Day 25

I pulled up the menu again and scrolled up; sure enough, there were numerous recordings labeled 'Illyria research'. I chose one of the earlier ones, ignoring quizzical looks from Jamie. She wasn't sure what I was doing, and was still on guard. She'd been thrown off balance by Dana's confession, and even more off balance by my acceptance of it; she was determined not to let anything else sneak up on her. Dana, on the other hand, was with me in wanting to get to the bottom of this.

The video played. It was very similar to the first one, a camera over the shoulder of a guard who was looking at cards. A voice that wasn't my father's spoke the replies this time, however.

“Circle,” the man the overlay on the video identified only as subject #31337 said. Like my father, he was right. He was right about all the other cards, too.

“That voice sounds familiar.” I said. It was familiar in the same way Dana's earlier self had been. Like a voice I should know, years before I should know it.

Dana was nodding. “That's Keith's friend Jeremy, if I'm not mistaken. It's been a long time, though, and I've done my best to forget this place. I didn't have much contact with him; by the time I came along each prisoner got their own guard, and they had us take precautions to prevent interactions.”

“There were other files with his number.” Jamie said, having taken nearly everything she'd seen on the screen in out of sheer habit.

I went back to the menu and she was right, as I'd known without even having to look. I pulled up the first one.

The camera was again pointing at the entirety of the examination room. A man who again looked naggingly familiar sat on a chair as an unsuited doctor stood next to him. An audio track provided explanation:

“This is patient #31337, Jeremy Bowers. We have successfully grown the Illyria virus in culture. Animal testing has proved difficult, due to the changes the virus makes in the genome. Still, results are encouraging and we have seen few side effects. The first human trial will be administered now.”

Nothing unexpected happened; the doctor injected Jeremy with the serum and left the room. This video went on for twenty-four hours as well, though I skipped to the end rather quickly after I'd determined this. It ended the same way my father's had – uneventfully.

“Jeremy fucking Bowers!” Jamie swore. She was no stranger to foul language, and I'd heard my fair share from her under stressful circumstances, but I also knew it only tended to happen when she was in fact very stressed or very surprised. “Shaw was right? You told me he said that the telepaths are in charge? Bowers is the vice-president!”

Nobody spoke for a moment. The familiarity had been there, of course, and the voice I'd heard sounded like a younger, less-confident version of the current man in power. The face was less difficult to place, but it certainly gave credence to what Shaw had told me ages ago. There was no way he'd known I'd eventually make my way here and back up his story, either. He'd had to know that if he lied to me, there was no way I'd find out differently. Yet he'd told the truth. It didn't make sense though. If the telepaths were in charge, why did the Afflicted still suffer? Why was I essentially a second-class citizen?

I finally spoke up. “What is this virus?” I asked Dana.

She shrugged. “No idea. They never said a word about it to me. When I came on they were paranoid about plague getting in, were trying to find a cure, but never said anything to me about a virus of their own.”

I frowned. “I think their virus and the plague were one in the same.”

Dana nodded. “Honestly? I wouldn't put it past them.”

I wasn't listening, I was scrolling through the list for mention of Illyria failures. I found one; before Bowers' inoculation in fact. Why hadn't the doctors in his video been suited up? Clearly they hadn't thought it would spread, but of course we knew it had. I queued up the video.

It was another twenty-four hour observation, or at least I thought so at first. Patient #16384 stood next to an unsuited doctor and got a shot. Time went by. Except this time, about five hours in, 16384 got sick.

Nobody opened the door to his chamber, even though the patient was now being physically ill and, between retching on the floor, begging for help.

The plague could act fast, that much I knew from personal knowledge. At the very least, the first signs of Affliction showed up within a day of exposure, though it can take weeks to die. It didn't take 16384 that long. His skin broke out in a rash in hour seven. He lost his voice during hour ten. His throat swelled up at the twelve-hour mark, and he died of asphyxiation almost immediately afterwards. The trademark joint disfiguration of the plague had also begun, though it was less prominent than I'd known it to be.

“Damn.” Dana whispered as a fully suited doctor walked into the room finally, checking for a pulse. “You're right. Illyria was the plague. Orin had said he knew it was engineered, but I hadn't guessed our own people released it.” she shook her head. “What I don't get is why? We had the stunners, we had the sleep-bombs. They were weapons that let our people march in complete safety, and we were safe from them. Why would the Troopers unleash a biological weapon that they could get killed by?”

“I don't think they meant to.” Jamie piped up. “Derek, I saw a file on a Private Renolds. Play that one.”

I obliged, as both of them were making good points.

I was treated to a scene I'd seen three times by now; camera over the shoulder of some wordless guard, cards in his hand, another voice saying what they were. This guard, however, sported hazmat gear.

“Triangle.” the subject said, and there was stress in his voice. Unlike Bowers or my father, he didn't seem calm at all. He was right, though. He continued to be right for the entire deck. This recording differed from the others, however, in that it had a secondary audio track. I turned it on.

“- the autopsy unit we shipped 16834 to.” the voice which usually provided the audio tracks was present again, though he didn't seem to be speaking for the record. Instead, he was talking to someone whose voice wasn't present on the disc.

“Well,” the narrator continued, apparently in response to some question, “he made a complaint to his superior officers a few days ago, apparently everyone was talking at night, when he was trying to sleep. Only it turns out that they're not, he's hearing their thoughts. So he was shipped down to us. A blood screen shows antibodies for Illyria, so he's definitely been exposed, but we can't tell how. We're testing his abilities here, and it looks like it's working. He's just lucky he didn't turn out like 16384.”

