Secret Histories 10: Dr. DOA

  “This particular benefactor, with the teleport,” I said. “Any connection to Black Heir?”

  Melmoth smiled. “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

  “I could,” said Molly.

  “How many people work here?” I said quickly. “Under the Mountain?”

  “Something like twelve thousand, I believe,” said Melmoth. “In their own various disciplines. We are a broad and eclectic church. And that’s not counting all the patients and volunteers, the security, and support staff. Let’s go meet some of them!”

  “Let’s,” I said.

  * * *

  We finally came to a pair of perfectly ordinary-looking elevator doors. Melmoth hit the call button, and the doors opened immediately, as though they’d been waiting for him. We all filed in, and Melmoth turned to a really long row of buttons, chose one near the bottom, and stabbed it dramatically with a long finger. The doors closed and down we went, into the depths of the city.

  “How many floors are there?” I said, looking dubiously at the many buttons.

  “Depends on your security clearance,” said Melmoth. “Only a few have access to all departments, on all levels. Most people only work within their own speciality, never seeing anything beyond their own few floors. But you, as our honoured guests, get to see anything you want.”

  “How nice,” said Molly.

  Melmoth beamed at her. “It is, isn’t it?”

  His relentless good humour was beginning to get on my nerves. No one smiles that much without their brain being chemically challenged. It isn’t natural.

  The elevator seemed to descend forever. At least there was no music. Molly and I looked at each other, behind Melmoth’s back. Molly’s expression asked me how I wanted to play this, and I shrugged in my best Take it as it happens manner. Melmoth was humming again.

  The doors finally opened onto what could have been an office floor in any building. Thick carpet, pleasant setting, cheerful atmosphere. Melmoth strode off down the corridor, leaving us to hurry after him, and led us to a surprisingly spacious room, packed with monitor screens showing views from all over the city. Dozens of people sat bolt upright in front of them, studying the views with great concentration. None of them looked round as we entered. Because we wouldn’t be there if we didn’t already have permission. I was starting to think nothing unexpected ever happened Under the Mountain. Because it wouldn’t be allowed. Melmoth strolled around quite happily, peering over shoulders at various views.

  “Behold!” he said grandly. “It’s all here—scientific laboratories, medical wings, demon surgeons, and magical grottos. Hope, in every shape and form. Everything from genetic manipulation to radical surgical procedures, the grafting of exotic genetic materials, and forbidden alchemical practices. Nothing is considered out of bounds, Under the Mountain. Except failure, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I leaned forward. I couldn’t help noticing the wide proliferation of armed guards, standing to attention outside closed doors, or patrolling brightly lit corridors in large groups. I pointed out a particularly heavily armed gathering, escorting a coffin on a hospital gurney. The coffin was wrapped in very heavy chains.

  “Why do you need so many armed men, Dr Melmoth?”

  “We give as much attention to internal security as external,” said Melmoth. “Safety is paramount. And we do have the occasional problem with disturbed patients trying to escape from the secure areas. We can’t allow that. Some are infectious, some present a danger to themselves and others, and some are simply deluded. The guards are there to protect the medical staff.”

  “Armed guards,” I said.

  “Well, of course.”

  “You shoot your patients?” said Molly.

  “Only the ones who complain,” said Melmoth. He chuckled happily. “Little bit of hospital humour there.”

  “Show me some of your success stories,” I said. “Cases where you’ve actually achieved something.”

  “Of course!” said Melmoth. “We have nothing to hide. And much to be proud of.”

  And I thought, but didn’t say, Then why did I have to ask? Why didn’t you volunteer to show them off?

  We left the monitor room, and not one single person turned to watch us go. In my experience, you don’t get that kind of discipline without staff indoctrination bordering on brainwashing, backed up by severe punishments for even the smallest infringements. Under the Mountain was starting to feel less like a medical establishment, and a lot more like Fanatics “R” Us. Melmoth took us back to the elevator, and this time the doors actually opened as we approached. Bit of a giveaway, that. Someone was watching.

