Zero, p.2
Zero, page 2
He chuckled at the thought.
“Where to begin...” Brian said, planting his hands on his hips and eyeing the stack of boxes. The logician in him immediately began to prioritize the contents, but practicality quickly superseded and he walked across the room to the stack of concrete blocks behind the cardboard mountain.
One by one, he carried the blocks across the room to where the cable jack protruded from the wall. He neatly stacked three side by side, leaving a carefully estimated eight-inch gap between each, then set a long board atop them. He placed a block atop either end of the plank, leaving out the third, then placed another board over the top. His stereo would fit nicely in the gap on the shelf he just created, while his television would balance comfortably on the top. It was a ghetto-looking arrangement, but again, functionality always won out over aesthetics.
He headed back across the living room to where the twenty-seven inch set rested on the floor beside the back door. Curling his fingers beneath either side of the base, he squatted and heaved the set from the ground. He braced the base with his thigh while he adjusted his grip, then turned to head back to the “entertainment center.”
He hadn’t heard Buck get up.
No sooner had he twisted and brought his right foot forward than he felt the dog’s forgiving side against his shin. He tried to stop his momentum, tried to defy the very laws of physics he held above all others, but there was nothing he could do.
Buck scurried quickly out of the way while Brian fought to regain his balance without releasing his grip on the television. Losing both battles, Brian stumbled forward, barely dropping the TV in time to thrust his hands out to catch himself before slamming face-first into the floor.
There was a loud crack, followed by an explosion of shattering glass and the subsequent tinkling of miniature shards skittering across the floor.
“Damn it!” Brian growled, pushing himself up to all fours.
Glass bit into his palms.
“Arrgh!” he roared, tightening his hands to fists, then immediately thinking better of it.
Buck whined from the corner of the room where he sat on his tail with his ears drawn all the way back, widening his eyes.
“It’s all right, boy,” Brian groaned, carefully turning his hand over to rub his eye with the back of his wrist. “You stay there, though, until I get this mess cleaned up.”
Buck whimpered.
“Stay,” Brian commanded holding out a bloodied palm like a crossing guard.
Carefully, he scooted forward along the floor, watching the glass pile like sand against his jeans, until he reached the television set.
There was nothing left but a tangle of plastic and metal like a car wreck. The black frame was crumpled sideways so it more closely resembled a trapezoid than a rectangle, and all that was left of the actual glass tube was a wide socket that vaguely reminded him of the remaining metal ring after smashing a light bulb. Fractured circuitry littered the floor around him.
It was beyond hope.
Dejected, he lifted the framework of the disintegrated set from the floor and figured that this was as good a place as any to begin cleaning.
The carcass was no more than six-inches above the floor when he saw the damage.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he sighed, exasperated.
The hardwood slats were completely obliterated where the corner of the TV impacted, leaving a wooden crater framed with jaggedly-fractured, splintered edges.
Setting the TV to the side, Brian crouched once again and began sifting through the debris. The hole was no more than an inch deep, and for a moment he held out hope of being able to patch it up without too much effort. Of course, as he began prying the cracked planks from the crater, they fragmented into even smaller pieces, which he had to clear out one by one from the massive indentation.
Buck whined from the corner.
“Give me a minute,” Brian snapped, immediately regretting his tone.
He grimaced and riffled his fingers through his hair.
“What in the world?” he mused, leaning even closer so he could get a better view.
He slipped his fingers as far as he could through the jagged hole without the savage splinters tearing his flesh, scraping his fingertips along the concrete until he found the edge of something circular. There were several holes in the metal surface just large enough to accommodate his fingertips, giving him the leverage he needed to pull it out.
He held it up before him, immediately recognizing it.
It was the corroded cover to a floor drain. The rims of the holes were black with deterioration and thick with grunge. There was even a clump of hair clinging to the holes and trailing toward the floor like a filthy rat’s tail.
Bloody handprints marred the floor, each of them smeared like someone had dragged a finger through the middle, drawing a circle with a diagonal line bisecting it.
Brian looked back into the hole and inspected the three-inch drain set into the slightly-sloped concrete in the middle of the living room floor.
Ø Ø Ø
It had taken him more than an hour to clean up the television’s shrapnel. The phone rang as he was dumping the last of the glass into the trash.
It was Dr. Connell, inviting him to the lab to introduce him to the other members of the team.
The unpacking was going to have to wait for another day.
There had been six other researchers in addition to Dr. Connell and Brian. The introductions had come so fast and furious that he couldn’t remember a single name, but he did remember his initial surprise at learning that the majority of the team was composed of bioengineering professors, one of whom was a retired surgeon. There was the balding guy with the yellow teeth and lab coat who stank of cigar smoke; the guy with the nose hairs that trilled like party favors every time he spoke, enunciating through his sinuses; the middle-aged woman who piqued his curiosity with her blonde hair done up in a bun, and a pen that constantly found its way to the corner of her mouth; her mousy graduate assistant who was unable to make eye contact from behind her clipboard; the burly guy who reminded him of his high school shop teacher; and, of course, the stereotypical white-jacketed surgeon, whose ego occupied physical space within the cramped lab.
