_Friday, April 10
9:34 P.M.
_
She was still conscious as David and Debra lifted her onto the gurney.
There was no operating table in the laboratory, but this procedure did
not require one. It consisted of a series of small subcutaneous
injections along both sides of the spine, followed by a larger
injection at the base of the skull.
As the injections began, she drifted into a mind-set where she was
never entirely sure how much was real, how much was fantasy, how much
deliberate, how much accidental. She remembered that she felt her grasp
of reality slipping away, but there was no sense of pain. Instead,
images and sensations in a sequence that corresponded to the passage of
time drifted through her mind. It was couched in terms of the people
she knew.
The first image was her mother, Nina, and they were together,
struggling through a dense forest Initially, she thought they were
looking for her father's grave, but then it became clear they were
searching for some kind of magic potion that would save her mother's
life. As they clawed their way through tangled tendrils and dark
arbors, she became increasingly convinced their quest was doomed, that
she was destined to watch Nina pass into oblivion.
But then something happened. The forest opened out onto a vast meadow
bathed in sunshine. In the center was a cluster of snow-white
mushrooms, and she knew instinctively that these would bring eternal
life to anyone who ate them.
"Come," she said to Nina, "these can save you."
"Ally, I'm too old now. I don't want to be saved. There comes a moment
in your life when you've done everything you feel you needed to do.
You've had the good times and now all that's left is the slow
deterioration of what's left of your body. It robs the joy out of
living."
"No, Mom, this is different," she said plucking one of the white
mushrooms and holding it out. "This prevents you from growing any
older. You'll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle."
"'To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love
grow old and wither and die? Is that the 'miracle' you want me to
have?" Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her
arms as though to embrace the sun. "My mind Ally. You've given me back
my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life God will see fit to give
me and actually know who I am and where I am. That's miracle enough for
me."
As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and
enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could
see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back
her eyelids.
"Alexa, I can't tell you what you're about to feel, because no one has
ever been where you're about to be. God help us, but we're on the high
wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should
immediately form tissue that's a facsimile of what's already there.
That's what the simulations show."
She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she
heard Bartlett's voice.
"Why are you talking to her, Karl? She can't hear you."
"We don't actually know whether she can or not. At some level I think
she's aware of her surroundings. In a way we should hope that she is.
If there are going to be impacts on her consciousness, I'd rather she
be alert and able to remember what it was like."
Then the voices drifted away, but she was sure she had no control over
anything. The white mushrooms. She was thinking about them again. Only
now they were above her and growing toward the sky and then she
realized she was underground, buried and looking up from her own grave.
What happened next was a journey through time--somewhere in the far-
distant future. She seemed to be watching it through a large window,
unable to interact with what was happening on the other side.
Time.
She felt a sensation at the back of her neck and the images faded away.
"This damned well better be right" came a voice. "There's not going to
be another chance."
"I did an activity simulation for a range of antibodies, just to make
sure she wouldn't automatically reject the enzyme because of the
earlier injection." The voice belonged to Karl Van de Vliet Her mind
was clearing and she recognized it "But all the results indicate that
the effect of the antibodies is essentially washed out at this
concentration of active enzyme. Have the good grace to let me try to
get this right."
She was listening and trying to understand what was going on. Her mind
had been drifting through time and space, but now she was aware that
something new was happening. The hallucinations, the conversations
around her, all were beginning to focus in, to build in intensity.
But that was not what was really happening; it was merely a mask over
something that had entered the laboratory, some kind of force.
Then her vision began to work in a strange way that felt more like a
sixth sense. She was "seeing" what was going on in the room, even
though her eyes were shut. Or perhaps they weren't. She didn't know and
she was still strapped to the gurney, so she had no way to check.
"Kristy," Winston Bartlett said dismay in his voice, "you
shouldn't be in here. You should be resting."
"What the hell are you doing down here?" Van de Vliet demanded. The
pitch of his voice had noticeably gone up.
Who? Ally wondered. Who's he talking to?
There are definitely new people in the room.
"Come on, Ally," said a voice in her ear, urgent. This time she knew
who it was. It was Stone. "Damn them all. I'm getting you out of here.
Now."