Broken Pixels (Broken Realms, #4)

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8A little more than an hour later, the van drove along the span of Fremont Bridge. It was a large one, suspended well above the waters of the Willamette River. Yet the echoing of tires whipping across its superstructure screamed bridge, and, to Mara, anything that screamed bridge also screamed water. To keep her water phobia in check, she occupied herself by focusing on the road signs. Her tension drained as they approached the end of the bridge. The van had navigated itself into the right lane and followed Highway 30 until they were off the bridge and firmly on the ground in the middle of a bunch of brick and cinder-block warehouses, manufacturing buildings and gentrified lofts.

“Well, this looks like the part of town where you would want to keep something called a repository,” Mara said. “We should be getting there pretty soon.”

The van followed Highway 30 signs through the maze of industrial buildings, railroad cars and parked semitrucks for the next twenty minutes, only stopping occasionally to allow cross-traffic to pass when indicated by what Mara thought of as invisible traffic lights. After another five minutes, industrial buildings on the left side of the road gave way to steep hills covered with lush trees, while the right side remained flat and urbanized with squat boxy offices, gravelly parking lots and railroad tracks.

Sam exhaled loudly. “How much longer will this take? We’ll end up in the Pacific Ocean soon if we don’t turn or stop.”

The van slowed and turned left onto an unmarked road leading into the hills and trees. The rough road climbed for several hundred yards and then leveled out just before entering a dense grove of trees that blocked almost all sunlight. Muted lights illuminated the van inside, and its headlights cut through the darkness outside.

“It feels like we are in a tunnel,” Sam said.

Mara nodded ahead and said, “No, that’s going to feel like a tunnel.”

A concrete wall with a wide opening to accommodate the road loomed ahead. The van continued into the tunnel but decelerated to a crawl for fifty feet and came to a stop in front of a large corrugated aluminum door that blocked their path. The number 97210 was spray-painted in stenciled letters on the door. With a sudden rattle, the door lifted and disappeared into the curved ceiling of the tunnel.

“This reminds me of one of those underground military installations like NORAD or something,” Mara said. “Except there doesn’t appear to be any kind of security around.”

“No security that we can see, at any rate,” Ping said. “Perhaps Cam or someone at the hospital notified them that we were on our way. If they arranged for the transportation, it seems reasonable that they would have contacted whoever administers this facility.”

The rising door revealed a wire-framed compartment as wide as the road and deep enough to accommodate the van, above which was mounted a tight cluster of machinery—a collection of wheels, pulleys and cables. The front wall of the compartment slid to the right, revealing a steel-plated floor with noticeable tire tracks. The van inched forward until it was inside the compartment. The front wall slid closed behind them, blocking them in.

Mara pointed to the concrete walls through the wire mesh and said, “We’ve just entered an elevator shaft or a cargo lift of some kind.”

Something clattered against the undercarriage of the van, sending vibrations through their seats.

Sam locked stares with his sister. “That felt like something just attached itself to the bottom of the van.”

Mara raised an eyebrow. “Some kind of clamp to keep us from rolling around while the elevator is moving?”

The van’s engine cut off, and the interior lights went out.

They plunged into the ground. As Mara felt her body lift off her seat and press against the seat belt running across her torso, she tried to cry out but could not inhale enough air to make a sound. Bands of light, apparently built into the shaft through which they fell, whipped by so quickly they almost blurred together. Just when she thought she might pass out, the elevator felt as if it had slammed into a cushion of air, and the descent slowed. Mara heard Sam rustling about in the passenger seat.

“Are you guys okay?” she asked.

“My stomach feels like it is about to come out my throat,” Sam said.

As the elevator came to a stop, Ping said, “I’m fine, especially now that it appears we have arrived.”

Through the windshield of the van and the wire mesh sides of the elevator compartment, another corrugated aluminum door lifted, opening to an asphalt-covered platform sitting in the middle of a rock-lined cavern. Floodlights mounted high above filled the space with simulated daylight. After the side of the compartment slid out of the way, the van’s engine turned over, and the vehicle rolled forward, following a white dashed line on the ground that curved to the left. Soon Mara could see two rows of other vehicles, half of which were white vans identical to theirs. This was a parking lot. Their van slid into a spot at the end of a row and again turned off its engine.

“I suppose that means we have arrived,” Ping said. “Why don’t we step outside and see if we can get our bearings?” He reached for the handle of the side door and slid it open.

Through the wide opening, they saw two men in light blue smocks and white slacks jogging toward the van. Behind them, an older woman in a lab coat—her gray hair pulled into a bun that peeked over the top of her head—eyed a clipboard while she walked at a more leisurely pace. The two men headed directly to the rear doors of the van, opened it and slid out the gurney holding Cam’s body. Mara and Sam clambered past Ping, out the side door of the van, and ran alongside the van to the rear.

