Dark Matter(10)

Maybe it’s just the drug, but it feels so good to be talking. An oasis of normal after two of the craziest hours I’ve ever lived. I know it isn’t true, but it feels like as long as we keep conversing, nothing bad can happen. As if the words protect me.

“Did you have something big in the works?” he asks.

Now I’m having to focus on making my eyes stay open.

“Yes.”

“And what was it?”

His voice sounds distant.

“I was trying to create the quantum superposition of an object that was visible to the human eye.”

“Why did you abandon your research?”

“When Charlie was born, he had major medical issues for the first year of his life. I needed a thousand hours in a cleanroom, but I couldn’t get there fast enough. Daniela needed me. My son needed me. I lost my funding. Lost my momentum. I was the young, new genius for a minute, but when I faltered, someone else took my place.”

“Do you regret your decision to stay with Daniela and make a life with her?”

“No.”

“Never?”

I think of Daniela, and the emotion breaks back through, accompanied by the actual horror of the moment. Fear returns, and with it a homesickness that cuts to the bone. I need her in this moment more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life.

“Never.”

And then I’m lying on the floor, my face against the cold concrete, and the drug is whisking me away.

He’s kneeling beside me now, rolling me onto my back, and I’m looking up at all that moonlight pouring in through the high windows of this forgotten place, the darkness wrinkled with twitches of light and color as swirling, empty voids open and close beside the generators.

“Will I see her again?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

I want to ask him for the millionth time what he wants with me, but I can’t find the words.

My eyes keep closing, and I try to hold them open, but it’s a losing battle.

He pulls off a glove and touches my face with his bare hand.

Strangely.

Delicately.

He says, “Listen to me. You’re going to be scared, but you can make it yours. You can have everything you never had. I’m sorry I had to scare you earlier, but I had to get you here. I’m so sorry, Jason. I’m doing this for both of us.”

I mouth the words, Who are you?

Instead of responding, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a new syringe and a tiny glass ampoule filled with a clear liquid that in the moonlight shines like mercury.

He uncaps the needle and draws the contents of the vial up into the syringe.

As my eyelids slowly lower, I watch him slide the sleeve up his left arm and inject himself.

Then he drops the ampoule and the syringe on the concrete between us, and the last thing I see before my eyes lock shut is that glass ampoule rolling toward my face.

I whisper, “Now what?”

And he says, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”





I’m aware of someone gripping my ankles.

As hands slide under my shoulders, a woman says, “How’d he get out of the box?”

A man responds: “No idea. Look, he’s coming to.”

I open my eyes, but all I see is blurred movement and light.

The man barks, “Let’s get him the hell out of here.”

I try to speak, but the words fall out of my mouth, garbled and formless.

The woman says, “Dr. Dessen? Can you hear me? We’re going to lift you onto a gurney now.”

I look toward my feet, and the man’s face racks into focus. He’s staring at me through the face shield of an aluminized hazmat suit with a self-contained breathing apparatus.

Glancing at the woman behind my head, he says, “One, two, three.”

They hoist me onto a gurney and lock padded restraints around my ankles and wrists.

“Only for your protection, Dr. Dessen.”

I watch the ceiling scroll past, forty or fifty feet above.

Where the hell am I? A hangar?

I catch a glint of memory—a needle puncturing my neck. I was injected with something. This is some crazy hallucination.

A radio squawks, “Extraction team, report. Over.”

The woman says with excitement bleeding through her voice, “We have Dessen. We’re en route. Over.”

I hear the squeak of wheels rolling.

“Copy that. Initial condition assessment? Over.”

She reaches down with a gloved hand and wakes some kind of monitoring device that’s been Velcroed to my left arm.

“Pulse rate: one-fifteen. BP: one-forty over ninety-two. Temp: ninety-eight-point-nine. Oh-two sat: ninety-five percent. Gamma: point-eight seven. ETA thirty seconds. Out.”

A buzzing sound startles me.

We move through a pair of vaultlike doors that are slowly opening.

Jesus Christ.

Stay calm. This isn’t real.

The wheels squeak faster, more urgently.

We’re in a corridor lined with plastic, my eyes squinting against the onslaught of light from fluorescent bulbs shining overhead.

The doors behind us slam shut with an ominous clang, like the gates to a keep.

They wheel me into an operating room toward an imposing figure in a positive pressure suit, standing under an array of surgical lights.