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“As soon as
possible,” Chal repeated, disbelieving. “You’ve
already started another one? Is there any reason to think it won’t
just fail again?”

“Well,”
Lieutenant Johnner said, “This time we have you.”

There was a brief
pause while Chal took in all this information.

“We only need
to awaken the prototype for a few minutes before re-sedating it,”
Fielding said. “The problem is that the prototypes so far
haven’t survived their first awakening.”

“Wait,”
Chal said, confused. “Back up. I don’t understand.”

“What don’t
you understand?” Fielding asked, his voice sliding into
condescension. His confidence – or lack thereof – in
Chal’s abilities was clear on his face.

“This –
” and here she pointed to the screen, “ – this was
the first time you awakened the prototype?” She had to make
sure. It was impossible that they had done something so wrong.

“Yes,”
Fielding said. “As was mentioned in the recording.”

“I thought
that was the first time the prototype had been
questioned
.”
Chal’s eyebrows knitted together in the middle of her forehead.
“You’re telling me that was the FIRST time he was woken
up?
Ever?
”

Johnner and Fielding
looked at each other again, and this time Chal could see that both of
them were more confused than she was
. Could they really have made
such a huge mistake?

“Yes,”
Dr. Fielding said, a bit less confidently.

Chal’s mouth
was open, and she didn’t even try to hide the contempt that
oozed into her voice when she asked him her next question.

“Did you
read
any of my papers?”

***

CHAPTER SIX

One of Chal’s
earliest experiments in biological-substrate intelligence had been
her work with the same rats that she eventually was forced to abandon
as failures. Initially, she had needed to create a system to ease
them into the most basic forms of consciousness.

She, too, had had
problems with her organisms “malfunctioning.”

At first, when the
lab had applied anti-anesthetics, they had run into a series of
issues. Many of the rats, upon being awakened, would freeze as though
paralyzed, their eyes darting around wildly. When touched, they would
go into spasms, squeaking horribly.

The EEG sensors on
the rat brains were made to be as precise as possible, and for that
reason were grafted directly onto the brains of the rats. But the
readings made no sense at first. The sensors picked up nothing until
the anti-anesthetics were applied. Then the sensors went wild. Every
part of the rats’ brains lit up like a Christmas tree, the
erratic spikes of electrical output shooting way past their normal
ranges. It was as though there was a surge of electrical activity
that sent the rats into brain seizures.

Chal still
remembered the sound one of them made after an assistant had tried to
poke it to see if it was responsive to stimuli. It had kicked its
legs, spinning in circles and squealing until it spun itself right
off of the edge of the table and onto the floor, ripping out the EEG
sensors as it fell. Legs kicking, the rat’s squeaks grew
fainter and fainter and then ended.

Chal had been
frustrated, but only for a short while. None of her assistants could
make sense of the EEG readings, but Chal continued analyzing them
after everyone else had given them up as random electrical output.
Working backwards, she was able to untangle the spikes of electrical
activity and realize that the rat brains were, in fact, being
overloaded too quickly upon awakening. Chal thought she could come up
with a solution.

If it was a surge
that was killing them, they needed a surge protector.

The problem with the
rats wasn’t that their brains weren’t able to handle
being awakened, it was that they were overwhelmed with the stimuli
that the world provided them right away. Chal had been trying to wake
the rats up into immediate adulthood, with a full memory center and
physical sensor capabilities. There’s a reason that babies are
born with underdeveloped eyes and ears, Chal decided: it was to
prevent information overload. And that would be her surge protector.

Easing the rats into
awakening was not as hard as it seemed at first. Rather than having
to rework the rats’ brains, Chal found that they could simply
rework the environment, making it less stimulating. After some
experimentation and a lot of dead rodents, they found that awakening
the rats in a soundproof tank with only dim red light was optimal.
Rather than have a normal rat cage with lots of objects around and
cardboard bedding, they put in a soft sponge floor. The direct EEG
sensors had to be replaced with remote ones so that the rats would
have no contact with wires, or, for that matter, with anything.

