there was a dark subungual hematoma under it. "And she's dead. Do you realize what you've got here, mate?" he said, softly. "A one-way ticket to bein' the richest fuckin' man on the planet."
"I don't want be the richest man on the planet," said Grayson, carefully folding the paper and pocketing it.
"Alexia's bloody dead, mate," said Don. "Why waste her work? You can always bloody credit her, posthumously. That thing, if it fuckin' works, would revolutionize the medical and astronautics fields, and we'd be rich fuckin' men."
"We?"
"You need someone to build a prototype, mate, and I'm that guy. And this place is full of scientists who can do all the science shite."
"Look," said Grayson, steering the conversation away from the topic of selling Alexia's work, "let's just check out the lab."
It was a long walk from the bar, and an even longer ride on a private elevator, to Alexia's laboratory. It was, at least to Grayson's knowledge (though he didn't doubt Alexia had performed other experiments down here), predominantly dedicated to Alexia's myrmecology and botany research.
As the elevator's doors slid open, they were greeted by a loud susurrus of chittering and buzzing, and countless skittering things. Alfred had warned him of the infestation, but Grayson hadn't expected it to have gotten this bad: ants, thousands upon thousands of them, swarmed around them, some flying, others scuttling along the expansion-grate catwalk. The catwalk ringed a huge, swollen nest that looked less like a nest, Grayson decided, and more like an excised, perforated tumor, and the air stank of rancid meat, and of something that reminded him of spoiled mushrooms.
Curiously, none of the ants attacked them. They found Peter, or what was left of him, slumped against a wall, still strapped into his insecticide rig, the sprayer clutched in his fist, his face frozen in a permanent scream of pain. Most of his flesh had been chewed off by the ants (Grayson didn't even want to imagine what being eaten alive by ants must have felt like, and he hoped Peter had died quickly), and where Peter's eyes used to be were crusted sockets, and there were ants crawling in them.
"What the fuck was Alexia doin' down here?"
"Alexia was obsessed with ants," replied Grayson, sounding much calmer than he actually felt. "Something about eusociality and pheromones."
"I thought she was a fuckin' virologist."
"She was," he said. "Her research was independent of Spencer."
The Scotsman darted a look at Peter and said, "We should grab the bastard's fuckin' insecticide."
"The ants aren't biting us," observed Grayson. "Just don't rile them up. Probably why Peter died. He sprayed them, and they got angry."
"These ants dinnae look fuckin' normal, Grayson."
"That's because they've mutated, Don."
They passed Alexia's office—that wasn't what Grayson was interested in—and stopped in front of an enormous, vault-like door. A keypad was mounted on the wall beside it, and he swiped the temp card, but the pad flashed red and beeped its denial. "The fuck is she keepin' behind there?" asked Don, squinting at the door.
"No idea," said Grayson, and tried the card again. Beep . He swore under his breath, then said, "I never saw the inside. But the thing Alfred's keeping from me is inside there. I know it." He stepped away from the keypad, considering their options. Then, "Guess we should check out Alexia's office. She might have a keycard lying around."
"Guessin' the temp card was only good for the elevator," said Don.
Grayson nodded. "Seems like it."
They turned back to Alexia's office, carefully negotiating a path through the ants. Alexia's office was part office, part myrmecology laboratory. The office part was decorated like a Victorian study, with a touch of rococo. A Plexiglass window partitioned the laboratory from the office, and inside the lab was a row of large cylindrical tanks filled with sand, a high-powered electron microscope, and a dusty computer station.
Don started opening drawers and pulling books off Alexia's shelves, while Grayson did the same; though he suspected they were looking for two very different things. "Did that wee lassie ever read anything that wasn't fuckin' academic?" the Scotsman asked, leafing through the pages of A Treatise on the Eusociality of Ants . "Or related to fuckin' bugs."
"Ants," corrected Grayson, rifling through the drawers of Alexia's desk. Alexia stashed everything in her desk. "She liked J.R.R Tolkien."
"She has good taste," said Don, approvingly.
He found Alexia's keycard wedged between the pages of a book on attine ants called The First Farmers. "Found the card," he said. "She was using it as a bookmark."
"Hope it hasn't been demagnetized," said Don.
They went back to the vault-door, and Grayson swiped Alexia's keycard. The keypad blipped green. The door's gaskets released, and it rumbled open, and he hoped the noise wouldn't disturb the ants. The ants remained indifferent.
The room beyond the door was dark, lit by the cold glow of CRT monitors and automated computer feeds. On the far side of the room stood an enormous tank of glass and insulated steel, cabled to wall-sized computers studded with lights and knobs and rocker switches, and to a rack of four massive oxygen tanks, and to other machines Grayson could not identify.
