The Prisoner (31 page)

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. Everybody is knocked out?”

She checked her watch—22:45—and nodded. “You couldn’t sleep?”

He didn’t answer but stepped over to Russo, checked the machine readings, drips, and lines, then neared the settee.

Laurel gathered her legs and moved aside to make room.

“That man is incredible.” Floyd nodded toward the bed.

She waited.

“When I first saw him, I was shocked. I was expecting someone who had been serving a hibernation sentence for a few years, not a living corpse.”

“What do you mean?”

“At the sugar cubes, the inmates are monitored constantly. Once their vitals show signs of decay, they are raised to the medical facility. There, an army of specialists backed with advanced instruments flush their organs of built-up toxins and redress most of the damage.” He nodded again in Russo’s direction. “I doubt that man was ever brought up from his tank.”

Laurel didn’t know, but Floyd was probably right.

“Back at Nyx, I would have given him a one in ten chance of recovery, maybe. If he were one of my patients, I would have recommended he be terminated.”

“You’d have killed him?”

“No. I wouldn’t have tried to revive him.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Life is not an absolute, but death is. Some patients decay to such an extent that recovery is almost impossible. Yes.” He turned to look into her eyes. “You can be ninety-nine percent dead with an active brain. Before we return a patient from torpor, we must always weigh how alive the patient will be when we finish. This is an issue we have to consider daily in my line of work.”

“You play God?”

“That’s a spiny subject. We play at being God whenever we extend life by artificial means.”

She picked up her book, placed the beer coaster she’d been using as a bookmark between the pages, and closed it, laying it down on a small side table. “And now? What are his chances?”

“I don’t know. His metabolism is responding and his blood chemistry is much better. Not normal—that will take a long
time—but acceptable. The problem is what will happen after I withdraw sedation.”

“His mind?”

“If they’d do this to his body, what did they do to his mind? Yes. I’m familiar with standard hibernation side effects—the physiological imbalances and systemic damage—but in my work we’re careful to keep mental activity monitored and vitals within tight limits. Whoever did this to him must have hated him beyond reason.”

For a while they shared a silence, punctuated only by the faint beeps from the machines.

“I’m sorry about your other friend, er—Sebastian.”

“Bastien. Bastien Compton.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyes filmed over. “Why did it happen?”

“What you did was a crazy stunt—much more dangerous than any of you could have guessed. Sinking into torpor only to be roused a few minutes later subjected your body to a huge systemic shock.”

“You mean we all could have died?”

Floyd didn’t answer at once. When he did, his voice seemed to come from somewhere farther away. “Yes. In a way, it’s a small miracle Raul and you pulled through intact.”

She straightened, aghast at the implication. Floyd shook his head, as if he could follow her train of thought. “Don’t be harsh on Tyler and the others who planned the operation. They probably didn’t know.”

“How could they not?”

“I spoke with Tyler earlier; that’s when he told me about Bastien. He couldn’t understand what had happened to your friend either. The truth is, little has leaked from Hypnos, or any of the companies offering commercial hibernation, about the drawbacks of the technology.”

“Couldn’t you have warned them?”

“How could I? All I knew was that a group of people would bring an inmate over to Nyx through the sewers. I had no idea of the details.”

She leaned back and shook her head.
Had I known all the
risks, would I still have done it?
It came as no surprise that the answer was yes, but their ignorance had come at a harrowing cost.

Floyd turned again toward the shape on the bed. “Who is he?”

His question traced a line in the sand; she could cross it or maintain her silence. But she’d crossed the line when she reached for his hand in the van. “His name is Eliot Russo.”

Floyd stood, his brow creased. He wandered randomly around the room, his restless fingers touching a tube or a container as if looking for something to do. At the top of the bed, he paused to look at the taut skin over Russo’s skull. “I remember. … A lawyer, a political activist, ostensibly killed in a car accident, five, six years ago?”

“Eight.”

