Where there’s a light blinking under the skin of the man’s neck.
Seth freezes, the man’s head in his hands. He’s suddenly aware, really for the first time, that he’s holding a living being, someone sleeping but breathing, warm to the touch.
Alive.
Gently, gently, he turns the man’s head to get a better look at the blinking light. It flashes on and off, green and sharp, in a regular pulse on a stretch of skin just at the base of the man’s skull below his left ear, uncovered by bandages.
At exactly where the bump is on the back of Seth’s own skull.
At exactly the point where he hit the rocks and everything here started.
Then he sees something else. He lifts the man’s head out farther. In the stretch of bare skin above the bandages on the man’s back is one of those quasi-Celtic tribal tattoos, stretching the width of the man’s shoulders.
A tattoo that Seth emphatically does not have.
Then of course he sees everything how it always was. The man’s hair is really a bit darker than Seth’s, and Seth’s stubble isn’t that thick anyway. The man’s torso is clearly shorter than Seth’s, now that he looks again, and frankly, as embarrassing as it is, he doubts there’s a teenage boy alive who wouldn’t recognize his own wang.
This man isn’t him.
Of course it isn’t him.
And all at once, touching the man feels too private, feels like an invasion of another person, almost criminal. He rewraps the bandage around the man’s head, saying “Sorry, sorry,” re-sticking the start of the adhesive to the spot by the man’s ear probably harder than he really needs to. He drops the man’s head back onto the cushion –
And that’s when the alarm finally goes off.
48
It’s not hugely loud, but it’s unambiguous, surging in and out like all bad news alarms everywhere. Seth looks around for the source of it but doesn’t see anything. He grabs the coffin lid to slam it shut. It swings down but then stops abruptly, finishing the journey in a slow, automatic smoothness, resealing itself and the man inside with a small hydraulic sound, looking as if nothing had ever happened.
The alarm is still blaring, though, and Seth is already running back to the platform to get back up the steps and –
He hesitates.
A display has appeared on the blank white wall, one long, milky rectangle sort of demisting to reveal that it’s been a screen all along. It’s now covered with words and boxes and symbols of different colors, just like you’d see on any computer pad. The alarm is still blaring, Seth still poised to run, but his eyes are caught –
Because on the screen, in a circular set of graphical symbols, the words CHAMBER OPEN flash in time with the alarm. Seth doesn’t even want to consider that this alarm must be alerting the Driver out there, that it can only be racing back here at top speed –
CHAMBER OPEN. CHAMBER OPEN. CHAMBER OPEN. In bright-red letters.
“But I shut the chamber,” he says and, almost in exasperation, he reaches out and touches the red symbols.
The alarm stops.
He lifts his hand away. The symbols have turned green, and figures and boxes and images suddenly appear on the rest of the display, whirring through their business, seemingly oblivious to his presence. One section shuffles through images of different angles on different rows of coffins, clearly a kind of surveillance, and Seth nearly jumps out of his skin when it shows an image of him standing in front of the display. But the image rushes on, as if his presence isn’t a threat.
He looks behind him to see where the camera might be, but there’s still only the blank whiteness of the lights, the endless spread of black coffins. Back on the screen, the images keep shuffling through, including what looks like a flash of a large, garage-size door on some distant wall, and he has a momentary unease that the van could come driving right up through here to get him, any minute now, any second –
But he can’t quite tear himself away. Boxes around the edge of the screen show things like temperature and humidity, others shifting clocks, only a few of which show anything like what the current time might plausibly be before being replaced by other times and then others still. The rest of the boxes contain graphs and displays Seth can’t even begin to guess at. What does MODULATION RATE mean? What’s BETA CYCLE, SEGMENT FOUR? And FLOW MANAGEMENT could be anything. Flow of what? Managed how? By who?
Seth knows he needs to go, that he may have shut off the alarm, but that doesn’t mean the Driver wouldn’t have heard a signal of some kind –
But he doesn’t go, not yet.
Because the center of the screen is asking him a question.
CHAMBER RE-ACTUALIZED? it reads.
Beside it, in the main body of the screen, is a green, graphical map of the coffins – he can tell it’s the ones behind him because the stairwell is there – and the coffin Seth opened is highlighted by a pointing line.
Connected to the line is a pop-up window with a picture in it of what can only be the man in the coffin Seth just opened.
It’s a head-on shot, like a driver’s license or passport. The man isn’t smiling, but he doesn’t look unhappy. More bored than anything else, like this is just one more bureaucratic photo that needed to be taken.
And his name is written below the picture.
“Albert Flynn,” Seth says out loud.
It gives other details, too. Something that could be a date of birth, but not written in a way Seth expects, and possibly height and weight, along with other measurements that aren’t clear. There’s a box labeled PHYSICAL MARKERS, and Seth touches it. It opens up another box, displaying a picture of the man’s tattoo, stretching from shoulder to shoulder and down the backside of either of his arms.
Seth presses the box again and it disappears. He glances up to where the alarm symbol was. CHAMBER RE-ACTUALIZED? it still reads.
“Yes?” he says, and presses it. The symbol and words disappear, and the box with Albert Flynn’s face shrinks down to nothing, back into the graphical rows of coffins on the screen.
Seth glances around, worried again at the time that’s passing, but he still can’t hear anything from the stairwell. The sound of the engine had disappeared deep into the night when he was outside. Maybe the Driver went far from here, traveling down roads that didn’t allow for fast passage.
He presses one of the coffins on the graphical display. The face of a woman expands out into a box. Older, more smiley than Albert Flynn.
EMILIA FLORENCE RIDDERBOS.
Seth presses the coffin next to hers. Another face pops up, an older man.