The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [137]
However, someone had been interested in her work, for soon after graduation, she had gotten a call from Duratek. Her advisor had told her she was making a grave error going to work for a private corporation instead of staying in the academic world. But the representatives from Duratek had been the only ones who were willing to fund the work she wanted to do.
Even then, she had known that Duratek was not a charity organization, that ultimately they were interested in her research because they believed they could profit from it, but it had been easy to forget that fact in the course of her work. They gave her a lab filled with state-of-the-art sequencing machines and computers—light-years beyond the shoddy equipment she had been forced to scrounge for in graduate school. They had bought her expensive research animals, from the first lemurs and monkeys all the way to Ellie, her chimpanzee.
A sigh escaped her. Ellie had been the culmination of everything Larsen had worked for these last ten years. A pygmy chimpanzee bred in captivity, she had been both curious and accustomed to humans. Ellie had never struggled or fought back as Larsen administered the treatments.
Her progress had been incremental in the beginning, though measurable. Manual dexterity and abstract reasoning test scores rose by over 10 percent. Then Duratek acquired the being E-1, and a whole new world opened up.
Where they had found E-1, she still didn't know. She supposed he had brought it to them—the one in the gold mask and the black robe. At first she had thought him some kind of joke, but just standing near him, hearing that hissing voice, made her shudder. And despite the crudeness of his methods, he had known things; it was the gold-masked one who had told them to try using E-1's blood as a delivery vector for the gene therapy.
Skeptical, Larsen had done so—and the results were astonishing. In a matter of weeks, Ellie's complex reasoning skills more than doubled. Intelligence shone like a light in her eyes. Soon she was on the edge of language—real language—and Larsen had looked forward to the day they could finally speak to one another.
Then everything changed in an instant. Something had placed the secrecy of their research in jeopardy. The order came down to evacuate. However, in the confusion, the human male E-2 escaped the lab, taking Ellie with him. Larsen had watched in horror as Ellie murdered one of the other scientists with her bare hands. Then the guards arrived, and they had shot the chimpanzee.
Ellie was trying to protect him—the man E-2. She jumped in front of the gun.
The experiment had worked. Ellie had finally achieved a human level of consciousness—she had sacrificed her own life to save another. Then, in one moment of lightning and thunder, the gun fired, and all of that work was undone. Ellie lay dead on the pavement, a hole in her chest, the light gone from her eyes.
Despite her shock, Larsen had managed to keep the guards from shooting the human male as well. However, it had all been for nothing. She still didn't know the full story—she never would—but somehow the transport caravan was waylaid on the highway to Boulder, and both of the extraworldly subjects, the being E-1 and the man E-2, had vanished.
In the weeks after, some of her associates whispered it was the Seekers who had stolen the two subjects, but she doubted that. From what Larsen had heard, the Seekers were some sort of scholarly society that sounded every bit as dry and dull as the world of academia. However, she had seen the fierceness in the man E-2's eyes. Whatever world he came from, she could only believe it was a perilous place. More likely it was from there his rescuers had come.
The computer had finished deleting the files. She glanced again at the clock. Twenty minutes had elapsed. She had only one more minute; after that, the guard could return at any second. She switched off the computer, then moved to the door. Just as she touched the handle, the door opened.
A gasp