WHEN WHISTLER COMES LATER with a tray of food, I’m back on my bed, just waking again. My blanket’s twisted around me, and my green scrubs smell musty. I’ve completely lost track of time, and my eyes feel smudged and puffy, as if from crying. His soft, aimless whistling sounds incongruously optimistic.
“Your cheek looks better. How are you feeling?” Whistler says.
I push up onto my elbow, and the heavy, chill scent of the stone walls invades me again. “Like crap. Where’s my sister?”
He angles the tray on the desk, facing me. “She’s safe with the others,” he says. He absently adjusts his earpiece, aiming the microphone nub toward his mouth. “We didn’t mine her, if that’s what’s worrying you. Just had a little look. Her dreams are very nice. Not the same caliber as yours, but that’s no surprise.”
“What about my parents? Where are they?”
“I have no idea,” Whistler says. “Berg isn’t the type to keep all his eggs in one basket.”
“So they weren’t delivered with Dubbs?” I say.
Whistler shakes his head slowly and rubs his chin. “Nope. Dubbs came alone. You should really eat. You need your strength. Aren’t you hungry?”
I’m starved. He’s brought me a pita sandwich with fresh cucumbers, cheddar cheese, tomato, and creamy mayo, and I can’t stuff it in fast enough. I gulp down half a glass of ice water. Then I rip open a bag of chips and nearly swoon at the salty crispiness. There’s a brownie with some chewy caramel in it, and I devour that, too.
“You like chocolate? I made those myself,” he says. He pulls the chair from the desk and sits awkwardly across from the bed.
I close my eyes, savoring the sweetness. “They’re good,” I admit. “How do you guys get food down here?”
“We have groceries delivered upstairs,” he says, like it’s no big deal. “If there’s anything special you want, let me know and I can get it for you.”
I lower my brownie. He’s implying that I’ll be staying awhile.
“You mined me, didn’t you?” I ask.
“Just a little,” he says, and eyes me closely. “Can you tell?”
Something’s different. That’s for sure. “Yes. How long have I been down here?”
“Two days? Yes. Two.”
I can’t believe this is happening to me again. I glance behind him to the door, which is closed again. I didn’t see him lock it from the inside, but that doesn’t mean it’ll open. I wonder what it would take to get past him.
“What you’re doing down here can’t possibly be legal,” I say.
“Well, it’s not illegal,” Whistler says slowly. “The pre-dead are all slated for harvesting. We pay for them fair and square.”
Pre-dead. I haven’t heard that term before. I guess that’s what’s kept in a pre-morgue.
“Except my sister and me,” I say.
He purses out his lips, like he might whistle, but then he doesn’t. “You represent a turning point, I admit,” he says.
Anger hardens inside me.
Without another word, he produces a little paper cup and sets it on my tray. It contains a small white pill suspiciously like the kind Orly gave us students back at Forge to make us sleep for twelve hours every night.
As Whistler glances away, evading my direct gaze, I have my first glimpse of his resemblance to Ian. Where Ian is all protruding eyes and soft lips and wispy blond hair, Whistler has subdued, even features and normal brown hair. He’s sturdier, with more bulk to match his maturity, and despite his hint of chagrin as he looks away from me, he still exudes a quiet confidence that’s more refined than Ian’s contrived, boastful manner. He has changed into a different set of clothes, a matching gray set of shirt and trousers, and his helmet is cocked at a jaunty angle on his head, so the headlamp looks like an unlit third eye.
I can feel him waiting for me to ask about the pill. Instead, I take another slow bite of my brownie.
“Who controls the dragon?” I ask.
“Pardon?” he says.
“I mean the special effects upstairs, by the Keep of Ages,” I say. “How’d you make it look like Dubbs fell from the plank?”
He tilts his head curiously. “The cameras were down when you came to the park. I didn’t see your arrival or anything unusual with the dragon. You saw the dragon in action?”
“Yes. And my sister. Or an effect that looked just like my sister. She fell off a plank from the roof of the keep, and the dragon scooped her up and flew away. It was terrifying.”
“That’s a little odd.” Whistler gazes at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Back in the day, when the park was up and running, the special effects team could do anything they wanted. They frightened the bejesus out of the guests. Ian likes to tinker with the old programs when he’s here.”
“But you said he’s not here.”
“He’s not,” Whistler says. “I don’t have an explanation. Perhaps Ian put a show on a timer, so to speak.”
I hardly think so. It was too perfectly timed to my movements. “Kiri said the dragon brought me here,” I say. “You agreed with her.”
“I didn’t mean the dragon on the keep. It was more of a metaphor, like a monster in the machine,” he says. “We do have something unusual going on here lately, and I haven’t been able to track it down. We’ve had camera blackouts, and pressure changes that blow out the hoses. One day, a couple months back, five of the incubators in the storage room went off for no reason and then came back on again four hours later. We lost a ton of research. Jules nearly busted a gut.”
“What do you actually do down here?” I ask.
Whistler jogs up his helmet brim. “Me? I’m just a glorified handyman. The doctors do the actual research,” he says. “We started with simple data storage, but now we’re mostly experimenting with treatments for brain injuries, coma, Alzheimer’s, whatever. PTSD’s a big one. It’s all dream based. That’s our niche.”
“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.
“I’m not,” I say. “And I don’t consent to any of this. I’m not dead. Or even pre-dead. I should have a choice.”
Whistler rises from his chair. “We don’t need your consent. Your legal guardian has given his.” He nods at the paper cup with the pill. “Take your meds.”
I crumple the little cup and hurl it toward him. It bounces off his shirt and to the floor.
“I repeat: take your meds,” he says. He lets himself out, and I hear the click of the bolt as he locks me in.