Lab 6 (6 page)

As Sam read, he heard his mother and father clomp silently upstairs. He heard the gentle rumble of their voices, a few minutes of TV, then silence.

The whole world asleep but me.

With a yawn, Sam turned to the last page of the article. There, in a box at the bottom of the page, was a small piece entitled “Twin Tidbits.”

Under the title was a close-up photo of a man’s outstretched palm. He was holding a strange-looking dark clump.

Sam read the paragraph below it:

Gross.

But too bad it didn’t happen to Jamie. Bart would have been a great little teratoma.

Sam smiled. The magazine had done the trick. His eyes were drooping.

No more nightmares tonight, Sam.

No more floating through streets.

No more haunted voices in your brain.

No more ghoulish scenes in your bedroom.

Sam drifted off, thinking gratefully of the strange machine that had helped him so much, and of the ludicrous ideas he had had about the voice in the basement …

The transpatheter took care of everything, took old Kevin away
…

Sam’s eyes sprang open.

He practically leaped out of bed.

It can’t be
…

All his thoughts were coming together in a new way

The feeling …

The sense that two people were inside …

Midge and Madge — the connection that lasted over a lifetime, across a continent …

Sam rushed out of his room. Treading softly, he sneaked to the kitchen.

He tore open the phone book, found the number for Richter, and tapped it out on the phone’s keypad.

“Yo.”

“Jamie? Did I wake you?”

“No. Who is this?”

“Sam. Listen — ”

“Do you know what time it is? Doesn’t anyone sleep at your house?”

“Yeah, my parents. Meet me at the corner of Webster and Elm.”

“Now? I’m practicing!”

“Take a break,”

“Sam, I’m hanging up. If you call me like this again, I will kill you.”

“Five minutes.”

Click.

Sorry I left. But I may get this to work.

You can’t. You have an obligation —

We must continue.

But I may not need to.

A safety precaution. In case we lose you. Now.
OUR MISSION IS
…

“T
HIS BETTER BE WORTH
it.” Jamie was livid. Sam could tell, even if he couldn’t see her face in the darkness as she jogged up the street. “It’s, like, four o’clock
A.M.
”

“Three forty-five,” Sam said, turning down Webster Avenue. “Just follow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Turing-Douglas.”

“WHAT? Give me one good reason I should follow you.”

“I’m reviewing your next concert.”

“That’s a good reason.” Jamie fell into step beside him.

“Jamie,” Sam said firmly, “the voice I heard in the window — the voice from Lab Six — it
was my
voice. That’s why it sounded familiar.”

“What?”

“You believed I heard a prisoner, remember?”

“Yes.”

“And you thought the prisoner was this …
Kevin.”

“A theory.”

“Well, Kevin does exist, Jamie. He’s the prisoner. And he’s my twin.”

She was staring at him.

Dumbfounded.

“Sam, if you’re having, like, a breakdown or something, can you do it at home?”

Show her.

Sam ducked under a street lamp and pulled his shirt down, revealing a scar near his collarbone. “Look at this.”

“I’m going, Sam …”

“The mark, Jamie! It’s from an operation I had when I was a baby. The doctors removed a growth.”

“You sure they didn’t remove a little something from between your ears?”

“Read this.” Sam pulled out the
Professor Phlingus
magazine, open to the twin article. He handed it to her.

Jamie’s eyes narrowed as she read it. “Your growth was … this thing? A teratoma?”

“I don’t know for sure. My parents never talked about it much. They just said it was benign.”

“Did they
tell
you that they’d been expecting twins?”

“No.”

“So what makes you think — ?”

“Put yourself in their shoes, Jamie. The doctor says you’re expecting twins. But it doesn’t happen. You have one healthy boy. How will he feel if you tell him the truth? You’re a twin — how would
you
have felt if you’d done that to Bart? Guilty, probably. Lonely, at least. So they hid it from me.”

“So you think you
absorbed
him — “

“Those headaches — they were more than that. I felt as if two people were crowded in my brain — ”

Jamie backed away. “This is weird, Sam. Even for me — ”

“He stayed inside me, Jamie. All these years. I saw him in a dream tonight. He was sitting at my desk. He looked exactly like me. And I couldn’t stop yelling the name Kevin. When I woke up, my parents were by my bed. They had this machine — they’ve been working on it for years. It can upload emotions from a human into brain circuitry. They used it on me, and the feeling disappeared. Everything was transferred out. Kevin was gone, and I was still there.”

Jamie burst out laughing. “But that’s ridiculous, Sam.”

“Any more ridiculous than the other things in
Professor Phlingus
?”

“Hello? One major logical problem — if you absorbed him, then he’s gone. If he’s gone, how on earth could he be calling you from a basement window?”

“That’s what I don’t know! But he
did.
Maybe a part of him survived. But I have some of his brain circuitry. That would explain the transpatheter. Maybe Mom and Dad are trying to construct the rest of him — ”

“Sam, that is disgusting!”

“Why would he be calling for help? Maybe he doesn’t have the ability to move on his own.”

