Replica (Replica #1)(11)
But two months later, by the time the doctors determined she couldn’t keep it, she was already talking names: Ocean, Sunday, Valium. After Pepper, all the knives in the mess hall were replaced with plastic versions, and the male and female replicas were kept even more strictly apart.
“It’s okay.” Curly gave her a nudge. “Go on. You’re with me.”
It was hotter in C-Wing. Or maybe Lyra was just hot. In the first room they passed she saw a male replica, lying on an examination table with probes attached to his bare chest. She looked away quickly. It smelled different in C-Wing—the same mixture of antiseptic and bleach and human sweat, but deeper somehow.
They took the stairs up to ground level and moved past a series of dorms, lined with cots just like on the girls’ side and mercifully empty. The males who weren’t sick or in testing were likely getting fed in Stew Pot. Despite the standard-issue white sheets and gray blankets, and the plastic under-bed bins, the rooms managed to give an impression of messiness.
They passed into B-Wing, and Curly showed her credentials to two guards on duty. B-Wing was for research and had restricted access. Passed laboratories, dazzling white, illuminated by rows and rows of fluorescent light, where more researchers were working, moving slowly in their gloves and lab coats, hair concealed beneath translucent gray caps, eyes magnified, insect-like, by their goggles. Banks of computers, screens filled with swirling colors, hard metal equipment, words Lyra had heard her whole life without ever knowing what they meant—spectrometry, biometrics, liquid chromatography—beautiful words, words to trip over and fall into.
One time, she had worked up the courage to ask Dr. O’Donnell what they did all day in the research rooms. It didn’t seem possible that all those men and women were there just to perfect the replication process, to keep the birthers from miscarrying so often after the embryo transfer, to keep the replicas from dying so young.
Dr. O’Donnell had hesitated. “They’re studying what makes you sick,” she said at last, speaking slowly, as if she had to carefully handle the words or they would cut her. “They’re studying how it works, and how long it takes, and why.”
“And how to fix it?” Lyra had asked.
Dr. O’Donnell had barely hesitated. “Of course.”
The Box was made of concrete slab, sat several hundred yards away from the main complex, and was enclosed by its own fence. Unlike the rest of Haven, the G-Wing had no windows, and extra security required Nurse Curly to identify herself twice and show her badge to various armed guards who patrolled the perimeter.
Curly left Lyra in the entrance foyer, in front of the elevator that gave access to Sub-One and, supposedly, the concealed subterranean levels. Lyra tried not to look at the doors that led to the ER, where so many replicas died or failed to thrive in the first place. Even the nurses called the G-Wing the Funeral Home or the Graveyard. Lyra wondered whether Lilac Springs was there even now, and how long she had left.
Soon enough, the elevator doors opened and a technician wearing a heavy white lab coat, her hair concealed beneath a cap, arrived to escort Lyra down to see Mr. I. It was, as far as Lyra could tell, the same tech she’d seen the half-dozen or so times she’d been here in the past month. Then again, she had trouble telling them apart, since their faces were so often concealed behind goggles and a mask, and since they never spoke directly to her.
In Sub-One, they walked down a long, windowless hallway filled with doors marked Restricted. But when a researcher slipped out into the hall, Lyra had a brief view of a sanitation room and, beyond it, a long, galley-shaped laboratory in which dozens of researchers were bent over gleaming equipment, dressed in head-to-toe protective clothing and massive headgear that made them look like the pictures of astronauts Lyra had occasionally seen on the nurses’ TV.
Mr. I sat by itself in a cool bright room humming with recirculated air. To Lyra, Mr. I looked like an open mouth, and the table on which she was supposed to lie down a long pale tongue. The hair stood up on her arms and legs.
“Remember to stay very still,” the tech said, her voice muffled by a paper mask. “Otherwise we’ll just have to start over. And nobody wants that, do we?”
Afterward she was transferred to a smaller room and told to lie down. Sometimes lying this way, with doctors buzzing above her, she lost track of whether she was a human at all or some other thing, a slab of meat or a glass overturned on a countertop. A thing.
“I don’t believe Texas is any further than we are. It’s bullshit. They’re bluffing. Two years ago, they were still infecting bovine tissue—”
“It doesn’t matter if they’re bluffing if our funding gets cut. Everyone thinks they’re closer. Fine and Ives loses the contract. Then we’re shit outta luck.”
High bright lights, cool sensors moving over her body, gloved hands pinching and squeezing. “Sappo thinks the latest variant will do it. I’m talking full progression within a week. Can you imagine the impact?”
“He better be right. What the hell will we do with all of them if we get shut down? Ever think of that?”
Lyra closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted.
“Open your eyes, please. Follow my finger, left to right. Good.”
“Reflexes still look okay.” One of the doctors, the woman, parted her paper gown and squeezed her nipple, hard. Lyra cried out. “And pain response. Do me a favor—check this one’s file, will you? What variant is this?”