The SubVersion Complex, Chapter Eighteen

More surprises, as usual. Let me know what ya'll think, I love getting feedback on the new material.

Here is Chapter 18 of The SubVersion Complex. This book is intended for a more mature audience, so be advised.

╗ EIGHTEEN ╚

FATHER

Daniel glared at Mr. Vickers. “I only ever did to her what I told you,” he snapped. The older man glared back.

“Which was quite enough, if I recall. I never authorized you to blackmail this woman or anyone else for that matter!”

Anna's head spun as she tried to process what she was hearing, but in another moment she knew her knees were going to give way from beneath her and she fell into a nearby chair without being asked. Mr. Vickers knelt beside her and pulled a quilt from the sofa. “Here, wrap up in this, your teeth are hammering.” He tried to smile at her.

Daniel, now agitated, knelt on her other side and looked her in the eye. “You said you had some success with my numbers.” When Anna nodded he continued with more passion, “Well? Did you find them? Both of them?”

Anna nodded but couldn't say anything. She opened her mouth to explain but her voice died and she was left to move her jaw in vain. Daniel moved closer to her; Anna could again feel that masculine warmth and dangerous tension near her face and she retreated into the chair. “What did you find, Anna?” he asked. “Tell me!” Mr. Vickers attempted to pull Daniel away but the younger man shook him off violently. “Let me do this, Father!” he growled.

“Father?” Anna finally managed to blurt. Daniel ignored her and repeated his question.

“Tell me, did you find them?”

Anna nodded.

Daniel's voice rose. “The woman? You found the woman too?”

She nodded again, wilting.

“Is she alive? Dammit, tell me she's alive!”

Anna began to tremble from head to toe. Her breathing quickened, her heart pounded in her ears. “No,” she gasped out in a hoarse whisper.

A fearful transformation overtook Daniel. It was as if a bright fire in his eyes had been quashed and all that remained were the freakish charred remnants. His breathing turned ragged, and she could see him fighting back hot tears. “You're lying,” he whispered.

“I watched her die,” Anna replied weakly, her eyes filling with her own tears. “She was thrown into an incinerator and was burnt up.” Her heart felt near to bursting with grief for the poor man. “She's dead.”

Even Mr. Vickers was taken aback. He and Daniel exchanged appalled looks, then Daniel looked away, fighting a powerful maelstrom of emotion. Finally the younger man stood and paced the room while Anna and Mr. Vickers watched him warily, unsure of what to expect next.

“Are you sure she's dead, I mean could there be some mistake?” Daniel stammered brokenly. Anna shook her head.

“There was no mistake. Neville found her and sent her to the incinerator,” she whispered back. “He said she had been frozen one too many times to be of any more use . . . “

Daniel clawed at the air. “Neville, that sickening beast,” he exclaimed. Then he turned on her with a fierceness that truly frightened her. “And you did nothing to stop it? You were right there and you did nothing?”

Mr. Vickers turned to him. “You don't know that, Daniel.”

Daniel waved him away. “Let the bitch speak for herself, Father.”

Mr. Vickers stood, and his old frame shook with anger. “That's quite enough, Daniel.”

“Like hell it is,” Daniel replied. He pointed to Anna. “She's the reason for all of this, don't you see? Her work is what industrialized all of this horror, the Versions and the SubVersions and all of it!” His demeanor turned suddenly calm, but Anna knew better than to relax. She was proven correct when Daniel pulled his own pistol from his belt and dispassionately held it against her head. She stifled a scream and shied away.

“This whole damnable business is her fault, it's on her head. Would it not be just to take her head for it?” Daniel remarked coldly. “Eh, Father? You're always spouting about justice and mercy, you tell me what you think! Then perhaps I'll decide not to pull the trigger.

Anna saw to her surprise that Mr. Vickers had slid between her and the barrel of the gun. “Daniel, this woman is special to me. But even if she wasn't I would still stand between you and the commission of a grave crime against your own soul and this woman's body. She deserves to be shot just as little as you do.”

Daniel threw up his free hand in exasperation. “Is there no justice in this world? What would be so wrong about blowing her away for her crimes?” he cried. “She is HomoGen! She is the enemy!”

“Daniel.” Mr. Vickers voice was soothing but firm. “You are grieving. But you will not grieve with a gun in your hand, nor will you threaten Annalise with any more violence. You will not.”

Suddenly Anna found herself exasperated with Daniel. She astonished even herself by pushing Mr. Vickers aside, grabbing the gun and placing the muzzle against her forehead. “No, it's all right Mr. Vickers. Go ahead and kill me, Daniel. Go on, do it. Pull the trigger. Talk about me like I'm not here and have no say, blow my brains out. I am the cause of all your problems, I am sure. I'm not sure why I care to live anyways, go ahead!”

Daniel was taken aback even in his rage. “Why?” he asked.

“Because I've seen enough today to make me doubt there is anything good left here or in you or anywhere else. So pull the trigger!” Anna's voice exuded desperation.

“That's enough, both of you!” Mr. Vickers said, quietly but in a voice of authority. He gently grasped the gun and pointed it away. To Anna's dumbfounded surprise Daniel let the gun drop completely into the older man's hand and then walked away towards the fireplace.

She watched Daniel grasp the mantelpiece and put his forehead against the wood. What was passing through his mind she couldn't know, but she did see several tears land on the hearth below and her heart again went out to him. Her anger had been brief, and all the feeling she had left for him was sorrow. She then remembered Sonya and her pulse intensified. All was not lost. She cleared her throat. “Daniel?”

He turned slowly to glare at her. Nothing daunted, she continued. “Your daughter, Sonya. She's alive. She's alive, and I spoke to her.”

A change occurred immediately. Hope visibly returned to the grief-stricken face and he approached her cautiously yet with unmistakable excitement. “You spoke to her?”

Anna nodded. “After a fashion.” She swallowed. “They -they're using her for an experiment.”

Daniel stood still, waiting. Whether it was patience or pent-up fury that kept him rooted to the floor she couldn't tell, but he waited nonetheless. Anna continued fearfully. “It's the project that they originally hired you for, the reason they took your brain scans. They built a system that used your scans to interface with other human brains via a special computer. Except,” she swallowed again, “that the heart of the transfer computer is a person.”

“Go on.”

“Sonya. She is the computer. And I spoke to her through the interface.”

