She started at him, her eyes wide open, as if seeing him for the first time.
“Mag, do you remember me? I’m Frank Shelby. You’re Maggie Douggan, daughter of Barney Douggan. He’s somewhere here too. Your dad’s here, Mag.”
He finished unstrapping her, gingerly removed the copper band with wires from her head and hurried to the locker in the corner. The furniture here was identical to Bow’s surgery that he’d just left. Frank took a lab coat off a hanger. He helped Maggie to sit up and put the coat on.
“Do you remember me?” he asked again.
She gave him a weak nod.
“They must have given you a memory scan,” Frank explained. “A selective one, not complete. They must be preparing you for a personality correction session. This is what Bow has just said — Kathleen’s researcher.”
“Now I remember,” her gaze slid over the room. “They wanted to know where we’d hidden the tape.”
“Maggie,” Frank glanced at the tech squashed under the table. He was quiet now. Frank took Maggie’s hand. “Are you sure you remember me?”
“I am… we were in the camp together.”
“And your father, do you remember him?”
Anguish showed in her eyes. Her gaze focused. With a startle, the girl looked around.
“What- what happened here?” Her breathing quickened and her gestures became jerky. She stared at Frank.
He put his arm around her shoulders and whispered in her ear,
“I’ve taken care of them… they wanted to change you… change us, but I didn’t let them. Maggie, we’ve got to go. We’ll find your dad and get out of here. You think you can walk?”
“I can. Where’s Dad?” Not looking at the unconscious men amid the trashed surgery, Maggie sat up and tried to stand. Immediately, she winced and lost her balance.
Frank caught her.
“I’m sick… my head just goes round…” Maggie sounded surprised. She tried not to throw up and couldn’t, vomiting on the floor.
Frank let her catch her breath and poured her some water from the water cooler.
“It’ll be over in a minute,” he handed her the plastic cup. “Drink it. Try not to make any sudden movements.”
When she emptied the cup, Frank helped her sit back on the bed and buttoned up her lab coat.
“Take deep breaths,” he told her.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s in the room next door. There’s nobody else there. We’ll go there now…”
“Frank,” her eyes glistened but she held back the tears. “You’re not telling me everything. What’s wrong with Dad?”
“I’m not sure. It looks like they tried to give him a memory scan, too, or a personality correction, but something went wrong. Barney’s in a trance right now.”
Leaning on his shoulder, she forced herself up. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Wait,” he opened the door a crack and peered out.
The hallway was empty. At its far end, the red light kept flashing on the wall by the glass panels. The camera on the ceiling focused its black eye on the door.
“The hallway’s under surveillance,” Frank explained. “We’ll come out and walk naturally, as if we’re discussing a job problem. Second door to the right. Got it?”
Maggie nodded. She smoothed out her hair and, businesslike, shoved her hands into her lab coat pockets. Frank stepped aside, letting her through the door. He left the surgery and closed the door behind him.
Maggie lingered outside, waiting for him.
“I’ve never been here,” she turned and walked along the hallway, trying to keep slightly ahead of him.
They passed Bow’s surgery and approached the room where, according to him, his techs kept Barney. Maggie pushed the door but it didn’t open.
“Let me try,” Frank motioned her aside.
Under the door handle, he saw the small rectangle of a scanning device.
“We should have taken one of their bracelets,” Maggie snapped. “You can’t get in without one.”
Frank pulled up his sleeve and pressed his bracelet against the scanner. Something clicked inside the door. In less than two seconds, they found themselves inside the intensive care unit.
It differed a lot from the other two surgeries. No lockers, no steel tables, no tomography equipment. Barney lay on a hard wide bed of thick plastic. His head was entangled in a net of wires. A thick bandage, spotted with red, covered his leg above the knee. Above him shelves hung with equipment and monitors. Machines hummed in large slide-out boxes under the bed. Barney’s broad chest heaved with his powerful breathing, as if he just lay down for a nap.
“Dad,” Maggie knelt next to him and touched his face, black and blue from a beating, “Dad, can you hear me? It’s me, your teddy bear. Wake up, Dad…”
Frank peered at the monitors trying to work out their readings and purpose. On one, shiny green graphs rose and fell showing his heart activity. Figures appeared in its right upper corner. They appeared to reflect heart performance.
Franks studied the other monitors. He hadn’t a clue what all those colored diagrams and readings were supposed to mean. He needed Bow or one of the techs. Frank glanced at the door. Maggie rose and pressed a button on one of the monitors. It went out.
“Are you mad?” Frank recoiled. “What if—”
“Nothing’s gonna happen,’” Maggie said, her voice dry and detached.
“But—”
“I’ve turned the biocurrent off.” She pointed at another monitor. “Look at the neurons activity graph. It’s moving up.”
Frank stared at the rising graph. “How the hell do you know?”
Maggie turned her emotionless face to him, her eyes vacant. She blinked, as if coming to.
“What’s wrong with me?” She touched her forehead, her fingers tracing her temple. “It just came up… I’ve no idea how… What was that button?” She looked up at the monitors looking for it. “What have I done?”
“You said you’d turned off the biocurrent. I didn’t see which button but this monitor went off when you did it,” he pointed. “Then you kind of came out of it.”
“Frank,” she started to shake, “Frank, I’m scared. I must have hurt Dad! Frank, I don’t remember what I was doing! What’s wrong with me, Frank?”
He took her by the hand and led her to the door looking into her face and trying to guess what could have happened.
“Do you remember what they were doing to you in that room?”
She shook her head. Frank stared at the wall trying to remember the conversation between Claney, Dickens and Bow.
“They wanted to submit us to a personality correction.” Slowly, he turned back to her. “He said you’d undergone the first phase and they were now prepping you for the second one. Then I came and knocked the techs out…”
Frank looked into the girl’s eyes filled with fear.
“They wanted to set us up. Claney and the others, I mean. They wanted to install new memories after the personality correction. Their story is, we tried to sabotage the Vaccination. It’s already in force. Millions are about to enroll. Claney targets them… and the migrants.”
Frank paused, musing over Claney’s every word.
“Claney doesn’t have the tape. It’s still in the camp. But he…”
Frank stopped. Blood pounded in his temples. The back of his head echoed with a dull ache. The painkillers must have stopped working.
“Claney told Bow to forge a new tape,” he said. “The three of us — you, me and Barney — were supposed to give ourselves up and confess to the crimes we hadn’t committed. To make it more convincing, we’d have the tape which would show how we’d doctored the mnemocapsule vaccine.”
“What are you talking about?” Maggie’s eyes widened. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry. It’s not good for you. We’ll take Barney and get the hell out of here. Now try to remember which button we should press to wake him up.”