Chapter Thirty-Three

Mikel

After a half-hour on the road, Mikel pulls up outside of Marco’s small apartment. The sunlight is only starting to glow on the horizon. He doesn’t know Dr. Greco himself. He has hardly spoken to him at work, and only in passing. He holds his fist up to the door, trying to think of what he could possibly say to the man about what he needs from him. Before he can knock, Arma pounds the bottom of her fist on the door as if she means to break it down.

“Dr. Greco, Dr. Greco!” She shouts almost loud enough to warrant someone calling the police on them as if someone were getting stabbed with a knife.

From inside they hear something like a lamp get knocked over. “What in the hell is going on out there! Holy shit! Do you need my help or the whole neighborhood’s?”

When he finally opens the door, he’s only in a white tank top, boxers, and socks. He could easily be mistaken for a crazy old coot, but he’s anything but that. He looks at the two of them with a scowl and shakes his head in annoyance. “I had half a mind to plug you through the door for making all that racket. He pulls his hand out from behind his back and sets his old automatic down on the little side table by the door. “Well that didn’t take long did it. Already in trouble Arma?”

Mikel is a little confused. “Arma, I thought this was Five-One?”

Marco looks at him as if he’s simple or something. His voice is condescending. “Yeah, it is, that’s her new name.”

“Yeah… well her real name is…”

Marco nearly slaps him in the face trying to get him to shut up. “Not another word! You take that to your fucking grave, you hear me!”

When Marco looks at Arma, he notices that she has what is clearly a wrapped up dead body in her arms. Mikel forces the door the rest of the way open and shoves his way into the small apartment.

“Marco we’ve uh…” He exhales, stopping his voice from wavering.

“Who the hell is under that tarp!”

Arma undoes the bungee cord around Aaron’s neck and shows Marco his face. He looks and then grimaces. “That doesn’t exactly help me, you guys.”

Arma’s eyebrows point down strongly. “It’s Aaron! You have to bring him back Marco! Make him like me. Save him!”

Facing the floor with his head in his hands, Marco contemplates the gravity of what has happened. He isn’t sure how he’s going to break it to them that it’s not going to happen. Aaron will not be coming back. He can’t simply walk into Werker and expect them to open the doors to random bodies he brings in. He thinks of Valerie, thanking god it at least isn’t her. “Does she know, Mikel, does Valerie know?”

“No, it’s only been a half-hour, no one knows but us.”

With a wry smile, Marco looks at Arma and the blood dripping off her elbows onto his hardwood floor. He figures it’s time Valerie is bound to the project for real. “Well, since you two’ve already got blood on your hands, you might as well keep it going, huh? I’m going to need Gabriel to do this, and he’s not going to be willing either.”

“Not fat Gabriel!”

Marco stares at him silently with a steel-hard glare to let him know to not waste any more of his time. “Gabriel is the only one with the resources and knowledge to make this happen at all. We cannot do it without him. He’s the only one who knows how the scanning operation works, how to use the equipment, and where it’s even located. Do NOT let him get away. If he does, Aaron, and well, probably all of us, will be dead for good. Now, I’m going to get Aaron’s head on some ice, you go do you.”

With a completely renewed spite, he marches out the door. Just before the door slams shut, he stops and looks back. “And they’ve got Five too.”

Mikel leaves his truck running while he waits outside of Gabriel’s home. The only thing keeping him awake are his many imaginary scenarios of Clarice and Valerie screaming at him for all he’s done. He thinks of what Arma told him, how she and Five are people that have been brought back from the dead. It didn’t sound like it was their choice either.

The prospect of it breaks every code that he and Ray grew up on. Ray’s father’s words keep playing back through his mind. “What is done is done.” He knows that it is not Five or Arma’s faults that they exist and he can’t hold they're being robots against them. Even though she butchered his most beloved friends, he can’t blame anyone but himself for it. He and Ray are only getting what they had coming.

He slams his fist on the dashboard until it hurts as much as he feels he deserves. The loss of his life-long best friend is still too much to bear, regardless of why it happened. He feels terribly alone without Ray. All he has left now is Clarice, and after what he’s done, he knows there’s no way their relationship will weather this. His life is completely unraveling. All he can think to do now is make sure that he does right by Aaron. He was a nice man and didn’t deserve any of this. If Marco can bring him back, it’ll at least count for something.

He is growing tired of waiting for Gabriel to leave his house. It’s only been a couple of minutes, but that’s more than enough to send him over the edge right now. He knows better than to try snatching him inside. It’s too risky. He’ll just have to wait just a little bit longer, and spring on him when the time is right.