As the men turned to roll away the gurney, Mara said, “Excuse me, but what exactly will you do with him?”

The men looked past Mara to the woman who had just walked up. She said to them, waving in the direction from which they’d come, “That’s okay. You guys go ahead, and I’ll consult with the relatives.”

“Actually we’re not relatives,” Sam said. “We’re just friends of Cam’s.”

The woman turned to him, and her eyes narrowed. Taking a step toward Sam, she leaned forward and stared into his eyes intensely—like she was conducting an exam. Reaching up to grasp his chin with her thumb and index finger, she turned his head slightly to the left and gasped. “You’re biological! How can that be?”

She turned to Mara, gave her a quick once-over and said, “You too!”

Ping stepped from the van and approached the opened rear doors. The woman shifted her gaze to him and said, “And you! How have the three of you survived this long without transitioning?”

Ping gave her a blank stare, collected himself after a moment and said, “I’m sorry, are you inquiring as to why we don’t have artificial bodies?”

“That would be a good place to start,” she said.

“Well, that may take a little time and effort to explain, miss—”

“Dr. Canfield, Celeste Canfield,” she said. She held up a hand. “I’ll tell you what. I need to get started with your friend,”—she looked at her clipboard—“Cameron Lee, and I can’t simply let you leave in this condition. I’d be called up before the ethics board for neglect.”

She pointed toward the orderlies, pushing Cam’s gurney into two large industrial doors leading into a rock face two hundred feet from the parking lot, and said, “Hurry along. With all the other craziness going on, I can’t get bogged down on any single peculiarity.”

Ping fell in step next to her, while Mara and Sam followed behind. “So, Dr. Canfield, how did you recognize us as biological so readily? No one else has given us a second look, even a nurse at a hospital earlier today.”

“I work intimately with both biological and synthetic physiologies on a regular basis. After a few years, you develop an eye for it—the subtle differences in skin texture and muscle tone, shading and coloring. Although I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve been put to the test—it’s not like I run into animate biological adults every day.”

“So you are a medical doctor?” Ping asked.

She gave him an odd look. “Of course. Who else would be running a repository? You wouldn’t ask a plumber to plug you into a synthetic body and then take care of your biological one, would you?” She held open one of the doors and waved them in ahead of her. “Though the three of you haven’t ever addressed that particular question, have you?”

“I suppose not,” Ping said.

Dr. Canfield pointed them down the hall and to the left. After passing several doors, she entered one labeled Diagnostics. Again she held the door and herded them through. Inside, a round smoky-gray Plexiglas table surrounded by backless chrome stools sat in the center of the room. The wall to the right appeared to be made of the same gray Plexiglas, while the one perpendicular to it—the wall opposite the door—was clear glass. When they approached it, they could see into an examination room one floor below. On a table at the center of the lower room was Cam’s headless body. Off to the side, on a raised oval platform, stood a three-dimensional transparent likeness of Cam—all of him, head and body—gesturing and talking to one of the attendants who had retrieved him from the van.

Mara pointed into the examination room and asked, “Is he actually talking to Cam?”

“Yes. We can generate a holographic representation of him through which he can interact with us. From Cam’s perspective, it is much less disconcerting, especially since he has been decapitated, and we have yet to retrieve his cranium,” Dr. Canfield said.

“He was definitely disconcerted about being decapitated. He got snippy a few times while we were carrying around his head,” Sam said.

The doctor looked appalled and said, “What?”

Mara frowned at her brother, raised a hand to catch Dr. Canfield’s attention and said, “I’m not sure it’s possible to retrieve his cranium. I have reason to believe that it may have been destroyed.”

The doctor looked doubtful but asked, “When did this occur?”

“The last time I saw Cam’s head was five days ago, and I believe it was lost soon after that,” Mara said.

Dr. Canfield walked over to the Plexiglas wall and tapped it. It lit up and displayed a row of white buttons in a line about chest high. She touched one labeled Geolocation. After rapidly choosing a series of options and dismissing several screens, she stepped from the wall and pointed to a map of downtown Portland with a red dot flashing on it.

“We are still getting a signal from the cranium. It appears inactive, but there’s every reason to believe that it may be intact and recoverable,” she said.

“Isn’t it possible just to fabricate a new cranium?” Mara asked.

“Assuming you could survive if I chopped off your head, and then I gave you the option of reattaching it or growing a new one in a petri dish, which one would you choose? Cam could survive with a newly fabricated cranium, but the engrams contained in it have evolved since they were taken from his biological body. What he had become as an individual, how he has been shaped by his experiences, all would be lost.”

“His memories would be lost?” Ping asked.

Dr. Canfield shook her head. “No, but how he felt about them and how those feelings molded his personality would be lost.” After a short pause, she asked, “Why am I having to explain all this to you? Even a schoolkid understands the basic concepts of synthetic physiology. Who are you people?”