“You know…?” Clemente had said on that occasion while putting on his surgical mask. “I still have my doubts about what we’re gonna do. I know you know, and I know you don’t care, but I wanted to tell you, anyway.”

“You’re right. I know it and I don’t care,” Broga had replied.

They were about to start with the intervention, and Broga was sterilizing his cybernetic hands in the steam chamber. A nurse offered him a medical cap and a mask, but he declined them. Pressed the device in his neck and the metal helmet covered his head; the mask would not only maintain asepsis, but its technology would be helpful at the time of the operation.

“I trust the peaks of the Primary Plasma on your brother will stay at bay,” Clemente said. He covered his bulging white hair with a medical cap and washed his hands. “You’ve conducted the studies yourself, and your calculations have always been accurate. And of course, in front of you is the best neurosurgeon on the continent. But beyond that, you should know there’s a risk that he—”

“—Would fall into a permanent vegetative state. I know,” finished Broga.

“I was gonna say that he wouldn’t make it. But I think leaving him as a vegetable could be worse than killing him.”

Broga stared at him; his eyes hidden behind his helmet’s huge red visor. Clemente knew him so well, though; he knew exactly the kind of expression that was under that cold Cyclops mask now.

“Prove to me you’re a better neurosurgeon than Templeton was, and I promise not to cut your head off for being such an insolent brat,” Broga said.

Clemente held up his hands for the nurse to put on his gloves.

“Instead of that, I’d prefer a big fat bonus,” he said and winked at him.

That would be the last friendly gesture Clemente would offer in his life.

Together, they entered the operating room.

Brun was lying on the surgery table, asleep. A male nurse had just shaved his head, and a doctor had outlined two sectors with a marker where the laser saw should cut, one on his forehead and the other above the temple, near the crown.

Steven, the old scientist from the cryogenic chamber, entered the room. Manson, his young assistant, was walking alongside him carrying a utility cart with cylindrical containers, all recently removed from their icy sleep.

“Here,” Steven presented them. “The last cloned stem cells we have in good condition; three of a Binary-C and two of a Binary-R.” He nodded toward the room at the end of the OR. “What do we do with the other remains? Shall we take them to the incinerator? Maybe we’ll need those tubs empty.”

“Later,” Broga dismissed him.

The old man sighed and looked at Broga as if he were debating whether to say his thoughts or not. Finally, he didn’t and left. His assistant went after him, taking some notes out of his lab coat’s pocket.

Broga heard young Manson claiming to Steven something about an important thing the old man had promised to say or something like that. It didn’t matter anymore, Broga could get a sense of what the discussion was about. He turned to Clemente, who answered him with serious eyes, and turned to the rest of the team.

“All right,” he told them. “First, we’ll work on the frontal lobe, then on the motor cortex.”

In silence, Clemente began working on Brun.

The laser sliced through the skull where it had to slice through, exposing the part of the brain that needed to be exposed. From one of the steam-wrapped containers, Broga removed the test tube it was to be removed and handed it over to whom it was to be handed it over. Clemente took the frozen stem cells from the test tube, and with a thin needle, guiding himself with an electronic image magnifier, injected them into the part of the brain where he had to inject them.

Thanks to his mask’s visor, Broga witnessed the entry of the cloned cells into his twin’s brain as if he were injecting them himself, and watched with joy that—as he had seen in the simulations he’d run hundreds of times while planning the operation—Brun’s original cells received them with the same urge the dry ground receives in the long-awaited rain. They looked like small thunderstorms moving back and forth, shrouded in transparent bubbles. Blue sparks that pulsed like tiny stars in a dark firmament. A microscopic-scale Big Bang from which new galaxies originated.

It had actually turned out to be a process as fast as it was supernatural. Soon there would be new neurons where the tissue was damaged. His brother’s brain would return to normal. His brother would regain his mind, perhaps much earlier than his calculations had predicted.

Carefully, one doctor resealed the open hole in Brun’s skull.

And while another one prepared to cut the next delineated sector with the laser, Clemente removed the second group of cloned cells from the cryogenic containers.

Broga turned to the Totem which was resting at the end of the room, and by pressing the circuits of his right hand, he set out to transmit the energy his body released to the computer’s energy reader. On his helmet’s internal display, a dot of white light flashed along with a legend that said: Pulse: On. Radiation: Emitted. He was ready to remove the Primary Plasma from the inner compartment of the huge computer.

“Doctor—?” he heard Robinson, a nurse, saying.

Robinson sounded worried. Something wasn’t right. And before he could turn around to see what was going on, the nurse announced:

“He’s opening his eyes.”

Brun? Was Brun opening his eyes? Impossible! He himself had calculated the dose of sedatives to be administered.

Suddenly there was a blackout, and then a deafening crunch, like thunder, that seemed to split the very same reality into two and a shock wave that struck him from behind. Thousands of sparks rained from the ceiling.

A power-surge! One so big even his artificial limbs short-circuited.

His helmet computer rebooted. Everything ahead of him was vetoed, all painted black. For a few seconds, his hands were useless, his legs didn’t respond and his feet didn’t move from the ground. Everything froze.

