“And have you found any cures?” I ask.
“Sure. Bits and pieces,” he says. “We share our findings with certain other labs. They often get the credit, but that’s okay.”
“Like the Chimera Centre,” I say.
“We do collaborate with Chimera. They’ve had some amazing breakthroughs there.”
It’s a lot to wrap my head around. I pull my feet up on the bed and tuck my hands under my ankles. The longer I can keep him here talking, the more likely I am to get him to sympathize with me and maybe let me go. It’s like with Ian, all over again, but without the crush.
“How long have you guys been down here?” I ask.
Whistler’s shoulders visibly relax, and he sends his gaze toward the ceiling. “For me, it’s been three years this stretch. For the others? Let’s see. The meltdown was in forty-eight, so that’s nineteen years ago for Anna. She was the first. She set things up. Then Kiri and Jules came soon after.”
“They’ve been down here for almost two decades?” I ask, amazed.
“I was with them back then, too, for a few years near the beginning. Four years? I think that’s right. I left for a while and then came back after my divorce,” he says. “A few others have come and gone from time to time, but we’re the core group.”
“How did this all start?”
He rests one ankle over the opposite knee, revealing an argyle sock. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you,” he says. “After the earthquake and the Olbaid meltdown, people started dying from radiation poisoning. Not everybody, but enough. It was ugly.”
“I heard about that. It must have been horrible,” I say, recalling Lavinia’s losses. “Wasn’t there a problem with a cemetery?”
“Yes,” he says. “The dead weren’t actually radioactive, but their bodies had to be handled specially, and the local cemeteries were overwhelmed. They couldn’t take everybody. That’s where we come in.”
I shift forward, leaning my elbows on my knees and clasping my hands together.
“The park here was closed, of course,” Whistler goes on. “A total loss, but even so, the Grisly brothers were generous. They offered to store the bodies here until a proper cemetery could be founded. You know, a memorial cemetery for the victims of the meltdown. That’s what the survivors wanted. It irked some people to think of their loved ones stashed at a horror park, but it was a cheap, safe solution, and it was supposed to be temporary. Anyway, years went by. The burial ground was never dedicated, and the county had enough other problems to deal with. A judge decided that the bodies were technically ‘buried’ as long as they stayed underground, so that was finally checked off as the solution.”
“So they just left the bodies here? All this time?” I ask, confused. “Why haven’t they decayed?”
“The original bodies have all decomposed by now, of course,” Whistler says. “But you asked how we got started.” He sets one hand on the desk, and every once in a while, he rocks his chair back on two legs in a restless fashion. “It seemed a shame to let all the bodies just rot. They couldn’t even be harvested for organs because of the radiation. Then Anna got an idea. She had done some research with quantum computer biointerfaces, and she saw no harm in stimulating some of the brain tissue. ‘If you can get light from a potato,’ she used to say, ‘you ought to be able to get something out of a dead brain.’”
“You can get light from a potato?” I ask.
He turns over his hand expressively. “A potato can power a light, to be more accurate, but she was making a point. The dreamers had a potential we could not ignore, and we couldn’t do any harm. It was slow work at first. Grim, really. But the bodies kept coming, some very fresh, and once we could reboot basic systemic functions in a few, we started seeing results. Some of the dreamers’ brains, the younger ones especially, were perfectly viable for storing data, computer data. Brains are really just living circuits, after all, and connected with the right interface, they make a nifty computer network. That was our first success.”
I’m agog. He’s goes on, bragging about their progress. He doesn’t appear to see anything wrong with what they’ve done, but it seems atrocious to me, and I can’t pinpoint why. I straighten again and lean a hand back on my cot. I’m all for donating organs, and I get that recycling bodies is just a stretch beyond that. It isn’t as if dead people could actually know they’re being used. And yet, if their brains are working enough to be useful, if they’re valuable enough to be used as circuits, aren’t they alive enough that they could notice?
That’s what troubles me. Who can prove the dreamers are really dead anymore? I can’t get over how helpless they all look, and I can’t forget how much I hated being kept asleep and mined for months at Onar. No matter how much Whistler brags about their advances, this still feels wrong to me. These people, these dreamers, ought to have a choice. They don’t. That’s why this is wrong.
“These days, we’re deep into the mining and seeding,” Whistler continues. “That’s where the most promise is. We have a whole bank of dreams now, the best in the world.”
“You have a dream bank,” I say, trying to imagine that.
Whistler absently touches his earpiece again. “Yes. We’ve worked with more than three thousand dreamers over the years, mining and seeding to see what works.” He hitches forward in his seat. “We can take a dream from a living host, like you, and implant it in one of our elite dreamers. It grows and multiplies and ripens there until we can harvest it and plant it again into other dreamers. In some cases, we have fifth-generation dream lines. Imagine that!”
“Have you done that with my dreams?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “That’s the problem. Berg’s been very stingy with you. Very stingy. We had to beg for some Sinclair Fifteen from Chimera, but we’ve never been able to get enough, until now.”
My pulse chugs with fear, and my mind leaps.
“You want to know what I think?” he continues.
“What?”
“We’ll duplicate your dreams and send them to clinics like Chimera, where they’ll be implanted into more coma patients, and bam, they’ll wake up. Your dreams will provide the cure for all of them.”
I hug my pillow to my belly. “But if you’re implanting my dreams into all those patients, and they all wake up, won’t they all be me? Like Thea is me?” I ask.
He stares a moment and then shakes his head. “No. They wouldn’t exactly be you.”
“But you said you would use my dreams. Your cure for waking them up is based on my dreams,” I insist. “Thea has my personality. She has my memories. You’re trying to duplicate me.”
“We’re really not,” he says. “It’s more like they’d be hybrids.”
“You think that’s any better?” I demand.
“Look, we’re just trying to help people. You should be honored,” he says.