Chương 201: B4. 8.1 - A Lab Tour

I looked at Deen.

"Any last-minute objections before I plug this in?" Deen placed her hands on her hips.

"What if Cecilia transfers her mind into her lab system… erm, computer storage, memory machine? I don't know what to call it. She might escape and lock us out of her lab."

"Wouldn't you like that if she's out of our hair? Our regular hair that's definitely not—""I'm worried about you," Deen exasperatedly said.

"If I'm overbearing, scrutinizing your body, I apologize. Also, don't think about how the expression 'get out of my hair' came to be. Focus."

"I wasn't thinking about that until you mentioned it," I said, taking a mental note to research that expression's origins later.

"And we can just force our way into the lab and wreck it if Cecilia betrays us." I raised the USB to the port. A tiny glint. I glanced at my right hand holding the USB stick—my thumb's nail was shiny. Golden. Fuck. Clenching my teeth, stopping myself from reacting more, I adjusted my hand and fingers so Deen wouldn't see it. This was the first time the growths on my hand had reached my fingers.

The fingerless glove that I chose to look like it was for fashion instead of hiding something was looking pretty dumb and useless right now. But then, I realized the silver lining of my seeding's progress.

"Here goes," I tried to say casually, though I was freaking out in my head. I was going to get golden claws! Awesome as fuck! Deen would be a downer about it, but I'd scratch her with my claws to show her how awesome they were. With a fluid motion, I pressed the end of the USB drive directly into the hidden slot. Its light turned on. I let go, my right hand falling to my side, hidden from view. This wasn't the time to show it to Deen. For a brief second, nothing happened.

Was USB Cecilia really escaping, as Deen predicted? I was thinking of a quippy line to poke fun at getting betrayed, when a mechanical click echoed behind the drywall. A subtle hiss of escaping pressure. A narrow, seamless portion of the wall, around Deen's height and a couple of feet in width, slid inward to reveal darkness. The air wafting from the gap was freezing, carrying a sharp smell of sterile antiseptic. Pins of light raced through the ceiling, illuminating the tunnel clad in white tiles.

"It's not a trap," Deen said.

"So far."

"Oh, don't be ominous like that," I said. One last look down the hallway. The historical display corridor was conveniently empty, but the PCM might have people other than Khaki Cop following us, probably hiding around the corner. Our disappearance would mean there was a hidden passage. But what could they do about it? Nothing. I pulled out the USB from the port and stepped through the threshold, Deen following closely behind me.

The hidden airlock clicked shut behind us, instantly changing the setting from roadside stop to tunnel. Freaking tunnels again. At least this tunnel looked different from La Esperanza's underground. Deen and I walked in silence, listening to our soft footsteps. The tunnel was bare except for the lights. No cameras or sensors that I could see. I hid my right hand in my pocket while pinning a paper bag to my flank with my right arm. Inside the bag was a black Dune Stalker sweatshirt and pajama pants.

Cecilia had better not complain about the clothes we picked for her. We also bought her shades, just in case she had monster eyes. Two pairs of shades, actually. I had told Deen it was for an emergency, in case one got broken. But the spare was actually for me. So far, my eyes hadn't turned red, like Spooky Erind's or Deen would already be yelling. At the end of the tunnel was a metal door. It smoothly moved aside, as if it were weightless, and we entered the laboratory itself.

The floor was more white tiles, reflecting the clinical blue-white light from ceiling panels. Rows of transparent vats lined the walls to our left and right, filled with a thick, swirling, viscous liquid. Inside the vats were suspended biological forms. Most of them were the size of children, except the one furthest from us—that must be Cecilia's spare body. Not sure what the other bodies were. Deen mumbled something as she stared at one of the grotesque floating babies.

She turned away in disgust, pulling me along, as if I were her kid who needed shielding from a horrible sight. We rounded a wide operating table in the middle of the floor, past boxy machines with glowing screens showing graphs and numbers. Articulated robotic arms hung motionless from overhead grids, hovering above us like weird metal crabs. I really, really wanted a hidden base like this. I didn't even care that I had no idea how to operate all the sci-fi thingamajigs.