The assistants
started to call the tanks
wombs
, and Chal thought the
comparison was apt. Once the rats had adapted to the womb, the
scientists could add in external stimuli one by one. The rats did
much better, and eventually were able to be taken out and placed into
the mazes which they promptly failed to solve. That was when the
funding ran out and Chal gave up on the project, believing it
unworkable.

One laboratory in
Germany had asked Chal for help with awakening chimpanzees in the
same fashion. She had been thrilled to fly over to assist them, but
it turned out that they were still in the beginning phases of the
program and didn’t have any new insight. The only thing she got
out of her visit there was that chimpanzees were much harder to deal
with than rats, especially when being awakened.

Passing through
childhood into adulthood was difficult enough over an extended time
period. To grow up instantly was a challenge, but with rats the
transition was solved through the womb tanks. The German scientists,
working with apes, had also to deal with the subject’s
transition into sexuality. For the first few days after the chimps
were awakened, they spent all of their time touching their own
bodies, licking themselves, and masturbating.

Chal remembered
going into the viewing room for one of the full-sized tanks, which
closely resembled her rat setup. Red light, soft floors, but in this
case there was a monkey stroking its erection. She had blushed, then
scolded herself for blushing.

“Zis is how
zey act for the first few days,” the German scientist had told
her.

“I see,”
she had said, and pressed her lips together. “And afterwards?”

“Afterwards
zey are not so aggressive,” he told her. “But we are just
beginning testing for levels of consciousness.”

That was what she
was interested in, but the Germans were not prepared to divulge their
results, and Chal returned to the United States disappointed. Her
disappointment was tempered by her belief that the Germans had not
succeeded, and that was why they had been reluctant to speak about
their results. Or so she thought.

***

Now, as she watched
Dr. Fielding twitch nervously in his chair, these memories sprung
back into her mind and she realized that the military, for all their
resources, had not done their homework before beginning this project.

“Which paper
was that, exactly?” Dr. Fielding asked.

“There were
several,” Chal said, directing her attention to Lieutenant
Johnner. She was sick of watching Dr. Fielding’s weaselly face.
“You’ve wasted quite a bit of time if you’ve been
trying to wake up prototypes in a room while attached to a bunch of
machines.”

“I think we’ve
been wasting time listening to you,” Fielding said. He stood
up. “Telling us we’ve done everything wrong–”

Chal interrupted
him, her attention still on Johnner. She had dealt with bullies
before and found that ignoring them worked wonders.

“You’ll
have to set up a new room. No bright lights, no machines. A sensory
deprivation tank would be best.” She ticked off the
requirements on her fingers.

“Anything
else?” Lieutenant Johnner asked.

“I can’t
believe you’re listening to this!” Fielding cried. He
made no attempt to leave the room, but the tic jumped wildly at his
lip.

“Make sure
that the floors in the lab are padded,” Chal continued. “The
walls too. We don’t want any loud noises.”

Johnner turned to
Dr. Fielding. “How long will it take before you can get this
set up?”

Fielding stood
silently. His body was nearly trembling with anger that he had to
answer to Chal. Finally he turned his hateful gaze away from Chal. “A
couple of hours, maximum.”

“Do it,”
Lieutenant Johnner said.

Dr. Fielding swiped
his ID across the keypad and strode out of the room. Chal felt the
tension in the air ease.

“Well,”
Lieutenant Johnner said, “I guess we can both grab a couple
hours of sleep then.”

***

Johnner walked with
Chal down the hallway to her quarters. Right next to her bedroom, at
the end of the hallway, was a large metal door with a wheel attached
to it.

“Where does
that lead?” Chal asked. It didn’t seem right to have
another sealed lab so close to the living quarters.

“That’s
one of the escape exits,” Lieutenant Johnner said.

“Escape
exits?”

