“How about forty years?”
Parmenter hesitated to answer.
Dane calmly asked again, “How about forty years? Can you revert someone forty years?”
Parmenter thought for a moment, then nodded his head with chagrin. “Now we’re getting to it. Somehow we did, but we don’t know how it happened, so at this point we can’t repeat it and, on the downside, we don’t know how to fix it.”
Dane’s mind was racing, only beginning to process what little he had heard to this point. A mountain of memories, events, and questions waited to be reworked into an entirely new schematic by which all the impossibilities would be possible. It was more than he could handle in days, much less minutes.
Parmenter could read all this in his face and chuckled nervously. “This is why I said we’d have to cover this in small doses.”
But Dane wanted it all, as long as that might take. “Please continue.”
“All right. Anyway, picking up where I left off”—Parmenter was delighted with himself—“not a bad play on words! That’s what we’ve done with objects, with lab animals, and with … well, you see the similarity. They go back to a particular point and pick up where they left off.”
“Yeah, right, so … ?”
“Right, right, to get to the bottom line, or near bottom line … we secured government funding, and let me tell you, that was the beginning of sorrows right there. The military people leaped at the prospects—I mean, they were frothing at the mouth. Think of being able to uninjure soldiers and send them back into battle perfectly fit and with no memory of ever being shot. You could recycle the majority of your casualties and just keep them rolling through your war over and over again and then, of course, the boys and girls could all come home as fit as when they shipped out. What a dream, a compelling dream! We couldn’t turn away, we couldn’t slow down, we had to achieve that—which meant we had to ignore … tromp on … certain moral issues. But isn’t that the way it goes?”
Dane kept telling himself it was all important and he should hear it. But he couldn’t keep his impatience from showing.
“Sorry,” said Parmenter. “There’s just so much … but getting to it: we procured government funding, which enabled us to build a full-size Machine that could revert human subjects, and our first was a soldier, a volunteer who’d been wounded in Afghanistan. It worked. More on that later, I know you’re impatient to hear… . Anyway, we did have a few other human subjects with various injuries and”—he searched the ceiling for his thoughts, wiggled his fingers nervously—“the secrecy of the whole thing, that’s what made it all so difficult. The experimental subjects couldn’t know what we were doing or, of course, the word would get out, and we were advised, we all knew, that a—well, the military referred to it as a strategic asset, and a strategic asset like this would only be an asset as long as only one nation—ours, obviously—had it. There was no way on earth or in hell that we could let any other government find out we even had such a thing.
“But that’s why we’re in such a pickle now, why everything is so complex and tangled up… . I’m sorry, I know I’m going on and on.”
Dane drew a breath and said, “I have all the time you do.”
Parmenter looked about the room, trying to find the next point to launch from. “So, I’ll say it, I’ll admit it, we were hasty. Pressure from the military, pressure from the government, all sorts of hassles over funding and who was in charge and … and there were the moral aspects we could never agree on, still can’t agree on, but that’s a matter to discuss later.
“But we did have human subjects, civilian as well as military, which brings me to our mutual acquaintance, Dr. Margo Kessler. I won’t say it was her exclusive territory, the whole thing has just grown so large and so unmanageable, but … we needed human subjects who’d been injured and could conceivably be reverted in such a way that they wouldn’t know they’d been reverted. I know, it sounds so impossible, and I think we’re finally accepting the fact that it is. But can you imagine, we actually had the first few sign consent forms, and then, after reversion, they had no memory of giving consent to anything or even experiencing anything and we, we just decided to leave it at that. Why tell them? Secrecy was the priority, right, and now we had human subjects who had no idea what we’d done to them. It was a gift, it was perfect.
“And Kessler was one of our … scouts. She saw injured people every day, she had the means to check their backgrounds, family ties, suitability, and when she found someone we could revert without a high risk of discovery, she forwarded them down to us. To put it succinctly, they came into the emergency room injured, we took them down the hall, down an elevator into our own version of an ICU, reverted them, they woke up with no injuries and no memory of an accident, and we sent them home after a day’s observation, just telling them how lucky they were to escape without a scratch. And they bought it. All they knew was what we told them.” He took a breath. He was getting visibly nervous. “You see where this is going… .”
Dane was there. It could take him days to accept and believe it, but he was there. He laid himself open for one more dose, and it wouldn’t be small. “She wasn’t dead.”
Parmenter came right back with a disclaimer, “She would have been, in just a matter of minutes. The outcome was inevitable, as determined by Kessler and the ER staff. You were at a wake, a death watch, but”—he thought for a moment but apparently found no better way to say it, so he kept going—“we had yet to revert burn injuries, to see if destroyed tissue would actually return given the fact that such vast chemical changes had occurred, that so many atoms and molecules were lost in combustion and just weren’t there anymore. It was an unresolvable question, like life itself. We found repeatedly that life couldn’t be restored to anything dead—so God still has control over that and isn’t about to share it. But your wife …”
Dane delivered a subtle look of permission to continue—please.
“Kessler had already notified us and we were so in need of a living experimental subject… . We actually expected her to die, that was the most likely outcome according to all our computer models, all the data we had at the time, so we didn’t think we were risking that much. She would die, we’d take her to the morgue, the normal unfolding of the tragedy would remain the same, and in the meantime, we would have some data for whatever it was worth. It, it was a snap decision. We had to get her in the Machine and just, just see what might happen, whether moments before death or after death, either way, because we didn’t know if the length of time before or after death might also have a bearing on it, or to what extent reversion, maybe resuscitation, might still be possible.”
“So … you faked her death?”
He smiled grimly. “As I’m sure you know, we humans can rewrite anything, we can redefine our way through any moral conundrum. We didn’t ‘fake’ her death, no, we anticipated it and brought it about as it would eventually occur anyway, then deferred it until we could make use of her body for scientific purposes. Well, after all, she was an organ donor, so … if the use of her entire body might lead us to discoveries that could save lives in the future …”
Dane understood. It turned his stomach, but he understood. “Beautifully done,” he said with a cutting edge.
“Uh, yeah. We found a way to justify”—Parmenter actually showed a pang of conscience and seemed to be confessing as he said it—“we … the nurse … well, under Kessler’s orders, under our orders … disconnected the wires to the heart monitor so your wife would go flatline. She would appear dead so we could get her body down to the Machine before she really was dead. We barely made it.”
He paused for a break they both needed. They sat in silence, Dane looking at Parmenter, Parmenter looking at the floor.
As if it might moderate the impact, Parmenter recalled, “They replaced the tracheal tube and ventilated her, one hundred percent oxygen, all the way down the elevator, all the way into the Machine.” Then he repeated, “We barely made it.”