Analog SFF, March 2012 (15 page)

Last Thursday, four days ago, an anthropologist who was studying an Arikara site in the South Dakota Badlands had a Dead Sea Scrolls moment, though unlike a shepherd idly throwing stones, the anthropologist made his discovery by dropping a trowel from a ledge. He looked down at the rocky slope below but could see no sign of the tool. Annoyed, he inched his way into a crevasse, searching in vain for the trowel, which he needed to finish the job. After half an hour he gave up. As he climbed, his foot fell in a hole he hadn't seen, giving his ankle a turn. But as he looked down, he was astonished that the hole had disappeared.

According to the report I'd read, he stated that he spent a few minutes feeling around before he found the hole again. It was elliptical, with a major axis of about three feet. The reason the anthropologist had trouble seeing the hole was that a spring-driven hinged flap covered it. The flap had a remarkably realistic rocky appearance.

Pushing the flap inward, he saw his trowel at once. He peered further into the darkness but could discern nothing. The ankle bothered him but he couldn't ignore his curiosity, so he painfully climbed to the ledge he'd been working on and retrieved a flashlight. The dimensions of the hole permitted his entrance, though with little room to spare. He slithered for about ten feet until the passage suddenly broadened into a cavern.

The air seemed to be fresh and circulating, and he reported feeling a slight breeze blowing on his face and hair. A sweep of the flashlight illuminated twelve cavities, about the size that could contain an adult human situated perpendicular to the wall. Eight of those compartments contained nude bodies. He immediately realized that the cave had nothing to do with Arikara Indians, or anything of similar archeological value. The bodies appeared contemporary, were in perfect condition, and consisted of four men and four women. He didn't think they were alive, although the limbs were flexible, and the skin was waxy and roughly at the same temperature as the air, eighteen degrees Celsius.

The anthropologist notified park authorities, who notified the local sheriff's office and a medical team. The medical team decided that the bodies were lifeless, so they put them in body bags and took them to the county's medical examiner. After the shocked M.E. saw one of the bodies twitch when it was placed on a cold examination table, she dialed the hospital.

All of this was in the report. After leaving the scientists to argue among themselves for a while, I interviewed the hospital director.

"We used sensitive instruments to establish signs of life in all of the bodies,” he told me. “We wrapped the bodies in warm blankets and infused nutrients into the blood stream, but the patients remained in a comatose condition. No change occurred even after we heated the bodies to the usual temperature of thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Careful visual inspection of the bodies revealed no indications of trauma. Then we tried to peer inside, and I mean we tried everything—X-rays, MRI scans, ultrasound, terahertz, even the new nanoprobes. Nothing, no trauma at all. The EKGs show that the heartbeats, once initiated, resemble a normal pattern of ion channel openings and closings, but with a rising phase that lasts tens of seconds. Crazy! They normally last milliseconds."

"What about the brain?"

"EEGs display a slow, extremely low-amplitude oscillation over much of the brain. The pattern looks a little like delta waves, the kind of waves in deep sleep. Metabolic imaging shows nothing but basal, resting activity, but much lower than sleep."

"Like in a coma?"

The director shook his head. “Like nothing I've ever seen.” He appeared baffled. “Most blood tests fall within normal ranges, and those that aren't normal fail to correspond to any simple diagnosis. Aside from the patients’ ultra-low respiration and heart rates, widespread brain wave synchronization, and the inability to self-regulate their temperature, they should be able to stand up and walk out of the hospital."

No wonder the mass media dubbed them “hibernators."

None of their physiological signatures matched anything in the databases. As far as the official records were concerned, they didn't exist; they had no identities. Their DNA was unusual and contained a few strange new alleles, and perhaps a new gene or two, but otherwise it consisted of perfectly good examples of human genomes—except that none of the eight were registered in the databases. Every once in a while an individual slipped through the net, but eight of them?

