“Is it against Army regulations to laugh at something?” These days, laughing was about all Reese had. Otherwise, he’d cry.
“No regulation against it. But I only laugh when I hear something funny.”
Reese hissed. “Ouch. That hurt.”
Harrington offered Reese a cup, and he shook his head. The colonel picked up the coffee pot. “I need to ask you some questions.” He tipped, filling his cup. “And I need you to think very carefully about your answers because people’s lives are on the line.”
“Okay.”
“What are my men walking in on when they go in there?”
Reese propped a hip on the table. “I don’t know to be honest.”
Harrington returned the coffee pot. “Then I may put this off a couple of hours until I can bring in more people.” He lifted the cup to his lips and blew. Tendrils of steam curled up around his mustache.
“It won’t matter how many men you have, sir.”
The colonel took a sip.
“Ten or a hundred. I meant it when I said there’s pretty much nothing you can do to hurt the subjects, aside from catastrophic explosions, and I’ve seen them walk away from those as well. What happened on level three is horrific, but I still can’t see the betas doing something like that. If they did, they had to have a reason.”
Harrington regarded Reese over the edge of his cup. “Animals turn on their owners all the time, Dr. Dante.”
Reese folded his arms over his chest. “It doesn’t make it any easier, you know.”
“What?”
“Trying to think of them as not human.”
Harrington stood there holding his cup, eyes on his people moving back and forth across the parking deck doing things Reese couldn’t interpret. They might have just wanted to look busy for the man standing beside him.
“With all due respect, Dr. Dante, you made those things with some black goo dug up in the desert. You don’t even know what you were injecting into those cadavers, just that after you did, they got up and walked around.”
Harrington wasn’t far from the truth. And listening to him made what Reese had partaken in sound like the unethical experiment it had been. “You’re right, we don’t know what the ichor is, but I do know when we resurrected those people, they came back knowing who they were.” It had been one of the most heartbreaking parts of the entire project. People waking up, their memories intact, their personalities whole. People with the knowledge they’d died and now they weren’t dead anymore. How did you tell someone they couldn’t go home? How did you make them understand they didn’t even have the choice?
No wonder so many of them broke in the beginning.
It had set the parameters for future subjects and why they never denied them contact with Koda.
“You really believe that?”
“I know. I spoke with those people. I practically lived with them for seven years. If there was enough tissue for the Anubis to rebuild the body, then the people came back. Not a shell, but a person.”
Harrington drained his cup. Droplets of coffee caught in his mustache. “When New World sent me the reports, they included a few hours’ worth of video files. The things on those videos didn’t act very human. At least not like a decent human being.”
But it wasn’t their fault. The Anubis had no concept of human emotions, human fears. Dreams, wants, relationships didn’t exist for it. When joined with a human mind, those inabilities translated into abnormal interactions when compared to social norms.
Harrington tipped his head. “Can’t argue the truth, can you?”
“Their behavior was the result of the Anubis trying to commune with itself.” Reese waved a hand. “I know that sounds completely—”
“Insane?”
“I was thinking more like redundant.” Reese took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt tail. “The Anubis began as a single collective and remained a collective when introduce to the first host. When we extracted samples from subject zero and injected it into secondary subjects, it became an independent entity while at the same time remaining whole.”
“You do realize that makes no sense?” Harrington refilled his cup.
“A lot of things involving quantum mechanics makes no sense. And you’re right, the ichor makes no sense. It shouldn’t have even existed. It shouldn’t have been able to exist.”