  This time we stepped out into a warren of cheerfully anonymous corridors, and Melmoth hurried along quite happily, never once seeming unsure of his way. Voices spoke calmly from hidden speakers. Announcements, instructions, requests for particular individuals to hurry to a certain location. There was a general sense of urgency in these voices; of important things happening.

  “This sounds more like a regular hospital,” said Molly.

  “It is!” said Melmoth. “In every way that matters. We work hard here, to save lives.”

  “At any cost?” I said.

  “Where the alternative is death, yes,” said Melmoth.

  “You don’t think the price of survival can sometimes be too high?” I said.

  “What an odd question,” said Melmoth. “Particularly from someone in your position . . . The whole philosophy of the Survivors is that we intend to go on living for as long as possible, no matter what the world puts in our way to try to stop us. And that, of course, means not being bound by unnecessary moral and ethical restrictions. We will use any weapon in our fight, because so will the enemy. Death pulls no punches, and neither do we. Anything less would be insane. We are at war with death.”

  “Couldn’t everyone say that?” said Molly.

  “Yes,” said Melmoth. “But we mean to win.”

  * * *

  To get to the hospital wards we had to pass through a series of heavy metal doors that opened only to number pads, voice recognition, and retina scans, and finally a DNA test. All of it enforced by armed guards with strict orders and no sense of humour. Dr Melmoth had to provide all the samples, because Molly and I firmly declined. I couldn’t help wondering whether the doors were there to keep unwanted visitors out, or to keep the patients in. We have a problem with disturbed patients trying to escape, Melmoth had said. Were they that disturbed before the doctors got to work on them? At least the guards had enough sense to point their guns well away from me and Molly. Word had clearly got around, which was just as well. I wasn’t in the mood to put up with any nonsense.

  Once we were past security, the hospital ward looked much like any ward. Though one where the patients were clearly only hoping against hope that someday they might walk out of there. A quietly desperate place, full of people chasing their last chance. I’d already decided I would not be ending up in a place like this. Patients lay quietly and uncomplainingly in their beds, hooked up to intimidatingly large machines. Lots of attached tubes and wires, and incomprehensible readouts. None of the patients so much as turned their heads to look at us. Because if we weren’t a doctor or a nurse, we didn’t matter. We couldn’t help them. These patients had only one thing on their minds.

  Melmoth led us down the central aisle, smiling brightly at everyone, and delivering a running commentary on what was being done for each patient; drugs, spells, tailored nanotech. Mostly just to see what would happen. He didn’t even lower his voice as he said that, but no one reacted. Nurses in traditional uniforms bustled back and forth, being quietly and firmly professional. Like bees moving among flowers, I thought, and carrying out a necessary function for their own purposes.

  “No private rooms?” said Molly. “I thought you had unlimited funds?”

  “
We prefer open wards,” said Melmoth. “One case might provide useful information or insight into another. And this way, the patients can provide emotional support for one another. Since we can’t allow visits from friends or family or loved ones.”

  “Not at all?” said Molly.

  “Security must be maintained,” said Melmoth. “The patients go along; they understand what’s at stake here.”

  “What happens to patients who get cured and want to go home?” said Molly.

  “A little light editing of the memories and they’re free to go, of course,” said Melmoth. “We’re not monsters, Ms Metcalf.”

  “But if your cures don’t work, then your patients die here alone,” I said.

  “My dear Eddie, we all die alone in the end,” said Melmoth. “Now, let me show you some of our successes!”