It was all for aesthetic—that was what memorable villains had. Wait, did that mean I was a villain? A villain to others, maybe. But I was the main character of my own story. Profound thoughts, right there.

"Welcome to my humble laboratory," said a voice coming from everywhere.

"Cecilia?" I asked.

"She had left the USB," Deen said.

"I had a hunch she'd do it."

"Kindly plug the flash drive into the console," continued the voice, its tone even.

"The console is flashing red."

"Kindly? Is this really Cecilia?" I wondered.

"Or is this like the AI of the lab system or something?"

"I'm inclined to think this is a mere program," said Deen. I gave her a questioning glance. She shrugged.

"I can change my mind. Allowing us entry is incompatible with betrayal. Unless there's some trap here, which I don't… sense…" She was careful not to mention Gabe.

"Kindly plug the flash drive into the console," the voice repeated.

"With haste. The substrate sustaining my consciousness is reaching critical degradation." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Let's get this over with, Erind," Deen said, "before I have misgivings again and stop you." I stuck my tongue out at her.

"As if you can stop me." I marched to the control panel thingy next to the vat with the full-grown body and inserted the USB into the flashing port. The small monitor above the panel flickered on, cascading with streams of green data code. A bunch of complicated words and strings of numbers. Tempting to tap the screen and pretend I was a hacker in a movie. I knew real hackers worked differently; they didn't complain about the tough system security, only to break the protections seconds later.

Deen pointed at spindly arms descending from the top of the vat.

"Those are probably going to connect to—Ugh! Gross!" The mechanical arms drove their spindly ends into the head of the body inside the vat. No spurt of red to stain the green liquid.

"No blood?" I wondered. The metal arms connecting to the head began to glow. The monitor displayed a percentage. The progress of downloading Cecilia's consciousness? What was the difference between downloading and uploading? Mental note to research about that, too.

"This body sort of looks like Cecilia, doesn't it?" Deen leaned closer to the vat, her nose almost touching the glass.

"Cloning technology?"

"Cloning what, exactly? Cecilia's not human. Not a normal human. Her head could survive and move on its own—that must be the monster part."

"A clone of her original body," Deen said.

"She was a normal person before… all this. Her detachable head might also have been a partial clone."

"Of her body that was destroyed, which led to Euphonia saving her. Anyway, this is your last chance. Destroy this body of Cecilia and end her for good. I'm not going to stop you or try to influence your decision. I don't want any issues moving forward." In truth, I'd stop Deen if she attacked the vat. Just shield it with my body; if I violently restrained her, Gabe would alert Deen, and Deen would know I was lying. Yep, I was really lying. What a surprise.

"I'm not going to kill Cecilia in cold blood," Deen said, taking the moral choice, as I expected.

"If she even has blood. We also don't have many people who could help us. Any people. But I still maintain that Cecilia isn't going to help us, and I wouldn't count her as people." I nodded. There we go with Deen's signature relativistic morality. She was nice to people, but she also decided who was 'people'. The progress meter reached a hundred percent. Some hissing and whirring. Deen and I stepped away. The green slime inside the vat rapidly drained into the floor valves.

More robotic arms and cables suspended Cecilia's no longer floating body, slowly lowering it. Was it already alive? In answer, the naked body, so thin that it looked famished, gave a violent twitch. Cecilia gasped for air, breathing through her nose and mouth likely for the first time. Her eyes opened, bloodshot and twitchy. She looked at us and grimaced, her sunken jaws adding wrinkles to her creepy smile.

"Looks like a zombie," I muttered.

"She won't attack us," Deen whispered.

"Don't think of baiting her to bite you. This isn't a zombie movie."

"Wha—? Can you cut it out with the assumptions? Until you get mind-reading powers, don't keep guessing what I'm thinking about."

"You weren't thinking about zombie bite infections?"

"Nope. But if zombies did exist, I think our regeneration could fight the infection. I don't think a zombie's teeth can wound us anyway." The light on Euphonia's USB switched off. A small puff of black smoke seeped through the seams of its metal covering. The rancid stench told us that the Adumbrae tissue inside had officially decayed. I grabbed the USB drive and pocketed it. The front glass panel of the vat slid upward.

