Zombie Ever After (5 page)

Donovan ran to her. She had a nasty bruise on her forehead, but there was no blood. Her lids drooped and all he could see was a thin stripe of the whites of her eyes. Her mouth gaped open, and she was breathing heavy, almost snoring. Then, abruptly, it stopped.
 

He knelt beside her, his ear near her cheek, and listened for her breath. Gently, she inhaled. She was all right. He didn’t raise his head at once, though. Now that he lingered so close to her, he was struck by her beauty. Her lips, parted as she breathed, glistened. Her lips were so close, so delicious, he found himself leaning in to kiss her.

“What. The. Fuck.” She opened her eyes and rose to her elbows.
 

“I, er, thought you were dead.” he said.
 

“If you thought I was dead, why the hell were you thinking about kissing me?” She glared at him, reaching out at first to slap him. She stopped an inch before making contact with his cheek and, instead, raised her hand back up to her own forehead.

“Owww,”
she said.
 

Welcome back. I’m Zoë Krant, and you’re watching Investigation Nation. We’re speaking with Dr. Burkhart Egesa, founder, CEO, and chief scientist at ATELIC Industries.

Dr. Egesa, how did this crisis we are witnessing today come about?

I don’t see it as a crisis at all. Rather, it’s a fantastic opportunity to explore the far reaches of the science of immortality, if you will. And, please, call me Burkhardt. Look, the technology for using stem cells to recreate certain body parts is already available. Right here, right now. Some labs are inserting stem cells into living, human bodies. To repair injuries. To recover from surgery. To generate a new finger, nose, or breast. Like a salamander can re-grow its own tail.
 

Yes, but, grow a whole entire human? Dr. Egesa, that’s a far more complex equation. Infinitely more complex. It might happen, a long time in the future from now, or it may never happen, you must agree.

With all due respect, Zoë, I don’t. ATELIC’s whole reason for being is reanimation, which ultimately means immortality. We are not simply in the frozen head storage business. We need to know: would the head—the brain—be alive after being frozen? Frozen, possibly, for centuries. It’s our charter, our raison d’etre.

Fine, Burkhardt, let’s move on. So the experiments began. As I understand it, various algorithms were run on computers, software models built.

Yes, ATELIC had an entire compute cluster—hundreds of computers—with petabytes of data, processing complex computer models in parallel. But nothing was done in the real world; it was all just silicon-based. Year after year of computer simulations, all ending in failure.
 

Then one day, two years ago, what happened?

I’m glad you asked, Zoë. One of the models worked. Or at least, it came close enough that it could be studied, tweaked, bugs ironed out, that sort of thing.
 

By year’s end, you and your team had perfected the equations, or so you thought. Correct?

Exactly. On the computer screen everything looked perfect. It was a miracle. We couldn’t believe our luck, our persistence—my genius.
 

But we all know how this goes. How it’s always gone, and how it will always go, ‘til the end of time. Man should never try to play God. When he forgets this and tries to, anyway, disaster ensues. With the most horrible, if unintended, consequences. Don’t go anywhere. More after this break.

Donovan stood up and walked to the kitchen. “You fell. I was, um, checking on you,” he said. “That’s all.”
 

“Oh, really?” she said. He had his back to her, messing with a cereal box on the counter, shaking it, reading about the nutrients, putting it back down. He turned around to face her. Before he could say a word, she said, “Yeah, well, it looked to me like you were moving in for a freebie. That’s what I think.”
 

“In your dreams, babe,” he said, although more than likely he meant his own dreams. He opened the freezer and took out an icepack, wrapped it in a dishtowel, and brought it over to her. “Here. You should put this on that bump on your head before it swells anymore.”
 

She mumbled thanks and took the icepack. Somehow, between the time Donovan almost stole a kiss from the Sleeping Beauty to when he handed her the ice, the bump on her head had seemingly cracked open. Odd, there was still no blood, not a drop. Worse, a bit of her skull—just a tiny sliver of it—glistened ghoulishly in between the thin layers of muscle and skin of her forehead.