Behind the mask of his face Anna detected a hint of dismay, and Daniel stood for a full minute with his arms crossed, breathing slowly. He then roused himself, rounded the bend to the hallway and shut himself in the nearby bedroom with a slam.

Anna shivered and sighed a long sigh of relief. He was gone, at least for the moment, and now that she could relax a powerful exhaustion seeped into her bones. She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair, pulling the quilt closer around her clammy body for warmth. The quilt smelled good, a kind of delightfully shabby grandmother type smell, and she buried her face in it and breathed slowly.

“That was my wife's,” a voice said, and Anna felt a warm hand on the back of her head. She tensed, then relaxed at Mr. Vicker's touch. Somehow his was the first touch today that she trusted, and she let his hand rest where it lay until she turned to look up at him.

“I'm sorry she's gone,” she whispered.

“And I as well,” Mr. Vickers replied, sitting down in the chair opposite her. He looked even older than usual today. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at them for a minute, then his eyes flicked back up to her face. “I can only guess the kinds of questions you have for me right now, and you deserve the answers to them.”

She did have questions, and they threatened to jumble together as she tried to decide which to ask him first. However, she decided to save the most obvious one for second and ask him the more burning one first: “How did you know?”

Mr, Vickers' brow furrowed. “How did I know what?”

Anna's pride suddenly threatened to choke off her explanation, but she forged ahead despite her discomfort. “You said . . . you've warned me for years that I would regret what I did one day.” She paused, hesitant. “Because I- I do regret it.” She stared back at him, straight into his soulful eyes. “How did you know? How did you know that . . . that I was not happy?”

Mr. Vickers looked back at her mildly, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest. Anna almost thought she saw a smile brewing deep inside him. He cocked his head at her and rubbed his forehead with his fingers. “Annalise,” he began, the smile that she suspected beginning to curl the edges of his mouth, “Annalise, I am old. I've watched many people grow and change, I've grown and changed myself. And if I've learned anything from my observations of people, young and old, that would be that I know when they are unhappy. When someone is unhappy it isn't usually difficult to find the cause, as long as one takes the time and the care to get to know that person.”

Anna frowned, unsure if he had answered the question. “But- but how did you know? Specifically?”

The full-blown smile appeared. “Because HomoGen's work, and Central Admin's work, are fundamentally untrue. You cannot be happy following that which is untrue.”

The concept was so foreign to her that she sat silently, trying to let the words penetrate. Untrue? Why was it untrue? Before she would have laughed in his face at such a suggestion, but now something in her soul resonated to the concept, though she didn't know why.

Mr. Vickers leaned forward towards her and he took her hands in his. “If you really want to know how I know, all you have to do is look around you, and think. You are unhappy because you know deep in your soul that what you do and what you've seen are troubling things. They are not good, they are untrue.” He released her hands. “There is no love in what HomoGen does, and there never will be. And you desire love. I see it with you and Jesse, I see it with your devotion to your job, I see it in everything you do. You want to love and to be loved.”

Anna's breath caught in her throat. One part of her demanded she rebel against his words, that she drive him away. She felt her desire for her work, her memories of HomoGen being pulled away from her and her body screamed that she resist. Then suddenly she heard the Secretary's words again: There is no love in this entire process, and it's about time the charade was dropped.

Adam knew that what he was doing was untrue.

The other part of her found itself listening to Mr. Vickers. “Jesse doesn't love me,” she blurted out. “He never did.”

“Probably not,” Mr. Vickers agreed.

“Did you know the SubVersion complex existed?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

“We had a pretty good idea that the part you saw did indeed exist, and of course Daniel is familiar with a certain portion of it. But we weren't absolutely sure what was going on there until this afternoon. You'll have to give us the rest of the details later of course,” Mr. Vickers said, leaning back again in his chair. “Which leads to your next question: why is Daniel in my house?”

Anna nodded.

Mr. Vickers shrugged. “He is Verité. So am I.”

Even though she had already begun to guess, the revelation still shocked her. “How could you be Verité?” she demanded.

“Because Verité was my idea.”

Now she truly gaped at him. “Your what?”

“Verité is the brainchild of none other than myself, your father, and your mother,” Mr. Vickers continued. “It exists now partly under my supervision and guidance.”

Anna's head spun. She struggled to hold her rising ire in check and she sat up straight, the quilt falling away from her shoulders. “You run Verité? And my parents used to as well? Then how in the world did Verité justify killing my parents? What sort of rationalizing did they have to do, did you have to do?”

Mr. Vickers shifted in his seat, less with discomfort it seemed than a kind of disappointment. “Annalise, why in the world would we have killed your parents? They were our biggest allies.”

Confused and faltering, Anna continued: “But- it was all over the news! It's what I've been told for ages, the Secretary even corroborated it!”

“And you believe everything the media and Central Admin put out?” Mr. Vickers eyed her. “The Party Secretary, he is a trustworthy and honest man? He has never lied to you before? Annalise, Central Admin denies that the SubVersion complex even exists. Their mission from the first day of Verité's existence has always been to discredit and destroy us, by any means possible. Back in the day a warning came to us, that someone from Central Admin knew that your parents were with Verité and within that same week your parents were dead.” He stared hard at Anna. “Killed with a weapon we didn't even possess at the time. I assure you, we had nothing to do with it. It wouldn't have made any sense.”

Anna shook her head; all of this new information was almost too much to bear. She felt a new anger now, the horrible thought that everything she had ever known was a lie and that she would never know the truth. Mr. Vickers' story rang true, but she felt afraid as her old opinions crumbled to pieces around her. Suddenly her anger could center on no one but herself.

Her next question surfaced and she decided to change the subject again. “Daniel called you 'Father.' Are you his father?”

Mr. Vickers smiled. “In a way, yes. I am a Catholic priest.”

The SubVersion Complex, Chapter Fourteen (Revised)

This is the first significantly rewritten chapter of the chapters that needed a rewrite, but I think it has vastly improved from its original version. A big thank you goes to my cousin and father-in-law for pointing me in the right direction when it came to government security systems, and for giving me the idea to really show off Anna's expertise in breaking into computers. This was a lot of fun to (re)write!
 
Here is the new Chapter 14 of The SubVersion Complex. This book is intended for a more mature audience, so be advised.

╗ FOURTEEN ╚

SHADOW DATA

With a gasp and a start Anna surged awake from a powerful nightmare and came bolt upright. Her eyes burned, her back ached, and her brain throbbed. She blinked groggily in what felt like the most intense light she had ever seen. As the murk in her head began to disperse she noticed that it was morning, birds were chirping and sunlight was streaming through the windows.

