With the head restraints still not fully deployed, Nikki is able to twist and crane her neck in an effort to see what is going on in the rest of the room. It doesn’t make her feel any less helpless, but it always exacerbates the sense of vulnerability when she can’t see her enemy’s line of attack.
The most horrible thing is the calm, the quiet. She wants to go down fighting in a storm of noise and struggle, but as Alice lies there motionless, Nikki understands what absolute defeat truly looks like.
Green lights flash all around the edge of the cradle, and Gonçalves is good to go.
There is barely a word for several minutes, then the lab assistants break the silence by methodically checking that their act of electronic butchery has run its course to their technical satisfaction.
“Subject is coming round. Go-ahead to disengage restraints?”
“Confirmed.”
Alice sits up slowly, looking like nothing has changed, and yet Nikki knows they wouldn’t be letting her loose if everything hadn’t.
She watches Alice walk across to a bank of machines and begin to calmly operate a device she knew nothing about when she walked into this lab. That is when it truly hits home. Nikki feels a mixture of marvel and horror as she contemplates how Alice’s mind has been literally changed: the memories informing her beliefs and consequent actions swapped out so that she opened her eyes a different person. Then a sickness takes hold as she confronts the inescapable reality that the same thing is now about to happen to her.
Alice raises her hands from the console and looks towards Gonçalves, who has given no exterior indication of satisfaction or relief at Alice’s transformation. It’s just business as usual to her, merely another step on the long path that began in that refugee camp and ends with her vision of a better humanity colonising the cosmos.
“What are you waiting for?” Gonçalves asks.
“A reunion,” Alice answers.
A moment after she speaks, the aperture opens with a swish, and in walks Beatrice, the lethal twin.
“I saw her approach on my cam feed,” Alice explains, then turns to greet the new arrival. “My dear sister,” she says, her voice warm, threatening to break with emotion. “I’m overcome to finally restore our acquaintance.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Beatrice replies. “Believe me, it’s been harder for me watching you at a distance. Glad to see you’re all caught up so we can, you know, catch up.”
“Which there will be plenty of time for later,” says Gonçalves, gently reminding Alice she has a job to do.
“Of course,” she responds, casting a neutral, unfeeling glance towards the operating tables. It’s like Nikki isn’t even there, not as an individual at least. All Alice is seeing is the tools for a job.
Nikki wishes she could feel resignation, but she can’t give up the fight. She focuses on her memories of Lawrence, like this will somehow protect them, then realises it will probably just make them easier for the process to identify.
Her mind searches for any last sliver of hope. She thinks about the people who have had erasures, and even what she has learned about Amber. The memory is taken, but some part of them still knows something is missing. Will that be her fate when she cannot remember her son? Or does this mean some part of Alice still instinctively recognises who are the bad guys here?
Alice looks up from the console and addresses the lab assistants.
“I need the subject properly secured.”
That will be a no, then.