“Listen to yourself. Do you really believe your parents would keep this — whatever it is, this
thing
— all locked up in the basement of a big lab for almost fourteen years, without anybody ever finding out? Do you realize how that sounds?”

Stupid.

Gruesome.

But possible.

They were scientists.

They had one child who was born healthy. Another who wasn’t. For some reason, they had to keep the child hidden. Maybe they needed to protect him. Maybe he couldn’t live outside the lab.

So they held on to him. They held out hope the only way they could. They waited.

Until the technology could catch up to that hope.

If you thought about it, they had no other choice. They
had
to try.

They were parents.

“I was hoping you’d understand,” Sam said. “But if you don’t, that’s cool. Totally cool.”

He turned away and began walking. As he rounded the corner, Turing-Douglas came into sight. The building was dark. Only the hum of the basement generator gave any hint that the place was different from the hulking shells around it.

Jamie’s footsteps pattered up behind him. “Wait, Sam.”

“Go away,” Sam said resolutely.

“You need me.”

“I can do this myself.”

Jamie pulled a small stack of magnetic cards out of her pocket. “Not without these.”

Sam stopped. The cards were marked
T-D: UNAUTHORIZED USE STRICTLY PROHIBITED BY LAW
and stamped with his parents’ names.

“What the — ”

“They were way in the back of a file cabinet drawer.” Jamie shrugged. “Spares, I guess. I was going to return them, but you pitched a hissy fit in front of your house — ”

“You stole them.”

“You need them.”

Grab them. Now.

Before you have a chance to think.

Sam took the cards and continued toward the building. Jamie followed close behind.

He braced himself for the headache to come back. But it didn’t. He felt fine.

The rear door was still ajar. Sam pushed it open and stepped into the harsh light of the basement corridor.

“I don’t hear anything,” Jamie whispered.

“Ssshhh.” Sam tiptoed down the hallway, reading the signs on the doors.

LAB 6
.

His hands shook. He fumbled the cards.

Jamie took them from him and studied the fine print. She inserted one of them in the slot.

The little red indicator light turned to green. Jamie pushed.

The door swung open.

Blackness stared back at them, punctuated by tiny lights on the walls and on a console in the center of the room.

Sam stepped inside. A low thrumming sound came from the console. He could see small backlit graphs, all trailing symmetrical sine waves. Squinting to adjust to the darkness, he felt along the door for a light switch.

Click.

Behind them, the door slammed shut.

“Jamie?” he whispered.

“Sorry,” she whispered back. “There’s so much
stuff here.
Where’s the — ”

“Da-a-ad?”

The voice made them both jump.

It was small. Muffled.

Sam’s voice.

OUR MISSION IS …

Uh … to — to increase our ranks. To find those minds have not yet closed to the possibilities —

BECAUSE
…

All are capable, but few are qualified.

OUR GREATEST OBSTACLE IS
…

Ignorance.

AND
…

Please. I’m forbidden to say.

SPEAK ITS NAME
…

You must answer all the questions!

“O
H MY GOD,
S
AM
. You didn’t tell me your dad’s here,” Jamie blurted out.

“Jamie, that wasn’t me!” Sam whispered.

“What do mean, it wasn’t you?”

“Someone else is in here!”

“Your dad’s in
here
?”

“Not my dad! Someone else!”

Sam was pawing the wall for a switch, but it was crammed with shelves covered with equipment.

A glass beaker fell to the floor with a crash.

“Sam, if you’re playing a joke on me, I will never forgive you — ”

“Please … respond,” the voice said in an odd monotone. “Dad, is that you?”

“Oh my god—it isn’t you. It’s different, isn’t it?”

“Be cool, Jamie.” Sam was shaking. “F-find the light switch.”

“The … green light … at knee level … by the door,” the voice said.

Sam saw it, but his arm froze.

He wasn’t sure he wanted light.

What am I going to see?

Do I want to see it?

He backed toward the door. “Jamie? I think I changed my mind …”

“Here it is!”

Zzzzt.

The overhead fluorescent flickered on.

Sam’s eyes shut. He braced himself, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

Then, slowly, he peeked.

A table came into focus — large and round, made of solid black marble, with a dark wood cabinet underneath and a clear glass dome on top, a little larger than a basketball.

Inside the dome was what looked like an electronic honeycomb — four layers of motherboards, each crammed with cards of varying sizes. In front of the dome was an ordinary-looking keyboard and screen.

The table and the domed apparatus trailed nests of tangled wires. They snaked through the room, attached to various instruments along the wall.

And that was it.

No person at all.

“Where is he?” Jamie asked.

“HELP … ME!”

The voice was louder. It came from the center of the room.

And Sam noticed the screen for the first time:

They were the words that the computer had just spoken.

“I don’t believe this …” Sam murmured.

Jamie looked from the dome to the screen. “This is Kevin?”

“HELLL — ”

Sam ran his thumb along a thumbpad and double-clicked on
DISABLE.
The voice abruptly stopped.

“An alarm,” Sam said.

“Kevin is an
alarm system?”

“With my voice sampled into it.”