Her thoughts began to race as she carefully put both feet on the floor. Daniel, the gun, the blackmail attempt; had it all actually happened or had her half-drunk neurons invented a memorable fiction? She then found herself looking at the living room windows, and after glancing down, she confirmed that she had indeed slept on the sofa all night in her work clothes. The whole episode from last night heaved back into her memory and she put her head in her hands. As she did so she found that her right elbow and wrist hurt like mad, the same arm Daniel had wrenched behind her back.

It had been real, and she was still trapped.

If she had been less tired she might have begun to cry again but she found her eyes were bone dry. Nothing would have come out of them even if she had wanted to. She willed herself to stand and stumbled to the bathroom. She flicked on the lamps above the mirror and was shocked to see just how badly she looked. Her makeup and mascara had smeared everywhere, her hair had all been pushed to one side, and there was a crease across her cheek from the sofa pillow. She sighed in numb resignation and looked at her watch.

It read twenty 'till nine. Anna froze, looked at it again. Then she swore, grabbed her commex from her purse, and raced upstairs while furiously tapping out a message to Terry saying that she would be very late for work. In a flash she had showered, changed, perfumed and was about to race out the door when she spotted two items on the coffee table in the living room.

One was the code slicer. The other was a scrap of crumpled paper. She picked up the paper and again saw the numbers that Daniel had scrawled there in pen. He was clever, putting the number on paper and not somewhere digital. A piece of paper could make it through Central Admin's security without a problem, provided it was stuffed into a good hiding place. Seeing the numbers again caused some of the panic to return though, and it was only with a good deal of effort that she kept her breathing normal and her hands from shaking. She pushed the paper into the front of her blouse, then picked up the code slicer and pondered it.

Would Central Admin's security personnel find it and ask about it? She honestly couldn't be sure. However, she remembered her tablet commex in its bag in her car and figured if she dropped it in there then it would simply be viewed as some sort of peripheral device. Computers pretty much defined her job description, anyways. Also, ever since Terry's little directive to the security personnel on Anna's first day, they had been reluctant to perform the full frisking procedure. She figured she had the Secretary to thank for that little tidbit. She bit her lip, decided she would have to give it a try, and raced out the door.

She rode in an enervated daze on autodrive all the way to the Central Admin complex, mulling over what Daniel had tasked her to do. She was not sure exactly how she was going to do what he wanted; she wasn't even sure that what he was looking for was real, let alone able to be discovered. She cursed and stared blankly out the window as the car slipped quietly into D.C. and found its own way into the underground parking garage. At least her hunch was correct: as she entered the main building she was only given a perfunctory scan and waved on her way. The guard didn't even give her tablet bag a second glance.

Even as she rode the elevator to her floor she had not decided what to do with the numbers. Daniel had suggested using the lonely IT department head as an opening but she was not quite as sanguine as he that it would be that simple. She briefly considered turning the numbers in to the Secretary, throwing herself on his understanding and hoping for the best, but the specter of being firebombed by Verité's hackers reared its head and she put it out of mind. Central Admin was paranoid, probably too paranoid for mercy or understanding.

It was two numbers, simple enough. Daniel only said he wanted to know the status of the two females and that was it. Nothing more. She suddenly had a thought: once the threat of blackmail had been lifted, she could tell Adam then and explain what happened. The only problem with that, though, was that Anna had gotten the suspicion from Daniel's attitude last night that he had a mole in Central Admin. How else could he have known about her conversations with Dr. Jarrod, about her code slicer, and all the other various tidbits he knew about her?

Deep in the midst of these musings she was startled when she collided headlong into someone and almost toppled over. She shook off her distraction and saw the rumpled shape of Dr. Jarrod, his glasses askew on his nose and his coat twisted. She was also surprised to find herself in the hallway near Terry Garnham's office.

“I am so sorry, Doctor!” she stammered. “I didn't see you coming.”

“Perfectly all right, Miss McLean, perfectly all right!” he replied, beaming despite the collision. He straightened his coat and glasses and beckoned to her. “I was about to ask Officer Garnham myself if you were coming in today, but here you are! Come, you really must follow me to my lab. You were summoned to the Secretary's office last night so I worked mostly by myself, and I had a bit of a breakthrough!”

“That's good,” Anna replied absently. She remembered why she had wandered to this part of the building in the first place, to give Terry the best possible excuse she could think of for being late. She began to edge past the doctor but he blocked her with his stocky frame and smiled.

“You are not ecstatic at this news?” he asked with a chuckle. “You, Annalise McLean, the one who has salivated for this chance for years, and you are not even interested in hearing more about it?”

Anna tried to smile back. “I'm so sorry, Doctor, I had a bad night and I'm late and I need to report in with Officer Garnham before I really do anything today. Please let me go by?”

Dr. Jarrod reluctantly stood to the side and waved her on. “By all means, go, yes, but hurry to my lab as soon as you can allow. I used the algorithm you suggested earlier this week and I am already getting results. You should be excited!”

“I am, and I'll be there soon, just give me a bit.”

The short man shrugged. “Very well. You know where to find me.” He turned and disappeared around the corner.

Anna steeled herself and approached Terry's office. It hadn't even been a full work week yet and she was late. She saw Terry sitting at her desk and with a rap on the glass door, let herself in.

Terry immediately stood as Anna entered. “I got your message. There is no need for an explanation. The Secretary himself told me you had a bit of heavy news last night and might need the next day or so to sort it out.”

Anna blinked in surprise, then felt her stomach convulse at the irony of the situation. Heavy news indeed. Just not the kind that Adam or Terry think. She smiled weakly at Terry and turned to leave, but she heard her orientation officer ask with some concern, “Are you all right, Anna?”

“Yes,” Anna replied in her most convincing tone, turning back. “Why wouldn't I be?”

Terry bit the inside of her cheek and Anna could tell she was holding something back. Then the blonde woman shrugged and sat back down. “You just looked like you hadn't gotten any sleep, that's all.”

“Oh.” Anna could think of nothing more to say so she exited Terry's office and rushed down the hall to the office that had been set aside for her. It was more of an afterthought, since she would be spending so much time in the lab with Dr. Jarrod, but it was a serviceable office space. After checking to see which security cameras watched her office, she sat down at the desk, woke the computer up, then sat with hands folded thinking.