  * * *

  Beyond the wards lay an open courtyard, full of men with metal parts. No artificial limbs, no Six Million Dollar Men with super abilities and telescopic eyes. Just rough-and-ready cyborgs; men with bulky pieces of tech jutting out through splitting skin, with bulging cameras where an eye should be, and artificial backup organs on the outsides of their bodies. Some had heavy packs on their backs to power internal motors; others were attached to standing machines, big enough to generate the forces necessary to keep them going. Some cyborgs looked more human than others. They clumped heavily back and forth, like tin soldiers with unreliable mechanisms, every gesture slow and awkward because it had to be thought out in advance. Joints and connections sparked, and bulging implants made loud complaining noises. The new bodies worked and they functioned; but that was the best you could say about them.

  “Not exactly aesthetic, I know,” said Melmoth. We were standing right there with the cyborgs, but he didn’t lower his voice. “Still, these are all prototypes. First we make it work; then we make it pretty. We’re learning something useful from all of them to be applied to the next generation.”

  “Can any of these people ever leave here, and go home?” said Molly. “Looking like that?”

  “No,” said Melmoth. “The implanted tech belongs to us. We developed it, and we’re not ready to share it with the rest of the world, just yet. But everyone here signed a contract, of their own free will. They were dying. They’re all grateful for the extra time these procedures have bought them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They look grateful.”

  “Ask them!” said Melmoth. “Talk to them. They have much to be grateful for. They don’t feel pain, heat or cold, hunger or thirst. They never get tired, and they’ll last for years.”

  He broke off as one of the cyborgs started screaming, in a flat, mechanical voice. The sound was horrible, like a machine having a mental breakdown. He lurched back and forth, holding his sutured head in both hands, while the other cyborgs backed jerkily away.

  “I can’t feel anything! Anything! How can I be alive if I can’t feel? It’s like being locked in a box with all my skin cut off. I can’t even remember what it was like, to feel anything. I hate this. I hate this.”

  He beat at his head with his fists, and tore off one of his ears. He looked at it for a moment, as though trying to remember what it was, and then threw it away. He ripped the camera out of his eye socket and crushed it in his hand. There was no blood. He tore tech implants out of his arms and chest, leaving trailing wires that sparked and smoked, along with the odd spurt of machine fluids. Muscular orderlies in hospital whites came running forward to restrain him. The cyborg struck out at them with his unfeeling fists. Still screaming. Molly grabbed my arm.

  “Do something, Eddie! Help him!”

  I armoured up and walked toward the cyborg. He turned awkwardly to face me. The taut skin on his ruined face couldn’t show emotions, but his words did.

  “Please,” he said. “Kill me.”

  I took him in my golden arms, and held him close. A doctor edged in behind the cyborg, and jabbed him in the back of the neck with a long needle. The cyborg sighed once, and collapsed. I lowered him gently to the ground, and the orderlies picked him up and carried him away. It took all of them to do it. I went back to Molly.

  “That was it?” she said. “That was all you could do?”

  “I don’t want to kill any more,” I said. “And he chose this.” It sounded unconvincing, even to me. But I couldn’t say, I don’t want to upset Melmoth. I might need him.

  “I’m sure he’ll feel better tomorrow,” said Melmoth. “Once we’ve adjusted his brain chemistry.”

  The other cyborgs were moving restlessly around again, trudging back and forth in their enclosure like animals in a zoo with nothing better to do. If they were at all upset by what they’d just seen, they had no way of showing it. They were too busy concentrating on the new limits of their miserable mortality.

  “Is this what you want done to you?” said Molly.

  “No,” I said. “Not under any circumstances.”

  Melmoth shrugged easily. “Then let’s go look at something else.”

  * * *

  In a small closed-off area, we looked out on another world, viewed through a one-way mirror. A wide-open moor stretched away before us; a place of dark shadows and drifting mists, muddy ground and stinking bogs, and scrubby, malformed vegetation. All of it under a night sky lit by the blue-white glare of a huge new moon. It was a cold and desolate place, nowhere anyone sane would choose to live.

  “Of course, most of that isn’t real,” said Melmoth. “It’s part recreation, part holographs. To make the patients feel at home.”