“There is one
on every level on the south side of the structure,” Johnner
said. “Even during an emergency, the elevators should still
work off of generated power. Just in case.”

“A backup for
a backup.” Chal noticed something. “There’s no
keypad for that door.”

“Wouldn’t
be a great backup if you couldn’t open it during a power
outage, would it?” Johnner said. “In case even the
generators fail.”

“But,”
Chal said, “isn’t that dangerous? I mean, couldn’t
anyone just pass through without going through decontamination?”

“The doors
don’t open from the outside,” Johnner said. He seemed
unworried about it. “The wheel locking mechanism seals it from
here.”

“But someone
could open it from the inside,” Chal said. “Or they could
steal equipment and then leave.”

Lieutenant Johnner
seemed amused at her insistence. “An alarm is set to go off if
anyone so much as cracked one of these doors open,” he said.
“All of the labs and living quarters lock down–from the
outside, not the inside – and security is alerted at the
entrance.”

“Someone could
still escape,” Chal said.

“Sure,”
Lieutenant Johnner said. “But where would they go?”

Chal shrugged.
Anywhere, she supposed. Again, Johnner answered as if he were reading
her mind.

“To get here,
you have to drive for hours through the desert. Anyone who escaped
from here would have a hard time finding their way back to
civilization. There isn’t anything except for the airstrip for
miles and miles,” Johnner said.

“Oh,”
Chal said. All of a sudden she felt more tired than she had in the
past two days. The adrenaline from seeing the first experiment on a
bio-substrate human was beginning to wear off.

“I’ll
have someone wake you up when we’re ready to start,”
Johnner said, opening her door. Chal nodded and went inside. The door
hissed shut and she could hear Johnner’s footsteps echoing
faintly down the hall.

At first Chal
thought she would not be able to sleep, her excitement was so strong.
She looked around her room, which was little more than a storage area
with a couple of cots attached to the wall. The sheets were folded
crisply at the corners, military-style, and she had the sensation of
being stuck in a hospital. Or a prison.

She lay down on the
cot, the video recording of the prototype replaying again in her
mind.

Hello.

Hello.

I am Dr.
Fielding.

You are Dr.
Fielding.

That is correct.
Who are you?

What a question to
ask an artificial intelligence. Chal twitched a little on the cot as
she remembered the IV being pulled out, the blood dripping on the
floor.

I – I am
malfunctioning.

Chal’s legs
kicked softly as she drifted into sleep, the prototype’s
twisted face looming in her mind.

***

The playa was an
empty bowl of cracked earth under the sky. It felt to Chal as though
she could reach up and burn herself on the bright blue horizon, maybe
even pull herself through to the other side of the atmosphere.
Strange to think that beyond this thin bubble of air there was
nothing but darkness and space stretching out beyond what the human
mind was capable of imagining.

This was why humans
were not nocturnal beings. Owls and coyotes could stand to live under
the vast expanses of the heavens, but when man turned his head to the
sky he got dizzy underneath the stars. They reminded him of how
infinitely small he was. How insignificant.

How
replaceable
.

Chal walked
alongside a parched gully in her dream. Silver brambles clouded the
edges of the dried out stream, hoping for the ghost of a creek to
come along and wet their roots. She walked on and on, until at last
she saw in the distance the chain-link fence that surrounded the
government station on the Tohono reservation. The galvanized steel
mesh twinkled in the blinding white light of the midday sun, its
shape rippling in the heat coming off of the desert floor.

Chal heard laughter
beside her, and turned to see two small girls playing in the sand,
about thirty feet away. Their backs were to her, but she knew without
knowing how she knew that it was
her
, Chal and her sister
playing together as young girls. When she moved toward them, she
found that no matter how many steps she took, they were still sitting
the same distance away. She stopped walking and just watched.

The girls were
singing a song that Chal almost remembered, a lullaby from her youth.
Now, though, she could only hear snippets of the melody when the
girls would turn slightly toward her –