I toured the small room in the hospital basement that the held eight glass enclosures, four on each side with an aisle down the middle. Six of the cocoons contained pale, undressed bodies, three men and three women. All of them looked to be about thirty years of age, though it was hard to tell for sure. They appeared waxy and dead—bloodlessly pale and perfectly still, lacking even a perceptible rise and fall of the chest. Yet the climate-controlled cocoons indicated a heartbeat—three per minute—and oxygen consumption, though barely one percent for a normal adult.

Two of the cocoons were empty.

"We're not Fort Knox,” the hospital director said, shrugging.

"Nobody blames you,” I told him. “You did a good job rigging these medical stations."

"We've never had to do anything like this before, but we're used to dealing with new situations. We're the only trauma center in the area—whatever comes in, we have to figure out how to treat it. The scientists helped out too. They came swarming here after the news leaked out, wanting to do all kinds of research."

"Do you have any recording of the vital signs of the two missing patients?"

The director shook his head. “Not at the time of the incident, I'm afraid. We didn't originally set up the system to record the sensors continuously. We could save bits and pieces of the data that we thought were interesting, but we didn't think we'd need to save everything all the time. Sorry, but we had no idea that this would happen. We're continuously recording all the data now, on the remainder of the bodies."

"Was somebody monitoring the signals at the time the bodies disappeared?"

"Yes. The signals were continuously watched at the nurse's station upstairs. Two of my best nurses were on duty last night, when the bodies disappeared. They noticed nothing unusual in the monitors until about eleven o'clock, when the signals from two of the stations were lost. One male, one female. The nurses suspected equipment failure, so they called for maintenance."

"You're sure none of the surveillance cameras picked up anything?"

"You're welcome to look at the video. There's nothing out of the ordinary, and no trace of the two patients or the guard and orderly that also disappeared. Which is remarkable, considering the only way out of that basement is through the door we went through."

I'd noticed the security camera mounted on the ceiling over the door as I walked through. “Every second of the video is accounted for? Nothing's missing?"

"As far as we can tell. It's pretty boring, though. Almost all of the video shows nothing but an empty hallway.” The director rubbed his jaw. “I guess it could have been tampered with. The orderly that vanished—he was pretty good with high tech stuff."

Juarren Trey. I'd checked his dossier. Bright twenty-two year-old, one year of college before dropping out. Professors said he seemed “restless.” Reads a lot of lurid fiction, watches unrated movies. But he was engaged to be married to an administrator's assistant at the hospital; appeared to be settling down.

I'd also checked the guard's dossier. Frank Sheldan; sixty-three years of age, looking forward to retirement. Worked for the hospital twenty-six years, never reprimanded. Finances shaky, but nothing serious. His wife was frantic—said he must have been kidnapped because he'd never just go away without leaving a note. After reading his file, I tended to agree with her.

"Any chance the patients woke up on their own?” I asked.

"You've been listening to Poe Weffle,” said the director.

"I admit his ideas seem unlikely. Considering the way their tracks have been covered up, it looks like the bodies were stolen. But I suppose it's possible that the patients woke up and forced or bribed their way out."

"They might have spontaneously woken up, or been programmed to do so, but nothing happened when we warmed them up. If they were going to snap out of it, I would have thought that's the time they'd do it."

"Still, Poe thinks it's possible."

The director gave me an odd look. “Did you know that Poe Weffle's wife is a seer?"

"A what?"

His upper lip curled briefly in a sneer. “A medium. She claims to talk to dead spirits.” He walked away, leaving me without the slightest doubt about what he thought of Poe's wife—and by association, Poe himself.

The sun shone brightly, but a chilly breeze blew from the west, and I buttoned up my coat. I stood all alone on the roof of a diner located across the street from the hospital—a convenient and private place. Lunchtime traffic zipped along the street below. I spoke the code that alerted all security apparatus in the area of my desire to communicate with HQ. A minute later the boss's voice came over a speaker I couldn't see, but seemed to be attached somehow to the satellite dish mounted on the roof. I suspected the diner's television reception had suddenly and mysteriously degraded. This meant I might not have much time before a disgruntled employee climbed the stairs to investigate.

