The Immortality Project

Below the Company

(Olivia POV)

The car comes at four, exactly as promised, and my roommate hugs me in the doorway in her pajamas with her eyes full of tears and her phone already out to take a picture of the license plate, "Just in case you get kidn*pped by a pharma cult."

"It's administration," I tell her, for the fifth time since Thursday.

"Sure it is." She squeezes me until my ribs complain. "Text me a picture of the weirdest thing you see."

"I'll try."

I don't tell her I won't be able to. I don't tell her that every message I send will be read by someone else, or that the small black phone in my coat is not my own phone, which sits in a sealed envelope in the trunk of the car along with my laptop. I only wave from the backseat until the street turns, and then I press my forehead to the cold window and watch San Francisco slide into the dark.

The flight is a blur of leather seats and an attendant who calls me "miss" and never once asks my name. I sleep for four hours without meaning to. When I wake, the sky is the color of dishwater, and below us a patchwork of green fields and red roofs unspools toward a gray ribbon of river.

It's raining in London. Of course it is.

A different car meets me on the tarmac, long and black and silent, and Elizabeth is already waiting in the back, a gray umbrella across her knees. She looks like she hasn't slept either, but she smiles when she sees me, and some part of me that has been wound tight for thirty hours loosens at last.

"You came," she says.

"You thought I wouldn't?"

"I thought you might change your mind somewhere over Greenland." She pats the seat beside her. "Most people do, a little. How are you?"

"Tired. Excited. A bit sick."

"All reasonable." She hands me a paper cup of tea from a thermos at her feet. "Drink that. It's terrible, but it's hot."

It is terrible. I drink all of it.

We drive for an hour through the wet gray outskirts of the city, past rows of narrow brick houses and playing fields and long, dull stretches of retail park. Elizabeth says very little. She watches me watch the world go by, and every now and then she makes a small, soft noise, as if she's sensing something in the air that I can't, and I decide it's best not to ask.

Then the road bends, and she says, "There."

The Spicer and Pestle campus in England is nothing like the glass towers I left behind.

It sits at the end of a long gravel drive, behind iron gates and a high wall of weathered brick, and the first thing I see is a chimney. A single enormous chimney, tall as a cathedral spire, blackened with age and crowned with a faded white band. Around it cluster the buildings, dozens of them, red brick and sooty stone, with arched windows and slate roofs and iron balconies that look like they were put up when horses still pulled carts. Here and there, a glass wing rises beside the old walls, sleek and modern, as if someone had set a laboratory down gently on top of a history book.

Above the main entrance, carved into a pale stone lintel, is a mortar and pestle and a date: 1791.

"The original shop was in Bucklesbury," Elizabeth says, following my gaze. "We outgrew it. Then we outgrew the street, and then the neighborhood. In the end, it was easier to build a small town than to keep moving the furniture."

"It's beautiful."

"It's mostly damp." She smiles. "But yes."

The car glides through a courtyard and past a row of smaller buildings, then stops outside a squat redbrick structure with a green iron door and a sign that reads BOILER HOUSE, NO ENTRY. There is a long moment when the rain drums on the roof and neither of us moves.

"Miss Hart," Elizabeth says. "Before we go in. I want you to know that nobody is going to ask you to be brave today. You only have to be curious."

"I can do curious."

"I know you can."

She opens her door. A man in a black raincoat has appeared out of nowhere to hold an umbrella over us, and we walk the twenty steps to the green door in silence.

The boiler house is exactly what it sounds like, at first. A cavernous room of bare brick, iron girders, and rusted pipes, with a cracked concrete floor and a faint, mineral smell of cold and old coal. Pigeons mutter somewhere in the rafters. At the far end, half hidden behind a shroud of canvas, stands the skeleton of a great iron machine, all pistons and flywheels and gears, preserved like a dead beast in a museum.

"The original steam engine," Elizabeth says, passing it without a glance. "It's the only part of the company that anyone is permitted to photograph."

I’ll remember this for later, at least something I can show the people back home.

She leads me down a narrow aisle beside the engine, to a plain metal door in the brick, flush against the wall, painted the same dull green as everything else. There's no handle. No keypad. No sign.

Elizabeth lays her palm against the center of it.

A low, soft click answers. The door slides into the wall without a sound, and behind it is an elevator.

It isn't an old one. It's smooth and white and quietly lit, the size of a small room, with no buttons, only a faint ring of light along the ceiling. The air that drifts out of it is cool and clean, and smells faintly, impossibly, of nothing at all.

"After you," Elizabeth says.

I step inside. She follows. The door closes behind us, and the engine hall disappears as if it had never been.

The descent takes a long time.

I don't feel it at first. There's no lurch, no hum, no flicker of numbers. It's only after the third minute, when my ears pop, that I understand how far we're falling. Elizabeth stands beside me with her hands folded, calm, patient, looking at a point in the wall that isn't there. I count to a hundred and eighty. I give up counting.

"How deep are we?" I ask.

"Sixty two meters below the boiler house," she says. "Which is about forty below the old Thames floodplain. You'll find it dry. We were rather careful."

"Does anyone know?"

"A few. They don't tell."

