“I will. Thank you,” Howard nodded.
“Don’t thank me yet,” the barkeeper warned, “You haven’t seen what’s waiting for you down there.”
“Doctor Carver! What an honor it is, I’m sure you know,” greeted a man far too gleeful for the setting. Each word condensed as a warm fog in the air. He and Howard met in an icy tunnel deep beneath the slush of Neptune’s surface colony. The blue tile behind the stove had opened up a staircase that led five stories down a rectangular spiral. Each step Howard took deeper echoed louder, until he bottomed out in a tunnel through solid ice.
“I know nothing of this honor,” Howard waved him off. His voice resounded down the crystal hallway. Little hanging orbs of light brought to life every shade of it, from cerulean to teal. The hall stretched out behind Howard’s guide as an infinite glare.
“Come now, your grandfather pioneered offworld psychiatry!” the man laughed. Each unrequited chuckle brought his volume down towards a low, humorless hum. “But you know that better than anyone, as I understand.” The day Howard took the research box flashed through his mind behind a blink.
“I do,” Howard assured him, “By offworld psychiatry, you mean unsanctioned 3D research.” His guide smirked at his boldness, then turned to lead him down the tunnel. Howard was never more than a freezing, echoing step behind. His guide led him past door after bolted iron door. Everyone, from his greeter to the stone-faced sentries, to the patients through luminous Chrysum windows, donned thermal fusion gear. After hardly five minutes below the surface, Howard understood why.
“Doctor Carver. We practice medicine here. It just so happens that the mental health of all our patients was compromised by the same condition. Besides, you know as well as I do the WCC can’t sanction anything where they have no jurisdiction,” the guide waved him off. Howard would have bit back sooner, were he not so distracted. But, with each passing cell door, there came deeper slush for his brain to dredge.
“Yet it was they who sent me here to collect research from an undocumented facility,” Howard chanced, to keep the air from settling between them. He was hardly focused on conversation anymore. Howard’s eyes swam with the passing insides of treatment rooms. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, at first. Silhouettes faced Chrysum-veined walls, tapping their foreheads. Then he passed one with a single, dried red streak down the back corner of the room. The patient stood with his bloodied forehead towards the ceiling. He muttered something that didn’t match any of the nine languages Howard spoke. “A facility beneath a bar, I should add,” he prodded, to keep himself grounded while the guide led on.
“Not anymore. We’re out past the edge of the colony by now,” the guide corrected. He made a sharp turn for a branching ice tunnel that led yet another staircase deeper. On his way after him, Howard caught a glimpse of a treatment room with two patients. One of them clutched two handfuls of his own patchy hair. The other was busy gathering the hair that was already scattered on the floor. Howard almost alerted his guide to the situation, until he noticed the third body in the room. An officer was already inside. He jotted everything on a shimmering tablet. A camera high in the corner recorded it all.
“Yo-you know what I me-me-mean,” Howard stumbled down the stairs after his guide, “I understand this place isn’t exactly within regulations, but why so secretive? It’s not like anyone's snooping around to enforce those regulations.”
“You passed through town to get here, didn’t you? You saw the dredgers? The patrons of Nereid’s Slushpit? One whisper of a Wellsworth Treatment Facility, and we’d be looted dry overnight. It has to be this way, or we’d never find the source.” Horror gave way the tiniest bit to curiosity for Howard. He traipsed down iron stairs to a wide cavern of sea-green ice with his guide. If he hadn’t known better, Howard might have thought he was inside a giant blown glass bowl. The place was a terminus between twelve steel cell doors. Even from outside, Howard could tell they housed a different sort of patient. Each of them had five locks that secured the doors flush in the ice.
“Source? Not a cure?” asked Howard. He inched closer to his guide, who waited in the center of the icy theater. He crossed his arms to trap what little heat he had left.
“Not yet,” said his guide, “First we have to source the signal before we can determine a treatment that will actually work for these poor bastards.”
“Signal?”
“You know… people used to think 3D was contagious, because of what therapists and researchers would come up with, after working with these patients, after a while. Researchers like your grandfather. People thought they were just as crazy. Turns out they were right all along,” the guide told him. Howard’s head tilted against his will, betraying his confusion. “Dragons, Howard. The only possible explanation left is the one we’ve never been able to disprove, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. We can’t medicate these people because there’s nothing wrong with their brains. Not internally. The cause has to be external.”
“You think… your patients are intercepting messages from Dragons?” Howard posed. It might have sounded more ridiculous to anyone else’s grandson but Tim Carver, who’d watched a friend lose her mind to Dragon Dissociation Disorder. Stories of what really went on in the labs on Mars lived on in Howard. The guide shrugged.
“That would drive me insane. Seems appropriate, doesn’t it? The theory that began with your grandfather’s research confirmed by yours?” he said.
“What… do you mean?” Howard shuddered. He knew without an answer it had something to do with how deep below Neptune they were. It had something to do with these most isolated cells. The guide stepped aside to nudge his head at one of the doors.
“Go on, take a look.” It took a while, between his freezing bones and the hesitation, but Howard did. Inside the cell directly behind his guide was something shaped like a human. It had the fairly accurate semblance of skin. Its black hair frizzed out in unwashed knots. Its eyes, overly glassy, blinked with interest at the sight of Howard at its door. They’d even clothed it. But, to the well-trained eye, it wasn’t human at all.
“Why… do you have droids locked in treatment rooms?” Howard murmured, when the android’s mechanical eyes zoomed in on his.
“To continue the healing process. How horrible a fate, to die with a warped spirit? Now that doesn’t have to be the end. Treatment doesn’t have to end with the death of the body,” said the guide. Howard’s head jerked sideways at him.
“This is why… Marcus sent me. It was more than just the Arcadia and Alice,” Howard began to realize. His guide nodded.
“Every android down here was uploaded with a DBS from one of the patients we lost. Just like you did with yourself and that fancy ship you rode here. This particular group died just before the raids on Saturn. All at once.” Howard shuffled back from the door when he noticed the android’s face a few inches away through the Chrysum screen. So close, he could see the subtle lines in its face, joints where textured plates met to imitate a face. What really almost took him off his feet, though, was the realization: they know. Howard had believed, until this very moment, that what he did with the high-density memory drives his father’s research box had been his secret alone.
“Those experiments were a failure. No one has successfully integrated a Digital Brain Signature. Not me or Alice. No one,” he told his guide.
“Not when they w
ere uploaded to a human, or a ship already equipped with an AI. You can’t put a mind in a box that’s already got one. That’s why we used androids,” the guide explained, “Empty, until we uploaded them with a DBS of a patient. Now they live again, to help us help them.”
“This is… sick…” Howard muttered. His eyes flitted back to the imitation human at the Chrysum screen in front of him.
“Why don’t you just focus on research for the cure? Leave the ethics of it to guys like me. Besides, now they can tell us what they never could. What they saw, right before the 3D took them,” his guide explained. Howard’s mouth hung open, wordless. “Patient 46-C. Go on and tell Doctor Carver what you saw, then what you did.” At his command, an android from a different cell materialized at her door.
“I saw Saturn. The ice rings, and the mining net. I saw a black beast… with yellow eyes. He didn’t want to hurt anyone… he had to. They need Chrysum. I heard them talking about it. I saw them when I closed my eyes. It seemed more real than being here, in my cell. I felt like I was suffocating, out in the ice rings. In reality, I choked myself to death.”
“How?” Howard dared to ask. He was familiar with Wellsworth policies on cell setup, and there was no tool for asphyxiation.