Floyd sucked air and smacked his lips. “Shit.”

“You can say that.”

“So it really is him and us.”

“I don’t follow.” Laurel did, but she wanted to hear his voice.

“You do. I presume this operation is about exposing what’s happened to him.”

She waited.

“To do that, he must recover and keep his mental faculties, at least a little. If he dies or turns up insane, we’ll never make it. Whoever did this to him will make sure.” Floyd paced back to the settee and slumped at her side without much elegance. “How many more like him are there?”

She looked up to find his eyes searching her face. “I don’t know. I once heard Shep—Tyler speak of many.”

After removing his moccasins, Floyd coiled his long body into the settee and curled up his legs, hiking his feet onto the seat so that their toes touched. “Hopeless.” His voice grew darker.

“There’s always hope.”

“Hope is the denial of reality.”

Laurel bunched her toes over his. “Where have you pilfered that quote from?”

“No idea. How can the government tolerate such bestiality?”

“In this case, because they know nothing about it,” Laurel said.

“Impossible.”

“Is it? Governments have grown pyramidal—too large, complex, and fragmented. Those at the top don’t know what happens at lower levels. Providing the waters remain calm and the bottom line tallies, they have no reason to dig into the bowels of any one department.”

“So is this a DHS operation?” Floyd asked.

“In cahoots with other intelligence agencies.”

“And Hypnos? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why?”

“Something like this couldn’t be kept secret forever. Eventually someone would blow the whistle.”

“That’s what we’re hoping to do.” Under the soles of her feet, he splayed his toes like a cat.

“So you’re crusaders championing the ideal of omnipotent justice.” There was a hard tinge to his voice, as if people fighting a corrupt system for the sake of ideals embodied something shameful, even dangerous.

“What’s troubling you?” Laurel asked.

“You are.” He waved a hand toward the door, and Laurel realized he’d used the plural. “You seem like good people, but you know next to nothing about whoever is pulling the strings or their motives. Ideals have a nice ring, but this reeks of a political struggle—one of the age-old battles for power after which nothing ever changes. Chances are, the players will regroup to tally up their wins and losses after mopping up the spent pawns in the field.”

“You mean that regardless of the outcome, even if it becomes public, what the DHS …”

“Right.
If
it ever becomes public. Perhaps the threat of blowing the lid is all our unknown master puppeteers need to achieve their ends. If so, we are nothing more than a troublesome loose end.”

“Twenty years ago, a cover-up like this couldn’t have happened,” Laurel said.

“You mean the Internet?”

Back in the ‘30s, artists and writers had waged a vicious campaign to change the rules, or lack of them, governing the Internet. Naturally, film, play, book, media, and music producers had supported the initiative with enthusiasm. As a result, the last glimmer of real freedom the world had ever known disappeared almost overnight. The exercise had been a remarkably simple two-step operation under the cover of intellectual property protection. Part one of the process entailed placing government-controlled server farms in high-security buildings buttressed by a new generation of supercomputers. Once the hardware was in place, individuals and organizations were given six months in which to migrate to the new servers. Then part two came into effect: Before a private server, network, or Web site could be housed, every piece of content needed a hard-crypto electronic signature to identify its author.

Against all predictions, the public uproar faded rapidly, because authorities leveled a morally unshakable argument: The new laws didn’t reduce anyone’s freedom to post whatever they wanted, providing it hadn’t been stolen.

Surfing remained unchanged; anybody could browse the World Wide Web and download at leisure in relative anonymity. But uploading was a different matter. To upload content, the files entered a short quarantine until the sender’s identity could be certified—a procedure lasting a few minutes. Whoever published an item whose authorship was disputed became blacklisted from further postings until the matter was settled. Any content backed with a banned signature would never reach the server. Naturally, dissidents—and a few nations—had tried to fool the system, and some managed to upload “delinquent” material. But it was a short-lived victory. After a flurry of stiff prison sentences and even banning entire countries from the Web for protracted periods while the software was purged of glitches and the procedure fine-tuned, anonymity was eradicated from every scrap of data on the Web. Like its predecessor, the Wild West Web had finally been tamed.