Suddenly a plan began to formulate in her head and she pulled her tablet out of its case and turned it on. Coding and hacking were what she was specialized in, and despite the fact that she was being blackmailed into doing this the thrill of making it work took over and she found herself feverishly typing on the tablet.

If the IT department head was indeed lonely, then a bit of social engineering would work perfectly on him. He had secure access to all the servers in the building she could ever want to hack into. He would just need the proper motivation to open an infected file sent by her. Which meant she needed an excuse to visit him in person, a chance to charm him a bit and maybe over-promise and under-deliver on a fake personal connection. She almost smiled as she finished typing and slid the tablet onto her desk. This was almost certain to work, as long as he rose to the bait. She left her office and strolled down a couple halls on her same floor, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible until she reached a room marked Information Technology. She knocked twice and heard a voice from inside shouting to her to enter. She pushed the door open.

Inside were rows and rows of monitors and humming machines, fiber optic bundles disappearing into the ceiling, cooling fans running. In front of the main desk sat two men, one turned away from the door working on something, and the other with his feet up on the desk with a paper container of Chinese food in his hand and chopsticks clutched awakwardly in his other. He was a balding, plump thirty-odd man with a bad comb-over and a greasy clean-shaven face, and had the chopsticks up to his mouth in mid-slurp as she entered the room. Grease from the noodles had dropped onto his shirt front and stained it. No wonder he's lonely, Anna thought unkindly.

At the sight of her the man immediately pulled his feet down from the desk and, instead of letting the noodles go the rest of the way into his mouth like a decent person, instead let them drop back into the container with a disgusting plop. He rubbed his hands together and smiled at her. “Uh, hi!”

Anna marshaled a smile and hoped it stuck. “Uh hi yourself,” she replied, doing her best to beam at him. She felt like her effort was unnecessary in the end, though, since he seemed to be ogling her regardless. This whole exercise would be both easier and possibly more annoying than she had anticipated. “I, uh, I just had a question for you. I'm the new recruit, I work in the lab?”

The man nodded enthusiastically. “It was Annalise McLean, yes? Your name? Somebody mentioned it to me earlier. Good to finally meet you! So what did you need to know?”

Anna felt on firm ground now. “Well, I don't know if you knew, but I used to work IT over at HomoGen and-”

“At HomoGen?” the man exclaimed. “That is exciting! I've tried applying for that position before, got turned down, not sure why. I'm one of the best, you know.”

“I didn't know,” Ann replied, trying to hide her amusement. Lonely was the wrong word. Desperate more firmly captured this man's demeanor. “But I'll keep it in mind.” She wasn't sure why she threw in that last bit. Flattery, maybe? She was fairly sure he would take it as flirting.

The man kept rising to her bait. “Oh good! Maybe even a good word would help. But, sorry for interrupting, what was your question?”

Anna forced another smile. “When I used to work for HomoGen, the biotech people would utilize the network to run certain calculations and procedures, and whenever they did it they had to check first so that their simulations didn't interfere with our virus checks. The whole network would slow down if they did.” She put on her sweetest, most innocent attitude and leaned on the door frame. “I'll be working with Dr. Jarrod today possibly running our own network simulations and I wouldn't want to interfere with your virus checks.”

The man grinned and waved a hand. “Oh, that's perfectly all right! The core network is running on all quantum and optical fiber so it shouldn't be affected at all. The server access might be a bit slower since it runs the traditional digital computers but that doesn't seem to be your concern. And we run a virus and worm check every fifteen minutes. We've got the fastest network around, at least that I know of, and it'll run whatever sim you want at pretty much whatever speed you want.”

Anna grinned wryly at him. It was like watching a male peacock spread its feathers and parade for the female. Very satisfying. She felt like she had made her opening, and was about to exploit it when he beat her to it. “My name is Jim Jarvis, head of the IT department,” he said a bit too eagerly, holding out a hand to her. She tentatively shook it, trying not to recoil at his cold and clammy palms. “Hey, you're a computer tech, I'm a computer tech. We should talk computers sometime over coffee sometime!”

Gotcha. “That might be nice, talking to someone who actually knows his way around a quantum computer,” she pretended to gush. “I'll think about it.”

“Or better yet, we could do Chinese!” Jim replied, holding up the damp paper container. “It's even good for breakfast. You might not think it would be, but it is.”

I might not think that, and I probably never will. Anna suppressed a grimace and wordlessly closed the office door, distrustful that her faux interest could sustain for much longer. She had everything she needed anyways, and strode purposefully back to her office and sat down at the desk. Picking her tablet up again, she typed in the rest of the code she was working on, compiled it with a tap of her finger, and transferred it to her desk computer.

“Now, Mr. Lonely Jim Jarvis,” she said to herself, “just for insinuating that I might like Chinese food for breakfast, here is a virused present for your computer to play with.” She pulled up his profile on the network and found his address, then typed out a vaguely encouraging message and attached her infected file. With a click the message shot off into cyberspace and she sat back and waited.

If her hunch was correct, he would open her file eagerly enough. It was an invite for him to view her deeper profile on the network, and it would populate his digital calendar with her personal contact information. It would also, unbeknownst to him, load a useful little script onto his computer in the background, something his machine would never notice since it would be using his system-level permissions. Once the script loaded, she was in. She sat back and waited.

It was not five minutes before she received an enthusiastic response to her message. She checked her computer and saw that he had indeed opened her file, since his info now populated her work calendar. She smiled with satisfaction and excitement. Eager fool. Now it's time to play. Her script had opened up a port on Jim's computer and all she had to do was plug into it from her own. She pulled the code slicer from her bag and inserted it into the universal data socket on her desktop machine. The device lit up with a flash of white status LEDs and began to warm up.

Now came the fun part. A window appeared on the screen, and a bar across the top read “Incognito Mode.” Whatever she did over the network now via her port connection with Jim's computer would remain invisible to everyone on the network. Only one of the reasons she loved the slicer. She quickly began to type and soon had loaded a key logger program onto Jim's computer, in order to detect his keystrokes. She still needed the password for the secure servers in order to get the files Daniel wanted, and only Jim knew the password. Even the slicer would take a while to break the password on such a heavily monitored system, and she didn't have the time or the patience to do that.

Several more minutes passed before the key logger began sending back information about Jim's typing habits. The first thing he typed turned out to be the address to a porn site, and Anna rolled her eyes with annoyance. Another five minutes elapsed, and still nothing. Anna checked her watch and frowned. The system scanned for viruses every fifteen minutes, and he certainly logged in at least every once in a while to check up on its progress?

