The Frankenstein Protocol

CHAPTER TWO (A)

Recovery

Research Vessel Nereid — Cargo Deck & Cryo-Bay — Days One Through Three

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The first problem was the weight.

The cryo-sling had been engineered for glacier core samples — cylinders of ancient ice rarely exceeding four hundred kilograms. The column they had recovered from the escarpment registered, on the deck scales, at slightly over two thousand, nine hundred kilograms. Nearly three metric tons. The crane operator, a taciturn Faroese man named Benedikt who had worked polar research vessels for twenty years and prided himself on having seen everything, looked at the number on his load display and looked at it again and then looked at Mara.

“That’s wrong,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“Ice that size shouldn’t weigh that much.”

“I know.”

He waited for an explanation. She didn’t have one. He recalibrated the scales, ran the measurement again, got the same number, and then did what professionals in extraordinary circumstances tend to do: he filed the anomaly in a mental drawer labelled not my problem and got on with the job.

The cryo-bay had been reconfigured overnight. Torres had overseen it personally, clearing the sampling equipment and the core storage racks and bringing in four additional portable temperature units to ensure the bay held within a degree of the recovery environment. It was remarkable work done in very little time by someone who hadn’t slept, and Mara told him so.

“Don’t mention it,” Torres said. He was looking at the column through the observation window with an expression she recognised from her own reflection: the expression of someone actively resisting what they were thinking.

“What are you not saying?” she asked.

He was quiet for a moment. “At what depth did the sonar first pick it up?”

“Approximately 1,400 metres.”

“And the shelf we were mapping — the fracture hypothesis — that was at what depth?”

“Three hundred to six hundred metres. The drift took Leviathan-7 off the survey grid.”

Torres nodded slowly. “So nothing should have been at 1,400 metres. Not on any mapping record. Not in any survey.”

“No.”

“And the escarpment it was fused to — that escarpment shouldn’t exist either. Not according to the bathymetric charts.”

Mara looked at him.

“I checked this morning,” he said. “The seabed topology we recorded on Leviathan’s instruments during the drift doesn’t match any existing chart of this section of shelf. The escarpment appears on our data and nowhere else. It’s as if…” He stopped.

“As if what?”

He shook his head. “As if it was always deep enough to avoid detection. As if the depth was… chosen.”

They stood side by side at the observation window. The column of ice occupied the cryo-bay like a tenant who had always intended to stay.

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On the first day, Mara documented.

She worked methodically and without interruption, the way she always worked when the subject was too large to approach whole. She photographed the exterior of the cryo-sling from every angle. She recorded the weight, the ambient temperature, the condensation patterns on the transparent panels. She logged the ice’s optical properties — its extraordinary clarity, its internal refraction index, which she measured with a portable spectrometer and which suggested a crystalline structure quite different from any glacial ice in the literature.

Then she began the exterior survey of the figure itself. As close as the sling panels allowed, which was approximately thirty centimetres.

She worked from the feet upward.

The feet were bare. This registered as the first coherent shock of the examination — not the scale, not the sutures, but the simple, human fact of bare feet. Whatever this figure had been in life, it had walked without shoes. The feet were enormous, proportional to the rest of the body, and the skin of them was visible in patches where the ice had thinned near the outer surface: a deep, uneven grey-brown, not the grey of death but something else, a tone that reminded her of old scar tissue. The kind of colour skin acquired not from a single wound but from repeated, layered damage over a long period of time.

She moved upward.

The legs were partially obscured by a denser section of ice — the column was not uniformly clear — but she could see enough to confirm what the sonar density had suggested. The musculature was extraordinary. Not in the way of physical fitness or athletic development, which produces a particular aesthetic of proportion and symmetry. This was different. The muscle groups visible through the ice were oversized in a way that suggested function over form, as though whoever had built this body had been working from engineering principles rather than anatomy. Certain muscle groups were simply too large. Others were absent where they should have been present. The overall effect was of something designed by a person who understood what muscles did but not necessarily how they were meant to look.

She photographed. She noted. She kept her face still.

The torso was where the suture work became fully visible, and it was where she had to stop for the first time and simply stand and breathe.

They ran in long, deliberate arcs across the chest and abdomen: closed seams, fully healed, raised above the surrounding skin in the characteristic ridge of mature scar tissue. Not the ragged lines of a wound sutured under emergency conditions. These were careful. Considered. The work of someone who had taken their time, who had approached the task with something approaching craftsmanship. She counted eleven distinct seam lines on the visible portions of the torso alone, each running a slightly different course, some following the natural boundaries of muscle groups as though the operator had been working section by section, assembling the whole from separately prepared parts.

She had been a marine biologist for fourteen years. She had studied ocean life at its most extreme and alien. She had once spent six weeks cataloguing species recovered from a hadal zone trench, things that looked like they had been invented by a fever. She had considered herself a person who was difficult to disturb.

She photographed the torso for forty minutes and did not allow herself to think about what the sutures meant until she had finished.

The neck and jaw she could see only partially, at an angle, through the ice. But she could see enough.

More seam lines. Fewer, but longer. One ran from behind the left ear down to the clavicle in an arc that no surgical procedure she knew of would produce. Another crossed the throat horizontally, just above the larynx.

She thought about that one for a long time.

A suture across the throat. A seam where something had been opened, or closed, or connected.

She moved the camera.

The face was turned away from her at an angle of approximately forty degrees. She could see the left side of it in profile: the jaw, the orbital ridge above the left eye, a portion of the cheekbone. The skin there was the same grey-brown as the feet, and she could see the same quality of layered complexity in it, as though it had been assembled from different sources the way a mosaic is assembled from different tiles, each piece selected for fit rather than match.

The hair was dark and long, fanned out in the ice where the head had settled, individual strands suspended in the crystalline matrix like specimens in a slide preparation.

The eye she could see was closed.

She told herself she was relieved.