Cecilia, no longer a digital consciousness, stumbled forward out of the vapor that smelled like rotten eggs. She grabbed the steel rim of the vat's opening, coughing up a mouthful of the green fluid, her trembling legs showing with weakened muscle. Her face, covered by some strands of sticky, long hair, was paler than mine. It irked me that she had me beat at paleness.

"Sixty-three percent efficiency," Cecilia rasped, her voice barely used.

"I didn't expect to use my spare body this early."

"You're just making up numbers," I said.

"You should've prepared in advance, given this intellect you boast of." Deen crossed her arms, glancing at me. We thought the same thing—Cecilia was laying the groundwork for the quest to hunt an Adumbrae and get some stuff from the Tea Party. Not sure if she really needed those, or if she was buying time to betray us. She looked very weak, though. Cecilia glared at her own twitching fingers.

"It's not apparent, but cellular decay has commenced. I had estimated two days until this spare body dies, but let's not push the deadline. By the latter half of the second day, I'll be mostly immobile from atrophied muscles. I won't be able to synthesize the serum, even if you deliver the required Adumbrae flesh."

"Is it your hobby not to tell us the whole problem until later?" I asked with a scowl. Cecilia was doing that annoying thing in movies where there was always a twist to make things more difficult for the protagonist—me. I was the protagonist here.

"There's no problem, dears," Cecilia said, hobbling over to the bigger computer next to the operating table.

"I'm sure you won't let me die." She started typing stuff on the computer. The monitors of the other vats switched on as the liquid inside bubbled. The whole laboratory was coming to life, and we had no idea what Cecilia was doing. Making more spare bodies? Or were these creatures going to be monsters that she'd use to fight against us? Asking would give us science mumbo-jumbo. Cecilia could certainly dumb it down for us law students, but she wouldn't tell the truth if she really were planning to betray us.

Deen's eyes darting from one vat to the next showed her suspicion levels rising. But she tried to pretend to be nonchalant, which was the right call. We held power over Cecilia's life. Stuff she did shouldn't bother us. Our confidence would dissuade her from betraying us early, while also convincing her that she needed our protection.

"We'll reach Vegas before midnight," Deen said.

"Though that might be too late to meet your contact. We'll sleep and deal with this problem tomorrow." Deen pulled the paper bag I had clipped under my arm and unwrapped the clothes inside.

"Once you point us at the Adumbrae, we can most definitely obtain some flesh. We don't want to kill it, don't we? That'll be a harder task."

"You don't need to kill an Adumbrae, no," Cecilia said.

"Capturing one is more preferable. Transporting the Adumbrae from Las Vegas to here would be a monumental task, but having a test subject and a constant supply of—""Let's not jump forward with your plans too much," I cut in.

"We get Adumbrae flesh, and that's it. Fix your body with the amount we'll give you and be grateful."

"But I need continuous—""We'll get you more," I said. We'd check if Cecilia was telling the truth; if she were, she'd be reliant on us for her survival.

"My life is in your hands," Cecilia said with an exaggerated bow.

"Wear this, and we can get going." Deen handed Cecilia her clothes. Cecilia stared at the Dune Stalker design.

"I suppose… leaving me here to tend to my children is out of the question?" She gestured at the vats with wriggling creatures.

"Most definitely out of the question," Deen said. With great effort, Cecilia tried to wear her clothes. But her arms and legs were incredibly stiff and weak. We had to help dress her up. Very awkward scene. Probably comedic.

"You don't have clothes here or something?" I asked.

"Lab gowns," she replied.

"A bit too conspicuous to wear outside, wouldn't you agree? Again, my death was unexpected. I do think I'm invincible at times. Let me gather some tools that might help us. I suppose I could also bring…" She started opening cabinets.

"Hurry," Deen said.

"I still have a long drive to—""Before we leave," I said.

"Cecilia, I want you to do something." I took out the contents of my other pocket. I didn't want these making contact with Euphonia's USB. Opening my hands, I let a tiny crystal fall to the operating table.

"Can you examine what is this?"