Then it began to appear, a row of ten letters and numbers that couldn't have been anything else but a secure password. He was logging into the server access portal. Anna's heart leaped and she copied the text, pulled up the server access portal window herself and pasted the password into the login bar. It had all been too easy. She tapped ENTER and the server portal opened

Anna's heart began to thud. She could pull anything she wanted to at this point. What was to stop her? Nobody would ever know. She shook her head and closed her eyes briefly. I am only going after the files for Daniel, and then I am done with all of this. She pulled the paper from her blouse. The numbers stared back at her, suddenly ominous. She was unsure of what they really meant, or what females they could refer to, but she was determined to find the relevant files and be done with it.

Which database though? From the portal home page she could see six separate options. One of them was the personnel records database, and she discounted that one right away. The next three were pretty standard government fare: Confidential, Secret, and Top-Secret. The files could be in Top-Secret . . .

She frowned and tapped her fingers on the desk. While she was thinking she pulled up her work calendar window adjacent to the Incognito window, to at least appear to any computer monitoring program on the network that she was doing something perfectly normal. After a wry glance at the calendar with its new picture of Jim Jarvis smiling at her, she returned to the portal window and continued to think.

There were only two databases left. One of them Anna could not decipher at all. It was labeled UCS/MIL, with a small flag next to it describing it as in the beta stage. She shook her head and moved on to the next one. The last one bore the simple title SVC/LEVEL3. She read it twice to be sure and suddenly knew this was the right one. The serial numbers Daniel had given her had both begun with “SVC.” She opened the database and began scrolling through the files.

From the looks of it, every single file on the list was encrypted. That's okay, Anna thought. The code slicer can take care of that later. All she needed to do was find the files and copy them; then the code slicer could work past the encryption at her leisure. She scrolled rapidly through the list and found both files without a problem, then copied them to the code slicer's internal memory. Then she backed out of both the server portal and Jim's computer, after blowing it a derisive kiss. She closed out the entire Incognito session and unplugged the code slicer, leaned back and breathed.

It was done.

With any luck, no one would ever know she had just broken half of the data confidentiality laws in the book. She realized her heart pounded hard in her chest and her hands shook. Usually hacking gave her a heady rush of adrenaline and excitement. But she had never hacked under duress before and the difference was substantial. She slipped the slicer and her tablet into their bag and, after taking one last look over her workstation to be sure she had left nothing amiss, she stuffed the paper back into her blouse and exited her office with what she hoped was an air of nonchalance.

She quickly made her way down to Lab A1A, and as she pushed the door open she saw Dr. Jarrod bent excitedly over his reactive computer, occasionally straightening up to pace about but always coming back to the same pose. When he heard Anna's footsteps he turned and smiled his big toothy smile at her.

“Ah, you are here at last!” he exclaimed. “At least you haven't missed all of the excitement.”

“That's good,” Anna replied, managing a small grin before sitting down at a workbench and looking to make sure she was out of sight of the security cameras. Most of the cameras centered on the reactive computer anyways. She pulled her tablet partway out of its case and powered it on, then plugged the code slicer into the side of it and began the brute force decryption routine. Hopefully sometime today the slicer would break the encryption and she would be able to read the files.

She let the tablet with the slicer attached drop back into its case where it would not be visible, then returned to Dr. Jarrod's side and bent over the computer with him. New code flashed by on the myriad displays and Dr. Jarrod happily tapped away on the keyboard, even whistling while he did so. When he was satisfied he stepped back and looked at Anna.

“I can't believe I hadn't seen it before, Anna. For the longest time I had thought one couldn't employ a Bates-Bigley equation set on a human brain wave but it turns out your suggestion to use it was the correct one. With a little bit of adaptation I managed to change the algorithm for this particular brain wave pattern. It compensates perfectly for the brain's protective mechanisms and pins the proverbial fly to the table, so to speak. I can't thank you enough.”

Anna smiled a real smile this time and felt glad that she was one of the few people that could understand even half of what he had just said. “So do we have a time frame of when we'll be able to see this transfer protocol in action?”

Dr. Jarrod shrugged. “It could be as early as this afternoon, or as late as next week, who knows? But I am confident that it will be sooner rather than later.” He handed Anna a tablet. “Help me write the rest of this code? The computer needs to run the full scan of the brain wave pattern before we can even begin to input data into the brain itself.”

“How long will that take?” Anna asked.

“Probably a couple hours.”

The SubVersion Complex, Chapter Sixteen

Let's just say that it's much worse than she suspected...

Here is the next chapter of The SubVersion Complex. Hope you all enjoy! If you missed Chapter Fifteen, click here.

This book is intended for a more mature audience, so be advised.

╗ SIXTEEN ╚

INFERNO

They emerged into a long hallway, narrow and gloomily lit by caged blue lamps at infrequent intervals. The stale air bit with a strange subterranean chill. Captain James went first, followed by an apprehensive Anna. The stifled quiet and dim light unnerved her, and despite being able to see at least well enough to walk she still found herself feeling her way along.

They came to a door at the other end of the hall, which Captain James unlocked with a swipe of his badge and again he proffered a hand to Anna. She stepped through without enthusiasm and he followed. The new chamber proved to be a bit more welcome. The walls and ceiling merged together overhead into one big barrel-like shape, and Anna realized that they were standing in what looked to be a section of old subway tunnel. When she asked James about it he confirmed her suspicions.

“Yes, these were subway tunnels, built before they dug some of the newer ones under the Potomac River. I believe this used to be an underground power substation for the trains.” He beckoned her down another hall leading to a smaller room with two doors facing each other from opposite sides. Anna squinted through the vague lighting and saw that the door on the left read “Subterranean Prison Command Central,” and the one on the right read “SubVersion Complex.”

Captain James motioned to both doors. “Prison Command Central is my side of things, and I also handle general security matters down here. But you claim that you came down to see Neville.”

Anna nodded with more confidence than she felt. “As long as he is the administrator of the SubVersion Complex, then yes.”

Captain James stood and regarded her for a long moment before speaking again. Anna saw a strange look in his eyes and it filled her with an inexplicable dread. He touched her arm. “Perhaps you would like to rethink your choice?”

The touch was meant as a gesture of concern but Anna reflexively jumped away from it. “Of course not,” she replied bluntly. “I have business with Neville and it's important, I am not simply going to walk away.” She frowned at him. “Why?”

