Places in the Darkness
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The test chamber is now only a few metres ahead. The entrance is a bladed aperture at the end of the shaft, but inside it’s like a giant buckyball. Jenna and Mehmet are both in synthetic pharmacology research, based out of Wheel Two. The firm they work for has a block booking on this chamber, studying the sustained effects of microgravity on certain artificial compounds.
‘That’s weird,’ Jenna says, reading the security status on her lens. ‘The chamber is open.’
‘It looks unambiguously closed to me,’ Mehmet responds, confused.
‘I mean it’s not locked. The team using it last can’t have closed up properly. See, these are the losers and wasters you’re about to throw your lot in with when you shift to Meridian.’
Without the security interface requesting an access code, they don’t have to stop outside. The aperture dilates in response to their proximity, so they can let their momentum carry them inside uninterrupted. Jenna executes a somersault to emphasise this fact, but as she spins upright again, she is tugged to a stop. Mehmet has grabbed the rim for purchase with one hand and taken hold of her shoulder with the other.
She looks at him by way of demanding an explanation.
Mehmet is staring into the vastness of the chamber, eyes wide: speechless, shivering, scared.
In zero-g, the gentle ballet of objects in motion can make anything look elegant. Not this. Glistening organs dance gently around each other in the bright expanse, like motes of dust in a shaft of sunlight. Intestines curl and twist between sections of limbs denuded of skin, muscle exposed like illustrations in an anatomy textbook. She sees an empty skull, the top sheared off. The brain has been removed, floating free amidst this carnal constellation.
Jenna is almost as much a geek as Mehmet for the work of the Neurosophy Foundation, but the one thing she never got is why they are pioneering memory erasure. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want that.
She does now. ■