Laurel straightened but didn’t shift her feet. “I follow your
line of thinking, but you’re wrong. This is not only a matter of ideals.” The silky feeling of his warm toes was too delicious for words.

He waited.

“He’s my father.”

Floyd jerked his head toward Russo as if harboring the hope she could be referring to somebody else. “I—I’m sorry.”

“So am I, but parents are hard to choose.”

“I meant—”

“I know.”

“So puny idealism had little to do with your involvement in this operation.”

“You sound relieved.”

“Few ideals survive past sophomore year, and those that do owe much to delusion and wishful thinking.”

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I believe the center inmates are an obscenity. I’ve gambled my life to stop it.”

“But you said—”

“That man is my father, but he’s also a stranger. I’ve been told he happened to contribute his sperm, but I had never met him before.” Over the next few minutes Laurel painted verbal-shorthand sketches of her upbringing by the Coles, the only parents she’d ever known, and the unknown patron of her exclusive and costly education.

“Is he the leader? Your benefactor—is he running the operation?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know if they’re the same person. I’ve never met him—either of them.” Laurel narrowed her eyes. “We’ve spoken on several occasions; that’s how I know Russo is my father. My benefactor, as you call him, outlined his plan, but it was my decision to become involved. Only Tyler has met him, and I trust both of them.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Ideals is the byword, but it’s more complex than that. The offer came at a difficult point in my life. I was depressed and feeling useless. This was a chance to do something important, something that could change our society a little, and … I wanted to confront my father. It may seem puny, but I wanted him to know I knew of his cowardice.”

He reached for her hand and wrapped long fingers around it. It felt good. “What about Lukas?”

“Money. A new life.”

Floyd nodded. Another puzzle piece to slot into whatever picture was forming in his mind. Laurel followed his profile, sharply delineated against the white wall. “And you?” Laurel asked. “They told me you didn’t ask for much money, only enough to settle your debts and pay off your ex-wife, so I assumed you were also a puny idealist. But you seem to view idealism with distaste.”

“My involvement was supposed to be slight, and I believe that hibernation has the potential to be a godsend for humanity, but the science is still in its infancy. And if the status quo continues, it will remain so. Let’s face it, next to nothing has been researched since its beginning—Hypnos has made sure of that by keeping a tight rein on the snippets of technology they license. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for free enterprise and for the rights of businesses to extract profit from their patents, but this is different. Hypnos has kept the lid on a technology that could herald a new era for humankind.”

“How so?”

“Reducing trauma in patients enduring long surgical interventions was the original reason behind the hibernation research. The U.S. government, however, had already thought of using hibernation to store people and ordered NASA to keep a watchful eye on the research, to be ready to pounce and seize the technology to send astronauts to far-flung destinations.”

“Yes, but besides cold storage in its different guises, what else could you use hibernation for?”

“The medical applications are countless; many illnesses are lethal because of how fast they spread through the system before the body defenses can kick in. Think of cancers and all sorts of opportunistic viral attacks. A hibernating body with only a fraction of metabolic activity could have its defenses boosted to a point where an infection would be history as soon as it appeared. For vaccines, we could study the viral mechanisms in slow motion. And develop much more sophisticated surgeries.”

“But I thought these avenues had been explored already.”

“Only superficially; most work has been done by the military or Hypnos itself. Imagine what would happen if the technology became available to researchers: Tens of thousands of brilliant minds could study untold applications. They could open avenues we can’t even imagine now. Take endangered species; once the processes responsible for damage and decay were fully understood, the species could be placed in long-term hibernation. Food preservation is another possibility. This technology is in its infancy, and the possibilities are infinite.”

“Was that the carrot dangled before your nose?” she asked.