did not resist being breezed along toward his personal freezer.
The tracker on his left wrist translated into numbers and a live readout on a screen in another room. The screen showed Milstone’s name, surname, then first name and initial, and displayed his heart rate and blood pressure. The medical subroutines installed into Annie’s server merged easily with the other systems and gave an audible warning.
“Blood pressure and heartrate elevated,” she said.
“Annie,” Anderson’s voice said aloud, “disregard elevated readings unless medical subroutines dictate a risk to life, understood?”
“Understood, Dr. Anderson,” came the soft response.
“It can do that?” asked Cat.
“Yeah,” he answered, “I added her own subroutine that can create simple lines of code that she writes herself. It’s just a streamlined version of fine tuning and saves me hours of programming. It’s the only way we’ve gotten anywhere near ready for this.”
Dismissing the information with a shrug, she turned her attention back to the screen.
“Annie, sync the subject with pod eighteen,” Anderson told the room in general. He heard just the soft beeps before the speaker in the wall answered with, “Sync complete.”
“Okay. Annie, initiate cryoprocess on the subject,” he said.
In the adjacent room, out of sight and hearing of David Anderson, Tanaka and his big colleague invited Milstone to step into the pod. He wore only white scrubs and the tracker on his wrist, and hesitated before he climbed in and lay down. Tanaka put the soft mask over his nose and mouth, ignoring the tears streaming down his cheeks, and stepped back.
Anderson watched the process begin on the monitor in front of him, as the heart rate slowed visibly. Annie had begun to administer the combination of gasses to bring Milstone down to sleep and sealed the motorized pod lid. The bio-readings went almost instantly flat as the body was frozen, and after a tense thirty seconds Annie announced via the speakers, “Cryogenic process, successful.”
A collective sigh of relief went around the small office, followed by a brief but sporadic round of applause.
~
I closed up my laptop and left the room, almost colliding with the creep I’d met there a couple of times. Tanaka smiled at me, which didn’t make me feel very welcome, and kept on walking with what I can only describe as a six-foot sirloin steak following him; the guy was a solid block of meat. I tucked into the side of the corridor as they passed, watching as they did the same to pass a guy coming from the other direction.
The two men, Tanaka and this guy I’d never seen before, eyed each other up in the most overt display of testosterone I’d ever seen outside of a pair of stags going at each other for the top spot. I could almost feel the hormones in the air when the two of them circled, like a fast-forward of a pair of neighborhood cats meeting for the first time.
When they parted, the new guy came in my direction and his face switched from Fight Club mode to normal. He smiled, and it was so genuine that I smiled back without meaning to.
“You’re Dr. Anderson, I presume?” he asked in an accent that threw me straight away.
“Er, yeah,” I said. “You’re … British?”
“What gave me away?” the new guy smoothly said like he was on a BBC chat show. He offered his hand as we kind of fell in step beside each other.
“Hendricks,” he said.
I shook his hand, switching the laptop under my left arm. “David,” I said, “what is it you do here, Mr. Hendricks?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” he said, pointing at my laptop. “I could do with a coffee anyway,” he said as he stopped at the door to my lab.
Just then, I had a sudden stab of worry and doubt. Was I being tested? Was this a security thing?
As though reading my mind, Hendricks slipped a hand into his pants pocket and brought out an access card, which he waved over the reader and prompted a green light. When he reached out for the reader, I saw a tracker band on his right wrist
“Yes,” he said with another smile, “I’m authorized to know.”
Walking in, I gestured toward the coffee machine for him to help himself, before putting my computer down and asking with a smile, “Annie, who is this guy?”
She beeped and answered.
“Russell Hendricks, Sierra Team Leader,” she announced as though I’d know what Sierra Team was. “Former Inspector in the London Metropolitan police service, he has experience in specialist firearms and close