  “What patients?” said Molly. “I don’t see anyone . . .”

  “There,” I said, pointing.

  Silent figures went slinking through the darker places. There was nothing human in the way they moved. They leapt and pirouetted, crouched and scrabbled, appearing and disappearing like animated scraps of nightmare whimsy. Drifting across the moor like tumbleweed moved by moonbeams, with flashes of flailing overlong arms and legs. The occasional roughly human shape stood out briefly, in silhouette against the full moon.

  Melmoth worked a set of controls below the one-way mirror, and although the moonlight grew no brighter, somehow we were able to see everything much more clearly. The patients were long-bodied and inhumanly slender, with stick-thin arms and legs. They skittered and scurried, like daddy longlegs dancing across the moorland. They looked like people who’d been stretched on a rack and then left that way. Even their skulls were horribly elongated, with glowing eyes and pointed ears.

  Several came together to form a group, or pack, and went haring off in pursuit of one desperately fleeing individual. They hunted him down, leaping through the moonlit night and cutting off every escape like a cat playing a mouse, and then they brought him down, killed him, and ate him. Stuffing the steaming flesh into their sharp-toothed mouths with calm complacency.

  “Why did they do that?” said Molly.

  “Something to do with herd instinct, we think,” said Melmoth. “They can always tell when someone doesn’t belong. We think the rejects must have too much of their original humanity in them.”

  “Why didn’t you do something to help him?” said Molly. “He was one of your patients too!”

  “They all signed releases,” said Melmoth. “They agreed to the new kind of life they would be joining. This is a part of their natural order now, their continuing life cycle. Purging the herd to keep it pure. It would be self-defeating to interfere. And we are learning so much from them.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “I’m afraid that’s classified,” said Melmoth. “Proprietary information, and all that.”

  “And they chose to become like this?” said Molly.

  “They all accepted the grafts of elven genetic material,” said Melmoth. “As an alternative to dying. Some were quite keen to become elves. Of course, this isn’t exactly the result any of us
were expecting when we started out . . .”

  “I’d rather die than be something like that,” I said.

  “When the time comes, you may feel different,” Melmoth said complacently. “They did. There’s something about being shown a coffin with your name on it that does tend to concentrate the mind wonderfully.”

  “Hold it,” said Molly. “Where did you get your hands on elf genetic material? Interbreeding with humans has always been one of the elves’ greatest taboos. I can’t believe they’d go along with this . . .”

  “You’d be amazed what certain individuals will agree to,” said Melmoth. “Under the right conditions.”

  “Something’s happening,” I said. “Look . . .”

  The elven hybrids were darting agitatedly back and forth. They plunged across the moors, in and out of the mists and shadows, in increasingly large groups, as though searching for something. Finally, they all came together and circled round and round the same spot, before crashing to a halt and freezing in place. Some kind of communication was going on among them, though there wasn’t a sound to be heard. And then they all turned their heads at once, to look in our direction. As though something had caught their attention.

  “Can they see us?” said Molly.

  “Of course not,” said Melmoth. “They shouldn’t even be able to detect the viewscreen, let alone know what it is. It’s just not present, in their world.”

  “Are you sure about that?” I said. “Because they’re certainly looking at something.”

  The whole group surged forward, dozens of elven hybrids leaping and scurrying over the uneven ground, heading straight for us. They crossed the moor at incredible speed, arms and legs pale flickers in the moonlight. Their stretched faces were fiercely intent, and their wide smiles showed vicious teeth.

  “They can’t see us!” Melmoth insisted.

  “They know we’re here!” I said. “Look at them.”

  They slammed to a halt just short of their side of the viewscreen, and then milled back and forth, crawling around and over one another. And then one stopped, raised a clawed hand, and tapped one heavy claw against the other side of the screen. Scraping the claw slowly across it, testing to see what it was. And one by one, others came forward to do the same. They were trying to get out. To get to us.