It took Reese a moment to realize what the man asked. How: As in how could they live outside a human body? “I don’t—” The room next door contained six oval containers with large portholes on the front. “Shit.”
“What is it?”
Reese headed into the other room. Shriveled bags of fluid lay in puddles at the bottom of the units. Smaller fetuses free floated, tethered to artificial placentas on the side of the bags.
“I thought that shit only happened in science fiction?” It was one of Jones’s men. He stared at the bag of human remains at the bottom of the chamber. Jones stared too.
“Everything starts out as fiction until someone creates it: cell phones, cloning, artificial wombs.”
“Did you know about this?” Jones didn’t look at Reese.
“No.”
“Because you were fired?”
It didn’t really surprise Reese that Jones knew. “I resigned, and my objection to things like this were the reason I left.”
They exited through a different door and back into the hall.
Jones waved a hand at a gray door near the end of the hall. “I thought you said there was only one way in or out?”
“That’s the observation room for Koda’s cell.”
“It wasn’t on the schematics.”
“Echols had it added after the facility was built. We needed a place to record the containment room and any interviews we did with the Alphas and betas.”
“How big is it?”
“Pretty cramped. There’re a few computers, a bank of monitors.”
“I need the dimensions.”
“Twenty by twenty? I never measured it.”
Jones entered, two followed. Movement whispered over the com. Metal clacked. Exhales broke apart the background noise.
“Room’s clear.” Jones stepped out and made room for Reese to get buy.
The computer screens were blank, along with the monitors for the observation room cameras. There was no one in the room.
“C’mon we need to check level five then we can get out of here,” Jones said.
Reese followed him to the end of the hall where he opened the door to a foyer and staircase leading to the last level.
Jones and three men took the lead, escorting Reese into the stairwell. Claw marks savaged the walls, ceiling and left perfect slices of stone missing from the steps.
Jones ran a gloved finger along the path of one of the cuts. “It’s smooth. Like it was cut with a laser.”
“Lasers don’t cut on a quantum level.”
He eyed Reese. “Which means?”
“What makes the subjects what they are allows them to separate matter on a subatomic scale. Basically, the stone was never really cut because it was never a part of the same piece of matter.”
Jones shook his head, and Reese followed him down the steps.
Reese typed in his code.