“Um, look,” he said. “Maybe I should take you to the hospital. You have quite an egg on your head.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, unconsciously raising her hand to her forehead. She felt around the bump, and then, with a squeak that sounded like a mouse that had just been stepped on, she sprang up and ran to the hall bathroom. She slapped at the light switch, bathing the small room in a flickering, blue fluorescent haze, and stared at herself in the mirror.

“Fuck!” she yelled, leaning closer to the mirror.
 

As Donovan watched, the buzzing of the overhead light in the bathroom added a strange soundtrack to the scene.
 

“Oh, Jesus H. Christ,” she continued. She slammed the bathroom door shut and locked it.

Welcome back. I’m Zoë Krant and you’re watching Investigation Nation. Before we return to part three of our interview with Dr. Burkhart Egesa, we have an interview with Dr. Alena Portanova for you. She is one of ATELIC’s top scientists and Burkhart Egesa’s right-hand person. Alena, we’re delighted to have you.

Delighted to be here.
 

Dr. Portanova—

Please, call me Alena.

All right. Alena, can you tell us exactly what you know about ATELIC? What you saw?

Well, scientifically, what we were doing, the approach, was sound. But we were being asked more and more by the founder— Burkhart Egesa.

Yes, Egesa. He was not the man I first knew back when the company started. He’d lost not only his joi de vivre, but his moral compass. He’d become so corrupted by the money we were making, or sorry, could be making, that he’d let no obstacle get in his way.

You mentioned something about the science a minute ago, when we were off the air.

Yes, right. Well, after we verified that the results we were getting in the computer model were valid, we took our findings to the bio-lab. There, we began building the chemical formulas that the computer models indicated would be successful.

Go on.

Well, some chemical combinations caused explosions, fires, noxious fumes. But we eventually got the formula right for this “bathwater,” as we called it. So, we began tests on living subjects. First on frozen brains from fruit flies. Nervous systems, actually.

Because fruit fly DNA is very similar to human DNA, isn’t that true?

Exactly. Well, after we had success with the fruit flies, we moved onto mouse brains, rabbit brains, sheep brains. And inevitably, chimpanzee brains—which are closest to ours, genetically speaking.

What happened next?

Frankly, we had quite a few disasters, failures, and mishaps. But intermixed with all that were a few victories that gave us hope. Last year, we broke through. We’d reached, in a way, Monkey Brain Nirvana. The thawed chimp brain, floating in the bathwater we’d created, registered activity on a direct neural interface. We also got readings on our brain-machine interfaces, as well as on our electroencephalographic devices. Rudimentary readings, to be sure, but unmistakable. The brain was alive again!

I don’t understand. This seems like a great breakthrough. What went wrong?

Here’s where I really parted ways with Dr. Egesa. We stopped following sound scientific principles, to put it simply. Without double-blind trials to verify our findings. Without the years and years of research and debate within the scientific community that a discovery of this magnitude requires—demands—we nonetheless moved on to human testing. Well, to be more accurate, testing on once-human organs. The frozen brains that we had in our charge, a trust we violated with these experiments. The first human tests were a disaster. The heads placed in the bath simply died. Or, more accurately, remained dead. No brain-wave readings whatsoever.
 

Mmmmm,
fascinating. [Turning to the camera] We’ll be right back.

Cathren stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. The face that looked back was smooth, almost no wrinkles. The skin clear and healthy. Her hair long, soft, and mostly straight with just a hint of a wave here and there. Her green eyes bright and alive.

She’d been Homecoming Queen at both her high school and at college, and over time had become convinced that men were superficially attracted to her. To her “shell,” not her soul. She didn’t believe any man had ever loved the Cathren who lived just under the smooth skin, the pretty face. No one, that is, until now.

And just when she thought that maybe for the first time in her life she might have found someone real—this man, Donovan—she was falling apart, accelerated decomposition of some kind. As if God wouldn’t let her have both love and looks at the same time.

She sniffled and grabbed a tissue to blow her nose, feeling more sorry for herself with each “toot” in the tissue.

