Chapter 6 Dimitri
DIMITRI
With his arm wrapped securely around Mattie's waist, Dimitri helped her down the stairs, one careful step at a time.
The sound of music intensified as they neared the bottom of the staircase, and it got even worse as they entered the sun-drenched lab.
Russian folk music was Petrov's go-to cover for their conversations, but the truth was that he enjoyed the accordion-heavy melodies and claimed that they were cultural treasures.
Dimitri considered them auditory assault.
The portable speaker on Petrov's workstation was turned up loud enough to drown out anything short of a gunshot, which had been the point back when the surveillance cameras were active and recording.
But the cameras were dead now.
Losham had ordered the internal monitoring system shut down. It had been replaced by guards who secured the perimeter and watched the comings and goings of the lab. It was not ideal, but a far cry from the constant surveillance that had made every conversation a performance.
Dimitri walked to Petrov's workstation and turned off the music.
The sudden silence was deafening.
Petrov looked up from the beaker he was calibrating, his bushy eyebrows climbing toward his receding hairline. "Excuse me?"
"The surveillance cameras are turned off, Konstantin. Losham had the recording stopped because of our new project that he wants to keep secret. We're free to talk without that blasted music drowning us out."
"Blasted music?" Petrov straightened to his full height, which was more impressive in width than stature. "That blasted music happens to be some of the finest folk music the Russian tradition has ever produced. Lyudmila Zykina is a national treasure, and you just silenced her mid-verse."
"I'll send her my apologies."
"She's dead. She can't receive your apologies."
"Then she won't be offended."
Petrov looked like he wanted to argue further, but the expression on Dimitri's face must have communicated that they had more important things to discuss than Russian folk music. Konstantin set his beaker down and crossed his thick arms over his chest.
"So, you say that the cameras are off?"
Dimitri nodded. "If Losham wants the enhancement research kept secret from his brothers, he can't have cameras recording what we do in here."
"Well." Petrov uncrossed his arms and reached for his coffee mug. "That's the first piece of good news I've heard in weeks. But I'm not giving up my music."
"You can listen with earphones on."
"I might." Petrov took a long sip, studying Dimitri over the rim. "Why the long face? You're supposed to be happy after shutting down my music."
"I'm ecstatic."
"Then what's going on?" Petrov's gaze shifted to Mattie, who had chosen to sit next to the window. "Is it the hand? How are you this morning, devochka?"
"Better than yesterday," Mattie said. "Worse than tomorrow, hopefully."
"That's the spirit." Petrov raised his mug in a mock salute, then turned back to Dimitri. "So. What happened last night with Dave that caused the long face and made you turn off Lyudmila Zykina?"
Dimitri pulled up a stool and sat.
He started with the mind-merge proposal in exchange for the escape offer and continued with the conditions that Dave had laid out.
He told him about Dave's wish to experience love from inside Dimitri's consciousness, and Dimitri's fear that the temporary connection to the collective would not be temporary, and he would be stuck being the ninth part of Dave.
Petrov listened without interrupting, which was unusual for him.
Then Dimitri told him about the Dormant enclosure.
Petrov's face went through a series of transformations as Dimitri spoke. Skepticism first, then something harder, then a disgust that settled into the deep lines around his mouth and stayed there.
"Boje moi." Petrov set his coffee down and stared at the far wall for a long moment. "How long has this enclosure existed?"
"Dave didn't say. But given the number of immortal soldiers on this island, it could be centuries, even millennia. Who knows how old these immortals are?"
"How many women are we talking about?"
"Dave didn't say. Could be hundreds. Could be thousands."
Petrov turned to look at Mattie, who had been listening from her chair by the window. "What do you think?"
Mattie sat up straighter. "I think we need to make freeing those women part of the deal with Dave."
The silence that followed was the kind that happened when someone voiced something that sounded completely insane, but it was said with enough conviction that it couldn't be dismissed offhand.
Petrov looked at Dimitri. "The merge idea is crazy."
Dimitri nodded.
"The escape is tempting."
"Very."
"And the idea of freeing the dormant women is…" Petrov turned to face Mattie directly, "also insane. Completely. It is not doable."
Mattie's spine stiffened. "Why not?"
"Why not?" Petrov laughed, a short, sharp bark of dismay.
"Because there are three of us, devochka.
Three humans, well, two and a half since Dimitri has become one of them, against an army of immortal warriors.
We are in a laboratory on an island from which no one has ever escaped, planning an escape that by any reasonable metric should be impossible.
And now you want to add a humanitarian rescue mission to the agenda? "
"It doesn't have to be all of them at once."
"It doesn't have to be any of them! What has to happen is that we survive.
That's it. That's the entire plan. Step one: don't die.
Step two: escape. Step three: continue not dying somewhere far from here.
Adding 'liberate an entire population of imprisoned women' between steps two and three is not an addendum, Mattie. It's a suicide note."
Color rose in Mattie's cheeks. "Those women have been trapped there for centuries."
"And they will continue to be trapped there whether we attempt a rescue and fail, which we will, or whether we escape and try to get help from the outside. The second option gives them a chance. The first option gives all of us a shared grave."
"Dave has the power to—"
"Dave has the power to compel a handful of guards at a time, or maybe a few more than a handful, not an entire army.
And even if he could, what then? Where do you take hundreds or thousands of traumatized women who have never seen the outside of a compound?
How do you transport them off an island that is surrounded by an ocean?
Do you have a fleet of ships hidden somewhere that I'm not aware of? "
Mattie opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Her jaw was set in the stubborn line that Dimitri had learned meant she was refusing to concede even though she understood the argument.
