“I find it suspicious,” said Stealth, “the matter was not brought up until we were here and disarmed.”
The colonel looked up at the nine-foot battlesuit. “You call that disarmed? I think if Doctor Morris disagreed with me, there wouldn’t be much anyone could do to stop her, would there?”
* * *
“It’s very simple,” said Sorensen. He peered at the elbow joint of the Cerberus armor. It was at his eye level, and he’d pushed his glasses up onto his head to squint at it. “We couldn’t train them because they’d died.”
“No wonder you’re a doctor,” murmured Cerberus.
Sorensen stepped away from the battlesuit and moved to one of the exes standing at attention. It was a dead woman with a square jaw. “It takes three to four hours for a corpse to make the transition to ex-humanity,” he said. “Lack of oxygen destroys the mind and memories, leaving only core survival patterns like eating, basic motions, and reaction to raw stimuli like sound or movement.” He set his glasses back on his nose and rapped the dead woman on the forehead. “There’s nothing there to train. It’d be easier to teach a grasshopper how to type.”
Then he went silent, staring into space.
“Doctor,” said the colonel.
“Madelyn had a baby bib with a grasshopper on it,” said Sorensen. He looked at Shelly. “Eva and I saved it. I’m sure it’s still boxed up in the attic at our house.”
“The exes, doctor.”
“Yes,” the older man muttered. “The exes.” He glared at them for a moment, then poked the dead woman in the forehead again. The ex rocked back and forth. “The physical structure of the brain still exists,” he said. “Just like a computer processor without power. The Nest restores electrical activity to key areas, allowing simple memories to form and reflexes to be re-developed.”
Stealth interrupted him. “The Nest?”
Sorensen turned the dead woman’s head to the side before pointing at the green box. “Neural stimulator,” he explained. He looked annoyed by the question. “It took almost a year to find precisely the right regions of the brain, the correct amperage and voltage.”
“I would think decay within the brain would prevent such a device from functioning for long.”
The doctor shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Yes, there’s initial decay. We have to give each subject several EEGs to make sure it’s still viable. But once the ex-virus takes hold the level of decay drops to almost nothing, so our largest worry is dehydration.”
Stealth tilted her head at Sorensen. “According to our research, the dead continue to decay, just at a decreased rate.”
He shook his head. “Your research is wrong. A lot of work was done before…before…” The doctor was lost in thought for a moment. “Before things went bad,” he said. “One of the last things they established about the ex-virus was that it’s lethal.”
Stealth shook her head. “It is harmless,” she said. “Individuals die from secondary infections, not from the virus itself.”
“Humans,” he said, nodding. “That’s not the problem. The ex-virus is a lethal bacteriophage. It attacks necrotic bacteria and uses them to reproduce. All necrotic bacteria. An ex’s decay rate drops by eighty-seven-point-eight percent.”
“They smell like they’re rotting,” said Cerberus.
“Material in their digestive tract or on their clothes,” the doctor said. “You notice none of these exes have the scent of decay on them. Once they’ve been cleaned, they tend to just smell like…well, clean skin. When you calculate in the resilience the virus creates in cellular membranes and the lower core temperatures in the afflicted—”
“Exes could remain active for years,” Stealth said.
“Almost eleven,” said Shelly, “by the last estimates we formulated here.”
“It’s a magnificent freak of evolution,” said Sorensen. “I’ve never heard of any organism in nature so perfectly suited to keeping its host alive. Or as close to life as possible, I suppose.” He shrugged and began to examine the velcro fuzz on the female ex’s shoulder.
Cerberus shot a glance at Stealth while moving a metal palm back and forth before one of the exes. “Do they remember anything? About, you know, who they were.”
Sorensen glanced up from the velcro and shook his head again. “That was my first hope, but no. They’re blank slates. Not a scrap of individuality or independent thought left in them. In fact, every time a battery pack dies, they lose any training we’ve given them and it’s back to square one.”
“You’re sure? What if they’re…comatose or something?”
“Positive. We’ve done numerous EEGs and MRIs. No activity at all in either the Broca’s or limbic regions, which means minimal language and emotion. I’d put their IQ below a lab rat at best.”
“A rat cannot be trained to follow complex commands,” said Stealth.
“Neither can the exes,” said Sorensen. “You can only issue one command at a time, and it must be an order they’ve been trained to follow. The most complex thing they grasp is a priority scale, that some commands can supersede others.”
“Priority?”
“On a few occasions we’ve gotten them to acknowledge soldiers over civilians, officers over enlisted men. There’s more work needed. Speaking of which,” he turned to Shelly, “if I may get back to my lab, colonel? I was in the middle of something.”
“Of course, doctor. Thank you for your time.”
“Shall I, sir?” said Smith. When the colonel nodded, the younger man guided Sorensen out of the Tomb.
“He’s a bit off,” said Colonel Shelly, “but believe me, he’s brilliant.”
Stealth was examining a Nest unit again. “Who is Madelyn?”
“His daughter,” said Shelly. “He lost his family at the start of the outbreak. We tried to evacuate them here to Krypton, but there was an accident. His wife and daughter were both killed.”
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Killed?”
“What would you rather hear, ma’am? Eaten alive? When he got the news it shattered him. He was in shock for months, and he’s still in denial. It’s not unusual to just find him sitting in a corner in his lab. He probably could’ve gotten the Nest done seven or eight months sooner but he has trouble focusing.”
The cloaked woman turned from the exes and walked out into the sun.
“If you don’t mind my saying, Doctor Morris, your companion isn’t very social.”
“No, she isn’t,” said Cerberus. The titan turned and followed Stealth outside.
The cloaked woman was a pillar of black in the sun-bleached road. “Are you going to give them the battlesuit?”
Another metallic sigh rasped from the armor’s speakers. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“They filmed the assembly procedure,” said Stealth. “There are four cameras in your work space. Two visible, two concealed. I would assume the office is monitored as well.”
“I’ll remember to be careful in the bathroom, too,” said the titan. “Look, they already know how to assemble the suit. That lieutenant said they’ve got all my records. They didn’t get anything from me they wouldn’t’ve figured out after doing it one or two times themselves.”
“Cerberus may have once been just a weapons platform,” said the cloaked woman, “and you were once just an engineer. But that is no longer the case. You have become a symbol to the people of Los Angeles. A hero. If you give the battlesuit away, that will go away as well. It will be just a weapons platform. You will be just an engineer.”
The huge lenses looked down at her. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
Chapter 18
NOW
The sun hit the horizon just as St. George crossed the Krypton fence line. He’d circled the base once to make sure they knew he was there. A group of soldiers waited for him. They didn’t aim their weapons at him as he landed, but they didn’t make a point of aiming them away, either.