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Dr. Luo Heng breathed heavily through his respirator. He stood in the sealed morgue with Zhào Min. The thin-limbed studious woman was a colleague of his, a molecular biologist from the University of Shanghai. The two had coauthored five papers together. When he had been commandeered for this monumental task, he had recruited her.
A pang of guilt etched through him now. He regretted involving her in this covert investigation. There would be no papers published on this research. They had both signed ironclad nondisclosure documents. Breaking their silence would likely end with a punishment far worse than any bankrupting fine or imprisonment. It would likely end up with them both dead and buried.
And regardless of our pledged agreement, we may still end up there.
He pushed down that fear and inserted another electrode into the occipital lobe of the brain that he and Min had dissected out of the body.
As they worked, Junjie videotaped them with a handheld recorder. The tall sublieutenant barely fit his biohazard suit. Even with the chill in the air, his face streamed with sweat behind his face shield. His eyes looked glassy, his mouth tight, likely fighting against a sickening churn of his stomach.
He had been forced to watch as Min and Heng had cut into the blackened corpse, the same body upon which they had performed a craniotomy the day before. Heng had rolled the subject onto its stomach and spent two hours cracking open the back of the skull and slicing down the spine. He then had delicately dissected out the brain and spinal cord, along with many intact nerve bundles.
It had proven to be surprisingly easy. With the surrounding bones dissolved away, the brittle calciferous flesh had parted cleanly around the neurological tissue. He had described it at the time:like peeling a hardboiled egg from a shell.
Junjie had coughed and clutched his stomach at this analogy.
After placing another electrode needle, Heng straightened and studied his handiwork. The brain and spine were all in one piece, soaking in a saline-filled plastic tub. He had needed the tissue insulated from the steel table under it to run an intracranial EEG. Thirty needles had been implanted across the stretch of the brain and spine.
“That should be the last of them,” Heng reported.
Min nodded and attached tiny clamps to the final two electrodes. Wires ran from all of them to a portable encephalogram. They crossed together and activated the EEG. Bent shoulder to shoulder by the monitor, they waited for it to warm up.
Heng noted how Min leaned heavily on him. He knew she had more than an academic interest in him. That affection was likely the larger impetus for her agreeing to come to Cambodia. Suspecting that—and unable to return her passion—only sharpened his guilt at involving her in this project. He had never been honest with her regarding his sexuality. In the academic world, especially following the handoff of Hong Kong to China, anything outside the ordinary could end one’s career. So, he remained deeply closeted, playing the role expected of him.
On the screen, glowing lines finally stacked across the monitor. The image flickered as the system fully engaged. The rows vibrated up into jagged spikes and troughs, but the amplitudes remained low.
Just like yesterday.
“It’s still there,” Heng whispered. “I was sure the electrical activitywould’ve faded by now. With no blood flow and no oxygenation, none of this should be happening. It makes no sense.”
“Could the leads be responding to some electromagnetic radiation from the installation around us?” Min offered. “The engineering projects above us surely require great amounts of power.”
Heng shook his head. “No. We’re decently insulated down here. And look at the pattern. The rhythms and waves are too much like normal brain activity.” He ran a finger down a few of the lines. “These are clearly alpha, delta, beta, and gamma waves. Interference noise wouldn’t randomly produce them.”
Min leaned closer. “Then what are we looking at?”
Heng studied the screen. He absently lifted a hand to his chin only to have it bump against his face shield. He lowered his arm. “I can’t say with any certainty, especially as weak as the signaling is. But it looks like there is a marked decrease in alpha waves and an increase in theta and delta.”
“What does that mean?”
“The brainwave pattern looks like what you’d see in a coma patient.”
Min glanced at him. “Petty Officer Wong fell into a coma when his temperature spiked. Surely these men suffered the same before dying. Could this be some ghost of that event? A pattern burned into their brains and still somehow persisting after death.”
“If that was even possible, something would still have to sustain the tissues, keeping the neurons oxygenated and alive. Whatever is happening here is too important to ignore.”
He had planned on sectioning the brain and studying the tissue, intent to determinewhythe CNS had been spared the calcification. But with this sustained electrical activity, he decided against it for the moment.
First, he wanted to explore one other avenue.
“I’d like to see what happens if we stimulate the tissue with more energy.” He turned to Junjie. “Can you use the intercom and ask Nurse Lam to bring over the pulse generator from Officer Wong’s bedside?”
The sublieutenant nodded, looking relieved to step away.
The portable EEG had come from the same room. They had been using it to monitor Wong’s comatose state. Heng had also requested that a neurostimulator be brought into the lab. Pulse-generating units were used to treat neurological disease, even comas. They had tried it on Wong, but it had no effect.
Heng stared across the drape of brain and spine, peppered with needles as if attacked by a mad acupuncturist.
“What do you hope to learn from deep brain stimulation?” Min asked.
