Chapter Four: Elvi
Get her out,” Elvi said. “I’m pulling the plug.”
“No,” Cara replied. The girl’s voice was still shaking, but the words were clear. “I can do this.”
Cara’s brain function showed in seven different datasets on twice that many screens. The data from the BFE—the technicians’ pet name for the Jupiter-sized block of green crystal that was the only feature of Adro system—showed beside it. Advanced pattern-matching protocols mapped the two together in six dimensions. The instability had passed in both datasets, the seizure—if that’s what it was—falling back from turbulence to a more stable flow.
All around the lab, the researchers and techs turned wide and uncertain eyes toward Elvi. She could feel the desire to keep pushing forward from her whole staff. She felt it herself. It reminded her of being the RA in her graduate dorm house and having to shut down the hall parties.
“I am the lead researcher. She is the test subject. When I say we’re pulling the plug, we’re pulling the plug.” As her team sprang to life, closing down the experiment, she turned to Cara, who was floating over the bed of imaging sensors. “Sorry. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that I don’t trust any of this.”
The girl with the pure black eyes nodded, but her attention was on something else. Cara’s visual and audial cortices were lit up like Paris at New Year’s, and a deep, slow pulse was passing through the girl’s postcentral gyrus that matched the energy readings coming from the BFE’s southern hemisphere. Whatever Cara was feeling just then, it was taking up more of her attention than Elvi was. She had the sense that she could scream in Cara’s ear right now and still be a tiny minority of the information flooding the girl’s brain.
Or for that matter the girl’s body, which was part of the issue. Elvi had studied somatic cognition theory, but the degree to which the BFE seemed to want to present its information to Cara’s whole nervous system—muscles and viscera included—was complicating things. She spooled back through the data as her team ran the shutdown procedures and brought Cara back to merely human reality.
The Falcon, Elvi’s private and state-sponsored science ship, was the most advanced single-function laboratory in thirteen hundred worlds. Which sounded really impressive until she remembered that most of those thirteen hundred worlds were the equivalent of 1880s European dirt farmers trying to grow enough food to not slaughter half their cattle at the start of every winter. The Falcon was the only ship that had survived the attack that killed the Typhoon and Medina Station, and the scars showed everywhere. The decking was subtly mismatched where threads of darkness that had been somehow more real than reality had ripped a third of the ship’s mass away. The power and environmental systems were all patchworks of the original and rebuilt. Her own leg had a line across it where the new skin and muscle had grown in the softball-sized scoop that had vanished in the attack. Working on the Falcon was like living inside a trauma flashback. It helped Elvi when she could focus on the data, and on the BFE, and on Cara and Xan.
Dr. Harshaan Lee, Elvi’s second lead, met her eye and nodded. He was an energetic young scientist, and she liked him. More than that, she trusted him. He knew what she wanted to do, and with a gesture, he’d offered to make sure Cara’s re-emergence from the experiment went according to protocol. She nodded back, accepting the offer.
“All right, people,” Lee said, clapping his hands together. “By the numbers and by the book.”
Elvi pulled herself through the air to the lift shaft, and aft toward the engine and the isolation chamber and Cara’s younger brother Xan.
Fayez floated against one wall, his left leg tucked behind a wall grip and his hand terminal glowing with text. Beside him, the thing they called the catalyst—the body of a woman infused with a contained but live sample of protomolecule—was strapped in its gurney. The catalyst’s sightless eyes found her, and Fayez followed its empty gaze.
“How’d he do?” Elvi asked, nodding toward the containment chamber and therefore Xan. Most of the time, the catalyst was stored there, but for the periods when they used it to activate the old, alien technologies, she put Xan in its place. The only time the young boy and the protomolecule interacted at all was during the changeover.
Fayez pulled up a screen with the security camera. Inside the isolation chamber, Xan floated. His eyes were closed and his mouth was just slightly open, like he was sleeping or drowned.