Inside the tank was a woman snared in a tangle of intravenous wires and biofeedback sensors, an oxygen mask secured over her mouth and nose. She was blonde and tall, and very beautiful, and Grayson would know her face in a crowd of thousands, of hundreds of thousands, of millions.
"Alexia," he said, aloud.
Don gawped, less interested in Alexia and more interested in the machine in which she floated. He poked around the machine, inspecting the wires and the computers those wires were connected to, trying to puzzle out how it all worked, and how a thirteen-year-old girl built something that veteran scientists had only been able to theorize on. "This is the thermoregulator," said Don, pointing to a large square machine. "It's cycling in the hypometabolic range. How the fuck did this wee lassie build all of this with 1980s fuckin' technology?"
Grayson didn't answer Don. He put his hands on the glass, and it felt cold to the touch.
"Grayson, do you realize we have a fuckin' workin' prototype," said Don, gesturing at the tank, "right here in front of us? And the guinea pig's fuckin' included."
"Alexia," said Grayson, a sudden anger rising in him like bile, "is not a guinea pig."
"Mate, she might nae even be alive in there. This is experimental tech," said Don. The Scotsman glanced at the computers, and said, "I bet all the information, all the fuckin' data we'd need, is right there in those computers."
"Leave it, Don." His voice came out cold, harsh. But Don was talking about Alexia as if she were just a thing in his way, an obstacle between him and his riches, and that deeply angered Grayson.
Don seemed to sense that it was in his best interest to do as Grayson said, and he did. He went back to nosing around the machine. "What I want to know," said Don, suddenly, "is what kind of fluid is she usin' in that fuckin' fishtank to induce torpor? It cannae be liquid nitrogen or liquid helium, or your other typical cryogens. It would kill her cells. It's why cryonics is a fuckin' scam."
"Maybe it's something Alexia developed specifically for this," said Grayson. "Something that's not on the market. Something new."
"She's not movin' in there at all. She looks dead," said Don.
Grayson knew it was a possibility that Don was right, that Alexia was dead—this was highly experimental, never-before-seen technology that should have only existed in science fiction movies—but he didn't want to think about that. Alexia was right there, just beyond the glass, and he wanted to imagine that she would wake up someday, and she would see him and know that he'd been waiting for her. And he would wait for her, for as long as it took.
"Alfred was probably checkin' on her vitals or somethin'," ventured Don, stroking his beard. "Monitorin' her progress. Makin' sure nothin' went wrong."
"Would a power outage kill her?" asked Grayson. "If she's still alive in there."
"If Alexia was smart enough to build this fuckin' contraption, she was probably smart enough to wire it up to a dedicated generator and build a power failsafe, like a battery, into the tank itself. But aye, she could, if somethin' went wrong. These are auld generators, mate."
"So," said Grayson, slowly, "if the power surged or cut out, she could die. That's all it would take."
"Aye," said Don, and nodded, "that's the right of it."
"I'm not leaving this room," said Grayson, firmly.
"You cannae sleep down here, Grayson," said Don. "You have to fuckin' eat, shit, piss, and shower. You plannin' to shit and piss in a corner, or over the fuckin' handrail outside? You plannin' to eat the fuckin' ants, to sleep on the cold steel floor?"
"Alfred isn't here," said Grayson. "Someone has to watch her. And I'm going to watch her."
"Mate, she might already be fuckin' dead."
"Then why would Alfred come down here?"
"Because he's a fuckin' loon," said Don. "Probably talks to her fuckin' corpse."
"She was thirteen when she 'died', Don," said Grayson. "But look at her. She's a woman now. Dead people don't age."
"Maybe she was alive at one point, but died recently," hazarded the Scotsman, watching him with a sympathetic look. "Mate, no human has ever successfully hibernated. Humans ain't meant to fuckin' hibernate."
"What about the fucking schematic?" he snapped, scowling at Don.
"It all looks and reads soundly, but that dinnae means it'll work," said Don. "Time travel is also technically possible, in theory. It's just a solid foundation we can build on, but that's 'bout it, mate."
Grayson said nothing, watching Alexia beyond the cold glass. She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. "Just go, Don," he said. "Leave me alone with her."
"Mate, get out of your feelings and—"
"I said go."
Don sighed, threw up his hands in defeat. "Fine," he said, "I'll go. But I'll be checkin' on you, you fuckin' numpty." He gave one last look at the stasis tank, at the machines it was wired to, and then he left.
