The Frankenstein Protocol

CHAPTER TWO (B)

On the second day, Vickers came to find her in the cryo-bay.

He stood at the observation window for a while without speaking, which was not unusual for Vickers. He was a man who thought in long paragraphs and delivered them only when fully formed.

“You know what it looks like,” he said finally.

“Tell me what it looks like to you.”

“Like something put together. Like parts.” He paused. “Like someone built it. Built him.” He corrected himself without apparent self-consciousness, the way people corrected themselves around things that refused to stay objects.

“Yes,” Mara said.

“There’s a book,” Vickers said, in the careful tone of someone raising a subject they are not sure is appropriate.

“I know there’s a book.”

“Do you think—”

“I don’t know what I think. Not yet.”

He nodded. He looked at the column for another few seconds. Then: “The ice still hasn’t cracked.”

“No.”

“Ice always cracks.”

“I know.”

He left without saying anything else. The professionalism of it moved her, obscurely.

She spent the second day on the hands.

They were visible from the side of the cryo-sling facing the bay’s interior wall, and she had to move a portable floodlight to illuminate them properly. When she did, she stood for a long time just looking, the camera loose at her side.

The hands were closed in fists. Not the slack, relaxed half-curl of unconsciousness or death, but true fists, deliberate and tight, the knuckles pressing against the interior of the ice in rounded ridges. Whatever stillness had taken him, it had not been peaceful. Or perhaps it had been, and the fists were from before. From something that happened before the cold.

The hands were seamed like everything else. Old work, fully healed. But on the right hand, along the outer edge of the fourth and fifth metacarpals, there was something different: a series of small, regular marks in the skin. Not sutures. Something else. She pressed her lens to the panel and increased the magnification.

Letters.

She pulled back. Looked again. Pressed closer.

Letters, or something very like them, cut into the skin of the right hand in a script she did not recognise. Not deeply — a shallow incision, the kind that would fade quickly in living tissue but had been preserved here by the cold and by whatever process had made this body resistant to the usual degradations. Approximately a dozen characters, arranged in two short lines. She photographed them at the highest resolution her camera allowed.

She could not read them.

She wrote them down anyway, in her notebook, character by character. The act felt important in a way she couldn’t articulate.

―――――――――――――――

On the third day, two things happened.

The first was the smell.

It began in the early morning, faint enough that she initially attributed it to the cryo-bay’s filtration system cycling. A cold, organic scent — not the smell of decomposition, which she knew well and which had an unmistakable note of sweetness underneath the rot. This was different. Cleaner. Like ozone, like the air before lightning, but with something below it that she could not name: a deep, mineral note, like soil after rain, like the inside of a cave. Like something that had been underground — or under water — for a very long time.

She checked the ice surface and found it unchanged.

The filtration system checked out normal.

The smell persisted.

By midday it was strong enough that Benedikt, passing the cryo-bay door on his way to the aft deck, stopped and put his head in and said, “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He stood there for a moment, nostrils working. His expression shifted through several registers before settling on something she would later describe as primal discomfort — the expression of an animal that has detected something its instincts cannot classify.

“It’s coming from in there,” he said, meaning the ice.

“I know,” she said.

He left quickly.

The second thing that happened on the third day was the bio-electrical reading.

She had attached a portable electrophysiology sensor to the exterior of the cryo-sling the previous evening, more out of thoroughness than expectation. The sensor was designed for ocean floor geological surveys — it detected ambient electrical fields in rock formations and sediment — but it was sensitive enough to pick up biological signals if they were present, and she had thought it worth knowing whether the preservation had affected the specimen’s electrical profile in any measurable way.

She checked the sensor log at 0900.

The sensor had recorded nothing for the first eighteen hours. Standard baseline. Geological noise, the ship’s own electromagnetic signature, nothing more.

At 0317 that morning, the sensor had registered a signal.

She sat down on a crate and looked at the log for a very long time.

The signal had lasted eleven seconds. It had emanated from the centre of the ice column, from approximately the region of the figure’s thorax. Its frequency and waveform were unlike anything in the geological reference tables, but its general profile — its shape, its duration, its amplitude — was consistent with a pattern she had encountered in a different context entirely: the electrophysiology of cardiac tissue. Not a heartbeat. Nothing so regular or so sustained. Something more like… a memory of one. A single, deep pulse, as though something very far down had briefly tried to remember what it was supposed to do.

She sat on the crate for a long time.

Then she photographed the sensor log, encrypted the image, and sent it to her own private server with a subject line that read, simply, Document everything. She had developed this habit in graduate school, under an adviser who told her that the most important scientific instrument was a paper trail, and she had never abandoned it.