“Kids who happen to have found and correctly interpreted an academic paper?”
“Chiu isn’t like most kids,” Farah says firmly.
“Suspicious,” Vikram says.
“For god’s sake. What do you want to do?” Abi says. “Turf them on to the street?”
“We can’t risk that,” Vikram responds. “They’d go back to whoever sent them.”
Abi turns to the older man. “Benedict, please, talk some sense into him.”
“Of course,” the older man – Benedict – says. “I apologize for the … poor start. This world has more than its fair share of trouble. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Professor Benedict Brownstein, I run this lab and allegedly I wrote this paper, which was an impressive trick seeing as I was unconscious at the time. These are my colleagues: Dr Abigail Peradams, Dr Vikram Shah and Dr Marcus Lancaster. We are – er, were – part of a study to explore disconnected consciousness.” He gives us an awkward little half bow and then looks around, brightening. “Marcus, maybe this would be a good time to put on a nice pot of tea, don’t you think?”
THIRTY-FIVE
They show us through to another room behind the main lab. It looks like some kind of common room, cluttered to the point of being filthy: pizza boxes, takeout containers, half-eaten sandwiches; electronic circuits, soldering irons, dismantled equipment. It’s hard to tell how much exists in this world and how much has leaked across, forgotten in the common room of the ordinary world. In the spaces between the equipment, there are piles of loose papers: ring binders and notebooks, all filled, as far as I can see, with densely packed writing and intricate diagrams. The windows, I notice, have been covered with cardboard and masking tape.
We sit on three long, low, moth-eaten sofas, arranged in a U-shape around a coffee table strewn with yet more scientific journals and notebooks. Marcus bustles over to a small kitchenette and flicks on a kettle.
“You have electricity?” Farah gasps.
Marcus grins like a schoolboy. He gestures to the far corner where a large section of the room has been given over to a stack of car batteries, all wired together with high-voltage cable. “Just a hand-crank generator, I’m afraid. I wish I could get the LiPos working but lead acid is about my limit.”
“How?” Chiu says.
“We’re scientists,” Benedict replies, looking affronted. “Neuroscientists, to be fair, but between us we have enough working knowledge to get a few things running.”
Marcus fusses over mugs and tea bags and starts pouring tea. “Milk?” he asks. “I’m sorry it’s only long-life. The fresh stuff never makes it through before it’s gone off.”
I grin at the absurdity of our sudden change in circumstances, as Marcus slops milk into each of our cups.
Something catches Chiu’s eye and he lets out a yelp of delight, leaping up and rushing over to the large flat-screen monitor on the workbench next to the kitchenette. “You’ve got a television?” He examines the flat-screen, which is showing a grainy image I can’t quite make out. “Can you get TV? Movies?”
“DVDs are a bit outside my field of expertise,” Benedict admits. “We have a hard wire to the CCTV camera in the airlock, that’s all.”
I recognize the scene on the monitor now. Not the broken filmic images we saw in the service station, but the white and cream walls of the hallway where they ambushed us. That’s how they did it, I think. This screen, an arrangement of magnetic locks on the doors and some kind of … explosive?
We make ourselves comfortable on the mismatched sofas while Marcus offers around a plate of biscuits.
“Ah! Tea and stale biscuits,” Vikram remarks caustically. “No one eats here, no matter how many times we’ve tried, but Marcus keeps at it. He thinks it’s good for morale. Typical upper-class Englishman.”
Marcus scoffs, haughtily. “You went to a better school than I did, Vik. And if I described you as a typical Indian, it wouldn’t be acceptable, now, would it?”
Vikram waves him away.
“It makes the place more homely,” Marcus insists.
Benedict sits next to Farah and gestures towards her bandaged hand. “May I?”
Farah casts me an anxious look but allows Benedict to take her hand and gently unwrap the bandage. “Hyperdactyly?” he says. “But … what happened to the extra fingers?”
“We cut them off,” I say.
Benedict glances at the others. “You cut them off? Why?”
“We were told that you could treat the symptoms. Slow it down.”
Abi comes over and sits on the far side of Farah, her face a mixture of scepticism and hopefulness. “It’s possible. Anything is possible in this god-forsaken place.”
“Surgical removal?” Vikram remarks, impressed. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
“We lost Alistair to hyperdactyly,” Marcus explains.
Farah withdraws her hand and wraps it again. “What are you all doing here?” she says. “You said you were studying … disconnected…?”
“Disconnected consciousness,” Vikram says.
“This is our lab, in the … real world,” Benedict continues. “We’ve been studying the nature of consciousness for many years now.” He sips his tea and watches us intently. “We discovered that in certain circumstances, patients who appear unconscious sometimes display neurological activity that’s indistinguishable from that of somebody who is fully conscious. We believed – and now we know – that it signifies a new state of consciousness.”
“Not dreaming, not hallucinating. Just … not there,” Vikram says.
“You mean here, in this world,” Chiu says.
“Exactly,” Vikram says.
Chiu nods excitedly. “I read the journal article.”