As soon as Gabriel’s garage door starts to rise, he puts his truck in four-wheel drive. The fancy white SUV’s backup light come on, prompting him to floor it. He crosses the street and into Gabriel’s driveway to block him from leaving. Gabriel continues to back out of the garage without paying attention to what’s behind him.

He rams into the rear of the car and keeps the pedal down until he has it pinned back inside the garage. Like Marco had said, he figures there’s no point in backing off now. With his life in shambles, he can’t hold his anger back any longer.

Completely destroying the smug pricks nice SUV does cheer him up a little though. He even manages to get a laugh out when he sees Gabriel’s head bounce off the back of his seat. While he jumps down out of his truck, he carefully watches him through the windows. He doesn’t seem to have anything to defend himself with and is frantically trying to use his phone.

When Gabriel looks in his rearview mirror and recognizes that it’s him marching into the garage, he panics even more and even starts squealing hysterically. The phone flies across the dash and onto the floor when he fumbles it. Unable to call for help, he starts clawing at the door like a rat in a jar trying to get out.

Just before he gets his hands on the door latch, Gabriel hits the panic button on his key pendant. All of the doors lock and then the loud screeching alarm starts to sound off. That really pisses him off and to a whole new level. He grabs an iron out of the golf bag next to the entry door of the house and smashes in the driver side window like some kind of desperate psycho. He immediately forces the keys out of Gabriel’s hands and turns off the alarm.

He pauses for a single second to take a breath and look Gabriel in the face. “Why’d you do that, you little bastard!”

“S-s-Sorry M-m-Mikel.”

With the amount of adrenaline coursing through his body, he has no trouble grabbing Gabriel’s head in a chokehold and pulling him out through the shattered window. Each time he tries to scream, Mikel slaps him hard across the face. He only has to do it twice. “We’re going on a nice little ride Gabriel, and if you make it any harder, I’m going to put you under the wheels. Ya got me?”

He snatches the garage remote from the sun visor of the wrecked car and closes the door after backing his truck out. Except for the black tire marks leading up to the garage, there are no other signs of what happened inside. Luckily, there doesn’t seem to be anyone around that might’ve seen what happened. It doesn’t matter if everyone’s security cameras saw, but he just doesn’t need any cruisers coming for him yet.

When they get back to Marco’s apartment, he forces Gabriel down onto his knees with a firm hold on the back of his neck, since it worked so well last time. As calmly as he can, he lets him know what all the fuss is about.

“Not only do I expect you to cooperate to the full extent, but I suggest you make everything go rather flawlessly as well.”

Marco kneels beside them and peels the sticky tarp back, exposing the stump on a badly burnt body where Aaron’s head used to be. Marco grabs Gabriel by his hair and points his head down to look at it more closely. It’s hard enough for himself to not wretch at the sight of it, but he maintains his tough composure for the theatrics. Confident in the level of terror that they’ve instilled in him, they break down what it is they need.

“I know about the latest brain scans you’ve been doing, and that the facilities to do them are still well intact. Where are they?”

“That was all decommissioned after the Fives, you know that!”

“Well, dang. I guess were gonna have to kill you now, if you insist on being no good to us.” Mikel starts dragging him away like he is simply going to go and find the nearest dumpster to dispose of him.

“Ok, ok! I’ll do it! But you can’t kill me! I won’t do it if you’re just gonna kill me after!”

Marco scowls down at him as if letting him live had truly not been considered before all of his begging. He puts his thumb under his chin and pauses mockingly. “Hmm, good point. I suppose if you survive this… that would make it so you can still turn everything over to me. The files, the equipment, everything.”

Before Gabriel can respond, Arma butts in with “or we kill you.” When she looks at Mikel, he gives her an approving nod.

With his eyes getting even wider, Gabriel looks up at the mishap next to him and tries to warn Marco about her. “You shouldn’t have brought her back, Marco. Her shit’s not right!” When he notices the sharp look of disapproval coming from her, he shuts up and looks away.

Marco squats down to Gabriel’s level and spreads his hands out to his sides. “So… where do we go from here?”

While Marco grabs Aaron’s head out of the freezer, Arma picks Gabriel up by his collar, and Mikel gets the door for them on the way out. While the others climb into the cab of his truck he walks around the front to sweep the rest of the broken glass off of his winch bumper. There’s a good amount of white paint rubbed off on it, but he’ll have to deal with that later. When he gets in and starts the engine, the three of them look back at Gabriel, waiting for him to spell every next step out for them.

Gabriel directs them to a small indistinct white warehouse not more than a few blocks from the main Werker facility. They’ve all been by the place many times, but would never have suspected what it was being used for. They leave Mikel’s truck in one of the few parking spaces in the back and enter through the only heavy metal key coded door. The place appears dark and vacant inside, but some of the equipment is still powered on.