The whole time, he had been unable to take his eyes from the apparatus atop the table on the other side of the window in the sterile clean room. At first, it looked like one of those braces they used to straighten out a clubfoot: a circular strap that ringed the calf, with metal posts bracketing the lower leg down to a snarl of thin tubes that were visible weaving in and out through the otherwise transparent skin of the foot.
The toes twitched down the line from the great toe to the pinky, one at a time.
The unnerving thing was that the subject was merely a lower leg amputated at the knee, sitting on the table like a slab of pale meat.
Brian thought Dr. Connell must have taken him down to the lab to see his first impression of the project. Was he revolted? Frightened? Anxious? – but no further details were disclosed. The group of people talked around it as though you could find amputated limbs in every room around campus.
It had been positively surreal.
Ø Ø Ø
“So, tell me, Mr. Niemand,” Dr. Connell asked on their way across the barren parking lot beneath the halogen glare of the street lights. “Why do you think I’ve chosen you for this particular project?”
“I won’t even pretend to understand what I saw—”
“Figure it out.”
The professor kept his eyes fixed stoically ahead.
“I graduated at the top of my class with honors.”
“Gifted students are a dime a dozen. Why did I choose you?”
“My Master’s thesis—”
“Tell me about yourself, Mr. Niemand. What is unique about you that would make you stand out from any of a hundred qualified candidates?”
Brian turned to the doctor, hoping for some hint to be betrayed by the older man’s eyes. There was a glint of mischief, but little else.
“I have a...” Brian started, formulating his words carefully, “overly-focused attention to fine details.”
“You’re the definition of the obsessive personality, Mr. Niemand, which suits us perfectly, but still isn’t the reason why I chose you.”
“Then why?”
“You’re already emotionally invested in our research.”
Brian stopped walking, his shadow stretching twice his height.
Traffic growled on the other side of the wall of spruces that separated the sheltered realm of academia from the real world.
“Tell me about your father,” Dr. Connell said.
“He had a stroke three years ago, which caused hemiparalysis on his right side, leaving him without control of his right arm or leg.”
“And your brother?”
“A car bomb took his arm outside of Baghdad, killing three other Marines.”
“What would you think if our research were able to reverse paralysis like your father’s or allow amputees like your brother to receive a new arm?”
Brian looked to his shoes, scuffing the asphalt, then back to the doctor.
“Life is electricity, Mr. Niemand. The heart beats as a result of electrical conduction from the SA to the AV node, stimulating atrial and ventricular contraction. Nerves carry impulses that cause a chemical reaction between neighboring neurons in a chain to cause everything from thought to movement. Say we were working on a device capable of converting standard direct current into a form of chemical energy that served as a liaison of sorts to the central and peripheral nervous systems, a kind of biological ‘battery’, if you will.”
“Then you could replace my dad’s damaged nerve tracts to allow him to function normally again?”
Connell nodded, working hard to repress a smile.
“The nerves and muscles at the end of my brother’s stump would be able to communicate with a new arm.”
“Do you understand why I chose you now?”
“Because there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to ensure the success of this research.”
Dr. Connell could no longer contain his smile.
“How close are you?” Brian asked, his voice little more than a whisper.
“You saw the leg. What do you think?”
Brian pondered it a moment.
“There’s a difference between the conduction of an impulse along a neural tract and the actual suffusion of life.”
“That’s why we’re involved. We’re all hoping that theoretical physics provides a bridge over the gap between the two. It’s my contention that electricity, which is essentially a stream of electrons traveling from a power source, can be modified to conduct through an electrolytic paste to simulate nerve potential, producing artificial neural tracts.”
“That’s why Dr. Leod was involved.”
“He was our resident expert on conductivity.”
“So why did he leave?”
Connell looked off into the distance, where a swell of clouds rolled over the Rockies like a cresting tide, swallowing the stars in its path.
“He envisioned the project moving in a different direction than the rest of us.”
“So he just up and quit?”
“After many heated debates, I think we reached a mutual decision. The rest of us wanted to use the technology in a medical sense, while he had something entirely different in mind.”
Ø Ø Ø
Shedding his jeans and sweater on the floor, Brian collapsed back onto the bed and slid beneath the covers.
The clock still flashed 12:00 in the darkness.
His first impulse had been to sprint home and call his father and his brother, tell them that he was about to make their dreams come true... but what if he couldn’t? While on the surface, the theory certainly seemed plausible, there was something missing in the equation that he couldn’t precisely pin down. To change an electrical impulse to a biologic one, they would essentially have to convert physical structure – no matter how infinitely minuscule – to energy. And therein lay the flaw.
