“There!” said Menno. “It’s been fifteen minutes. That’s got to be at least three times as long as Marchuk was out. We have to call 911.”
Kayla ran up to the nursing station. “What room is Travis Huron in?”
The nurse—a stout, middle-aged woman—pointed to a green chalkboard on the opposite wall. It was a chart of patients, with their room numbers and the names of their attending physicians; Kayla found the line about Travis and hurried down the corridor, low heels clicking against flooring marked with colored stripes.
The door to Travis’s room was open. He had a bed whose front could rise; it was supporting his back at a forty-five-degree angle. His eyes were closed and his hair—dark, like Kayla’s—lay flat against his scalp. Some sort of drip was going into his left arm, and his right index finger had a pulse monitor clipped to it. He was wearing a hospital smock the color of an old woman’s hair rinse.
“Travis,” said Kayla, coming up on his left side.
No response.
A slim and short male doctor in a white lab coat came in. “Hello,” he said. “I am Dr. Mukherjee. And you would be?”
“Kayla Huron. His sister.”
“Ah, yes, good. Thank you for coming. Have you been briefed?”
Kayla shook her head.
“Well, it falls to me, then,” said Mukherjee. “Your brother is in a coma as far as we can tell. There is no sign of trauma or injury. He has had an MRI, and there is no blood clot or tumor.”
“How long will it last?”
Mukherjee lifted his shoulders slightly. “That we do not know. There are varying degrees of being in a coma: we use something called the Glasgow Coma Scale to assess motor response, verbal response, and eye response. Sadly, your brother scores the lowest—the worst—on all three axes. Of course, we will do everything we can. With luck, he will wake up at some point.”
“With luck?” snapped Kayla. “What the hell happened? How did he get here?”
Mukherjee was carrying a clipboard. He looked at it. “He was brought in by ambulance”—a glance at his watch—“five hours ago. Apparently he was found unconscious in an empty classroom at the U of M; a janitor stumbled upon him.”
“What are you doing to help him?”
“We are attending to his physical necessities. But you, young lady, can sit with him. Chat. If he makes any response—speaks, turns his head toward you, or the like—let the nursing station know. Just pull that red cord there, do you see?” He turned and left.
Kayla looked at her watch; Christ, she’d never make it to the club tonight. A chair with orange vinyl padding and a chrome frame was tucked against one wall. She scraped it across the floor. Once it was by Travis’s bed, next to the stand holding the drip bag, she sat on it. “Come on, Trav,” she said. “Wake up, damn it. It’s me, it’s Kayla. Wake up.”
He didn’t react. She looked at him, studying his face, something she hadn’t done for ages. She still thought of him as an angular, geeky kid—but he’d grown into a handsome young man, with clear skin, a high forehead, and…
…and, she knew, piercing blue eyes. But they weren’t visible now: his lids were closed, and the eyeballs beneath were stationary, she could see that. No rapid eye movement, no dreaming.
“Trav, for God’s sake,” Kayla said. “Mom will have a fit. You don’t want me to worry her. Wake up, will you?” She hesitated, then took his hand; it was warm but limp. “Travis?” she said. “Travis, are you there?”
“You really effed up the helmet when you threw it across the room,” said Dom.
“I didn’t throw it,” Menno replied. “I just—”
“Man, you hurled it.”
Maybe he had; he was furious at the fucking thing, and at himself.
“Anyway,” said Dom, “if we’re going to get more work done before classes resume on the eighth, we’ve got to get that first kid who fainted—what’s his name? Jim Marchuk? We’ve got to get him to come in.”
“Why?” Menno asked.
“To recalibrate the equipment. He’s the only one we have previous readings from who’s still around; all of our other experimental subjects have gone home for the holidays.”
“Why on Earth would he agree to put that helmet on again after what it did to him the last time—not to mention what happened to Travis Huron?”
“Surely those things were because of the transcranial focused ultrasound,” said Dominic. “We won’t activate that part; it obviously isn’t working quite right. But if we don’t calibrate the helmet properly, any new subvocalization data we collect will be useless.”
“Jesus, Dom, we should just shelve the whole project.”
“For what reason? Nobody but you or I knows about the subjects fainting.”
“It’s not fainting, damn it. Travis is in a coma, and, unlike Jim Marchuk, he shows no signs of coming out of it.”
“I agree that’s really unfortunate,” said Dom calmly. “But we’ve stumbled onto something huge—huge—and I’m not going to just walk away from it. We need to get Marchuk back in here.”
At last, Menno nodded reluctantly. “I suppose it can’t hurt to ask.”
“Sorry to bother you again during the holidays, Jim,” Dominic said. He was sitting on a lab stool, and Menno was leaning against a wall.
As far as Menno could see, Jim looked no worse for wear despite what had happened last time. He was dressed in tan corduroys and a tattered Calgary Stampede hoodie. “No problem,” said Jim.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Menno.
Jim looked puzzled by the question. “I’m fine, thanks.”
Dominic scowled slightly and took back control. “Good, good. We were hoping you’d be willing to do another stint with the helmet.”
“The new one or the old one? I didn’t much like that new one.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dominic. “We’ve, ah, loosened it up; it, um, won’t be as tight a fit this time.”
“I don’t know,” said Jim.
Of course the boy was going to refuse, Menno thought. But Dominic pressed on. “Please.”
Jim frowned.
“It would really help us out,” Dominic added.
Menno shook his head slightly. It was a waste of—
“Sure,” said Jim, with a shrug. “Why not?”
“Okay, Jim,” said Dom into the intercom mic, looking at the young man through the glass. “Try again.”
“I am trying,” said Jim.
Menno pointed to the oscilloscope. “The phonemes are there, and there, see?”
Dom nodded.
“But there’s nothing else,” said Menno. “Ask him to try another phrase.”
“Jim,” said Dom, “think the words to ‘Humpty Dumpty’—you know, the nursery rhyme.”
Jim nodded, and the oscilloscope dutifully showed little spikes for each syllable.
Dom looked at Menno. “Maybe you damaged the helmet more than I thought.”
“No,” said Menno. “When I put it on myself, just to test, it showed the usual internal noise. But we can’t use me to calibrate because we didn’t save any of my earlier recordings.”
Dom keyed the mic again. “Jim, can you make sure the serial cable coming out of the equipment bank is tight in its socket?”
Jim checked the RS-232C port. “Snug as a bug in a rug,” he said.
The boy fell silent, and Menno’s heart sank as he looked at the flat line on the phosphor screen. “Oh, God,” he said. Fortunately, the intercom was off; Jim was staring blankly into space.