Cathren, in a daze, opened the bathroom door at last and tottered back slowly into the living room. She dropped like a cadaver onto the couch. She slid deeper into the cushion, until her head rested on the back of the couch. She stared up at the ceiling and sighed. “This is bad,” she muttered. “
Real
bad....”

She was talking to herself, but Donovan answered anyway. “Yeah, no kidding. You need medical attention,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “I don’t want to alarm you, but that thing on your head—”

“It’s not a thing, asshole.”

“Okay, fine, the wound, whatever it is. What do I know? But it doesn’t look good.”

She sighed again, exhaling her fears into the room. She said nothing for a minute. Then she got up. She took her purse from where she’d dropped it by the door, pulled out a silver compact, and sat back down. “Dammit,” she said, studying the wound as she powdered it. “Dammit.”

When it was clear that powder wouldn’t make a difference, she undid her pony tail and shook her hair out, fluffing it with her fingers. She brushed her bangs down and across the wound, as if pulling a shade down to hide it.

“Ugh. I’m so ugly.” Cathren held compact up to the injury. She tilted the little mirror up and down and back and forth to get a better view, light reflecting from it onto the wound as if someone were taking photos with a flash. Tears filled her eyes, and one broke free to trickle down her cheek. “I look like a freak.” She snapped her compact shut and stared at the monogram on it for a second: CW. She tossed it back into her purse as if she was throwing it in the garbage.
 

They were silent for a few minutes. Donovan stood in front of her, his hands loose at his sides, unconsciously biting his lip. He tried not to stare at the lump, yet he couldn’t look away. He didn’t have any idea what to say in a situation like this. Other than suggest, again, that he take her to have it looked at.

“No, no. Can’t do that.” She curled her legs up under her on the couch and slouched just a little. “You forget, I’m a wanted woman.”

Donovan sat next to her on the couch. “They said on the news that you needed medical help, that’s all. Nothing about you being a criminal or anything.”

“Yeah, right. How many people have you seen whose picture is splattered all over cable news because they need medical treatment?”

“Well, um, none.”

“Right. Fugitives only. They want me safely put away. Gone. I know too much.”

“Come on, I think you’re being a bit paranoid. Maybe you really did catch something there when you ran into those buildings. I smelled stuff. Chemical smells. That’s probably what got into you.”

“Trust me. I’m a problem and they want to make the problem go away. I know these guys at ATELIC. Monsters.”

“You can’t know anything like that. You make it sound so sinister.”

“It is. It’s as bad as I’m painting it to be.” She sighed again, loud, as if she was expelling her last breath. “Look, I work for them. I mean, blogging doesn’t pay the bills. Not yet, anyway.”

“You’re working for ATELIC now?”

“Yes, as a contractor. Just for the past few weeks.”

“The cryonics people?” Donovan shook his head back and forth, trying to absorb this unexpected information.

Cathren sat up and leaned forward, her hands on her knees, holding her head. “Don’t judge me, all right? I didn’t know they were evil when I took the gig. And I was never really sure. Not until last night.”

The icepack he gave her was still on the floor where she’d dropped it. He reached over and picked it up. When he sat back up, she had crossed her legs and her arms, as if to lock herself away, and had closed her eyes. It was the wrong moment, but Donovan couldn’t help noticing how pretty she was.
Some hero I am, he thought. She’s here for me to save her, and all I want is to get into her pants.
 

“When you’re done looking me over,” she said, eyes still closed, “what do you suggest we do next?”
 

Donovan startled slightly, as if he was stung by an angry, yet pretty, bee. “What? Yeah, well, I think I should take you to the hospital.”

“Not now.” Cathren rested her head on the back of the couch. “Right now, I’m really dead. I just want to rest. And to be here with you.”
 

“Why don’t you lie down in the bedroom, then?” She opened one eye and gave him a funny look. “No, seriously, to rest. It’s cooler in there, and it’s away from all the street noise.”
 

She smiled. “I guess,” she said, getting up—