“Then why isn’t she moving?” he says. “Shouldn’t she be screaming?”
“Yes, sir. That would be the normal reaction, sir. Yes.”
“What the hell is wrong with her? Is it possible she still has a mutative gene interfering with the process?”
“It’s hard to know. We’ve administered the gene-editing therapy several times now; at this point she should have no residual mutations, had there been any to begin with.”
“This is unbelievable. Billions spent on research, and you can’t give me a solid reason why there’s one person on this island who can’t be brought online?”
Cool water, warm water, more hands on my body.
“It’s been two years of trying,” says Sebastian. “She’s had plenty of time to recover between attempts. I’m sorry, sir—she promised me it would work this time. She promised me it wouldn’t happen again—”
“I’m sick of this,” Soledad says angrily. “It’s been years of bullshit excuses. I want a real explanation—”
“Her body is exhibiting some kind of resistance,” says a voice I don’t recognize. “We’ve tried it a number of different ways now. No matter what we do,by the time we get everything online it just stops working. The tech is being rejected.”
“That’s impossible,” he says. “The program is flawless. It’s been tested in a thousand ways—”
“We don’t know why it’s happening,” says the voice, terrified now. “In order to bring her online, the mind has to be active. For some reason, we can’t get a signal.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Soledad demands. “Her brain just isn’t working?”
“Yes, sir. Her brain waves are nonresponsive.”
“How?” I hear the moment his anger becomes suspicion. I hear it from lifetimes away, as if I’m suspended from the sun. “You’re saying her body assumes a vegetative state at will?”
“Yes, sir. As far as the program is concerned, she appears to be dead inside.”
It occurs to me that I am naked.
My flesh is pressed against cold metal, a coarse sheet pulled up to my neck. My nerves awaken, like antennae unfurling. My skin seems to soften, my bones to harden. Sound returns to me slowly and scattered: the buzz of electricity, the drag of a footstep, the jangle and clatter of steel, the scrape of tools, sharpening.
Then his voice: a miracle.
“I can’t believe she’s really dead. This is crazy. Are you sure there was no heartbeat? Shouldn’t we be absolutely sure before we do this? Because there’s no logical reason why she should be dead right now—”
A woman says, “She suffered a bad blow to the head at some point in the night. Sometimes the symptoms of a brain hemorrhage are hard to spot.”
I’m on a gurney, I realize, wheeling through space. I feel every bump and rattle of the wheels, the cold bite of metal against my skin. Footsteps pound the floor around me, pound in my head. My heart is beating so slowly it seems to drag. I feel ancient, held together by cobwebs.
“Wait,” James is saying. “Hey— Wait— Can you just hang on for a second—”
The gurney comes to a sudden, violent halt. My body sloshes. My teeth rattle.
“Let it go, James,” says a cold male voice I’ve never heard before. “I want the autopsy performed without delay.”
Autopsy.
I must be in the morgue.
“You’re just going to cut her open?” James is saying. “You’re not even going to try—”
“Look,” the woman says, her voice brisk. “There’s nothing we can do to help her. She’s already dead. We’re thinking she died at least thirty minutes ago. No amount of healing is going to bring her back to—”
My eyes open slowly, the effort like prizing an orange peel from its flesh. My fingers curl by micrometers under the starchy sheet, my lungs expanding a degree at a time.
“Fucking zombie,” someone screams.