When Broga regained his vision, the chaos had scattered across the operating room, spreading out a deep stench of burned wire and… carbonized meat.

He turned, and no longer found Clemente or any of the other doctors or nurses. In a blink of an eye, his staff had been replaced by stains on the walls and pieces of bodies disseminated everywhere. There was only Brun, standing next to the operating table, static; with the disposable robe half-lit, his eyes ajar and his lips shaken; soaked in sweat as if he had just come out of a sauna, but wrapped in an icy mist.

Broga took his gaze off of his brother and saw a bloody sneaker next to the utility cart and the cryogenic containers, now burned to a crisp. He recognized it. That sneaker belonged to Clemente; he had given it to him as a present. So that meant that the dark, smoky mass next to it was…

A sharp pain pierced his chest.

Clemente!

Clemente was gone. And in the most horrendous way he could have ever imagined. Although he didn’t even have time to mourn his loss.

He heard children’s laughter. Many laughs. A mocking gossip. An unbearable murmur that oppressed his temple, even with his helmet on.

Suddenly, the entire room was covered by a dark gas, a cloud with violet stains and luminous dots that beat as a heart would; as a star cluster would.

The fantastic image he had seen during the surgery just an instant ago, those cells sizzling in his brother’s brain, that cluster of newborn galaxies, was now out there. The operating room had become a perfect image of outer space. And it was beginning to be tangible.

The pressure on his head increased. The oxygen levels in the room—according to his helmet’s sensors and his own lungs—dropped sharply. Now it didn’t just look like outer space, it was feeling like it.

And there was Brun, standing in the middle of that nebula, with his eyes moving behind his eyelids and muttering who knows what, suffering a strange case of supernatural sleepwalking.

The Primary Plasma! Broga tried to get to the Totem to take it; it was the last sample that existed, he couldn’t allow it to get lost.

He stretched his arm to the machine’s energy emission reader. However, the pressure that this strange gas exerted on the environment was so strong that his robotic fingers compacted and disintegrated.

His arms creaked. The device he had tied to the back of his neck, from which his helmet unfolded, flared. The visor on his mask cried sparks. If he didn’t get out of there soon, he’d lose his limbs and maybe even his head.

Go away, Broga, said a voice identical to his, speaking directly to his mind.

And all of a sudden, the same pressure that had begun to destroy him, expelled him from the room, pushing him into the corridor.

Five years had passed since then. Five years in which everything had remained the same as that day.

Brun had fallen asleep in a kind of trance, suspended in a strange mattress of space nebulae that stretched to every corner of the operating room; a mass of condensed air that seemed the spectral stuffing of a cryogenic chamber that, with its doors open, displayed its occupant so that whoever crossed the corridor could contemplate him. A frozen snapshot in time.

The Totem, with the last dose of the Primary Plasma inside of it, had also been trapped there, in that purple cloud, at the other end of the room.

How many times had Broga returned to that lab since then to see if there had been a change in the situation? He’d already lost count.

How many attempts to enter the operating room had he had? Thirty? Fifty? None of them had turned out to be satisfactory; all had ended with his circuits burned or with the complete or partial destruction of one of his limbs, the first to come into contact with that gas.

Then, forced to stay in the corridor and careful not to set foot inside the room, Broga had tried to strike up a conversation with Brun to get him to react. Although, of course, in the state his brother was in, he would have had better luck talking to the wall.

Standing in front of that scene, how many times had Broga turned the situation around in his head trying to figure out where his mistake had been, what calculation had he done wrong? He’d already lost count of that, too.

That knowledge had always eluded him, even more so when his guilt had been as difficult to remove as his hurt pride.

Clemente.

But today, after five years, the situation was different.

From the entrance, Broga looked inside the OR as he had done so many times before. Everything looked so clean now. Where that dense cloud had been, full of specks of light, there was nothing but darkness. Where his twin had been suspended in the air, there was nothing but emptiness.

He studied what was ahead with the help of his helmet sensors. Nothing indicated danger. He fired an energy beam into the room, and the beam, instead of being devoured by the nebula as it had been the previous times, followed its course and pierced the back wall, spitting debris and remnants of green tiles over the floor.

Everything was gone from the lab: the material things, the Totem, the last dose of the Primary Plasma, and his brother.

He now knew that Brun had awakened and was certain that the military had looted the lab. The Army was the new owner of the secrets that had slept in there.

Was Sebastian—his benefactor, according to Clemente—aware of this? No. If that had been the case, Sebastian would have contacted him by now. He had to let him know. The news about the Totem’s find could leak, reach The Order’s ears and expose him.

He activated the phone on his wrist and wrote: Sleepwalker’s lost. Castle looted. As he feared, though, the message wasn’t sent. The electromagnetic imbalance caused by the discharge Brun had released that time continued messing up radio signals. His four-frequency emitters might be keeping their cybernetic implants going, but there was little they could do to restore communications.

Fine. It was time to move away from there and try again. Sebastian had to know about all of this as soon as possible.