Captain James dropped his hand. “I don't doubt that whatever business you have down here is important, Miss McLean, seeing as not many people even know we exist. How you know is beyond me. However, I have to warn you about Neville. He is . . . ah . . . “

Anna stared at him, afraid of what the answer might be and irritated at all the half-answers. “He is . . . what?”

“Unstable,” James replied at length, “to put it politely. I don't trust him. Neither should you.”

Anna cocked her head at him with an attempt at a smile. “I work with a slightly unstable scientist upstairs, that shouldn't be a problem. Is Neville dangerous? Are you suggesting I need an armed escort?”

James shook his head. “It's not what I'm afraid he'd do to you, Miss McLean. It's what I'm afraid he'll show you. He has a certain . . . relish for his work.

“Ah,” Anna said in an attempt to sound positive, but her soul had begun to shrink inside her with apprehension. She almost considered turning around and heading back upstairs but the thought of never finding out what she wanted to know killed that impulse. She motioned to the SubVersion Complex door. “I understand if you might be concerned, but this is something that I must do. So, if you please.”

James gave her a resigned shrug and she could feel the worry in his expression. “As you wish.” He stepped closer to the door and tapped the intercom button next to it. “Margaret? Tell Neville that he has a visitor, a Miss Annalise McLean.” Anna heard the buzz and click of an electronic lock opening. Captain James leaned over and pushed the door open for her.

Anna stepped through into a lobby area, a room that could have been more hospitable had it been painted in a more cheerful color. However, industrial taupe was the decorative choice and it lent an oppressive air to an already oppressive place. Captain James remained outside; he looked her long and hard in the eye before wordlessly shutting the door.

It took five long minutes for Neville to appear. Margaret, the middle-aged receptionist at the desk across the room proved to be no decent company in the meantime, preferring to ignore Anna and sulk behind her omni-monitor viewing some unknown content. All Anna could see of her over the screen was her graying hair and a pair of suspicious beady eyes that glanced over every so often.

Finally the far door swung open and a tall man entered, sweeping in with an uneven gait and white coat flowing behind him. He had a surprisingly youthful, handsome face, a shock of blonde hair that floated around his head in a golden cloud, and piercing blue eyes that immediately engaged her from across the room.

He wore a wide easy smile and he approached her with a hand outstretched in greeting. “Good to meet you at last, Miss McLean! I've heard so much about you from our colleagues at HomoGen but it is a pleasure to see you in the flesh.” The voice that emerged surprised Anna with its strong British accent, but she realized that with a name like Neville Sanders she should have known better. She shook his clammy hand in a bit of a daze.

“It's good to meet you too, Mr. Sanders, but I have to be honest and say that I have no recollection of you from HomoGen. No one there ever spoke of you.”

Neville released her hand. “Ah, well, they wouldn't have spoken about me to you. Proper policy and whatnot, they are sticklers about that sort of thing.” He played with his lab coat with an odd nervousness. “But of course your business at HomoGen has always been intimately connected with my work. Shall we proceed?”

Anna was taken aback. “My business connected with you?”

“Of course!” he replied cheerfully. “Why else would HomoGen send me the cream of their crop?”

Thoroughly confused, Anna shook her head. “What cream of who's crop?”

Neville looked at her. “Did HomoGen not send you?”

“No, I don't even work with HomoGen anymore, I am with Central Admin now.”

“Ah.” Neville shrugged. “Well . . . I had felt for sure that they had sent you for some purpose or another, considering our especial relationship. Why HomoGen would send a computer programmer to us instead of a biotech scientist was beyond me, but I have to say they didn't tell me programmers came with such fantastic bodies.” He eyed her up and down. “But no matter! What was your purpose here then, if not for a tour or other such thing?”

Anna was too perturbed to register offense at his leering. “You keep saying HomoGen has a special relationship with this place and with you, but I must insist that I had never heard of you or this place until very recently. How are you connected?”

A look of genuine shock crossed Neville's face. “How are we connected?” he repeated incredulously. “Why, this is where your SubVersions are housed!”

“What do you mean?” Anna asked, her confusion giving way to alarm.

“Your SubVersions . . . “ He frowned at her. “Surely you know what a SubVersion is?”

With growing fear Anna shook her head. “I've never heard of a SubVersion before.”

“There are Versions, and then there are SubVersions,” he explained. “The Versions go out into the world, into families and homes and training centers and such. The SubVersions come here.”

“But HomoGen doesn't make anything called a SubVersion,” Anna insisted in a frantic tone.

“Are you so sure?” Neville asked ominously. “You say that with such assurance, and yet you had never heard of me or this place until recently. What else mightn't you know?”

“But I don't understand, what is a SubVersion?”

Neville locked his fingers behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. “As I said, there are Versions and then there are SubVersions. Women come in, they donate their eggs and the men come in and donate the sperm. HomoGen does the matching and processing and fertilizing and incubating and voila! You have a perfect little Version, ready to go to a new home just like a regular child. But for every one Version HomoGen makes, they get between two and eight other fertilized eggs that grow as well. Just part of the process. We call them SubVersions. Those never go to any customer anywhere, instead they come here.” He gestured around him. “A SubVersion is not part of a regular HomoGen order, it's merely a by-product of sorts. HomoGen figured 'Why waste it when we can use it?' So they all get shipped here.”

Anna felt sick to her stomach. “And . . what do you do with them here?” she croaked.

Neville suddenly chuckled. “You act shocked!” he said mirthfully. “No, Miss McLean, let me assure you that the SubVersions are a product, pure and simple. A product we have been able to do fantastic things with, but a product all the same.”

“If they are merely a product, then why hide them down here?” Anna whispered fearfully. “What do you have to hide?”

Neville turned on his heel and swung open the door he had entered from. “Because most people are less understanding than us few. We simply have the stomach to do what must be done.” He gestured with his head. “In you go?”

Anna automatically complied and Neville followed. Anna's insides immediately convulsed as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light and her nose acclimated to a strange mix of clinical antiseptic and filth. They were walking down a long hallway with thick glass doors down each side. As she looked into the blandly lit cells behind the glass doors Anna realized that there was a person inside each one. Some wandered about inside their cells, others lay curled up in the corners; almost all of them exuded a resigned and lifeless air. Most of the subjects were men but Anna saw a fair number of women as well, and in one of the cells she was shocked to see several children all sitting in a group.