Someone must have said something upsetting, because his voice changed as he demanded. “What? What did he ask?”

The camera had changed to a full-view of the experimentation room again. The guard was standing up, having gone through the entire deck, and a similarly suited scientist was talking to Private Renolds.

“He wants to know when we can shut it off.” the scientist said.

“Tell him he can stop listening on our thoughts whenever he wants, the experiment's over.”

I saw the scientist relay this information to Renolds, who shook his head emphatically and said something.

“Uh, sir, he says he can't. He wants to know when we'll be able to cure him.”

“He can't shut it off?” an edge had crept into the narrator's voice, frustration or fear or possibly both.

There was another conference between experimenter and experimented. “That's correct sir.”

“Christ on a-” the video cut off, and once again our room was silent.

“Those morons!” Dana whispered under her breath. I could tell she had a few more choice words but was holding them back. “They're sloppy cleaning up after their mess and so everyone gets sick?”

“Are you surprised?” Jamie said. “Sloppy cleaning up after themselves is the only reason this place is still standing.”

“I guess not, it just... God!” She was more frustrated than angry, though the frustration was born of not being able to properly express her anger. “What the hell were they thinking?”

I shrugged. “They didn't seem to think it was contagious. Something must have happened after the guy died, didn't they say that Renolds was from whatever autopsy place they sent him to?”

Dana just shook her head, apparently having come to a conclusion. “We've spent enough time picking over the corpse of this place. Let's just get it back to Orin and let his people figure out what's gone on.” She paused, then in answer to a question I wasn't even thinking of asking, “I may have been young, but I fought on the front lines. Even with the stunners and sleep-bombs, I saw things. People who fought back, killed my friends, people my friends killed, people I had to kill. So when I say I've seen enough of what the Troopers have done, when I say my stomach's just not in it anymore, you know I damn well mean it.”

That was that. I put the PDA back on my belt, disc kept safely inside it, and then the three of us left the room. It was a slow walk back toward my father's cell. Dana had apparently given in to the idea that all of us were alone; we'd made more than enough noise to bring down the wrath of any security that was to have remained, and nothing had happened. She hadn't insisted on any one person being on point, hadn't had me checking around corners with the flashlight.

When we passed my father's room, neither I nor Dana looked into it.

We were nearly back at the garage when we passed the stairs again, and I shone the light down them. Another door was at the end, I saw. I hadn't spotted it at first, as it had been parallel to how I'd been shining the light the first time. Now, coming back, I saw it in the wall, covered in soot.

“What's down there?” I asked Dana before thinking better of it.

She stopped and looked down the stairs at the door, thought of lying, discarded it. “Another experimentation room. Stuff they didn't even want us guards knowing about, or at least not me.” She stood there, waiting for me to ask to continue.

She didn't want to, that much I knew. She'd come here to say goodbye to Keith, she'd made her admission, provided us with our evidence. So far as she was concerned, she was done with the place. She wanted to leave, and she knew I knew it. She was going to make me ask her to delay.

“I want to go down there.” I said simply.

She nodded. “I know.”

She wasn't being overly hostile, but she was tired, far more tired than she wanted to let on. So I made the decision and began walking down the stairs. Jamie followed behind me, more than a little tired herself. The light from the outside had long faded, it was night and we'd be better off finding a place to sleep than continuing to explore this ruin, but I couldn't stop now. Whatever I'd already seen, it hadn't been the entirety of what they'd done, and I had to know.

As I reached the bottom and turned to examine the door, I heard Dana's footsteps follow down the stairway. What the hell, she'd decided. There was nobody here. And part of her was still curious.

The door was heavy, and operated by an electronic lock whose keypad had melted long ago. Dana had already broken out the tire iron to try it on the door, but this door appeared to be made of something a great deal more sturdy than the rest of the base and it refused to even budge.

“Hey Dana, hit this thing for me.” Jamie said, gesturing at the molten keypad. Dana was more than happy to oblige, glad to find something yielding after all. The plastic cover came off in a single strike.

Jamie was on it almost before then. She examined the wiring while I held the flashlight steady. Nobody said anything. Dana was again growing restless, and Jamie's mind was filled with abstractions I didn't fully understand.

“This is still live.” she said finally.

Dana's eyes widened, darted to the nearest security camera. The compound had been littered with them, and the small hallway we were in was no different. The nearest one, however, was just as melted as the keypad had been. “So the security system's still up?” she asked, eyes still on the obviously nonfunctional camera.

Jamie shook her head. “I think it's just this. Probably batteries somewhere. Did you know the code to this door?”

“Like I said, they didn't want me down here. Not a lot of people went down here, in fact.” Dana didn't like where this was going, but instead of objecting, she continued. “You can try 58008; that's the general emergency code. Don't know if they put it on this door, though, and I smashed the only way you had of entering it, melted though it was.”

“Not a problem” Jamie said, having extracted a metal probe of some kind from her belt. She touched it to a number of contacts.

A generator outside kicked into life, and Dana jumped into a crouch. Her mind at first thought it was an approaching vehicle, but quickly realized the truth. If not for her realization, in fact, I would have thought the same thing.

The door swung open. Though the outside of it had been blackened by soot, it had clearly been designed to withstand more than mere fire; the inside was spotless. We walked through.

Florescent lights flickered on. We were in a room much like I'd pictured the observation room to have once looked like. Monitors lined three of the walls, stacked on top of filling cabinets, tables, and each other. A heavy control board was in front of a full, intact wall of glass. I suspected that, like the experimentation room we'd been in earlier, it was one-way and likely bulletproof. I only got these vague impressions of the current room, though, as I was more drawn to the one this was made to observe.

Previous - Next