The elevator stops. The doors open on a low, narrow room with a concrete floor and a single steel desk, and behind the desk sits a very large man in a gray uniform, with a shaved head and a face like a closed door.

"Miss Hart," he says. His voice is pleasant, surprisingly, with a trace of a Scottish burr. "Welcome. I'll need your phone, your watch, and anything else with a battery or a signal."

I hand them over. He logs each item in a ledger, an actual paper ledger, and slides them into a numbered drawer. Then he gestures at my coat.

"And the pocket."

My hand goes to it before I can stop myself. I close my fingers around the cloth bundle and feel my heart climb into my throat.

"It's a tuning fork," I say. "It was my grandfather's. It isn't electronic. It doesn't..."

"She has permission," Elizabeth says quietly.

The guard looks at her. Something passes between them, brief and unreadable. Then he nods, and holds out a palm. I unwrap the fork and place it in his hand. He turns it over, inspects it, taps it once against the edge of the desk with a little ringing note that makes my eyes sting, and gives it back without a word.

"Go on through."

The first door is behind him. It's thick, with a rubber seal, like the door of a submarine. A pane of dark glass beside it flickers to life as we approach, and a thin beam of green light sweeps over my face, my hands, my pupils, my fingertips. A voice, soft and genderless, says, "Subject registered. Visitor status. Escort required."

"That's me," Elizabeth says. "I'm the escort."

"Confirmed."

The door sighs open. We step through into a short, empty corridor, white walled, with a second door at the end of it. The first closes behind us with a heavy thud. My ears pop again.

"Airlock," Elizabeth murmurs. "It keeps the air in here clean. And the air out there out."

"Out where?"

"Everywhere else."

The second door opens. Beyond it is another corridor, and another door, and another scanner, this time with a tiny needle that pricks my finger so quickly I barely feel it. Another voice. Another seal. Elizabeth lays her hand on each pane and says nothing. I stop counting the doors somewhere around the sixth. The corridors grow quieter, and warmer, and stranger, until all the ordinary sounds of the world, rain and traffic and the faint, endless bustle of people, have been squeezed out of existence, and all that's left is the soft pad of our footsteps and the hush of filtered air.

I think of the lobby with its water wall and its thousand employees. I think of the sign in the engine hall, NO ENTRY, and of the eight security gates, the badge readers chirping, the cheerful people carrying boxes of tubes. All of it belongs to a different company now. A pleasant, honest, daylit company that I will never see again, at least not in the same way.

"Last one," Elizabeth says.

We have stopped at a final door. It's plain, matte gray, as tall as the ceiling and wide enough for a cart, with no scanner, no glass, no markings of any kind. The wall around it is old. I can see that now. The concrete has given way to brick, dark with age, and the mortar between the stones is crumbling in places, and there is a faint, unmistakable scent of damp cellar.

"This part is older than the building above," Elizabeth says. "We built around it."

"Older than 1791?"

"A little."

Before I can ask what she means, she lays her palm on the door.

It opens.

And I forget how to speak.

The room beyond is enormous. It rises in a great vault of dark red brick, the arches soaring overhead like the ribs of some drowned cathedral, with iron lamps hanging from the keystones and golden light pooling on the old stone floor. But the floor is laid with glossy white panels, and the walls are lined with banks of glass cabinets and humming instruments, sequencers and spectrometers and long steel incubators glowing blue from within. Holographic screens float above the benches, pale columns of data turning slowly in the air. A brass microscope with a green enamel base sits on a shelf beside a machine I can't begin to name, and neither looks out of place.

It's as if time has been folded. Like four hundred years of science have been gathered into one room and left to settle.

The air smells of warm paper, tea, ozone, and old stone. Along the nearest wall runs a long whiteboard covered edge to edge in equations, written in a dozen different hands, some neat, some slanting, some in ink so old it has faded to brown. Beneath it stands a shelf of notebooks, hundreds of them, leather bound and cloth bound and plain, their spines cracked and mended and cracked again.

"Welcome," Elizabeth says softly, "to the laboratory."

I take a step inside. The floor is warm under my shoes. I'm turning slowly, trying to take it all in, the arches and the glow and the quiet, when I notice the silence has changed.

The room is not empty.

Four people are scattered among the benches, and every one of them has stopped moving. A hand hovers above a keyboard. A pipette is lifted in midair. A cup rests halfway to a mouth. One by one, all four heads turn toward the door, and four pairs of eyes settle on me, unblinking, unhurried, and utterly, intensely still.

Nobody speaks.

The hum of the machines seems very loud.

I feel my face warm. My fingers close around the tuning fork in my pocket, and I try to smile, to say something, anything, but my tongue has gone dry. They aren't hostile, exactly. They look more like people who have been told a story for a very long time and have just seen the main character walk through the door.

It's the stare of someone measuring a stranger against a memory.

"Don't mind them," Elizabeth murmurs at my shoulder. She sounds amused, and a little fond, and a little worried all at once. "They've been waiting for you for three weeks, and pretending otherwise."

The silence stretches. A drop of water falls from a pipe somewhere and rings against the stone.

Four people, I think. Four strangers who have been in this room, doing this work, longer than I can possibly know.

And I'm the only one who doesn't belong yet.