As soon as Gabriel turns the lights on, Marco recognizes the machines. Especially the one for laminating brain structures that he had put so much work into designing. The entire place is a spotless lab of clean-room quality. Marco is rather impressed.

“You son of a bitch!”

When they cross the shop floor and step through a pair of double doors, they are standing outside the brain processing center. Without needing to be prodded, Gabriel goes ahead and suits up on his own. He has always been the one and only expert to handle the brain preservation process. He is no stranger to handling murdered candidates either.

When Marco hands Aaron’s head off to Gabriel through the chute, he symbolically cuts his own throat with his finger. “If anything goes wrong, Gabriel.”

As Gabriel works alone in the processing room, the three of them watch through the large observation window at the front of it. He clamps Aaron’s head in a nasty looking pronged vice and removes the skin and bone from almost the entire skull. He very gently lifts the whole brain out and takes it over to another table that has a few quart-sized dark brown glass jars on it. The labels on them plainly depict that they are poisonous.

He spends nearly an hour bathing and injecting the brain with the stuff. While he works, he talks to them through the intercom in his suit. To steady his nerves, he explains the details of what he’s doing as he goes through each step.

“With some edits to Aaron’s motor memory, I’ll be able to make the immediate learning curve much less steep for him. After others, like the Fives, have done the leg work of adapting to their artificial systems, I’ll be able to incorporate some of that knowledge into his memory before rebuilding his mind.”

After quite a while of soaking and curing, Gabriel takes Aaron’s brain out of the chemical bath and gently sets it out on a foam bed to continue chilling.

“The special aldehyde solution I use has soaked into every cell of his brain and chemically cross-linked everything together, pretty much turning it into a solid plastic. It’s kind of like vulcanizing rubber.”

With blank stares from Arma and Mikel, he huffs and rolls his eyes. “His brain is no longer tissue-like. It’s been chemically altered and turned into a solid inert block that won’t decay. It could probably be left out at room temperature and not rot for like… a year. It’s quite stable. If we couldn’t bring him back right now, like if something happened, we could wait and do it later, even a hundred years from now if we kept it frozen.”

“We are doing it right now, Gabriel and nothing had better happen! I’ll kill your dumb ass myself if you try ‘n fuck us.”

“Right, right. I’m just sayin’. You know, I’m not even the one that came up with this process, ok. It’s been around since like, before the war. There’s probably brains like this stored all over the world. Paul actually came across one that had been documented and retained within his inheritance. That’s what started this whole thing. No one could pull off rebuilding one with electronics back then. Thanks to you Marco, we can now.”

After mixing a thick two-part batch of some type of blue syrup, Gabriel pours it in a clear square box, filling it up about half the way up. When he places the brain in the gel, it floats in it about an inch above the bottom and fills the rest of the box to the top. When the solution completely sets up after about another hour, he unlatches the sides and tests the firmness of the formed gel block. It has developed a consistency much like wax but is designed to cut free and clean.

He places the entire block into the loading tray of a machine that looks kind of like a huge industrial planer. After he hits the green cycle start button on the front of the control panel, the big drum inside begins to spin. The solid blue block cube feeds in towards the drum and stops below it. Backers rise to support the block and then the drum starts to lower. As the machine progresses down towards the brain, a long row of condition check lights turn green. A vacuum turns on and then it starts slicing off immeasurably thin layers of the block on each revolution. They all watch in amazement as the machine slices away at the block with surprising speed.

“The blade on the drum is as thin as a razor and laser sharpened to only a few atoms across.”

Half of the drum has a recessed clear window on it for scanning while the other half has the cutting and cleaning blades in it. When each layer of tissue is cut, it gets sucked into the drum and blown out into a waste bin in the corner of the lab.

“With each turn of the drum, a new depth layer is exposed and scanned. Even though each cut is curved, the computer puts it all back to where it’s supposed to be. This is the fastest way to get through hundreds of thousands of layers. Even at this speed, it’s easily going to take the rest of today. We’re just going to have to wait.”

After watching the system run for a few minutes, Gabriel heads back out of the cleanroom to take his suit off. As much as he would like to hide away from them in there for as many hours as he can, there is still a lot of work that can be done meanwhile. They aren’t going to be letting him go until everything is done, so he might as well get on it. Needing a moment he sits down on the bench in the dressing area and leans his head back against the wall.

There’s nothing else Mikel can do now but wait and fret. As soon as his thoughts return to dark places, he breaks down into tears and saunters away. They all flinch when he kicks the shit out of the double doors on his way out. When Arma tries to follow after him, Marco snatches her wrist. “This isn’t the time when a man needs to talk about it.”

