A row of chairs ran parallel to the wall, facing away from the windows. I counted twenty. They were arranged in one single, unbroken line. The seats and backs were covered with rough, khaki canvas that was stretched over simple tubular frames. The chair legs disappeared into a continuous concrete plinth, twelve inches high and three feet deep. I guessed that was to anchor the chairs firmly in place. No one would be able to knock them down, now, or tip them over. Assuming that anyone sitting in them was able to move. Higher up the sides I could see where straps had been attached. There were three on each chair. One at shoulder height. One at waist level. And one that would wrap around the thighs. They were made of black webbing, and had silver buckles at the ends like the seat belts on passenger planes. Once they were fastened up tight, with your arms pinned to your sides, there’d be no getting them off. Not on your own.
The line of chairs was bookended by a pair of square wooden frames. They were held up with scaffolding and filled with narrow parallel louvers, which were angled toward the ground. An electric fan stood behind each one. They were large, industrial models like they use on movie sets, mounted on battered mobile stands. And in between each fan and frame, I could see a tripod. Each tripod had a metal cylinder clamped to it. The size and shape of the cylinders was familiar. They were just like the one I’d found in the machine shop in Gary. The color was the same, too. Matte green. But at the top, things looked different. The normal clamped-down lids had been replaced with black spheres, about four inches across. They were peppered with tiny holes. And a thin radio aerial snaked out from the top of each one.
The kind of aerial you use to trigger remote explosive devices.
I was studying the base of the closest cylinder, checking for tell-tale yellow markings, when the screen went blank. Nothing happened for five seconds. Then a caption appeared:
Live subject exposure test #2
Variant A
Spektra IV (no BMU8)
A bar at the bottom showed the date, which was almost eighteen months ago. There was a clock, which was showing just after 6:00 A.M. And there was another figure for elapsed time. This seemed to be frozen on one second, but as I watched it jumped forward to ten minutes and then kept running. The black screen bled away, and the interior of the tent became visible again. Everything looked the same, except that now the line of chairs was no longer unoccupied. A person was sitting in each one. There were men. Women. Boys. Girls. Toddlers. Geriatrics. Some looked strong and healthy. Others were frail and feeble. At least one of the women was pregnant. All the people were different in some way, like some kind of carefully constructed social cross-section. But they also had one thing in common. They were all strapped down.
There was no sound to go with the picture, which I was extremely glad about. You could see people’s mouths opening and shutting as they yelled and screamed. Some fought and struggled against the straps, heaving and pulling and wrenching with all their might. Others sat quietly, almost serenely, waiting for their fate. I scanned along the line and saw a pool of liquid appear under one woman’s chair, near the center. It grew steadily then flowed off the concrete platform and splashed onto the ground, twelve inches below. But no one around her cared. In fact, no one even noticed. Everyone’s attention was taken by a sudden movement at both sides of the room. The giant fans had sprung into life. Their curved blades started slowly, then spun faster and faster until you could only just make out a gray blur behind the protective wire mesh covers. And it may not have been visible to the people in the room, but thanks to the camera I could see another thing that had changed. Something at the top of the cylinders. As soon as the fans had reached full speed, a tiny red LED light on each one flashed three times. And after the final time, they remained illuminated.
Most of the eyes in the room remained locked on the fans, but a few people started to glance at their neighbors. Fear and helplessness were etched clearly into their faces. A couple of them started to struggle again. Then the person third from the left—a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old—was suddenly thrown back in his seat. His legs straightened out like staves and his neck bent so far back that his head seemed to disappear. All I could see was the underside of his chin. He hung there for a moment, rigid and still. Then his body began to shake. He was twitching so fast and so hard you’d think he had hundreds of volts running through him. The movements were so violent you wouldn’t have been surprised if one of his legs, or even his head, had been torn clean off his body. The fit lasted maybe thirty seconds without any sign of letting up, then stopped as suddenly as it had started. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and the kid was freed to slump back down, torso sagging, legs slack, head lolling to the side.
It was impossible to know this for sure, but I imagined the inside of the tent was completely silent. The nineteen survivors were all fixated on the dead boy. The people nearest him were trying to look away. And failing. The ones at the far end were craning their necks and stretching for a better view. All their faces were pale and shocked. No one was unmoved by what had just played out. Things seemed tense, but a few notches down from hysterical. They stayed that way for maybe a minute. Then the woman at the end on the right jerked back in her seat. The same thing happened to the next two people in line—a man, and a girl who looked less than ten years old. They started thrashing at virtually the same moment, and before they collapsed another nine people had succumbed to the same fate. The computer screen was a mass of uncontrollable movement. It was such a frenzy my eyes could hardly make out what was happening. But within a minute, the outcome was clear. Thirteen people were dead.
Everybody had died except for the three to the left of the central point, and the four to the right. And while I knew they were alive—I could see their rib cages move as they breathed—I couldn’t say they were unaffected. As the people nearer the edges were in the midst of their final agonies, I’d noticed the ones in the middle were starting to sag. Their legs had grown limp, their eyes had closed, and their chins had rolled down onto their chests. I expected that someone would come to release them, or treat them, or at least find out what state they were in. But nothing happened. The scene was static for another two minutes. Then I noticed the LEDs on the cylinders were no longer glowing red. The fans slowly wound back down until their blades were stationary again. And just as the last one stopped spinning, the screen faded softly to black. It was inert for ten seconds, this time. Then another caption appeared. It looked for all the world like the next installment in a series:
Live subject exposure test #4
Variant A
Spektra V (inc BMU8)
The information bar at the bottom showed that a day had passed since the video sequence I’d just watched. The clock said we were back to six o’clock in the morning. The elapsed time had reset to one second. I kept an eye on it, and once again it sprang forward to the ten-minute mark. The black background dissolved. And I saw that another group had been brought into the tent. The mix of age and gender and condition was similar to the first sample. The range of reactions was equally broad. And the people were strapped to the chairs in exactly the same way.