But the last cage on the left brought her up completely short. Inside crouched a man, or at least what was once a man. Something looked wrong with his face but Anna could not tell quite what it was. He crouched next to the side wall, bent over the prone form of what appeared to be a small boy. As Anna pressed up against the glass to see him better, the man perked up and turned his head quickly in her direction. She gasped when she saw blood draining from the man's teeth and down his jaw and neck. The man visibly panted with an opened mouth and extended tongue, and when he had stared at Anna with wide soulless eyes for a long minute he suddenly lunged for her.

Anna screamed and backed away, just as the man crashed headlong into the other side of the glass and fell away bruised and whimpering. She cowered against the opposite side of the hallway for a full minute, the blood pounding in her temples hard. Neville stood chuckling, however. “He really frightened you, didn't he?” he remarked, grimly pleasant. In response to a terrified look from Anna, though, he decided to explain. “He could smell you, even through the glass.”

“Smell me?” Anna asked blankly.

“This particular SubVersion was checked out to a biotech firm on the other side of D.C. They specialized in DNA sequence splicing and they needed a subject for an experiment they were conducting on combining the DNA of bloodhounds with that of humans. Well, this fellow was the subject of that experiment.” Neville sighed wistfully. “But it would seem the project was only partially successful. The subject's sense of smell and hearing increased a thousand-fold but he began developing rabies-like symptoms for no apparent reason, so they sent him back here for observation. He's been an interesting one so far. Likes to kill for the sake of killing.”

Anna nodded incredulously at the explanation. Her mind roiled in an agony of guilty repugnance as she watched the feral dog-man slink back to his previous position. Versions are people, Anna. Real people. Mr. Vicker's words echoed in her mind like a faraway bell, plaintive but insistent. She wanted to shut them out, wanted to squash away the raw emotion of seeing her life's work slobbering and growling in front of her in that cage. But it was impossible. Maybe they are truly human, and then again, maybe they're not. That had been her response, and it now sounded weak and stupid.

Neville turned to her with a quizzical look on his face. “To be honest, I don't remember you ever telling me why you were actually here. I assumed you merely wanted to tour the proverbial pet shop, but you never answered that question. Was there something specific you needed to know?”

It took several seconds for Anna to remember that he was still standing there, and still more to recall that she was indeed down there on a particular errand. She marshaled what was left of her courage and pulled out Daniel's paper with the numbers scrawled on it. “I- I need to find this serial number,” she stuttered, handing the paper to him. He took it from her and his eyebrows suddenly shot straight up.

“Wow,” he whistled, “you are in luck! I am intimately familiar with both of these subjects. One of these, the first number, is no longer here. Checked out for a long-term project with a neurologist upstairs. Sweet little thing, her. But the other number is still here. She's packed away in cold storage, but we can take a little stroll in that direction if that suits your fancy.”

Anna nodded without a sound and followed Neville through the next two sets of doors into a huge high ceilinged rectangular room lit entirely with the blue caged lamps. The temperature dropped precipitously as they entered and with a start Anna realized she could see her breath smoking in front of her. She gazed around and then upward in combined awe and trepidation. All four walls were intersected with grid lines and, after a moment's observation, she saw that it resembled a giant morgue, and each grid square was the front panel of a closed human-sized drawer. Another man in a lab coat and overcoat worked nearby and nodded to them as they entered.

Neville didn't even have to look twice at the number on the paper; he handed it back to Anna, made a beeline across the room to a drawer at waist-height marked SVC5403-1F, and pressed his thumb to the scanner next to the number. The drawer emitted a faint clunk and Neville grabbed the handle and pulled hard. The drawer appeared heavy but it slid out of the wall smoothly enough. Inside was a closed coffin-shaped black container, similar to Sonya's box in all respects except for its larger size.

“Here you are,” Neville remarked, unlatching the box and shoving the lid open. Anna peered over the edge and felt the familiar pang of horrified sadness as she saw the prostrate body of the young woman inside. The woman was even more beautiful in the flesh than in her picture; the resemblance between mother and daughter also resonated much more strongly now that Anna had observed both.

She turned to Neville but barely knew what to ask. He needed no prompting, however, and immediately began talking.

“Now this one has always been a special specimen to me,” he noted with a weird fondness in his tone. “She's one of our oldest SubVersions, and has definitely been here just about the longest. A long-term companion of mine, of a sort. She's been checked out more often for experimentation than any other SubVersion we have.” He reached out and caressed one of the woman's cheeks and sighed. “My little angel. Never raised a fuss about her time here until that man showed up.”

“What man?” Anna asked, already knowing the answer.

“Daniel Marcus, that bloody fool. He fancied himself in love with the poor creature and got her pregnant. Normally we would have terminated such an unauthorized pregnancy but the decision came down from the top to keep it for observation. Then as luck would have it, Dr. Konrath Jarrod needed a child for a project of his so we permanently moved the child out of here. Mama stayed put though.” He gently touched the woman's face again. “It's amazing how human she looks, is it not? Beautiful, just beautiful . . . Anyways, after all that the order came to freeze her like the others. She had been relatively free to move around before that. Too bad she's been through so many freeze and thaw cycles.”

“Why?” Anna's questions were automatic, unthinking, as she stared in gathering horror at the frozen woman in the box. Neville sighed again.

“Just like a piece of beef in your freezer at home,” he explained. “Freeze and thaw it too many times and eventually it's worthless.”

Shocked, Anna turned to face him. “You mean she's dead?”

“Oh, no, not dead. Not yet, anyways. But at this point it would take quite a bit of work to bring her back from her most current freeze. She'd probably still be comatose for weeks before the revival procedure was complete.” He shook his head. “Too bad. She's been here for more than twenty years and I still haven't gotten my fill of her. I normally don't take liberties with my SubVersions but she was simply too special for me not to take a shag.”

In that moment Anna felt the urge to strike him but all she could do was gape open-mouthed at his flippancy. Neville didn't even seem to notice her anger but instead gestured to the other man standing nearby. “Jeremiah, it's time to say goodbye to my little angel.”

The other man approached. “Really? How many freeze/thaw cycles has it been for this one?”

“Twenty-two. And you know what that means.”

The man shook his head. “I'll be back.” He exited the cold storage room for a few moments, then returned with a gurney-like trolley which he wheeled up to the open drawer. Neville clicked a latch on the front of the drawer and it dropped down, allowing the black box to slide forward out of the drawer onto the gurney. After detaching a mass of cables and piping from the box the man closed it and wheeled the woman away.

