Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [4]
‘You do realise he isn’t human,’ she said.
Meijer grunted. ‘The Ants have processed dozens of different species. But they’ve never come across one of him before.’
Ms Cohen let her eyes slide from the bleeping scanner to 24. He was wearing the same kind of uniform as the Ants’ hired hands. There were laugh lines around his eyes and mouth; that face had done a lot of smiling. He was not smiling now.
‘How many times have you tried to, to process him?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘What?’
‘No, eighteen, including this morning. How is he?’
She stood up, faced Meijer. ‘He’s exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished.
His blood volume is down. There is a great deal of subcutaneous bruising, especially on his back. There’s a greenstick fracture in his left humerus, as though someone tried to break it with their bare hands.’
Meijer met her stare until the accusation dribbled out of it. ‘I meant, how’s his head?’
‘This thing doesn’t tell me much about his psychological state. I’ll need to do an electroencephalogram, some other tests. And I’ll need to know everything.’
‘Everything?’
9
‘About the process. About the computer. Plus,’ she said, and her voice quavered as she heard the way she was talking, ‘plus I want him back to full health before we do anything else to him.’
Meijer went on staring at her. She took back the scanner, her eyes groping at the data on its screen. At last he said, ‘How long’s that going to take?’
‘I don’t know, he isn’t human. But he’s in poor shape. Unless you want to kill him outright, he needs some time to recover. And proper medical treatment.’
One of the guards outside swore, kicked the wall, boot crunching against the cuticle. Meijer sighed. ‘You know what that’s going to mean? We’ll have to install force shields in the lab. And I’ll have to roster people in there, around the clock. We’re busy enough as it is, with this new crowd.’
‘Force shields and guards?’ said Ms Cohen. She gestured with the scanner at the tired little lump on the floor. ‘For this?’
‘You don’t understand, lady,’ said Meijer. ‘That’s the Gingerbread Man.’
‘How long was I in cold storage?’
‘About a month, lady. Why?’
Meijer was checking the preparations in the medical lab. They had ripped chunks of tissue out of the walls and grafted in slimy cubes of living machinery.
The pulsing cells and veins in the wall and the mown lawn smell turned Ms Cohen’s stomach. She sat on the edge of the medical bench, a great raised slab of plant tissue, and closed her eyes. ‘What about him?’
‘Maybe a week. We’re doing two, three subjects a day. I guess you’ll want to see that.’
‘I guess I will,’ said Ms Cohen faintly. ‘How much do you really know about the Ants?’
‘They don’t say much. We just keep the wheels turning.’
‘Where’d they come from? Who built them? Why are they doing this?’
Meijer moved his head from side to side, as though shaking her questions out of his ears. ‘My guess is that the Ants used to be people, and they put themselves in robot bodies.’ He shrugged. ‘Why does it matter how long he was frozen?’
‘The cold might have damaged his neuroreceptors.’ Or eighteen doses of your process might have left him with no mind to read. ‘Have you ever encountered this, this problem before?’
‘No-one’s given us this much trouble before. Sometimes it takes a couple, maybe three zaps to sort them out. Sometimes we use drugs or electric shocks, things like that.’
‘Or a little physical therapy.’
‘Yeah,’ said Meijer, grinning. His face was unshaven, an ugly colour in the pale green light.
10
‘I don’t want you to use that kind of therapy on this subject,’ she said, surprised by how firm she sounded. ‘I want him in the best possible shape – as close to his condition on defrosting as we can manage.’
Meijer shrugged.
‘You don’t have to manhandle him.’
‘Lady, you still don’t understand. Do you think we give every subject the VIP treatment? Guards and shields and stuff?