Hope, Levy, Marc [good summer reads TXT] 📗

“If you’re done stuffing yourself with junk, we could head down to the Center,” Luke said, swiping up a slice of pizza.

Half an hour later, Luke still hadn’t said a word since they left campus. Turning off the highway, they ventured deeper down the streets of some faraway suburb, before the Camaro turned onto a deserted little street surrounded by foreboding warehouses. Luke slowed as they arrived at the foot of a whitewashed building. They drove around it, finding themselves in front of a sliding gate set against a fence topped with barbed wire. He rolled down the window, fumbled in his pocket for his badge, and nudged it into the reader. A camera whirred into action, turning toward them before the gate opened.

They parked the car and began walking toward a heavy metal door, where a fingerprint reader awaited. The two friends pressed their hands on the device, before moving through the hatch and into the building.

The Center, they called it. A private laboratory run by the company Longview, owned in turn by some enigmatic entity.

The Center was home to a hundred-odd scientists, each working on their own project. What made the Center so unlike any other was the sheer range of research conducted there. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, molecular biology, computer engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, an endless roll call of everything imaginable. Other than answering to the same management, the Center’s researchers had two things in common: not a single one of them was over thirty, and all were students on Longview’s funded program. What made the Center special was how it had exclusively chosen research projects that others labeled utopian, or unrealistic. The people who owned and financed Longview had a vision, an outlook reflected in the sentence that adorned the break room’s walls: “Nothing is more imminent than the impossible.”

Like all the other scientists working at the Center, Josh and Luke had never met their employer. They had only ever been in contact with the person who’d reached out to them to let them know their application had been successful. Professor Flinch had been there to greet them on their first day. He had given them the rules, confidentiality agreements, and student loan documents to sign, the paperwork that was to seal their destinies for at least a decade.

As Josh followed Luke over to their workstation, his mind wandered to Hope. He could almost hear her whispering in his ear, “What about Luke? Did he sell his soul too?”

At their station stood a sterilization cabinet, the contents of which were always kept at 37.2°C. Opening its door, Luke removed several rows of test tube holders at the front of the crate, reaching deep inside to pull out the glass box hidden away behind them. Inside the box was a tray of ninety-six receptacles.

He placed the tray on the table, and using a pipette, carefully decanted the contents of a dozen or so air sacs, depositing them evenly onto slides. Once he had finished preparing his samples, he slid them under a microscope, leaning over the ocular lenses and adjusting them before standing back to make way for Josh.

“See for yourself.”

Josh, his gaze locked on the lenses, stood there for a minute before moving toward the microscope.

“Take as long as you like,” Luke continued. “I checked again and again while you were away. I checked hundreds of times. Not a single one is the same as the rest. Now, before you get overexcited, remember: this is just the start of it. But you were right. The neurons I extracted from the rat’s brain aggregated on the silicon chips and formed a network.”

“This is huge,” Josh murmured, throwing his arms around Luke. “Are they active?”

“I don’t know anything about their properties. I wanted to let them develop over a few days. Then we can test them all, and we should get some answers.”

“Have you told anyone?”

“Of course not. That’s why I kept trying to call you.”

“What about Tuesday?” Josh asked. “The weekly meeting?” He glanced up at one of the cameras.

The meeting rooms, workspaces, and laboratories were interlinked by an internal network that allowed everyone to update and check experiment reports conducted by all the different researchers. But none of the equipment was linked up to the outside world. On Tuesday evenings, a committee picked out the projects that seemed most promising, before submitting them to the research community. The researchers were then required to check up on the projects as quickly as possible.

“In today’s world, all scientific progress is collaborative and multidisciplinary,” as Professor Flinch had explained. He was the only boss they had. “What you discover might not be of interest to you, but it could be useful, and indeed essential, to one of your colleagues. The freedom and resources you enjoy here come at a price: we ask that you dare to dream, and that you shelve your egos. Longview is a team. We’re not inventing the future—we’re exploring it. This is an incredible opportunity that requires you to demonstrate great humility. Anyone not capable of this has no place at the table. Never forget that.”

His eyes fixed on the camera’s red light, Josh could almost hear the professor’s words.

“Don’t be so paranoid,” Luke sighed. “They aren’t tracking our every move. And anyway, we’re not hiding anything. I just want to buy us some more time to check that we really have accomplished something new, rather than humiliate ourselves in front of everyone.”

“We’ve used low temperatures to disaggregate four thousand neurons sourced from a rat’s brain.” Josh stared at him. “We’ve managed to get them to stick to silicone microplates, brought them back to life using meticulously controlled reheating cycles, gave them all the essential nutrients needed to revive them and help them thrive, and then these neurons spontaneously linked up to intercommunicate. And you’re worried we’ll look ridiculous?”

“In the lab next door, six of our colleagues have re-created the Mussa-Ivaldi experiment using acoustic sensors,” whispered Luke. “When they emit certain sound frequencies, their little robot