“Wait, where are they going?” Anna asked, her anxiety growing.

“You needn't bother to watch this part, really, Miss McLean,” Neville dissembled quickly.

Anna watched as Jeremiah and the black box headed for a wide set of double doors to their left, then turned an incredulous eye on Neville. “I'm not letting that box out of my sight. Where are they going?”

For the first time Neville appeared genuinely uneasy. “Miss McLean, out of all the things I could show you down here, I'm sure you don't want to see this. Let's go back, I have some other fantastic projects to demonstrate-”

Anna grabbed him by the arm and wrenched him towards her. She was rapidly beginning to panic as she watched the woman in the box disappear through the double doors. “I don't give a shit about what you want to demonstrate to me, I want to know where he's taking her and what you are planning on doing with her. So show me now!”

“Miss McLean, really, there's no reason for violence-”

“Damn you, show me! I want to see it, I want to see everything!” Anna immediately regretted the request but she was not about to take it back.

Neville threw up his hands. “Fine! If you insist. If you must, you must.” They traversed the space to the double doors and Neville hesitated until Anna threw him a furious glance. He sighed. “But don't tell me I didn't give you a word of warning.”

He pushed open the doors and let them swing wide.

The blast of noise and heat caught Anna completely by surprise and she stood blinking in the scorching breeze, her hair thrashing her face and her eyes tearing up. She put up a hand to shield herself and glanced over at Neville with fear and uncertainty. He gave her a look that Anna could not fathom; madness, maybe? Or was it terror?

“You said you wanted to see everything,” he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear over the din. “Your words, not mine.” His unnerving smile reappeared, albeit not as broad as before, and he waved her in. Anna reluctantly complied and they stepped through the doors together.

The new chamber arched up and over them in a tremendous half-barrel, dimly lit by widely-spaced rows of yellow lights affixed to each curved roof support. To the left, emerging at an angle from a rectangular hole in the floor rose an enclosed conveyor reminiscent of a strip mining machine. Its long frame carved a stark black shadow into the air and terminated near the ceiling high above. The whole assembly angled over an enormous hopper that began at the floor and spread its gradually widening neck towards the conveyor's terminus.

Because of their low angle Anna could not see into the hopper, but she realized that it was creating both the noise and the heat. The ceiling above flickered with a reddish-orange glow and the tremendous machine ground out its cacophony as if in some dreadful agony.

“Follow me,” Neville shouted over the noise, pointing towards a metal stairway that led to the top of a maintenance gantry to their right. They began to climb the steps, and the entire time they did so Anna's eyes were glued to the hopper. She began to feel more sick with every step she took, and when they had surmounted the last stair and reached the top of the gantry her stomach had turned to mush. From the top of the platform she could finally see down into the mouth of the machine.

It stretched at least twenty feet wide at the top, a gaping metal maw with a flaming interior. The bottom of the machine glowed brightly but the fire seemed to breathe from deep within, and more than that she could not see at the moment. She had never believed in hell before, but feeling the heated wind rise up from the mechanical beast and seeing the glow of fierce flames inside reminded her of nothing so awful as hell. The picture that had terrified her so badly in her childhood came vividly to mind again, the two men walking through the flaming underworld as the bodies of the damned burned all around them.

She looked back down from her high perch and saw Jeremiah and another worker standing down near the base of the conveyor structure. They had the lid of the black box open, and after several seconds of squinting Anna realized with a fright that they were struggling to remove the limp body of the woman inside.

“What are they doing?” she exclaimed. Neville glanced over, then smiled his grim, insane smile.

“Doing their job.” He folded his arms and his tone took on a fatalistic air. “Since you really wanted to see it all, then you're in luck. This happens to be disposal day and that means you get to watch.”

Without ceremony Jeremiah and his helper inserted the woman into an opening in the side of the conveyor. Anna would have shouted to them to stop but the words died in her throat in a dry squawk. With a sickening flop the petite form of the woman fell into the dark and disappeared. Neville shook his head.

“Such a beautiful specimen,” he remarked pleasantly. “Ah, well, all good things . . . “ He put two fingers in the air and signaled to the men down below. Jeremiah nodded back, shut the door in the conveyor, and tapped in a command on a control panel. Motors sputtered, wheels ground, and the conveyor assembly began to roar to life.

Anna, violently agitated, turned to Neville and tried to form a question but her powers of speech had failed her. He leaned closer to her, trying to hear. She tried again. “What are they doing? What is that machine?” she rasped, her mind closing to the truth that was dawning on her with horrible clarity. He turned away from her and fixed his eyes on the conveyor's peak, face expectant and hands clutching the handrail.

“That machine is where we will all go,” he intoned. “It is where everyone in this city goes who is not wanted.” He raised his face up. “Where the SubVersions go when they are finished with their usefulness, where the elderly from the geriatric homes go. An author of old once wrote that if you have a problem without a solution, the solution is to burn the problem.” He turned to Anna, and when he smiled his teeth gleamed orange in the wretched light. “Watch the problem burn, Miss McLean. Watch them burn.”

Something emerged from the top of the conveyor. Long hair at first, then the inert body of the woman Daniel had loved appeared. The machine dispassionately ejected the body headfirst into the air, and Anna could not tear her eyes away as the woman plunged through the void towards the fire below. She saw Neville out of the corner of her eye blow a kiss to the victim as she fell; then with a awful suddenness the woman struck the side of hopper and Anna heard the dull crack of smashing skull. The body slid down the inside of the hopper, trailing blood behind it as it vanished into the fire. A roar erupted from the machine and flames swirled up to meet their prey, engulfing the hopper in yellow fire. Then when Anna's unbelieving eyes were drawn upwards again she realized it was only the beginning.

From the mouth of the conveyor a stream of something began to pour out, a lumpy brownish choked flow that at first Anna could not discern. She blinked in the heat and looked again, and the individual forms of human bodies became visible in the stream. Aged, broken bodies, men and women, gaping dead eyes and slender naked limbs. In a massive tangle the stream of corpses poured out, crashing unceremoniously into the hopper below. Bones smashed, congealed blood flowed down the stained metal, and the fire thundered its enormous all-consuming din.

A powerful nausea rolled over Anna in a wave that she could not hope to control. She could look no longer. She wrenched her way past Neville and ran for a door at the end of the scaffold. Opening it and stumbling into a hallway on the other side, she collapsed onto the floor and vomited hard.