The dragonfly passed over Boulder, flying low over the buildings on the CU campus, and then climbed above the foothills and hovered. Nick leaned over and looked down. They were landing in what had been the parking lot at NCAR.
Nick remembered the Anthropogenic Global Warming furor. He was already in his twenties when that hysteria hit its apogee. Now it was just a cautionary tale from the early-century Dark Age of long-range computer modeling. Nick, for one, had looked forward to longer summers, easier winters, and palm trees in Colorado, but the weather the last few decades had been colder and snowier than average and the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming had joined that of Herr Becher’s phlogiston and Soviet Lamarckism evolutionary theory.
One of the first victims of the public’s disgust at the AGW false alarm, combined with disappearing federal budgets, was the group for which the beautiful building growing larger beneath them had been built: NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The architect I. M. Pei had designed this Mesa Lab NCAR center out of sandstone and glass and meant for its stone to age with and blend in with the giant sandstone Flatirons just above the building while the glass reflected the turbulent Colorado skies. It had done so beautifully for almost seventy-five years now, but the atmospheric research people had long since sold the structure—the only structure allowed to be built in the miles of greenbelt separating urban Boulder from the Flatirons and foothills—to some private company.
They landed gently. NCAR—NAKAMURA CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH said the small sign to the right of the entry walkway.
“Mr. Nakamura kept the old initials,” Sato said redundantly as he opened the door.
Damned white of him, thought Nick.
The outer sections of the old laboratory, in the towers and where the broad windows looked out on sky, stone, and brown grasslands, were still offices. But the basement and former courtyard core of the building had been converted into… something else.
They donned green cloth surgical booties and little cloth surgical shower caps in a sort of airlock outside the long, wide underground room. But Nick had already caught a glimpse of what was inside.
The three ninjas stayed in the airlock as Sato escorted Nick into the space. Two medicos or technicians, both wearing full surgical robes and masks as well as the caps and booties, hurried up to say something, but Sato waved a single finger that silenced them. One of them bowed low to Sato.
They walked past tall tanks of Plexiglas or some stronger, clear plastic-glass material. Each tank was filled with a greenish liquid. A score of pipes and tubes snaked into each tank, and half of the tubes connected to the human beings—mostly men, but a few women—who floated in each vat. They were naked except for a sort of diaper from which more tubes came and went. Tubes ran into the men’s and women’s nostrils, and broader tubes were forced down their throats. Other IV drips connected to wrists and arms. Sensors on the figures’ chests and bellies and shaven heads fed data to control boards on the exteriors of the tanks.
“The tubes are for nutrients and other functions, Bottom-san,” Sato said softly, almost whispering, as if they were in a church or shrine. “They receive no oxygen in gaseous form. You see, their lungs are actually filled with the liquid. The fluid is a highly oxygenated mixture. The initial immersion is difficult for the subject, if conscious, but the human body—once the lungs are completely filled—soon learns to use the oxygen in the fluid as easily as if he or she were breathing air.”
They moved from tank to tank, walking in single file between the tall containers. Each of the hundreds of tanks was illuminated from the inside and the overall effect in this subterranean chamber was that hushed, almost solemn sense of being in some fantastic aquarium. The only sound came from the quiet machines or the occasional rustle of soft-soled slippers on the tile floor. The laboratory space did have a churchlike hush and reverential feel to it.
“Except for a few cases, in which the subject is being punished,” whispered Sato, “we remove the eardrums, eyeballs, and optic nerves. There is no need for them, you see. They could only be a distraction.”
Nick thought, They’re being punished by not having their eardrums, eyeballs, and optic nerves removed? He feared that this would make sense in a moment.
“What is this?” demanded Nick. “Some sort of sci-fi experiment for long-distance space travel? Are these clones or something? Adapting the human body to live under the oceans? What the fuck is this nightmare?”
They stopped by a tank where a man who looked to be in his early sixties floated amid his Medusa-hair tangle of tubes and microtubes. His eyelids were sutured shut and sunken. He had no external ears and the ear openings had been covered over by grafts of flesh and skin.
“These are the first test subjects,” said Sato. “A few hundred here at NCAR from thousands finishing their testing nationwide. These are the final quality-control check before Flashback-two is distributed in America and elsewhere.”
“F-two?” Nick repeated stupidly.
“Precisely,” said Sato. He set his strong hand on the glass inches from the floating man’s face. Nick noticed that this man’s skin—the skin covering the faces and scalps and bodies of all the figures in all the tanks—was fishbelly-white and as wrinkled as an albino prune.
“They will spend the rest of their lives in flashback happiness,” continued Sato. “Less than two miles from here, people are spending millions of dollars to relive their entire lives under supervised flashback medication at the Naropa Institute. But regular flashback demands that the subject be awakened for several hours out of each twenty-four—to exercise, to eat, to avoid bedsores and other ailments of the permanently immobilized. Their relived lives are constantly being interrupted, the flashback illusion interrupted and violated. But here…”
Sato gestured around.
“Here Mr. Nakamura’s science department has provided full lifetimes’ worth of only the happiest moments, not merely relived as with flashback, but restructured as one’s imagination and fantasies would have them. People here are spending happy futures with loved ones they’ve lost to death. Cripples in real life walk and run here and will for the rest of their F-two lives. Failures in life find success in these tanks, with this drug, and no one is harmed. There is no failure or loss under this kind of flash, Bottom-san. There is no pain under Flashback-two. None at all.”
“It’s real,” mumbled Nick. He meant the drug. After all these years of rumor and myth about F-2, it was here. And real.
“Oh, yes. To these men and women, everything they are dreaming is totally real,” said Sato, misunderstanding Nick’s comment. “The only difference separating life under Flashback-two and what we call ‘real life’ is the wonderful absence of physical pain and painful experiences or memories or emotions for this privileged group.”
“How long do they… live?” asked Nick. His clothes still carried the stink of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine. He wished he were back there.
“Our best projections, based on a decade of research, suggest a normal span of seventy or eighty years,” said Sato. “Sometimes longer. A full, rich, happy life.”
Nick covered his mouth with his hand. After a moment he removed it and grated, “The penalty in Japan or anywhere else for Nipponese nationals using flashback is death.”
“As it shall remain, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “And that law will continue to be strictly enforced, just as it is in the Global Caliphate.”
Nick shook his head. “You’ll sell this stuff, this F-two…” He broke off when he realized he didn’t know how to end that sentence.