"I need a science team,” I told the boss.

"One is already working on the data. When they reach any firm conclusions that you should know about, you'll be notified."

The boss sounded dismissive. Maybe he—or she—didn't appreciate the notice I'd filed of my intent to not renew my contract. It was impossible to discern what the boss was thinking. It was impossible to determine anything at all about the boss; the synthesized voice masked the real one, and nobody knew how many security devices, communication links, and satellites my transmission passed through before finally reaching wherever it went. It would take a million years to trace those transmissions.

"My next step,” I said, “depends on what these hibernators really are."

"You should proceed on the assumption that they are an unauthorized genetic experiment or mission."

Which was what had pushed everybody's buttons. HQ believed that the hibernators had been genetically engineered, but nobody knew who had done it and why. As anyone who works for government security will tell you, always assume the worst.

"The hibernators may have self-activated,” I said.

"We are discussing this possibility. In which case you should search the data for any signs of the two hibernators as well as the two suspects that have also disappeared."

By “data” I knew the boss referred to the output of the billions of instruments we stashed in every nook and cranny of the world. I had DNA samples from the two hibernators, and they would be easy to spot if the DNA showed up in any of the data from the sensors and probes. The hospital also furnished me with a few photographs of the missing hibernators, although they weren't high-resolution shots, and the subjects’ eyes were closed, which limited their use. I'd need to make some digital enhancements before I could search the exabytes of data from the visual monitors. Of course I already had everything I needed from the guard and orderly in their dossiers.

I heard footsteps in the stairwell. After coding the closure of the comm link I walked toward the door. The diner employee came out just as I was going in. After he glanced at my badge his challenge died before it escaped his lips.

As soon as I got back to the hospital I planned on commandeering a broadband link and initiating an expanded computer search of the sensor data. There'd been no signs of the missing guard and orderly, but now that I had hibernator DNA samples, I could include them on the list.

After a five-minute walk I reached the parking lot. Then my comm rang. I looked at the ID screen—Clarissa Jardin.

"You better get back here right away,” she said.

"Any news?"

"It's Poe.” Her voice had a tone of disgust. “I think he's really gone off the deep end this time."

Security was a job you got into because you were too young to realize what you were getting into. And though I lost my esprit de corps a long time ago, I'd stayed in the business a dozen years, and done a lot of good things. Remember that nano-plague threat in L.A. six years ago? They didn't start replicating because my colleagues and I found the terrorist in time. We had to fight dirty, but there wasn't any other way of saving eleven million lives. Once it became easy for small groups, or even individuals, to acquire catastrophically destructive weapons, the survival of civilization seemed to require a headlock on privacy. A single instance of misplaced trust, and a million people go bye-bye.

Lots of downsides to having such a high degree of security. Nobody was more aware of that than security agents. Suspicion dominates your thoughts. When you meet somebody new, your first thought is: What could this person be hiding?

Clarissa, for instance. She was waiting for me at the hospital entrance. Exasperated, she ranted about Poe's wild ideas. Poe claimed to have detected a radiation by which the two missing hibernators had been “animated."

I listened to her, but only with part of my attention. The rest of my mind occupied itself with wondering why a knowledgeable, gifted scientist would so sneeringly attack another. Jealousy? Maybe, but according to her dossier she chose her own career path—she could have played with the big boys but decided to stay close to home. That suggested a different sort of person than the one she presented. I would have thought she'd be skeptical, but in a constructive, matriarchal manner. The way Clarissa acted, she fit the mold of a big league in-fighter, jostling her way to fame and fortune at the expense of whoever didn't agree with her.

"Surely even someone with little or no scientific training,” said Clarissa, evidently referring to someone like me, “can see that Poe is a distraction, diverting time and resources away from the real problem at hand."