What kind of synthetic material was capable of carrying a biological impulse at the speed of thought while converting it from neural energy to electricity and then back again? There had to be a physical change of matter somewhere in there.
His eyelids drooped closed, the back of his head merging with the pillow. Consciousness trickled away like a meandering stream as darkness crept in from the periphery to whisk him off into a dream—
A grinding sound roused him.
Brian’s eyes fluttered open to stare at the shadowed ceiling.
Immediately, his thoughts flashed back to the night before: the sound of footsteps in the hallway, the reflected face in the window.
His senses sharpened, tuning themselves to the night.
The sound continued in earnest, almost like teeth trying to gnaw through something that provided too much resistance.
He slipped from beneath the covers and followed the sound toward the bathroom.
“Buck?”
As he passed the sink, he flipped on the light, momentarily blinded by the sudden flare of light.
Buck looked back over his shoulder to Brian from where he lay to the left of the tub on the brown- and orange-patterned linoleum, then turned his attention back to the wall in front of him, where he had gnawed a hole the size of a fist.
“No!” Brian snapped, his right hand striking like a snake to snatch the dog’s collar.
He jerked Buck toward him, though the dog bore down with his nails on the tile in defiance. A chalky plaster dust coated the dog’s snout all the way up to his eyes, covering the floor beneath the maw like snow.
Through the ragged orifice, Brian could see a chewed and frayed vertical wooden joist, and the back side of the outer wall.
Surprised at the depth of the wall, Brian reached through, his arm vanishing halfway to his elbow before his fingers came into contact with the external shell of the house.
“They’re going to throw us out before we even get unpacked,” Brian said, retracting his arm from the hole.
He gave the collar another firm tug, dragging Buck back into the bedroom. As he closed the door, he began to ponder how in the world he was going to patch the wall.
Ø Ø Ø
Brian’s eyes snapped open the moment Buck started to growl.
His heartbeat immediately accelerated, sweat beading his forehead.
He lay there a moment, not daring to move, all of his senses attuned to his surroundings. Without raising his head to draw attention to his movement, he tried to peek at the doorway to the bedroom, where that first growl had already stilled.
Buck’s dark silhouette was framed in the doorway, tail fixed rigidly.
Brian pinched his eyes shut and tried to block out the sounds and the damp fear that was slithering all over his body, clinging to the sheets, but to no avail. The longer he closed his eyes, the more intense the fear became, until it was almost claustrophobic, forcing him to pry his eyelids open.
The growling snapped into a barrage of barking.
Before he even consciously formulated the thought, Brian leapt from bed and dashed toward the doorway, slapping the wall to flip on the overhead light.
Brian scoured the hallway, expecting someone to dash across the shadows toward the front door.
All was still.
This was stupid. He was going to drive himself out of his mind if he didn’t seize this crazy horse by the reins right now.
Without taking his eyes from the threshold, Brian backed toward the stack of boxes, fumbling with the folded lid of the top one before finally opening it. He reached in and fished around until he found something suitably long and hard, pulling it quickly out and holding it high over his shoulder.
The entirety of his flesh was taut with goose bumps, every single hair rising uncomfortably erect.
Slowly... quietly... he crept across the hardwood, conscious of every barely-audible creak and groan that betrayed his advance. His sweaty grip readjusted constantly on the wooden shaft of the hammer, which seemed to become smaller and lighter with each step.
Buck still barred entrance to the room, long teeth bared menacingly between ferocious barking assaults.
“Good boy,” Brian whispered, unnerved by the tremor in his voice.
His arm tensed in preparation as he peered around the trim of the door, hoping he would be quick enough to strike whoever was out there before they could—
There was no one in the hallway.
He wanted nothing more than to climb back into bed, close his eyes, and force himself back to sleep, but he knew that wasn’t an option. He’d lie there for the rest of the night imagining all sorts of scenarios playing out in his living room while he cringed in fear beneath the covers.
Stepping around the side of the door, he brought his right foot silently into the hallway.
Buck thundered past with a violent battery of barking. Nails clattering, the dog’s back legs slid out from beneath him on the slick floor. He quickly righted himself in the middle of the skid and disappeared into the darkness of the living room, where his furious barking echoed like gunshots.
Brian hurried behind, heading directly for the switch plate in the hallway. Toggling all of the switches with a slap, Brian whirled toward the living room, tensing his arm in preparation for driving the hammer down as hard as he possibly could.
But no one was there.
A stripe of fur stood erect down the Lab’s back like a mohawk. His stance widened, head lowered toward the ground, Buck was planted in front of the hole in the floor, barking at the empty space that separated him from the back wall.
Brian stood there a moment, watching his companion menacing nothing at all, before finally lowering the hammer and tossing it onto the couch.