With another ten hours to spare, Marco pulls Gabriel along by the front of his shirt over to the main computer station. “Give me everything you’ve got.”

“I can’t, not kept here.”

A more than generous slap to the back of his head gets him to reconsider. “After all I’ve done Gabriel, why do you still assume I’m stupid? Get your ass moving before I have Arma motivate you.”

At that, he quickly starts doing what he’s told. When suddenly remembering the details of what Mikel said happened between all of them, he realizes that Five is still missing. “Gabriel, where is Five right now? Where did you and Barry take her, and don’t forget what I said about Arma.”

Arma grabs the whole top of his head in her hand and pulls it back far enough to make him claw for the desk in front of him. Then she presses down on his eyeballs with her two fingers, until he squeals. “Where is Five, you piece of shit!” The aggression and loudness of her shout makes even Marco startle. Before she can cause him any real harm, Marco puts his hands over her forearms, to get her to release him.

“Barry… Barry Cutler’s got her!” His eyes dart back and forth between the two of them, trying to determine who’s going to hit him next.

Marco’s mouth curls in disgust at the mention of Barry’s name. Cutting Arma off from assaulting him again, he holds his hand up in front of her raised fist. “Go and get Mikel. He’s got a lot more to make up for than just this mess in here.”

When Gabriel accidentally looks down at her crotch, which is right at eye-level, she whips him across the face with the back of her hand. It sounds like marbles against wood. She finds Mikel outside sitting in his truck. The door is still open and his head is on the steering wheel. He doesn’t notice her approaching until she is only a few feet away. When he looks up at her she can tell he is dealing with a lot of grief.

“You know… Ray didn’t kill Aaron. He… he didn’t even do anything to Five this time either. He didn’t have anything to do with it. He was home with his dad the whole time.”

It takes her a moment to realize what all she’s done. She places a hand on the edge of the open door, but can’t bring herself to look him in the face. “I’m very sorry for what I’ve done. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me. Maybe we should give Ray a second chance too, it’d only be right.”

He wipes his face with both hands and waits for her eyes to meet his. “Ray won’t be coming back. Besides, he wouldn’t have it anyway, you know that. That’s the whole point Arma. Our one life has to be lived like it’s our only one.”

She slides her hand off the door and drops it to her side. “Barry still has Five. We have to go get her.”

He pulls his door shut and starts looking up Barry’s address like he did Gabriel’s. “Get in, we're gonna go and get her back.”

With Aaron gone to work early, and not answering his phone yet, Valerie gets dressed and heads down to the other end of the hall to get ready for work. When she opens the door to her apartment, she finds Clarice sitting on the couch watching the morning news, and she looks like crap. Her eye makeup is smeared all over the place and she’s still wearing what she had on last night.

“Clarice, what’s goin’ on? What happened?”

“Is anyone back yet?” Her voice is quite distressed.

“What’d ya mean? From where?”

“Did Aaron and Arma find Mikel and Five? Are they back?”

The dumfounded look on her face makes Clarice start to fret even worse. She explains the whole thing to her and starts crying all over again. As Clarice tells her what happened last night, she begins to pace around the apartment.

“No one told me anything! I didn’t even know anyone was missing! I just woke up a couple of minutes ago!”

“They’ve all been missing since about midnight.”

She stops pacing when she sees Clarice put her hand over her mouth and gasps. Something has happened on the news. She quickly sits down next to her to see what’s going on. A reporter is standing in the back yard of a small country home, where there are four bodies covered in linen in the back yard. There’s a considerable amount of blood soaking one of them at the head.

As they listen, the reporter claims that four men have been brutally murdered outside of their home in the middle of the night. Neighbors were woken by a couple of gunshots and reported the incident after they went to check on the residents of the home.

The news feed switches to a detective who elaborates further on the crime. Two of the deceased have been identified as the residents of the home, Ray and John Knapp, longtime members of the local farming community.

Clarice begins to bawl hysterically. As she holds onto her tightly, she keeps focused on the news. She can only expect who the other two must be. The feed switches back again to the reporter who is claiming that a forensic specialist believes that the crime may have been committed with the use of a robot. Such a gruesome incident like this has never occurred before, but the facts are strongly pointing to the possibility. An account of the brutal force that was used in the massacre is strongly contrastive to what a single human assailant might be capable of.

The typescript running across the bottom of the channel states that a trace amount of a specific polymer used in the robotic industry was found burnt onto a murder weapon. She tries to console Clarice by telling her that they haven’t said Aaron or Mikel’s names yet, but deep down, they both know who the other dead men are. She loses control of her emotions as well and begins to cry in her sister’s arms. They both sit on the couch holding onto one another in hopes that everything will be ok, even though they know it won’t be.