"Dave's mothers might be in there," she said. "That's personal motivation for the Eight. It makes the escape more likely to succeed because they would have something beyond just experiencing Dimitri's emotions. They would have their own reasons to commit fully to it."
"That's a fair point," Petrov admitted grudgingly.
"Using the mothers as leverage to ensure Dave's commitment is clever.
But there's a difference between using the idea as motivation and actually attempting the rescue.
One is a strategy. The other is madness.
Dave can't do this even if they want to. It's beyond their capabilities."
Dimitri was so happy that he wasn't the one who was saying those things to her.
He'd been silent throughout the exchange, watching the verbal sparring match with guilty relief. He'd said and thought the same things, but compared to Petrov's bluntness, his arguments had been diplomatic.
"We're not making any decisions right now," Dimitri said, heading off the argument before it could spiral further. "The immediate priority is figuring out how to respond to Dave's proposal. The merge, the escape, the logistics. We need to go back to him with specific questions."
Petrov nodded. "When you're right, you're right.
The first question is the merge itself. How would it work?
" He was redirecting his argumentative energy toward practical matters.
"Dave says he doesn't know the mechanism because it just happened.
It wasn't planned, but we need to understand what a temporary connection to the collective consciousness actually means in neurological terms. What pathways would be involved?
Can your brain even support that kind of connection without the enhancement drugs?
And more importantly, can the connection be severed once it's established? "
Dimitri grimaced. "I don't want to take the enhancement drugs. That's a permanent addiction, and I don't want to be dependent on chemicals to keep from losing my sanity."
Petrov reached for a notepad and began writing. "Question one: mechanism. Question two: reversibility. Question three: what happens if the merge changes Dimitri's cognitive function permanently? We need to quantify the risks before we agree to anything."
"There's also the matter of privacy," Mattie said.
Petrov looked up. "Privacy?"
"If Dimitri merges with the collective, Dave will have access to everything Dimitri experiences. And I mean everything."
"Ah." Petrov glanced at Dimitri with a look that was equal parts amusement and sympathy. "I see the problem."
"The privacy issue is manageable," Dimitri said.
"I mean, it's problematic, but this is exactly what Dave is after, so he will not compromise on that.
It will be something that Mattie and I will have to come to terms with.
What's not manageable is the risk of cognitive contamination.
If the merge introduces elements of the collective consciousness into my individual mind, I might not be the same person when it's over. "
"The 'We are Borg' scenario," Petrov said.
"That's what Dimitri called it, too," Mattie said. "I didn't find it funny."
"Great minds." Petrov scribbled another note. "We also can't forget about Losham."
"What about him?" Mattie asked.
"He gave us a deadline," Petrov said. "One month to produce a viable proposal for human enhancement. A formula that could create enhanced human soldiers. That deadline is still there regardless of Dave's schemes."
The escape planning and the enhancement deadline were two trains running on the same track and using the same engine, but the engine had limited fuel to work with.
"If we fail to produce the proposal," Petrov continued, "Losham replaces us, which means we are dead, and because whoever he gets will be less qualified than we are, there will be many more humans dead than if we managed the project.
The same will happen if we escape, just without the part of us being dead. "
"Can you fake it?" Mattie asked.
Petrov tapped his pen against the notepad.
"We need to give Losham something, enough to keep him satisfied and to buy time, but not so much that he can actually use it.
A proposal that looks promising but is riddled with complications that require extended research.
That's our specialty, after all. Making science look harder than it is. "
"Meanwhile, we plan the escape," Dimitri said.
"Correct," Petrov confirmed. "Which means we need two parallel tracks of work. Track one: the enhancement proposal for Losham. Track two: the response to Dave's offer. Both tracks need to be running simultaneously, and neither can compromise the other."
"Sounds like you need my help after all." Mattie raised her good hand in a gesture that encompassed the lab, the notepad, and the entire impossible situation. "You've got a lot to do."
"I never said you weren't needed, Mattie. I said you're not allowed to do anything physical because your body needs time to heal. It's not the same thing."
"Semantics."
"Not really. Your body is compromised, but your mind is not. You can help us think and strategize, but if I see you trying to lift a beaker, reach for a pipette, or do anything that puts strain on that hand, I'm carrying you back upstairs."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
She studied his face, apparently concluded he meant it, and settled deeper into her chair. "Fine. I'll be your consultant. Your strategic advisor."
"Our strategic advisor," Petrov corrected. "I'm not working under a hierarchy where I report to a twenty-three-year-old with a broken hand and delusions of military grandeur."
"I'm strategically advising, not commanding."
"The difference being?"
"You get to ignore my advice. But if you do and things go wrong, I get to say I told you so."
Petrov snorted. "That's the most honest job description I've ever heard."
Dimitri turned back to the notepad and the questions they needed to answer. Two parallel tracks, a mind merge to evaluate, an escape to plan, an enhancement proposal to fake, and a deadline counting down like a clock attached to a bomb.
And underneath all of that, quietly and insistently, the ache in his gums that reminded him that his body was changing, and that soon he wouldn't be able to hide the transformation.
He ran his tongue over his canines again. The right one shifted.
Not much. Just a fraction of a millimeter. But it was enough.
He had days. Maybe less.
"Let's start with the questions for Dave," he said. "Petrov, walk me through the neurological considerations."
Petrov cracked his knuckles and began to write as he spoke, while Dimitri synthesized, filtered, and tried to hold all the pieces in his head at once.
His gums throbbed.
His throat burned.
And somewhere deep in his jaw, a tooth that had been human for twenty-nine years was getting ready to fall out and get replaced with a fang.